Rich Puchalsky's blog

Occupy

2011-11-15T16:33:00.000-08:00

Today Zuccotti Park was cleared. Today the first tent went back up at Occupy Northampton, weeks after the police made us take them down.

We aren't going away.

More Occupy Wall Street

2011-10-15T10:46:00.000-07:00

For the last week or so, I've been involved with a small-city offshoot of Occupy Wall Street. I haven't wanted to blog about it because I'm always suspicious of people who blog about protests as Carnival. It's easy for people to get caught up in the social aspects of protest, and not so much in the long-term work after; look at the comparative numbers of posts about the protests in Wisconsin and the subsequent recall efforts. Anyways, with Occupy it's far too soon to tell what the consequences will be, and my own self-chosen role, far from being carnivalesque, has much more to do with setting up Google Groups and helping people figure out how to use it.

But a few early observations:

1. There are a number of older people, like me, involved. But I'm genuinely surprised at the number of people for whom this is their first significant activism.

2. What is the first thing that happens when you set up a camping site in the city center? Of course the site becomes a haven for long-term homeless people, most of whom are more or less apolitical because politics requires that you first be able to deal with society well enough to do things like find shelter. "We are the 99%" is a great slogan, but the people directly involved have to deal with society's neglect of the lower 1% in a much more immediate way than with the politics of the upper 1%.

3. I'm also genuinely surprised at the low level of preexisting technology use here. I know that Occupy Wall Street itself is large enough to have all sorts of advanced technology projects, and I'm located in what is basically a hinterland. But the movement itself is a complete rejection of the techno-optimism of "Twitter Revolutions" and so on, involving as it does even the rejection of sound amplification. And at least where I am, the people are in general not technology types at all.

Lastly, the "We are the 99%" Tumblr has spawned a host of imitators. I'm not going to link to the tired right-wing "We are the 53%", although I will link to this post about it. What strikes me about the 53% bit, other than the obvious -- people on the left want to include almost everyone, people on the right want to divide the country in two and take the just slightly larger half -- is that the 53%ers tend not to hide their faces as much as the 99% pictures do. It's self-promotion vs shame, basically.

Other Tumblrs: We are the 1% and we stand with the 99%. The cruel and very, very funny Actually, you're the 47%. And one for comics fans.

The return of Some Guy With A Sign

2011-10-10T08:49:00.000-07:00

During the Bush years, one influential person made a common appearance on the political stage -- Some Guy With a Sign. No matter what you needed to have your opponents say to discredit them, Some Guy With a Sign could be found, somewhere, to obligingly have his sign say it. The right-wing media were champions of this technique, only occasionally overreaching, as with amateurs like Donald Douglas and "Sasquatch Israel". The left, of course, had the Morans! guy, but didn't have Fox to catapult the propaganda. The electronic version of Some Guy With a Sign is Some Guy With a Blog Comment, commonly held to discredit everything written on that blog, or indeed everyone on the same side of the political spectrum.

This is a bit different from the right wing's use of agent provocateurs, such as Patrick Howley, the editor of the American Spectator who openly boasted about trying to get Occupy protestors to turn to violence. Any really good Guy With A Sign could be an agent provocateur, of course. But it's not required. It's impossible to police and discipline every sign brought to this kind of demonstration, or to anything that has a contemporary style of mass involvement without a leadership cadre. And some of those signs are going to be brought by crazy or ignorant or bigoted or self-promoting people.

The Occupy version seems to be Some Guy at a General Assembly, as seen in this iconic picture (they are always iconic pictures, if they catch on) of Some Guy Marginalizing John Lewis. Some people gamely try to make the argument, in comments, that John Lewis is a politician and the movement can't let itself be taken over by politicians etc etc. Which just doesn't work. Any press flack, if Occupy had such things, would have said something like "Geez just let John Lewis talk for a while, then we'll go back to whatever we were doing." But Occupy doesn't have press flacks, leadership cadres, or any of the other things beloved by our mass media, so these scenes are inevitable.

I wish that people could move to a style of defense that doesn't involve denouncing Some Guy With a Sign, and that doesn't involve saying oops we are so sorry and blaming it on the "process". It's an unguided popular movement. Things are going to happen. We have a media addicted to sanitary photo ops, which loves to treat pictures like this as if they mean something symbolic, but really, what they mean is that in a consensus-driven general assembly, some guy named Joe can have a bad day. That's pretty much it.

If the general assembly was supposed to be a cadre making decisions, then sure, it's a very bad way to do that. But it's not. It's supposed to be a way for people to talk to each other, basically. People made fun of the grab bag of Occupy Wall Street demands, which I'd guess were indeed just a grab bag of things that someone got up and said and other people cheered to and that got written up. But the real point of Occupy is that the people are there, warts and all.

ETA: "Anarchists for good government", and the sign "Our economy could be more fair". (Via here) You can find vaguely British understated humor in these signs too. "Anarchists for good government" is worth coming back to, though.

Take it away, Marty Lederman

2011-10-09T20:21:00.000-07:00

First, read this Greenwald article. It describes one Marty Lederman; strong opponent of secret detention and expansion of executive power when Bush was President, and author of secret law once Obama became President allowing the President to have people assassinated at will.

What Lederman did is, in some ways, worse for the system than what Obama did. People expect Presidents to run off the rails. You don't get to be President in the first place without a strong liking for power and a lot of narcissism that convinces you that whatever you do must be right. The rest of the system is supposed to keep Presidents in check. Well, it obviously doesn't. The Supreme Court has been a joke since Bush v Gore. The Justices are, openly, appointed-for-life ideologues, chosen for their adherence to some political position or other, and the decisions on important matters don't come down to law but come down to this. And now it couldn't be more clear that the Constitution restrains nothing, that lawyers only rationalize whatever their client wants to do, and no judge will ever call them to account.

It's easy to shrug cynically and say, what did you expect from lawyers. But cynicism is too easy here. When Yoo and company were writing for Bush, they were an aberration. Even Ashcroft refused to do everything his President wanted. But now lawlessness has been normalized. There is no reason to think that any important decision about war, torture, surveillance, imprisonment, or assassination is ever going to be governed by anything but secret memos again.

We are currently imprisoning a higher percentage of our population than any other country on Earth. The rich are immune from prosecution for rich-people crimes like defrauding people out of their houses; the poor can be thrown in jail for any number of activities involved in being poor. Democratic legitimacy has gone from being a farce, a bought-and-paid-for property of lobbyists and PACs, to being simply irrelevant. The President can have anyone imprisoned at a black site, or killed, for secret reasons that presumably involve the accusation of being a terrorist. The President can declare war on Libya without even bothering to pretend to consult anyone. The population welcomes this, even people like Josh Marshall are perfectly willing to take the government's word that someone "was essentially waging war against the United States from abroad" without any of those messy trials or presentations of evidence that ridiculous documents like the Bill of Rights say we're supposed to have.

We no longer have a legitimate state. I'm tempted to write that what we have is an oligarchical anarchy -- anarcho-capitalism as it really is, not how its deluded advocates think it would be -- but that just confuses the issue, probably. In any case, law is now just something that you have to watch out for, not something that you have to take seriously at any intellectual or moral level.

Our elites are incompetent at even running a corrupt system in their own interest. It's likely that the system will collapse in one way or another, not because of anything that people do purposefully, but just because it will get increasingly unable to respond to reality, just as everyone knows what we have to do in our current economic crisis (and in our current global warming crisis) but somehow no one can do it. When we pick up the pieces afterwards, I hope that we don't try to put together the same fantasy that we had before.

Occupy Wall Street

2011-10-05T20:50:00.000-07:00

From experience with how people reacted to Wikileaks, I think that I understand how this works now. Occupy Wall Street seems to me to be an unreservedly good thing. But most everyone who comments on it prefers to think of it as a platform for What They Are Doing Wrong. If anyone reading this is still unfamiliar with it, there are some convenient links here, though you should probably start with the We Are the 99% Tumblr.

First, the archetypal, much-derided media response from Andrew Ross Sorkin in the New York Times on 10/3/2011:

I had gone down to Zuccotti Park to see the activist movement firsthand after getting a call from the chief executive of a major bank last week, before nearly 700 people were arrested over the weekend during a demonstration on the Brooklyn Bridge.

[...]

As I wandered around the park, it was clear to me that most bankers probably don’t have to worry about being in imminent personal danger. This didn’t seem like a brutal group — at least not yet.

Everyone loves this quote because it's so obviously and cluelessly corrupt. A reporter gets a call from the C.E.O. of a bank, asking whether he's in danger, so of course the reporter goes to check it out for him. You couldn't get a better illustration of the relationship between the wealthy 1% and the media. But there's another aspect that's less commented on. The "not brutal, not yet" phrasing functions to reassure the reader that this group of people could "turn brutal" any time that the C.E.O. gives Sorkin another call and tells him to report it that way. But there's also a certain obvious disappointment to it. Why aren't they being good anarchists and providing him with better copy? They'd better get some big black round gunpowder bombs fast or Sorkin will have to write about them as clueless hippies, which is not as good a career builder for him.

The mainstream left, meanwhile, is full of lectures about how these people should never have stepped outside without a list of demands and an organizational chart and a charismatic leader suitable for media profiles. Most of this stuff is too tepid to be worth quoting. Some of it is a bit better, but heavy on experienced people saying how Occupy is likely to fail without the advice and work of people like those experienced people: Rich Yeselson's article, say. One of the best and most sympathetic of them was David Atkins' Democrats: A necessary but insufficient condition post at Digby's blog, which I actually largely agree with. I certainly agree with:

Ultimately, the institutionalists need to allow the Occupy Wall Street protests to develop organically without attempting to convert them into electoral activism in any form. Supporting the protests is perhaps the most important thing progressives can be doing right now.

I don't so much agree with the contention that real change can only happen with Democrats in power, frightened by activists on the left into doing the right thing. That could have happened a couple of years ago. I think it's too late now. Real change can only happen when the system collapses in one way or another. Atkins' post is nicely symmetrical with Ian Welsh's "I’ll just note that Occupy Wall Street is necessary and insufficient. That is, the revolt of the students and the young intellectuals is necessary. It must occur. It is insufficient."

None of the above is to disrespect the Occupy movement. I’m a big believer that they’re doing something important and that they deserve props for putting themselves on the line. Their embrace of apparently leaderless leadership is a master stroke of organizing, and indicates they understand that any visible leadership will be destroyed, smeared or co-opted. This is all good, but it is useful for those of us on the intellectual margins to disengage our emotions, keep our hopes in check, and look at the state of play dispassionately.

This is better, but it still treats the people in Occupy as a way station towards the radical cadres that supposedly need to happen in the eye of the dispassionate, intellectual observer. Which, structurally, is no different from any of the other comments of the form "I admire their naive energy, but they'll only be what we need when they turn into X."

The most comical example of radical scolding was probably the "Anarcho-Liberal", as seen, say, in Bhaskar Sunkara's article here with Cyrus Lewis following on here:

Some things were broadly shared by “anarcho-liberals”: an anti-intellectualism that manifested itself in a rejection of “grand narratives” and structural critiques of capitalism, abhorrence for the traditional forms of left-wing organization, a localist impulse, and an individualistic tendency to conflate lifestyle choices with political action. The worst of both worlds, the “anarcho-liberal” can neither manage the capitalist state nor overcome it, and aspires to do both and neither at the same time.

That kind of piece is instantly familiar. The people we don't like should get a group name chosen by us, not one that they use. (Attaching "liberal" to anything means Very Bad Indeed.) If people begin to "proclaim a new politics of 'rhizomatic' and horizontally organized multitudes" (quoting from Cyrus Lewis) that means that they are anti-intellectual -- only people who read real leftist works are intellectuals, evidently, not poseurs who read Deleuze and Guattari. And of course these Anarcho-Liberals are individualistic and therefore unconnected to real political action. It would be so easy to write a parody counter-article, declaring people who write for Jacobin the "New Neo-Socialists", as people who must have a grand narrative even though it has proved false, as those with a condescendingly described gift for rigor in the service of nothing real, and with an incoherent attachment to mass politics while having far less connection to the traditional forms of left-wing organization like unions or political parties than Occupy does. But one paragraph is more than enough already.

What's actually going on? One of the best articles -- because it's an interview, probably -- was this one. Here'a a quote from David Graeber:

July 2nd. That was the first actual meeting. What happened was AdBusters put out this call for these protests. We had heard there was supposed to be a general assembly on July 2nd. So I just showed up. But it was a rally, not an assembly. Some Marxist groups had set up stages and megaphones and was making speeches and were planning a march. So we said we don’t need to do this. We pulled a small group together and decided to have a real assembly.

So we wandered over to another part of the area and began a meeting and people kept migrating over. But we had a problem because we only had six weeks. AdBusters had already advertised the date to 80,000 people. And their date was a Saturday. You can’t really shut down Wall Street on a Saturday. So we were working under some significant constraints. We assembled 80 or 100 people and formed working groups for outreach, process, so forth and so on. And we began meeting every week

Parts of this are instantly familiar from the Bush-era protests against the Iraq War, during which a lot of leftist hand-wringing occurred over whether people should march in protests organized by A.N.S.W.E.R. But something different happened here. One group put out a call, and the usual Marxist groups were there with their one remaining, antiquated skill set: stages and megaphones and march planning. And people just wandered off and organized on their own. The existing leftist leadership, such as it is, is ineffectual at all levels, and there is no point in following them any more. Graeber again:

You’re creating a vision of the sort of society you want to have in miniature. And it’s a way of juxtaposing yourself against these powerful, undemocratic forces you’re protesting. If you make demands, you’re saying, in a way, that you’re asking the people in power and the existing institutions to do something different. And one reason people have been hesitant to do that is they see these institutions as the problem.

Yes, exactly. Yes, it's easy to score cheap shots against this: it's idealistic, it's undisciplined, it won't last. Is it really more realistic to say that a list of demands for reform of the banking industry would do better? Or that people need to pass through this way station on the way to being good Democrats, good radicals, good whatever else has already failed?

It's not supposed to last. If Occupy Wall Street lasts, it will have failed. We have plenty of organizations that have lasted, long after they should have gone away. Occupy Wall Street's success is now, and has already happened.

ETA: police riot.

ETA: And here. I don't get the left's liking for Jon Stewart as reporter. If a comedian is the only person in the media who can say anything true, then that's not a good thing. But still, he's the only one saying it.

Anti-Copernicus (IX)

2011-09-21T21:14:00.000-07:00

Continuing from here a piece on Adam Roberts' E-published work Anti-Copernicus.

The Fixed Stars

“gambling, arrogance, boasting, stealing, self-mutilation, literary criticism, running with animals in the wild, or marrying strangers”-- fragment from Projects: A Manual of Ambition, by Jenna Moran

There are no fixed stars. All of the other sections in this piece are named after actual astronomical objects, although their order and implicitly their orbital center is wrong, based on what we now know to be an erroneous model. But the stars never were embedded in some material that kept them from moving relative to each other. They swirl around, although they do so on long time scales. So this section is really about unfixed stars, about familiar social-role reference points slowly shifting. In this case, the social roles around literary criticism. This section is also a sort of appendix, or a bait-and-switch; it has even less to do with the text Anti-Copernicus than some of the previous sections do. But I figure that anyone who has read this far must be really interested in literary criticism, and thus capable of writing answering opinions about it.

Because I think that this piece that I'm writing can be described as literary criticism, as a matter of genre classification. It's also fan labor, a subset of fanac, something that has existed as long as SF-as-a-genre has. Fan writing about SF is more often fanfic or book reviews, but literary criticism is sometimes written too. What good is this kind of thing, in general? Can it do anything other than participate in the fan gift/attention economy? Those aren't rhetorical questions.

The reasons why literary criticism is written are generally explicable in occupational terms. For a while, literary criticism was largely written by people who published in literary magazines. Then there was a shift to academia, with magazines generally going to the more restricted task of book reviewing. The reason for existence of the vast majority of current-day literary-critical essays is that they are either written by a student for a grade or by a professor for academic publication. These are understandable and familiar reasons.

Literary criticism might be written by ex-academics, or those with an academic education in the humanities, who never got or held a job in the field but don't want to give up doing what they like. I encourage anyone actually interested in this to read John Emerson's piece Les Érudits Maudits if they haven't already. But John Emerson does actual scholarly activities like translating Chinese texts and doing historical research. Most of the fans who write on SF are not under-or-differently-employed humanists, or even autodidacts who have found their own way to an education in the humanities. They aren't really capable of producing scholarship per se, even if the academically crowded humanities were disposed to include their work.

The usual response is to say something like “But fan communities can collect and annotate a huge amount of descriptive material. Have you seen any wiki page on something SF-related? Or TV Tropes? “ That isn't really what I have in mind either. People like Franco Moretti could undoubtedly make use of a horde of people without much training to classify works for some database or other, or analyze fan information already collected. But I'm interested in actually doing interpretations and readings, rather than furnishing raw material. In aesthetics, for instance.

Since the 1940s or so, SF in English has had a troubled relationship with attempts at aesthetic quality, starting out with Pulp, which didn't have time for it, and the Golden Age Campbellian work, which rather actively scorned it. The genre went through a "discovery" by academia, a single avant-garde movement, the New Wave, a reactionary period, during which many fans sullenly played up to SF's subcultural self-image by insisting that academia was ignoring SF and that academia's values had no place within it. And after that? Cyberpunk insisted that it was avant-garde in a certain sense, but particular qualities of writing really weren't one of those senses. Certain British writers, loosely grouped, had a lefti-ish political sensibility that gave their work coherence , and a willingness to do certain kinds of formal experimentation– here I'm thinking about Iain Banks, Alasdair Grey, the later Moorcock, et al. –but didn't really try to form an artistic sensibility as such. And other than some New Wave holdovers like M. John Harrison, and the scatter of individually gifted writers like John Crowley or Adam Roberts, that's about where things stood until China Miéville and the New Weird. Miéville, at least, combines a left political sensibility with influence from some current literary theorists, as least as shown by his interviews.

So now everything is fine, one would expect. Fans can read any one of a number of literary-SF writers, write screeds like this for whatever reason – but wait. Here's something that Martin Wisse recently wrote about:

"I don't have a problem with fandom," she says. "But I don't think fans realise the pressure they put on authors. The very vocal ones can change an author's next book, even an author's career, by what they say on the internet. And writers are expected to engage and respond." She pauses. "The internet is poison to authors."

Ouch. This is only one person's experience, of course, and not the only reason that Steph Swainston gave when she said that she was going to stop writing for now. But she was the only author that I remember reading when I was wondering if the New Weird actually meant anything more than China Miéville's books. The article mentions the first appearance of her character Jant, who (as I laughed to myself when I read her first book) was a kind of iconic shorthand of the New Weird: a winged guy in a T-shirt, carrying an ax, coming back on his way from doing illegal drugs and battling a giant insect to go to a press conference.

I'm used to thinking of what I write as having certain flaws. A tendency to start with a certain type of close reading and go on pointing everything out at far too much length. An impoverished critical vocabulary, due to never taking an English course that I remember past high school -- for instance, I really would have liked to use more than the word "concision" to describe (the real) Ange Mlinko's poetry, but I'm never able to come up with convenient descriptors or genre relationships in that regard. (Although I did cut myself off at a bare word because I was making a joke about egocentricity). I'm not used to thinking of it as potentially actually harmful.

I'm not thinking so much of Adam Roberts here; Adam seems to me to be a seasoned critic and not likely to be bothered by anything I might write. But what's the right attitude to take to something like, say, Jenna Moran's Hitherby Dragons? Hitherby is, I think, a work of genius, or could be, or contains them in some manner. It's unfinished, and may never be finished. It started as something written and published every day, so readers saw it as written, before later revision. Since I'm trying to consider more than this particular case, I won't try to describe specifically what I see in Hitherby. But the author claimed not to be writing high art, and I really wanted/want to perceive it as high art. I was itching to dig in, close-read, make an interpretive apparatus... all the usual. And to a limited extent, I did, in comments, along with fanfic and the usual fan exchanges.

And at some point I had to step back. What the work really seemed to me to need was an experienced publisher, hopefully one that employed both a publicist and an editor. It didn't need a critic, especially one that consistently saw the work in a different way than the author did. John Clute, a well-regarded SF critic -- well-regarded by me, at any rate -- wrote about misprision being a necessary element of good criticism. But that's after the work is sent out into the world, and can bear a "very vocal" (to quote Swainston) differing interpretation than the authorial one.

Hitherby is different from the vast majority of works that people read in that it is read before it's done. But this is not exactly new for SF and fantasy. It was in one of Adam Roberts' blog posts, I think, that I read that the fix-up -- linking short pieces together or re-writing a short story into a novel -- is a characteristic form of science fiction. (Apologies for the mis-paraphrase from memory.) And one of the other things that Swainston mentioned was the pressure to publish -- to keep writing books, in her case all within a linked series. If an author always is in the middle of writing the next book, then I can see how misprision could start to gum up the works. An author can always choose to ignore a fan, of course, but this is a small world and not that many people are actually paying attention, so it's correspondingly more difficult to ignore the very vocal ones.

None of this would be a problem if there were an accepted reason to do this kind of thing in the first place. Book reviewers have to write to get paid. Academics have to write to get tenure. But less and less literary criticism from either of these sources appears to be to be read by anyone outside the relevant professional communities. More and more of it, such as it is, is from fan sources like this one. And this is a form of writing that has no center. Theorizing one -- making reasons for readers to write something other than fan-chat and book reviews -- may be one of the more useful literary activities for SF at this time.

Anti-Copernicus (VIII)

2011-09-20T07:40:00.000-07:00

Continuing from here a piece on Adam Roberts' E-published work Anti-Copernicus.

Saturn

”One night Ange had a dream. She was back in her house. A man clothed entirely in black, with white skin and black eyeballs, stood balanced upon an opened book. ‘Population is self-regulating,’ he said. ‘But we must understand self in the largest way! The Cygnic aliens have come to winnow humanity, and they will destroy a third, and a third more will die of famine and disease after they have gone! Rejoice!'”-- Anti-Copernicus

I wrote previously about how SF has its own myths about population. But these are centered on even deeper, much more fundamental myths – myths about death, or rather, myths about a kind of necessary balance between life and death. Saturn, in Roman myth, was depicted with a sickle in one hand and a sheaf of wheat in the other.

Anti-Copernicus started with “The Mighty Adam”, started with Genesis. Midway through, it's reached the Book of Revelation. (I encourage anyone who's forgotten the book to follow that link. It's to a form of it that made the most sense to me.) That's where all of these thirds of humanity dying off come from. But this isn't just an element of Christian myth. There's a much more general myth cycle, ironically encouraged or drawn on by environmentalism itself, that says that life and death need to be in balance, that an unusually large number of births throws off the natural order and requires an unusually large number of deaths to balance it out. Well, of course every birth results in a death eventually. But since births in overpopulation are mentally thought of as a sort of huge wave, the deaths are mythically thought to have to be a huge counter-wave of war, famine, and other catastrophe, rather than deaths due to, say, old age.

This is a myth of closure. Instead of an overpopulated world causing people to have fewer children, so that population gradually declines and people find their own, individual ends, things are neatly wrapped up in a communal story conforming to Freytag's Triangle. And Anti-Copernicus, in keeping with how its story unexpectedly closes, participates in this myth.

In addition to the textual passage in which Ange dreams in Biblical imagery, deaths in thirds form a neat loop. The aliens go on a trip with three of them on board. Two of them die, and the third talks to Ange. Ange goes on a trip with three people on board. Two of them die, and the third, Ange, talks to the Cygnic. Cygnic itself meaning swan, this is the alien's swan song. The last alien dies (or does it? perhaps it escapes, since Ange does), and Ange lives on.

And this is where the text reinforces its skepticism about rationality in this important matters of birth and life and death. As she's mentally communicating with the alien, this happens:

Ange went through, got herself some food. She held it in front of her helmet for a while, and pondered how to get it in her mouth. She could certainly hold her breath long enough to get the helmet off, and the food in, but there was always a risk that she would fumble her grip, and have to scrabble around to get the helmet back on. Was it a risk worth taking? She would be dead soon, but had no desire to die sooner than absolutely necessary. On the other hand, she was hungry.

And after the alien leaves, just before Ange is rescued:

Ange took the plunge, more out of boredom than hunger. Deep breath, pop up the helmet, morsel in mouth, helmet down again. Then she checked through the ship. She even managed to sleep—a nap, at any rate.

A completely irrational act, given that she has no desire to die any sooner than necessary. It must be deeply risky to pop open a spacesuit helmet and put it back on with the assurance that if you fumble resealing it, you'll die in short order. But she's hungry – not starving, just hungry and bored. People eat themselves to death (more slowly, of course) all the time. A Heinleinesque or Golden Age, deeply boring old-type SF hero would never do this. But this is what the text wants to bring forward about how people are. When it comes to basic biological activities like food, sleep, and having children, rationality is most often a rationalization for what we've decided at a more basic level. At the end, flattered by being the focus of social attention, the “flush of near death and survival touched even Ange’s distant soul” and she decides to have a child – no more rationally or irrationally than how she previously decided not to have one.

There is something Gnostic or Buddhist, about this, as it's generalized to more than Ange's individual condition – there is not just contemporary Christian myth involved. When the alien is telling Ange how its companions died, it communicates “We were giddy. We were intoxicated by the glory and seediness and splendour of it all. When they died I took my craft away, but my own consciousness has been ... poisoned, I suppose you might say ... as well.” The Bardo Thodol (the “Tibetan Book of the Dead”) works in pretty much this way. After death, the individual sees one display of pure light after another, which if they have the ability to follow, will get them off of the wheel of reincarnation. But most people can't bear these light-visions, instead get attracted by the “glory and seediness and splendor” of visions of sex and blood, and are put back into life again. In Gnosticism, the whole seedy physical world with all of its tribulations is a sort of fake, concealing a higher truth, and attachment to biological reality is rather like … well, it's rather like being attached to reading SF.

For me, this is the final unity in the work. Ange's consciousness is “poisoned” in just the way that the alien's was; she's intoxicated by her brush with death, by the physically attractive, attentive crew that rescues her. But being intoxicated with the glory and seediness and splendour of life is, after all, the basic reason to live.

There will be one final section after this one, “The Fixed Stars”.

Anti-Copernicus (VII)

2011-09-18T19:58:00.000-07:00

Continuing from here a piece on Adam Roberts' E-published work Anti-Copernicus.

Jupiter

“There’s a TV reality show in the US (Same Name) about people with the same name swapping lives. I feel confident that the producers won’t be calling on me. But a few weeks ago, Google alerted me to the improbable existence of another Ange Mlinko.”

The above was written by Ange Mlinko. (It's from here.) It transpires that Adam Roberts had read an article of hers in Poetry magazine, used her name as a placeholder, and then kept it. (Luckily she seems to like this, or at least not to mind. I wonder if she still won't mind once Google starts alerting her not only to mentions of her work, but also to irrelevant (from her point of view) pieces like this one? Having an unusual name can be quite an advantage in finding mentions of your work, as I well know.) So I in turn read some of Ange Mlinko's poetry. Her poetry is good, with the kind of concision that I can't do and therefore don't try for. See what I did there?

Adam mentioned this on his blog (together with a recommendation of this still-being-written piece: thank you), but I didn't find out about the exchange from there. I found out about it much earlier. Quoted in full:

Just saw this on the LRB blog, and I’m wondering if I might just not be responsible for the connection. I don’t know for sure whether Adam Roberts reads this blog – though I suspect he’s glanced once or twice, perhaps due to SEK’s occasional links. On the other hand, I’ve posted stuff like this about Ange Mlinko… Anyway, funny stuff, who knows…

That's from a post on ads without products, a blog written by one CR (who has pretty much said who he is, but it's polite to use someone's pseudonym.) This kind of thing is heartening. At least to me.

Most people want to be at the center. Not in an overly egotistical way, but in a good, part-of-the-social-web way. “Did you hear that Jim and Thomas got married? Hey, they met at one of my parties.” That kind of thing. Or “Someone named his blog after something I wrote. Not that it's an influential blog, but...” Or “I was Googling my name and found this weird connection.”

Why do I find this heartening? There are theories of people being at the center of their own worldviews, of people looking out for (mentions of) themselves. They usually come down to theories that because we're interested in events that even tangentially involve us, we're selfish, and that's good or at least unavoidable. In economics, this is the rational man looking out for his own self-interest. In politics, it's right-libertarianism, (plain libertarianism to people within the U.S.), which comes down to the rational man not wanting to pay taxes for public goods or to help anyone else in any kind of organized or sufficient way. But there is, or should be, a left social-economic version of people wanting to be at the center, too. Not the left dreaming of a return to the Party and the Great Book of some 19th century worthy. But a left in which most of the action looks like people wanting to be at the center of their own doing-good-connections.

But enough about politics. These exchanges, apparently tangential to the text as a text, should remind us that what writing is really about is sociability of a particular kind. Texts that are not notations to oneself are meant to be read, and every reading of a text is a social exchange between a writer and reader. Perhaps the writer is dead, perhaps they even left the work to be published after their death, but the text was written in the expectation of readers eventually. And a text in any kind of circulation makes its own connections between reader and reader.

That's the real center among all these imagined centers. A text isn't centered on the Earth, on its (physical or electronic) form, or on its aesthetic qualities, on its politics, on the systems that support it, or its genre history. It's a social occasion around which each reader picks out the piece that resonates to them. That's what really looms largest to us, and that's what should.

Anti-Copernicus (VI)

2011-09-17T00:15:00.000-07:00

Continuing from here a piece on Adam Roberts' E-published work Anti-Copernicus.

Mars

“It was not enough, she thought, to flatten the rising curve; human numbers had to be actively reduced. But the group eventually fractured: some stayed true to the group’s original Pimentelist beliefs; some insisted more radical Francipettian strategies were needful, and a small group declaring that mass terrorist action was needed. The bickering depressed and alienated Ange; she distanced herself from her former friends, and moved to a different country.”-- Anti-Copernicus

Anti-Copernicus is scattered with current-day trite SF references, which in the future society of the book have evidently become the cultural referents by which people handle alien contact – itself one of the most hoary, endulled SF ideas. The people in Ange's society keep referring to the Earth as being in an insignificant spiral arm of the galaxy, so Hitchhiker's Guide must be a cultural signifier in their world. The aliens sometimes boom like ents. (Ents are Tolkien. They're trademarked. When they wanted to use them in D&D they had to call them treants.) A Martian town is even Robinsontown, presumably after Kim Stanley Robinson.

If people had to prepare, in a mass cultural sense, for overpopulation in the same way that they “prepare” for First Contact by reading SF, how would they do? Well, as a general mash-up of SF ideas, I'd expect the following from severe overpopulation. First, people would start to go crazy from crowding and begin to kill each other. Then frenzied violence of all against all during the collapse, followed by mass death leaving the survivors at a pre-technical, tribal level, possibly even with the world stripped of all other animal life. Science fiction's ideas about overpopulation are centered on war, violence, and total catastrophe.

This is all, as far as I can tell, BS. We have extensive experience of people dying in famines. There may be food riots during times when prices are rising out of people's reach, but actual starvation does not fill people with the manic strength to go out and kill everyone they see. Resource wars are mostly done by rich groups with the resources to carry out a war. The people who are first to die in resource shortages are usually, pretty much by definition, the least powerful people in society, which generally doesn't have much problem in protecting some resources from them for the benefit of more powerful people. And the technical collapse? As Bruce Sterling pointed out somewhere in the context of Peak Oil, we could drop back in energy terms by more than a century and still have coal-fired trains delivering stuff that people ordered by catalog. Horrible tragedies are quite possible, but they aren't SF tragedies.

On the other hand, I think back to Collapse and reflect that no society is safe from the greed of elites who want to cut down the last tree on the island because it's their tree. Then I think about the wonderful, demonstrated competence of our own elites, and I'm a lot less sanguine about our prospects. But this is basically a matter of politics, which SF fans in general don't get.

I felt a bit of foreboding when I read about how the main character in Anti-Copernicus was a solitude-loving, rather chilly environmentalist once involved with a group attracted to mass terrorist action to reduce population. Because that is where SF goes. Compare, say, George R.R. Martin's character Haviland Tuf, a chilly, solitary ecological engineer who avoids killing off the overpopulated planet that hires him but does use coercive methods to bring them into line. SF loves drama, and SF loves escalation. The most natural solution to the alien contact story is a genocide, and the most natural SF solution to overpopulation is either exporting the problem to other planets – this is explicitly brought up in the text by Ange's annoying crewmate – or by villains and even, mind-bogglingly, heroes taking action via some dump-sterilants-in-the-water method, or even by killing off lots of people off first so they won't die later.

Luckily Ange avoids being quite part of the killer environmentalist cliché through some mixture of the matter-of-fact way that the text humanizes her life, and her ordinary cargo run to Mars. But both of her two crewmates die of accidental drug overdoses. She gets more cheerful after the first death. There's a scene where she wakes up and only then realizes that she's put her spacesuit helmet on automatically in her sleep in response to a loss of cabin pressure. I had to wonder: has she been sleepwalking, or in a fugue state of some kind, and been wandering around killing her crewmates off by arranging convenient overdoses? I decided not, unless the narration is a lot more unreliable than I thought it was, but the history of SF makes it the first thing I think of.

Against my better judgement, I'm going to go into a lengthy digression on how SF handles environmental issues and environmentalists. For a sample, I'll just look at a shelf of the late B's. There's Earth, by David Brin, a 1990 Hugo nominee / lengthy potboiler in which Daisy, the environmentalist, naturally sets out to kill all but 10,000 people in the world. In most of the verbiage written about this book on the Web, people want to mention Brin's technical predictions, but no one seems to want to mention Daisy... John Brunner? His environmental/population books were, as I remember, mostly one horrific, deadly incident of amok violence or industrial / accidental death after another, a kind of futurist nightmare that mostly had middle class viewpoint characters who experienced overpopulation as if they'd suddenly wandered into the bad part of town. The aftermath of mass death is just as bad. Algys Budrys, in what is admittedly one of his worst books (Some Will Not Die) writes a plague that kills off 9/10th of humanity and three years later people are still all individually holed up in their apartments, trying to shoot anyone who passes by. It's just natural, I guess, that instead of people coming together after a catastrophe, they grab a weapon and become individual monads, and the hero has to kill them to unite them. Or something.

Enough Bs. Special mention has to go to Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle “environmentalists are New Age anti-science non-slans, and if civilization broke down they'd turn into rampaging cannibals. By the way, did I tell you about my global warming denial?” That some part of SF fandom still considers these people to be leading hard SF writers is expected, but absurd.

How about some better authors? Herbert's Dune was a standout book in part because it was set in an actually different environment than the landscapes that SF readers were used to, and because the novel centered around an environmentally produced source of power. But it also posited that sand dwellers would be forced by the hazards of their environment to become incredible warriors, instead of – as in reality – being limited in numbers by that environment to irrelevance. The tribes sweeping out of the deserts that you read about were nomadic pastoralists, not sand dune dwellers. Ursula Le Guin's The Word For World Is Forest? It's a book that might have been used as a template for the movie Avatar: invading people-like-us fail to understand ecologically different natives, sympathetic viewpoint character helps them, natives repel people-like-us through violence. But, as in most of the stories from that time I can think of, the sympathetic viewpoint character doesn't start out as an environmentalist to begin with; it's a realization that they come to when they see something different than they're used to. They start out clueless.

Have there been SF books where the heroes were environmentalists as such? I can think of two, offhand. One was Kim Stanley Robinson's “Science in the Capital” series, where the viewpoint character is employed by the National Science Foundation. I had high hopes for that, based on KSR's past work with similar themes in his Mars and Gold Coast trilogies, hopes sadly dashed by the amazing and nearly complete failure of the work. Mostly what that work tells us is that if you take sociobiology too seriously, you'll turn yourself into a kind of sociopath who justifies your misdeeds through BS Just So stories about how primitives act.

The other was Zodiac, by Neil Stephenson. I have to admit liking Zodiac in some ways: the hero is instantly identifiable as a certain rare type of Greenpeace staffer, right down to the authorial admission in the acknowledgements that the character is an asshole. But Stephenson can't resist SF's love for drama, and escalates to a world-threatening biological release and nuclear weapon use considered to destroy it, and all kinds of other overly thrilling stuff that never happens. The French government deciding to sink a Greenpeace ship and killing people in the process did, of course, actually happen, so maybe Stephenson gets a bit of a pass.

I'm tempted to go on about popular written tropes around environmentalism – did you know that both the first James Bond book, Dr. No, and one of the first trashy legal thrillers by John Grisham, The Pelican Brief, both involve evil masterminds who come to the attention of the good guys because they get rid of presented-as-nutty people who want to protect birds? – but I really should stop and focus back on the main point. Why does SF do so badly on overpopulation, specifically? Other than its general love of dramatic stories, that is.

I think it has something to do with engineering culture, a part of geek culture. And geeks confront overpopulation, when they happen to think about it for some reason, like this. “You can't have infinite growth on a finite planet!” This is true, but also very obvious, so obvious that the only people who you have to explain it to are mainstream economists. And it's not much of a constraint on anything. Nine billion people by 2050 and ten billion by 2100 is not exactly ever-expanding growth, much less the exponential growth that people dimly remember being warned about with the whole bacteria in the petri dish metaphor. But an appropriate got-to-do-something atmosphere has been created. Then the mind naturally turns to engineering solutions, i.e. getting rid of people. The staggering cost and practical difficulties of shipping people off-planet probably having been realized by even the most stubborn fans by now, some massive technocratic solution is the only way to go. The whole bit about why people have children and what kind of normal social processes might cause them to have fewer of them is, after all, a big mystery.

Anti-Copernicus doesn't really have these problems. But as is every case where common tropes are ironized, it's difficult to say exactly where irony blends into straightforward use.

Anti-Copernicus (V)

2011-09-15T14:40:00.000-07:00

Continuing from here a piece on Adam Roberts' E-published work Anti-Copernicus.

Sun

When Adam sent me this text he described it as sort of a borderline environmentalist fable, except not really. Is it environmentalist? There's no simple answer because of conflicts over what “environmentalist” means, but it's possible to clarify those meanings by considering the different ways in which the story might or might not be. My own understanding of what environmentalism is about is idiosyncratic, so I'm going to have to summarize it in a few paragraphs.

Modern environmentalism has two main branches of concern: ecosystems (habitat and wildlife preservation, sustainability, endangered species, climate change, etc.) and pollution (persistent bioaccumulative toxics, radioactive wastes, industrial chemical releases, untreated sewerage, smog, etc.) Clearly there is some overlap. But at base, when people talk about environmentalism, I think that they're generally talking about damage to ecosystems or damage to human health from pollution. I'm leaving out resource depletion concerns as such because if the resources in question are renewable, that's an ecosystem concern, and if they're not, the usual next step is to say that they should be replaced with renewable ones.

So, what are ecosystems about? Mostly, they are centered on the Sun. The best way that I've found for thinking about ecosystems is that they are complicated ways to trap solar energy and use it to maintain biomass. The solar energy coming to the Earth is limited and approximately constant for any particular geography. The more efficient the ecosystem is at using solar energy, the larger a biomass the area can support. Biomass, in turn, makes everything that we live on: air, water, food.

Why do I write that they're “mostly” centered on the Sun? Because science is really overwhelmingly Copernican in that not everything has a single center. The ecosystems in abyssal hydrothermal vents are based around geothermal energy, which comes partially from primordial heat of the Earth's accretion and partially from radioactive decay. And of course life in tidal pools depends in part on tidal energy, which is mostly from the Moon. But most of the other forms of energy in the environment, like wind and hydropower, come from the Sun indirectly.

What makes an ecosystem efficient? I'm simplifying tremendously, of course, but it's largely a matter of whether specialist species have coevolved in the area. The longer an ecosystem goes on in more or less the same state, the more time that evolution has to produce species that occupy complicated ecological niches and trap solar energy that would otherwise not be used. Disturb the ecosystem seriously and the specialist species die and generalist species remain or move in. But they can't maintain the same ecosystem efficiency as before. I remember a particularly ignorant poster, back in the days of Usenet, who declared that human damage to ecosystems didn't matter because if you took wild land and turned it into a city block, it was still habitat for nonhuman animals – as if generalist scavengers like crows and rats could replace a functioning climax ecosystem.

So human economics, the allocation of scarce resources, is really a subset of a more important ecosystem economics. There are various chemical substances that can limit biomass if they aren't present, but the most important limited resource is solar energy. But it has to be solar energy that's used, and the way that it's used is by being filtered through a vast, evolved information system – the information held within both gene and population distributions – that is adapted to local conditions. This information system passes around all of the local resources that it can hold incessantly among its living components. Human damage to the ecosystem through land use, over-extraction, bioaccumulative toxins, or climate change either destroys part of the information system or changes conditions so that it no longer applies. Over-extraction may also mean that too much biomass/energy is being appropriated for human use out of the system, as with some kinds of farming.

Getting back to the story now, is Anti-Copernicus an ecological story? There doesn't appear to be anything ecological going on that I can recognize with the dark energy. It's not directly used by anything, not passed around within a system. It's not a sustainability story, because there isn't a resource produced by the system that is being overused; there isn't a mechanism by which the universe removes or detoxifies dark energy that is being overloaded. Within the story, the universe seems to simply have a limit on the amount of dark energy generated within it during a big bang/big crunch cycle, and below this limit the universe going back to a big crunch again and restarts the cycle, above it it expands forever. It appears to be an ecological story because of the basic idea that “you're communally approaching a limit over which you should not go”, but … not really. Things that you communally or individually should not do, yet do anyways, are a staple of all kinds of admonitory stories, including the Biblical myths referenced in several places in the text, and this isn't really a specifically environmental concept.

So I'll go back to the other main branch of environmentalism. Is this a pollution story? Here the argument looks a lot clearer. There is dark energy, an unwanted byproduct of human activity -- thinking, in this case. We're heedlessly putting more or more of it out into the environment as our population grows, and over the long term it's going to destroy the universe's ability to support life.

But there are subtle differences that make this not quite work for me as an environmentalist story either. The pollution in this case is a necessary part of our existence as human beings, since we can't stop thinking. It's not the result of our tool use or our built environment. That's not necessarily a problem: all organisms produce waste of some kind, and many organisms have evolved the ability to produce poisons that work in the environment specifically to kill other life. So pollution is something that ecosystems naturally have to deal with. Ecosystems have evolved ways to deal with pollution of this type, though, and detoxify or re-use it. There's no way that the universe in this story has to deal with the dark energy.

What the story reminds me of most, in an environmental sense, is the Proterozoic Eon when cyanobacteria were producing the free oxygen that now exists in the Earth's atmosphere. I can imagine one implausibly intelligent cyanobacteria telling another that “If we keep producing this much waste oyxgen, we'll overwhelm the banded iron formations on the ocean floor. We need to reduce our numbers before all the dissolved iron is used up, or there'll be a mass extinction.”

It's a good analogy, but following it along, the rise of oxygen in the atmosphere was also when eukaryotes appeared, another form of life. A pollution-related catastrophe on Earth (by a volcano that put too much ash in the atmosphere, say, or perhaps a worldwide radioactive isotope release from some kind of dirty bomb) can't normally destroy the whole ground of being. Life just starts evolving again to meet the new conditions. That is no comfort for species (like us) that are either destroyed in the extinction event, or that depended on particular ecological conditions that are now gone.

But the potentially catastrophic buildup of dark energy in Anti-Copernicus is supposed to have no direct effect on humans until the universe keeps expanding rather than contracting again. The human species would probably be long gone by then in any case, or if it were still around, might last longer in the continually expanding universe than one beginning to contract. So we wouldn't really be destroying ourselves – we'd be destroying the ground of being for all future life. It's this element of SF escalation that turns this from what I think of as an environmentalist story into something else. Something that's surely about overpopulation, but in a more religious kind of story-type – there's one sequence where Ange imagines the horror of an afterlife where the multitudes of dead don't allow anyone oblivion. That's a rather picky interpretation, though, and someone else who wanted to think of this as an environmentalist story could without being wrong.

One last bit: there are many species that use a kind of waste that they're immune to as the aforementioned poison for other life, giving them an evolutionary advantage. For instance, dead leaves from trees kill other plants that might compete with the trees for sun or soil nutrients. In Anti-Copernicus, humans are apparently immune to the negative effects of a high concentration of dark energy, perhaps since they're evolved in those conditions. (But those conditions wouldn't occur until intelligent life did, and by that time there wouldn't there already be a lot of humans in comparison with the one-per-planet rule elsewhere? Yes, I'm looking at this too closely.) But the dark energy is fatal to other intelligent life within a fairly short time interval. So the dark energy from the multitude of humans is like dead leaves from trees, crowding potential competitors out. That might be the environmental story within the story.

Anti-Copernicus (IV)

2011-09-14T08:33:00.000-07:00

Continuing from here a piece on Adam Roberts' E-published work Anti-Copernicus.

Venus

“The petri dish is foaming with bacteria, has gobbled the disc of nutrient jelly to a sliver, and is still consuming it, although starvation must necessarily follow. When she was younger, before her marriage, Ange had been quite active in a Netherlands-based Ehrlich group, agitating for much more aggressive population control.”- Anti-Copernicus

That's half of a quote, really. The other half will come in the Mars section below. Venus and Mars traditionally go together.

Remember when I said that everyone thinks they know how the population story turns out? Well, in reality, no one really knows how it turns out. Concerns of this kind are, I think, best divided into two overlapping areas: how high will the population get, and can that population be sustained without damaging the ecosystems that it depends on and thereby leading to mass deaths. These are “overpopulation” and “sustainability” respectively. As long as the death rate doesn't go up due to some catastrophe or ecological crash, and lifespans don't get extended much (it seems very unlikely that they will), overpopulation is mostly a matter of births: how many do people have, and how late in life do they have them. Sustainability depends on how people live, so it's pretty much determined for a given population level by a mixture of culture, technology, and politics unless people bump up against some kind of hard limit on resources needed for that population level and can't do anything. No world society has yet bumped up against a hard limit, so we don't really know what this looks like. I pretty much believe in Amartya Sen's work, which says that famines so far have been political, not resource-constrained. Even the collapses of island societies that Jared Diamond writes about in his excellent book Collapse are political, if you look at them closely.

Anti-Copernicus is mostly about overpopulation, so I won't write much more about sustainability. For overpopulation, the United Nations' current best guess is 9.3 billion people in 2050. However, there has been a decline in the population growth rate, and the United Nations predicts 10.1 billion in 2100. Declining fertility is supposed to be linked to the Demographic transition, and high standards of living generally, although there's a paper in Nature that claims that this will reverse itself back to what looks to me like replacement levels. There's no point in my quoting a number of wiki pages at you at this point: the environmental work that I do is mostly about pollution and global climate change, and I don't have any special expertise in the actual field(s) of study involved in overpopulation.

However. I do know about SF, and SF's general attitude towards overpopulation is all wrong. This may be the most problematic area in the text. The first warning sign is Ange's membership in an Ehrlich group. Ehrlich groups still exist, in an attenuated form, and I suppose it's conceivable they'd still exist in Ange's time. But it's rather like saying that she was a Yippie, or a Situationist, or part of a Maoist group. People are still very concerned about overpopulation, but Ehrlich's approach is considered to be antiquated where it isn't considered to be discredited, the heir to eugenics. At least in the U.S, towards the turn of the century, work against overpopulation is mostly about feminism.

The accepted conventional wisdom among people who care about overpopulation is, as far as I can tell, that what's important is how much power women have. Raising children is a whole lot of work. It starts with the aptly named labor, and continues with nursing and a multitude of home chores, and with basic education, all of them typed in Western societies (and most non-Western ones, as far as I know) as women's work. Now that child mortality has gone down to the point where people don't have to have a lot of children so that some will survive, the ability to have a lot of children depends on one's ability to fob off this work unpaid to someone, and (in richer societies) for women to choose having more children over more leisure time. The more power that women have to decide on when they'll get pregnant and how many children they'll have, and the more that their labor has to be accounted for in monetary terms, the fewer children people tend to have. Therefore, the main concern is really patriarchy. Population control is centered on women, not in the simple they-produce-babies sense, but in the sense that if they have power the natural incentives not to have many children are quite strong enough. Cultural imperialism makes talk about natural incentives problematic, of course.

I'm not sure how much it's useful to write about Ehrlich at this juncture. It's sort of a shame that anyone is still concerned with his work on population and famine in a world where Amartya Sen exists. As of a roundtable in 2008, he seems to be saying mostly unobjectionable things about the importance of women's rights, although he seems to slip back naturally into a genderless, central-incentive approach: “You could simply raise the taxes very high on people who have beyond two children.” But the policies he advocated in the past, in his book The Population Bomb, were really very bad: various kinds of coercive regulation, sterilants added to staple foods if only more biological research on them could be done, denial of food aid to countries that didn't control their populations. Big science fiction ideas, in other words. I'm inclined to think that The Population Bomb may be a significant part of SF's problem; it was one of the first “futurist” books that I remember of the kind that SF fans of the era fondly liked, and SF authors and fans may dimly remember it when they haven't been exposed to much else. Ehrlich was later involved in U.S. anti-immigration groups, and that strain of thought led to a quite recent and damaging blowup in the U.S. Sierra Club.

I don't want to focus too much on a single word in the text. But Ange seems to be following a Zero Population Growth (Ehrlich's first group) kind of line; she refers to her “rationally chosen childlessness”. If rationality is defined as taking actions that seem likely to lead to a desired result, then personal childlessness isn't a rational response to overpopulation. Overpopulation is a social problem, and no likely amount of volunteerism from upper-middle class people (because that's what Ange is) is going to have any effect on it. Political action is rational, but politics depends on communication with people: what does a voluntarily childless person really have to say to a parent? Their daily concerns are very different, and people who want children are naturally suspicious of people who don't seem to want them at all saying that they should restrain themselves. Of course this decision, and Ange's decision in the text, is not really made on the basis of pure rationality.

At any rate, it's not that Ange is being held up by the text as an exemplar of the ideal activist. On the contrary, it's made quite clear that she's a personally rather chilly person whose politics are guided by her personality. Maybe she's supposed to have gravitated towards a tiny splinter group that isn't representative of majority concerns in her future society at all. The problem is that the rhetoric of what I'd consider to be a more mainstream extrapolation from current concerns doesn't seem to be familiar to her, to crop up in her internal monologues. She, and the text, seem to think of overpopulation as an abstracted “people having children” rather than “some people having children for particular reasons”. I could more easily believe that she was a member of a (Margaret) Atwoodite group, say. That would bring feminism more obviously into an already crowded work. But for a work concerned with overpopulation among humans, it kind of has to be there. Feminism is at the center.

Feminism is still present in the work, of course. Ange is skilled, independent, not waiting for a man to tell her what to do. And she isn't a heroine-iized character made to be unusual and remarkable because she has these qualities; her crewmate Ostriker is presented as being somewhat annoying, but really has them too. This is nowhere near the usual SF attitude in stories about overpopulation. About which, more later.

Anti-Copernicus (III)

2011-09-13T16:36:00.000-07:00

Continuing from here a piece on Adam Roberts' E-published work Anti-Copernicus.

Mercury

“It was all very unsatisfying.

Ange did not find it so, however. On the contrary she found the offkilter non-symmetry of the whole thing actually rather pleasing; pleasing in an aesthetic sense.”-- Anti-Copernicus

Since Mercury is a planet named after a god of language, this is the best place to write about the work's aesthetic qualities. I could write about a number of aesthetic features of the text, such as the way that double quotes are avoided everywhere, blurring speech and thought and telepathic communication and omniscient narrative into a single, immediate but slightly reserved distance. But I may as well focus on the aesthetic concerns brought up within the text itself. The aesthetic concerns within Anti-Copernicus are concerns about story shape. If the piece has an aesthetic effect beyond its science fictional one of presenting us with a decentering idea, I see it in an ironic set of layers around story shape: promising, playing out, denying.

The book begins with a chapter called “The Mighty Adam”. The elemental habitat of humanity is in Western mythology the Garden – the center, from which we are displaced with the necessity of toiling for bread – which is what the Adam reference in the chapter title is supposed to be about, according to the second paragraph of the text. (“Let’s call this first, solitary atom Adam. It is all that exists. [...]—just it, alone in its spacetime Eden.”)

When a text has an in-written authorial interpretation, that is the center around which our idiosyncratic readings orbit. So here we are told in so many words that this is a text concerned with archetypal, primitive Biblical imagery and mythology, but that metaphor is used in the context of three paragraphs all about scientific cosmology. A contradiction, in other words. A throwing off balance.

“First Contact” introduces Ange and a mood of absurdity. Ange was going to be sent to the presumed center of action of the story, the First Contact mission, but she wasn't. We're following a viewpoint character who could have been special, but instead watches events on TV just like us. But it's an anxious absurdity. Here's a part of first contact with the aliens:

Fingers are a mode of madness—and toes! Toes? Toes!

What do you mean? Do you mean you don’t possess fingers and toes? That the sight of them distresses you? Do you have flippers, or tentacles, or do you manipulate your environment with forcefields directly manoeuvred by your minds? We can wear mittens, if you like. If it distresses you. We can wear shoes on our feet and boxing-gloves on our hands! Not that we wish to box with you ... we have no belligerent feelings towards you at all!

This is straightforwardly rather funny; I think of the expectations for a serious, diplomatic Star Trek first contact confounded by the aliens' giddy ramble, the human representatives, under pressure to respond quickly, blurting out more than they meant to say. But even setting SF paranoia aside, it would be deeply worrying to have an entity that goes on like this anywhere nearby. The aliens deny any intent to hurt people, but an accident with an FTL drive could be quite damaging enough.

But Ange hasn't been chosen for the mission, so she goes on an ordinary one. And during that she hears that the aliens seem to have just gone away. Her two crewmates talk about why they would have left, one of them saying that there must be some reason, the other saying that the universe doesn't always give us coherent reasons. And Ange thinks this:

She believed (and this belief was as close to religion as she came) that the universe was not structured according to the logic of the human mind, despite the fact—ironically enough, perhaps—that the human mind is unavoidably part of the cosmos. The billions of buzzing homo sapiens brains craved pattern, structure and resolution; they saw the beauty of a story arc in every rainbow’s bend. The cosmos liked structure too, of course; but of a much less complicated, or perhaps it would be truer to say a much more monotonously replicated, kind. Hydrogen and helium everywhere in varying alternated clumps; the inverse-square-law everywhere in every direction. Everything existent, nothing mattering. And above all the cosmos had no sense of story whatsoever.

And Ange doesn't find this unsatisfying. This is where the quote that I started this section with goes, about her liking the off-kilter non-symmetry of it in an aesthetic sense.

Gareth Rees commented, on “Earth”, that:

The trouble with taking Anti-Copernicanism as your theme is that nearly all fiction (and especially science fiction) is already Anti-Copernican: the hero or heroine really is at the centre of the fictional universe; the events of the universe really are set up just so that they can save the day.

This is true. But possibly because Adam Roberts is a historian and critic of SF as well as a writer, the story is set up to (nearly) metafictionally address these very expectations.

So where is this going, aesthetically? This seems to be going into Stanislaw Lem territory. A large part of the feeling of real science that I get from Lem's work is his explicit insistence that scientific questions usually don't have answers, that the story centered on a particular character is going to end without the reader ever getting the closure of finding out what really happened. It's what many of his major books are based around – Solaris, His Master's Voice, The Investigation, The Chain of Chance (to use the English names). Len undermines himself a bit by giving hypotheses at the end of each work that are a bit too good, so believable that it feels like cheating. But people do create convincing hypotheses without really knowing what's going on.

So that's where the reader – or, at least, me – thinks the work is going at this point. The asymmetric story, the denial of an easy wrap-up, the refusal to center everything on the character in a genre-typical way. I've written about this before. As a general aesthetic for SF, it's one of my favorites – my aesthetic theory, such as it is, being somewhere near Umberto Eco's Opera Operta (The Open Work) rather than his later criticism.

Is that what we get? As Ange's journey goes on, her ship suffers from a series of accidents: one of the crew dies of a recreational drug overdose, a micrometeorite damages the trip and takes off the other crewmember's foot, and ... wait a minute:

At this Ostriker began to weep. I feel faint, she said. Oh my foot! My poor foot! How will I do without a foot? My toes! My foot.

Her toes? Where have I seen that before? The uneasiness for the reader with this implicit aesthetics is starting to take form: things are circling back. And indeed they do. Ostriker dies via another accident, and Ange, alone on the ship, realizes that it is heavily damaged and that she's probably going to die. Ange reinforces the theme:

If I live, she decided, and get home again I will write a work of philosophy, explaining how Copernicus revolutionised our living and dying as well as our cosmology. All those Greek tragedies, all that Shakespeherian to-do about death, the distinguished thing—it all belonged to that Pre-Copernican delusion of our importance. Only an important being can have a significant death! An unimportant entity dies, as she was doing (there was little point in denying it), stupidly, belatedly, unexpectedly, in a downbeat banal accidental way. The modern mode of it.

And then, totally without justification – or if there is one, I missed it – the alien that she lost the chance to talk to at the beginning mysteriously crashes into or contacts her ship. At first I thought it might be a hallucination, but there is all sorts of confirming physical evidence, then and after: a neat circular hole in her ship, the alien ship's detection on many other people's sensors. And the alien answers all of the significant questions of the story for her and us. And then, because people detected the alien ship, a ship is sent that rescues Ange. She lives after all. It's a neat wrap.

Why would the story raise the expectation of a certain kind of aesthetic, talk about it, and then withdraw it in favor of a different one? Well, of course I don't know, I can only give a reading. It could be something as simple as: in Adam Roberts' books characters don't tend to get what they want; Ange wants an off-kilter story, therefore she doesn't get one. It could be the requirements of commercial publishing. But I think – and here perhaps I should read Eco's Interpretation and Overinterpretation – that it has something to do with those toes.

Why do the aliens go on about toes in the first place? Well, here's what the surviving alien out of the original three tells Ange, about their reaction to being near so much dark energy produced by the multitudes of human intelligences:

It has destroyed my two companions.[...] We were giddy. We were intoxicated by the glory and seediness and splendour of it all. When they died I took my craft away, but my own consciousness has been ... poisoned, I suppose you might say ... as well. So I have come back. I might as well expire here as anywhere. Here at the heart of the cosmos.

So the giddy ramble wasn't the aliens' natural state, it was a state of being intoxicated and dying. That's a lot more grim than that amusing exchange appeared at first read. Why toes? Well, traditionally, a child uses fingers and toes to count. The intoxicated aliens are saying that fingers and toes are a mode of madness because they're boggled by our numbers. When Ostriker mourns the loss of her toes later, it's symbolically – for each of us is a civilization, according to the aliens – us mourning the human losses that we're going to take if things go on as they are.

What's the opposite of a story with an unknown ending? A story where, from the start, you know how it's going to turn out. This text is centered around overpopulation. That, I think, is the reason that this aesthetic is raised, celebrated, and then rejected. We all think that we know how the overpopulation story turns out.

Is this sometimes rather funny story really that grim? No, it isn't: Ange's final decision to have a child has its own evident irony, but is optimistic for all that. But the reversal of aesthetics is part of the unsettling that the story seeks to cause. The aliens in the story are concerned that because of human-generated dark energy, the universe won't close its big bang/big crunch cycle, will expand forever and end in entropy. Meanwhile the reader may be conscious that the story has, ironically, done the reverse.

Anti-Copernicus (II)

2011-09-12T08:43:00.000-07:00

Continuing from here a piece on Adam Roberts' E-published work Anti-Copernicus.

Moon

Adam sent me this text through Email, as a .docx Office 2007 file. When I first read it, it looked fine. When I read it a second time – the read I'm doing now for this piece -- it had changed. I was using a newer iMac, and OpenOffice instead of NeoOffice, and a strange corruption had set in. There was now a gap after every apostrophe. Spaces between paragraphs had de-spaced, changing the page count that I remember from the original 32 to 21 pages. The file hadn't even gone through a save-and-restore sequence, but it appeared wholly different.

A book doesn't read the same with a different font, with different cover art, different margins. These things normally do not change for a particular instance of a book; they are physically stable. E-publishing brings out a Lovecraftian lunar madness, a mutation of form that depends on the (programs used by the) observer, not the observed. Books that are published purely electronically may well become unreadable in time, just like so many electronic records have whose formats become disused.

But we don't have to wait for decades. I'd guess that within a month, or a day, someone is going to look at the sentence in Anti-Copernicus “At a café she decided to respect the e-acute and ordered herself a latté” and see strange, unreadable symbols whose meaning can only be gained through context. I hesitate to write much about it since it is so well known within the group of people likely to read this, but electronic text is firmly centered on English, more specifically on the 94 printable characters of ASCII. Even within the symbols in ASCII, people managed to somehow mess up the tab and the apostrophe. Going beyond English, even to any kind of accented character, puts you into a wasteland of varying implementations of Unicode.

I'm not trying to write yet another screed bemoaning the supposed death of printed books. The logic of electronic publishing is inescapeable. And in an environmental sense, there are obvious disadvantages to cutting down trees, bleaching wood pulp, shipping the product all over the world etc. Although, as Bruce Sterling pointed out in the Viridian list, bits are not metaphysical, abstract entities. They require hard drives, backup tapes, electricity. For you to read what I'm writing now, coal is being burned in a electric power plant somewhere. Still, since we're all connecting to the Internet and using some computing device near us anyways, the additional marginal cost of one E-published book must be fairly negligible.

But E-publishing is, again, currently in a Lovecraftian mode. “I'm seeing indescribable symbols that people were not meant to see!” and all that. The cultural imperialism that goes along with it, written into its most basic set of codes. Even its inevitabilitty.

As the text's readability suffers a strange decay, certain formal qualities become weirdly apparent, like lunar features not screened by atmosphere. How many words does a particular book contain? At the beginning of the book, no one knew, without an obsessive act of counting. Then when books began to be typeset, perhaps the typesetter knew. The publisher. The author, once authors used word processing software. When you get a file as an Office document, the reader knows. Tools → Word Count → there are 13,115 words in this work.

Science fiction, as a genre, has an obsession with word count. Possibly because of the Hugo Awards, possibly because at heart it was a magazine-based genre during certain formative years, with pay by the word and stories cut smaller or fixed-up larger as space allowed. It is the only genre to really care about the definition of the “novella” and “novelette”. If you look up these words on Wiki, the SF definitions are the only formalized ones, and they are formalized to word count. Therefore, this isn't a Dwarf novel as Adam jokes, or a mini-novel. A novelette, in SF, has a word count of between 7,500 and 17,499 words. This is therefore a novelette. The formal classification of this work is scientific. Anyone can see it. The book has lost its physical center, but its word count is a rock.

Anti-Copernicus (I)

2011-09-11T14:36:00.000-07:00

“There was nothing special about her. She was as perfectly ordinary as anybody else in the world. And the world itself was perfectly unexceptional, ordinary, banal, in cosmic terms a Copernican un-wonder.”-- Anti-Copernicus

Anti-Copernicus is a short novel E-published by Adam Roberts. It's a work about where the center is. Since the center is in the Western tradition troped as an exceptional place, it's also about what is ordinary and what isn't.

I've chosen to write about Adam Roberts' novels within arbitrary formal structures – for this piece, that means I've written within sections labelled according to the spheres of the Ptolemaic system: Earth, Moon, Mercury and so on. But in the comical reversal that often accompanies formally structured attempts of this sort, I found myself writing more and more; Adam's shortest novel-like work will go with my longest blog post. So I'm just going to post the first section now, “Earth”, and follow with the rest later.

Earth

Anti-Copernicus, and Adam's own introductory post about it, mention dark energy and the Fermi Paradox. SF has this idea that it is a literature of ideas. The text doesn't mention, oddly enough, the Anthropic Principle.

I think that a plot summary is required. (And yes, these are spoilers.) Ange Mlinko is a space pilot, considered for a First Contact mission with the only aliens who humanity has yet encountered. Instead she gets sent on an ordinary commercial run. An ordinary space voyage for her, of course, is not ordinary for us the readers. During the course of her trip to Mars to deliver a cargo of barnacles, a series of accidents kill the two other crew members on board, and a in a final accident that threatens her own life, she meets one of the aliens after all.

The alien explains that all other intelligent life in the universe has one creature per species (or one hive mind per species, but in any case only one intelligence), and that the three aliens who banded together to contact Earth are not representatives, but each their entire species. They are aghast at the billions of humans living on Earth, because intelligence produces dark energy, and the tremendous amount of dark energy produced by humankind will over a long term destabilize the cycles of expansion and contraction of the universe, leading to continual expansion of the universe and its effective destruction as a support for life. Therefore Earth is really the center of the Universe, or at least a very special place unlike any other; the dark energy isn't and hasn't been produced in these quantities anywhere else. But it is a destructive center. The aliens die, overwhelmed by the effect of so many nearby intelligences, and Ange, a rather withdrawn person, decides after her near-death experience to have a child.

It's a satire, of course. But at the center are these ideas, which work through SF escalation to treat overpopulation as more than Earth-ecosystem-threatening -- as universe-threatening. Does this work as hard SF?

Having posed the question, I'll immediately qualify it. I was an astrophysics grad student ABD (all but dissertation) when I left that field to do environmental work. As a result, I'm weirdly overqualified to comment on this particular text. Hard SF is very difficult to do well for a reader with scientific training, or perhaps only I find it so. The only hard SF that I've found very convincing is Stanislaw Lem's, and, fitfully, Kim Stanley Robinson's (though his still has its gaffes, as with his Mars windmills that heat up the planet). With this text, I immediately thought that the “intelligence generates dark energy” idea was extremely doubtful. It relies on a lot of handwaving about the observer changing the observed that's part of a continuing misunderstanding of quantum behavior beloved by science popularizers, because after all it puts we the observers at the center through the fallacy of equivocation, treating “observer” used as a physics term of art as the same as “living, intelligent and perceiving creature”. In terms of biological science, too, I wondered how it was that these aliens were so verbally communicative, so fluent. Why would they have evolved the capacity for speech when there was literally no one else on each of their home planets to talk to? For that matter, how could they evolve at all, when their singular nature means that there's no population for variation and natural selection to work on?

But this is a story, and unlike Kepler's Somnium (the first work of SF, possibly) the science ideas are in the service of the story, not the reverse. So the question is, do the scientific ideas help make the story work? In particular, a lot of the impact of the work is the reader's bogglement at the idea of each intelligence being a whole civilization, solitary and self-contained and rare. That seems unlikely, doesn't it? – the idea that our multiplicity is unique, and that makes the Earth unique. Shouldn't we trust our intuition that it's really unlikely that we live in a one-of-a-kind place?

It turns out, we shouldn't.

“The phrase "anthropic principle" first appeared in Brandon Carter's contribution to a 1973 Kraków symposium honouring Copernicus's 500th birthday. Carter, a theoretical astrophysicist, articulated the Anthropic Principle in reaction to the Copernican Principle, which states that humans do not occupy a privileged position in the Universe. As Carter said: "Although our situation is not necessarily central, it is inevitably privileged to some extent."

That's a quote from wikipedia. It's so apt that I'm I don't know whether Adam didn't encounter it, or chose not to include it, but in any event it's one of those rare cases in which an astrophysical concept will illuminate a story rather than serving as backdrop.

How to explain the Anthropic Principle? It says that an observer – in the sense of “living, intelligent creature”, this time – requires an environment that supports its existence, or there can be no observation. Why does the Universe have fundamental constants that support our kind of life? We don't know why, but we know that it has to – otherwise we couldn't be here to see it. Therefore, if there was some kind of random variation or multiplicity of universes with different fundamental constants, we would only see the universe that supports us, no matter how unlikely it was, or how long it took for that universe to appear. We can't appear and observe it until it comes into existence. What if the conditions that created life on Earth were incredibly unlikely? Well, we wouldn't know if they were, because we can only appear on Earth, even if it were the only such planet in the multiverse.

This is a strange, de-centering principle for scientists. We're used to thinking that if we have no information at all, the safest guess is that we're in the middle of a Gaussian bell-shaped distribution of some kind – many things look like bell-shaped curves, and it gets increasingly unlikely that you're out on one of the tails of one. But it doesn't work that way in this case. Would life be likely to appear on planets like ours? We can reason from our knowledge of physics, chemistry, and biology that the same kind of processes that produced us would work elsewhere. What we can't do is just look around and say that we're more likely to be average than not. Scientists seem not to like the Anthropic Principle; they grumble about it being unfalsifiable, not really part of science at all, and it's rather stuffily been classed as part of philosophy.

I like the Anthropic Principle. When I was young it was one of the first things that I really got about astrophysics; a paper or conference presentation that someone had summarized claimed that since we saw some kind of astrophysical object nearby, it was likely that they were common. But you can't do that, I said, at least not in cases where the object could have some possible connection to life on Earth. Nearby supernovas? They create heavy elements which later became part of our planet, so if life requires an old supernova within a certain distance, then we will see one at the right distance, even if that's really rare. Large moons? Some people theorize that our moon was important for the emergence of life because of the tides that it creates, so, again, if what we needed was an unusually large moon for a planet of the size of the Earth, we'll see one, even if they almost never appear around other planets.

I remember my realization about the Anthropic Principle occurring when I was a freshman or sophomore in college, 17 or 18, which seems young and perhaps my memory is falsified to a later event from grad school, but at any rate what matters in something trivial like this is what I remember, not what really happened. Why am I bothering with telling this personal story now? Because a significant sub-thread in Anti-Copernicus is how supposedly rational decisions are really made on the basis of very basic biological drives. When I had my realization about the Anthropic Principle, I was in a serious relationship with a girl a couple of years older who'd already decided on astrophysics as her field. She was impressed that I'd seen something wrong with the paper that she hadn't. At the time I had no idea what area of physics I wanted to go into. I only knew that I didn't want to go into anything that could lead to weapons development. So... astrophysics seemed interesting enough, a safely theoretical field without the necessity of working for some defense contractor someday. My rational decision to go to grad school in astrophysics was probably more about the warm glow of admiration from my first sexual partner than anything else.

To get back to general matters. The odd thing about what Brandon Carter in the quote above describes as our inevitably privileged position in the Universe is that it acts rather like “privilege” does, as used casually in accusations on the Internet when someone is supposed to be writing out of social privilege of some kind. It's there, but we just can't see it. It's always been part of our environment, and we're so used to getting its benefits that they're part of our assumptions; we have difficulty imagining anything else. And unlike the various forms of social privilege, there really isn't anyone else we can compare life experiences with. A white, heterosexual, middle-class etc person can meet other people and begin to see that what they thought was normal is really a set of special benefits that they get that other people don't. No contact with aliens means that in a larger sense we can't do this; we are solitary despite our multiplicity. Maybe other intelligent life really is all singular while ours is multiple. It seems very unlikely to me, for various physics-chemistry-biology reasons. But we can't tell simply through introspection, because even if our kind of life is really rare, we'd be there to see ourselves. A radical distrust in our intuition is what's required by the Anthropic Principle.

And now back to SF. The whole point of SF being a literature of ideas is not that it's supposed to be ideas about geosynchronous satellites that people later actually invent. Well, some fans think that it is, but I don't. It's supposed to be about ideas that de-center you, make you rethink where you are in ways that more realistic literature can't, because reality as we know it doesn't furnish what we need to see our position of privilege. Hard SF is supposed to do that with scientific ideas, ideas that have force because, as far as we know, they're really true. That is what is essential to hard SF, not scientific plausibility in all of the story's supports.

So, does Anti-Copernicus work as hard SF?

I think it does.

Riots

2011-08-15T10:30:00.000-07:00

A large number of people whose blogs I read are writing about the British riots. I know nothing, really, about them, and my default idea on riots is that the Dead Kennedys pretty much said everything already in their song "Riot". (Chorus: "Riot- the unbeatable high / Riot- shoots your nerves to the sky / Riot- playing into their hands / Tomorrow you're homeless / Tonight it's a blast.") But I don't need to know about the riots themselves to know that some of what is being said about them on the left is pretty troubling, politically. And, of course, much more so on the right, but those people aren't worth my time.

But no one will take you seriously if you rely on the Dead Kennedys, so I went back and did what I always do when I think about social justice: re-read the Book of Amos. That is one strange, strange text, and it's foundational to how I think about social justice because some of its most evocative language was used for the U.S. Civil Rights movement. What does Amos say about riots? Or rather, what can I read him as saying about riots? Because of course I don't share any of the referents of the original context, really.

Well... Amos says that the great house shall be smashed to bits, and the little house to splinters. When retribution comes for social injustice, it's not going to be the rich people, or only the rich people, who suffer. The poor suffer even worse. (Dead Kennedys again: "But you get to the place / Where the real slavedrivers live / It's walled off by the riot squad / Aiming guns right at your head / So you turn right around / And play right into their hands / And set your own neighbourhood / Burning to the ground instead.") Here's Amos on people who hope for the day of justice:

Ah, you who wish
For the day of the Lord!
Why should you want
The day of the Lord?
It shall be darkness, not light!

--As if a man should run from a lion
And be attacked by a bear
Or if he got indoors,
Should lean his hand on the wall
And be bitten by a snake!
Surely the day of the Lord shall be
not light, but darkness,
Blackest night without a glimmer.

(translation from Tanakh: The Holy Scriptures_, copyright 1985 by The Jewish Publication Society, ISBN 0-8276-0283-9)

Now, it used to be a staple of stupid leftist talk in the U.S. that some academic or media figure would say that people should have leftist solidarity and join in with rioters (I remember that particularly from an academic whose name I forget during the Washington, DC, Columbia Heights riot) or that rioters should or could act like a leftist rebellion (I remember Michael Moore pointing out where the real slavedrivers live on a map and saying that people should go there after the 1992 Los Angeles riots). I haven't seen anything like that this time. The condescension, hopeful assumption of partial responsibility for the riots (because rioters, after all, aren't ignored like leftists are), and fake solidarity is more subtle this time. Perhaps not even present in some cases. What are some of them?

I'll start with CR. CR is a person who used to comment on a blog we both read, The Valve, and who seems to me to have gotten a lot better, politically, since he started becoming a kind of advisor to student protestors. (I found, from my own student protest days, that it concentrates your mind on what you're really advocating tremendously when people are getting themselves arrested in demonstrations that you set up.) CR seems to have written mostly sensible things about the riots. However, CR also linked to a piece by Owen Hatherley that he found "excellent" and that I thought was pretty noxious. What does Hatherley say? Well, read it yourself, but in part:

Look at the looted, torched places, look at what they all have in common. Look at Bristol, a port where you could walk for miles and wonder where its working class had disappeared to, which seems to have been given over completely to post-hippy tourism, 'subversive' graffiti, students and shopping. Well, those invisible young, 'socially excluded' (how that mealy-mouthed phrase suddenly seems to acquired a certain truth) people arrived in the shiny new Cabot Circus mall and took what they wanted, what they couldn't afford, what they'd been told time and time again they were worthless without.

It's the hippies at fault! No, really, the post-hippies with their tame, scare-quoted subversive graffiti. And wow, the people who went to steal things during a riot would never have known to steal valuable, yet portable objects unless "they'd been told time and time again they were worthless without" them. You see, those chavs can't even *loot* things without being informed by the media-industrial complex in some cultural-criticism fashion that they should desire certain objects to maintain their self-image. Of course, all objects -- even gold bars! -- only have socially-mediated value in contemporary societies, so this isn't exactly new. No one would have blinked if rioters had stolen gold bars. Yet since the shops didn't have gold bars lying around, and did have expensive sneakers or radios or whatever, all of a sudden the rioters are responding to messages about how their worth depends on material objects when they steal them.

I'll move on from there to a post-hippy, Andrew Rilstone (well, really I'd describe him as a classic SF geek, but I'm not sure how that translates into Britishese). His article about the earlier Tesco riot was the best I'd read about it, really. Here's what he writes:

certainly, there were lots of forum comments in the evening post, and on twitter, saying that the people who lived on the croft, the people who objected to tescos, the people who think that chris chalkley's campaign of purposeful graffiti and street art was a good idea were street scum, rats, hippies, crusties, dole monkeys etc etc and that after the riots the next step was to drive us out of the area

just be careful what you wish for, that's all

To make clear one thing that I think is right about Rilstone's account, and bad about Hatherley's: I think that the left should really give up on authenticity via reflexive anti-middle-classism. Did austerity cause the riots? All right. Austerity is a policy pushed by upper class creeps, not by middle class post-hippies, not even really by middle class non-hippies. Hatherley criticises the smug, middle-class people who think that it's better in London than in Paris because London doesn't have banlieues. Well, it is better.
Are the people who care about that really the same people who decided that austerity was what was needed?

What other accounts of the riots did I encounter? Well, CR also links to an article by Michael Sayeau (yes, yes, I know). This article seems a lot more sensible to me. Where it starts to run into problems is here:

Leftists and liberals—of both the “public” and “student activist” stripes —have been incessantly asking themselves questions about the meaning of these riots and the pragmatics of handling them. Should those who have been defending the right to protest in the UK defend the rights of rioters who have looted electronics stores? Would distancing oneself from the rioters imply that previous claims of solidarity with the non-matriculating lower classes and the largely West Indian poor of Tottenham, Hackney, and elsewhere were only valid until the going got rough?

These are good questions, if there is any chance that they will actually be answered realistically. This is the problem of fake solidarity. The left, however defined, is addicted to claims that when students protest, it's really in solidarity with the working class. Or the poor, or at any rate someone other than the soon-to-be-middle-class students. Perhaps it's time to give up on speaking for other people and allow people real choices. Did some of the actual people who rioted actually show up at Sayeau's earlier demonstrations? Then certainly Sayeau should be in solidarity with them, if they weren't among those who committed crimes of violence; they were in solidarity with him. But, from the way in which they appear in this account as an unknown mass, without specific examples of people whom Sayeau knows, I don't think that they did. Why then is it so important for "leftists and liberals" to either defend the rioters or distance themselves? There's a relationship between two distinct groups of people there that seems much more important to those on one side than on the other.

Sayeau writes things that I agree with to a greater extent later on: if you dismantle the welfare state -- if you return to the capitalism of the 1930s -- then you should expect the horrors of the 1930s. That's what I take from my reading of Amos, in any case. The price is going to be paid, even though it's mostly going to be paid by poor people. And he's probably right that "the riots and their aftermath represent a painfully clear illustration of one of the most demonically perverse historical tendencies: that right-wing policies hurt ordinary people and in doing so promote support for right-wing policies." (Is he? Based on American precedents, I suspect that the aftermath of the riots will lead to police training in how not to cause incidents that spark riots. And that austerity of certain kinds may well be backed off on in response to social unrest. Whether the final result will be to promote the right-wing or not is still uncertain.)

I think that Ken McLeod addresses this whole issue more squarely.

The Grand Experiment was, of course, the postwar Keynes-Beveridge full-employment welfare state. Supported by the main parties of left and right, by the end of the sixties it was coming under attack from both flanks [...]

It seems obvious now that the postwar settlement had reached its limits by 1979. But I sometimes wonder if a more rational left than I was part of could have carried it forward, rather than helped to bring it down.

When leftists argue against austerity, they're implicitly arguing for the alternative to austerity, left-liberalism or left neo-liberalism. For Keynes, really, because the social-democratic alternative that doesn't come down to Keynes isn't really there any longer, as best as I can make out. Can there be student anti-austerity protests in favor of Keynesianism? If not, something about the left's myths is perhaps getting in the way. Or it isn't really austerity that's the problem.

P.S. (via Crooked Timber): Science!

Infrastructuralism

2011-07-14T12:45:00.000-07:00

What would work best as a preventative to anthropogenic global climate change? According to most economists -- including, in particular for the purposes of this post, John Quiggin -- it's carbon taxes. I don't think so. For that matter, I don't think that any number of other favorite solutions have a good chance of working.

To make long argument short, I favor a model that goes something like this: people use whatever infrastructure is available. In a contemporary society, major infrastructure is essentially a command-and-control activity of government. Therefore what needs to happen is: a) scientists convince the public that change is needed, b) the public tells their governments that change is needed, c) governments issue orders to replace one kind of infrastructure with another. Emissions trading schemes and carbon taxes are basically market fetishism, because the vast majority of users of energy, including businesses, do not have the ability to choose differently enough within the existing infrastructure to make a difference. Demand elasticity only goes so far, and not far enough. Only if the cost of an ETS or carbon tax builds up enough to force a major rebuild of infrastructure would they work. But that is unlikely to happen, because a government in which people are feeling that much pressure from the ETS or carbon tax will respond to that pressure by revoking it.

And let's take the carbon tax argument to its limit. Quiggin writes that "The alternative solution is to make those responsible for carbon emissions pay a price, just as they do for goods and services of all kinds." What good or service are they paying for? Unless they are paying to replace carbon infrastructure with non-carbon, then what they are really paying for is ecosystem services. Imagine a situation in which global climate change goes on unchecked, but in which economists announce that the people doing the polluting have properly paid for their damages, in monetary terms, to other people. Is that really acceptable? No. Aside from the moral or ethical valuations involved, ecosystems can't really be replaced by money (i.e. human activity) just in physical terms.

Quiggin, in the linked blog post, writes that those who favor what is being called "direct action" in Australia do so primarily because they are either business-linked/conservative or because they are climate change deniers. I am neither of those, and wouldn't want to give aid or comfort to them. But it's my sense that this support of "direct action" on their part is purely instrumental, because they perceive that in their current politics it is least likely to lead to any action at all. You see this in the U.S. in the other direction, where measures against climate change were originally proposed to be regulatory, and so the right wing "favored" emissions trading schemes. When it looked like those might have a chance of actually being implemented, they went to pure denialism. So I don't think there's any point in disfavoring regulatory/command-and-control change just because they favor a do-nothing version.

Quiggin uses the usual invisible hand imagery of economics when he writes that "This problem raises a vast number of possible options, and the problem is to choose which will achieve the necessary reductions in emissions with the least possible disruption and economic cost. This is a difficult problem. [...]" Therefore, turn it over to the market (in the main) rather than the experts. But there is a large amount of fictitious economic activity that goes on, at least in the U.S., to camouflage the fact that major energy infrastructure is in fact an activity already decided by a few experts. Want to build a coal-burning electric power plant? In no sense is a "market" really involved. The government is involved from start to finish. How about a gasoline refinery? In fact, the major inputs to the system are government-controlled in all but name, with corporate ownership mostly being there for purposes of crony capitalism.

Someone might reply that the millions of decisions take place on the consumption side, with all of those light bulbs being replaced, car miles being driven to a greater or lesser extent, heaters being turned up or down, and small solar panels being put on roofs. None of that makes enough difference. If the electricity is being supplied by a coal-burning plant, people will use it somehow. If the roads have gasoline stations and infrastructure and no electric infrastructure, people will use up whatever gas is available, for the wider sense of "available" meaning "all that can be gotten out of the ground".

Conversion of our societies from carbon fuel to non-carbon is really a communal, global cost. Governments are how contemporary societies decide on and pay those kinds of costs. Trying to get the government to hand it off to the market is just the economist with a hammer thinking that everything looks like a nail.

Declining empire politics

2011-07-14T09:44:00.000-07:00

I see that the nation has moved on from Obama's birth certificate and the question of whether he really did kill Bin Laden. Between these two poles of birtherism and deatherism, we're now at adult politics -- the question of whether or not the nation is going to raise a debt limit that is completely meaningless except insofar as it has the capability to cause various forms of self-inflicted catastrophe.

Who usually cares about debt limits? Creditors do, when they're deciding whether to give you another loan. Do the creditors of America care? No, they want to lend more money. The debt limit only functions as a political device by which politicians can pretend to do something about debts that they've already committed to paying. At least, they've already committed to them according to the U.S. Constitution, which majestically declares that the debt shall not be questioned. But everyone in power, not just anarchists like me, agrees that the Constitution is a meaningless piece of paper.

Will the posturing around the debt limit cause U.S. debt to be downgraded? Either way, only the poor will suffer. Rich people, like Congressman Cantor, routinely hedge against this kind of risk. If the debt limit raise goes through, it will probably be because some part of the social safety net has been traded away. If not, it's an opportunity for disaster capitalism. Certainly it's provided a nice show for people who'd otherwise wonder what is being done about jobs.

What else is going on? I predicted back in Jan 2010 that "At the end of Obama's term, we'll still be in a war in Afghanistan. But I'd guess that we'll pick up another war, too. It's the standard response of American Presidents whose domestic policies founder." The Libyan people thank you, Conor Foley!

And lastly, I see that Obama has taken in a record $86 million in campaign contributions, 98% of which were contributions of $250 or less. The Obama administration really is popular among the more or less left-of-center in this country. That pretty much removes the last possible check on our dysfunctional politics. I never really had much hope that Obama would change his tune because he realized that he needed support, but there was some, and he's turned out to be correct that he doesn't need to.

Anarchism now more than ever. If we're going to be ridiculous and futile, it might as well be with some class.

Go Mitt Go

2011-06-13T18:30:00.000-07:00

America's politics is particularly bad in the Obama years. In the Bush years, you could at least say that a large minority of the country was engaged with reality, and had a coherent response to the majority. Now?

What would a coherent opposition to Obama look like? It would begin with a concerted attack on his civil liberties policies, war-making, and assumption of executive powers -- in all respects, his policies are worse than Bush's. It would continue with his failure to do anything on critical parts of his agenda, such as global warming, in which his failure makes the U.S. not a leader but one of a few laggard nations that run a real risk of causing global failure to do anything about the problem. It would certainly include his failure to bring the U.S. up to First-World standards for unionization and health care, areas in which he not only failed the citizenry in general but more particularly and directly sabotaged his base in favor of elite interests. And it would conclude with his failure, in the face of those same interests, to bring the country back from sustained mass unemployment.

What does the actual opposition to Obama look like? It begins with questioning his birth certificate. It continues with crudely racist tracts, conspiracy theories in which he didn't really kill the enemies of the state that he said that he killed, and his supposed disinclination to torture people as much as they should be tortured to keep us safe. It claims that the science behind global warming is a fraud and that Obama's watered-down health care scheme is socialism. And it concludes with discredited Hooverite economics that would make unemployment worse -- if the proponents of it didn't succeed in making the crisis worse much more quickly by refusing to pay the government's debts.

I've written many times that Obama has been lucky in his enemies. In a declining empire, there are no good choices. But Obama is certainly preferable to outright racist craziness.

That's why Mitt Romney's candidacy is interesting. He is, as far as I know, the only major GOP candidate who isn't a global warming denier. And I was interested to see this political ad (linked to by Duncan Black). He's actually attacking Obama on unemployment. Who cares that the ad is misleading? He's going there.

The criticisms of Romney tend to be that he flip-flops and says anything that his audience wants to hear -- as far as I'm concerned, that's a necessary quality in a politician. Perhaps if Romney wins the nomination, a more serious criticism of Obama might emerge. I have no illusions about any of his policies, if elected, being any better than Obama's. They'd probably be worse. But if his narrative becomes more of the opposition narrative, instead of birtherism, global warming denialism, and crackpot Hooverism, that'll be good for what remains of the country.

Snow Storm

2011-06-09T18:07:00.000-07:00

Snow Storm Massachusetts June 2011
(after this radio spot)

1.

You ever imagine shooting a kid? Getting sent to Iraq
for one tour after another and straight up shooting a ten year old?
Ten years old if you're lucky
They've got to slow down at those checkpoints
And if they don't you have to blow them away, those are the rules
And sometimes really young kids get shot up in the car

I heard the ad on the radio, driving down the highway:
Two young men driving in a snow storm, rescuing cars, thrilled
“Ever imagine anything like this would happen when you joined the Guard?”
“Rescuing people – now that's what I imagined when I joined”

Man, you've been driving blind your whole short life if you believe that

2.

Rescuing people – that's what I imagine
Desperate kids, naïve kids
Telling them to slow down
Telling them they're gonna get driven overseas
The Massachusetts Broadcasters Association has a special radio spot for that too
People who tell you to stop are whiny, controlling, female like your mom

3.

Imagining being a rescuer is good, isn't it?
I want the firefighters to be there for the next tornado
And so does everyone and that's why the evil people use it, you can't stop it
Evil is best, purest, when it uses good intentions

We're heading blind down the highway into the storm
And you can't rescue every kid who wants to go fast in snow
So people who know what they can see
Stop, pull over, watch the doomed drive off, hear the crash in the distance

4.

Standing there silently, like a jerk
While a good person listens to an evil voice
And does what's going to destroy them forever
Because you can't do anything else
Isn't that what God does?
Isn't that the closest that we get to God?

More about suckers

2011-04-19T18:00:00.000-07:00

As if to prove that my opinions are the exact rehash of an axis loosely defined around Duncan Black and Heather Parton, there's been a recent article about liberals as suckers. Since linkrot will undoubtedly make anything on the Washington Post's web site go away soon, it's by Sally Kohn, and has the unwieldy title "Liberals pride themselves on being tolerant. Are they really just suckers?" Sample quote:

What is the problem here? Is it a lack of leadership from the White House, a failure to out-mobilize the tea party or not enough long-term investment from liberal donors?

The real problem isn’t a liberal weakness. It’s something liberals have proudly seen as a strength — our deep-seated dedication to tolerance. In any given fight, tolerance is benevolent, while intolerance gets in the good punches.

In a word, no. That misses the point. As does digby's discussion of the article. The problem is not that liberals are being suckers in their negotiations with the Right. The problem is that they are being suckers in their negotiations with their own leadership.

The article assumes that Obama and ordinary progressives/liberals have the same interests, and the same mindset, so that if Obama is mushy in his talks with the GOP, it's just another example of liberals not being firm enough in defending their beliefs. Their mindset is assumed to be the same as his. Or, in a slight variation, Obama isn't firm because ordinary liberals don't want him to be. That may be true, for all I know, but also misses the point. Obama's interests, and Democratic leadership interests more generally, are not the same as those of the people who they purport to speak for.

Obama wants what's good for him. Some leaders might be motivated by loyalty downwards, but it's become abundantly clear that Obama has none. But that's a distraction too. Institutionally, the Democratic Party has to please powerful constituencies that have a lot more leverage than the liberals/progressives, who can be safely written off as having to support the party no matter what. The same isn't true of the banks.

This is a very typical agency problem, and as is typical of our society, which is increasingly dominated by elites, it's handled badly. Look at corporations and their management, say. Are the interests of management really aligned with the interests of shareholders? Or look at the way that high unemployment just isn't a problem for elites in America at all.

The only way that liberals can get Democratic leadership's interests to align with theirs is to credibly threaten to make them lose. It's not hard to understand at all. Liberals have no leverage over the Right, who are going to keep on doing their own crazy thing without asking whether liberals approve of it or not. Ordinary liberals have no way to "get tough" with the Right in a legislative sense, because they aren't legislators. America is a representative democracy, after all, not a direct one. They can only help to choose the people who will do the actual legislative or executive negotiating. And it's that interface between voters and Democratic pols that they've been complete suckers with regard to. All the leadership has to do is utter one more bleat about "look how crazy the GOP is!" And yes, they are crazy, and the Dem leadership has been very lucky to have such crazy opposition. But if the base is always going to blink first, well -- we know how that goes.

Would a re-run of the Bush years be bad? Yes, it would. Would it be worse than the Obama years -- which codify everything that Bush did wrong, make it bipartisan, and ensure that liberals can never win even with the best possible electoral result, in exchange for a few token victories? No, I'm not sure if they would. Before Obama, liberals at least had hope in the electoral process. Now there is none.

Edited to add: obligatory Greenwald. Obama really is a con man who is systematically doing everything that he promised differentiated him from Bush. But so what? In our culture, con men are admirable. The people who we have contempt for are the suckers who let the con men get away with it. See, for instance, any movie about cons.

Suckers are a bore

2011-04-05T13:03:00.000-07:00

Looks like Greenwald agrees with me, instead of vice versa! No, not really. But what he writes here is what I (and other people of course) have been writing since Year One of Obama. There is nowhere for the loyal progressive to go. Obama will not only not listen to them, he will actively work against them in order to gain credibility as a moderate.

I've already listed the consequences for the upcoming Presidential election. There is now nothing that progressives in the U.S. can do, at the national level, that will not hurt them in the near term. Oppose Obama, and they get blamed if he loses, derided as of no account if he wins. Support him, and get less than nothing if he loses, and he returns to hippie punching nonstop if he wins. "Hippie punching" is a good descriptive phrase, but in more serious terms this means starting wars, killing and torturing people, and generally shredding civil liberties, as well as completely failing to do anything about global warming.

A lot of Greenwald's article is well-worn themes (to me, anyways) about how the GOP didn't force Obama into this, and how Congress didn't force Obama into this. When he e.g. refuses to close Guantanimo, it's because he doesn't want to, not because he can't. He's a failure as a President both on the principled and pragmatic levels. Where I disagree with Greenwald is where Greenwald writes that a rational politician would of course kick his base when it brings a benefit and no cost. I know that Greenwald is writing rhetorically, but that is "rational" in the same way as a lot of short-term economic thinking is rational. Politicians don't obtain long-term success for their policies by alienating their base.

What can progressives do at this point? Well, the two readers of my blog know what I did -- I became some kind of anarchist. (I'll write more about that sometime, after delicate spousal negotiations about what we can do with our joint resources towards what is essentially a side interest of mine.) This does as much nothing as continuing to be a progressive does, but it at least does not involve being a sucker.

I've seen some progressives come up with various Rube Goldberg plans -- support Obama later, but not now, or do electoral politics only at the state and local level. I know of precisely one jurisdiction, Wisconsin, where state politics seems worthwhile at the moment because of its ability to send a general message. Otherwise? Well, maybe.

A lot of the discussions that progressives and the left generally are having strike me as the same "failure is not an option" nonsense that (digby, was it?) criticized so trenchantly around the Iraq War. Failure is certainly an option. "Failure is not an option" is one thing that people who suffer from terminal diseases say on their way to acceptance. The U.S. in particular is well on its way to failure on a variety of levels, a failure that Obama has only exacerbated by failing to provide a real choice.

If failure looks likely, then really all you can do is hope for a lucky break. If that break comes, do you want it to be wasted by absorbing whatever energy there is right back into the support of some other Democratic pol, who will use it to maintain the same failed system? Or, if we're reduced to hoping for a break, why not hope for a larger one?

The title of this post is from one of my poems, written during the Bush era, but even more relevant now. Don't blame Obama, enablers. Of course people look up to a successful con. Just decide to not be a sucker next time.

No use to blame the con men
We're heard it all before
Everybody loves a con
But suckers are a bore

On learning to read Adam Roberts

2011-03-08T20:45:00.000-08:00

I should write at the outset that I don't pretend to have a handy guide to how to read Adam Roberts. This is mostly a response to Paul Kincaid's blog post here.

Paul Kincaid describes an interpretive tool that may work for his own reading: Roberts writes Menippean satire. There's something to be said for that. Certain elements of the satire are there: fragmented narrative, the rapid movement between styles, the use of the picaresque, satirical commentary. Kincaid seems to me to be certainly right that many of Roberts' books work as satires of SF. (See, e.g., my piece here on Splinter.) But. The concept of the Menippean satire comes with a lot of baggage that doesn't seem to apply, and doesn't include a good deal of what I see as being there. The concept may work perfectly well for Paul Kincaid, who states upfront that he has trouble reading Roberts, but as a fan writer who's written a good deal about Roberts' work, it's not how I think he is best read.

Roberts' works seem to me to be best described as experimental novels. They would be avant-garde if there was now any literary garde to be in the avant of. Kincaid writes at the start of his post that "I don’t believe the set up, I don’t believe the characters, the plots seem an exercise in artificiality." Well, yes, sometimes they do. Adam Roberts, if I can resort to biographical criticism, is a professor and historian of SF who has read a tremendous number of SF works. The Ideal Author of his books, to revert to how they appear to me to be written, is not someone who wants to write a seamless set-up, believable characters, and realistic plots. Those elements of writerly technique have long since been turned into routine. Although I admire the craftsperson who can successfully carry out this routine, I'm really more interested in attempts to do something else.

What is the "something else" that Roberts attempts? His novels seem to me to be characterized by a high degree of formal structure coupled with underdetermination of what that structure means.

In Swiftly, in another passage that Kincaid had trouble with, we see Eleanor before and after a big gap in her described life, and she appears to be almost two different people in the two sections of the book. One could write a middle section of the book that explains the transition from one Eleanor to the other. But that would remove what Roberts is calling attention to: the gap itself, which the reader can and must fill in with their own narrative. "Blood in the gutter" is a comic-book critical phrase referring to the space between one comic book panel and the next, which the reader must fill in out of their imagination. By making the gaps in action small enough so that readers ideally never notice them, authors create "realistic characters". But what they are doing is pretending that they are doing the work that they are actually trying to get the reader to do. Swiftly is a formal balance with a beginning and an afterwards around a gap, and wouldn't work without it.

Does this kind of thing always work? No. Sometimes Roberts may attempt a bit too much at once. Yellow Blue Tibia might have had a bit less of the (yes, distracting) pseudo-Aspergers sidekick character if it hadn't been "how about a metafiction about Soviet SF coming true" mixed with "what would an action movie hero look like if he was old and plunked into a pseudorealistic setting". But experiments are experiments: some work and some don't. Literary experiments are better than scientific ones because literary experiments work for some people and don't work for others. Jonathan McCalmont wrote some excellent criticism of New Model Army that takes the same changes in viewpoint that Paul Kincaid notes and turns them into a sort of satire of SF yet again, "a cultural blueprint for the entire genre."

Do I think that Roberts intended to write the book that McCalmont read? No, not exactly. They are, to repeat myself, books with strong formal elements coupled with underdetermination of what those elements mean. In other words, they're wonderful toys, full of moving parts that don't do obvious things, made to order for a critic to play with and come up with a reading. I can understand why a bit of puzzlement is common when reading Roberts. If New Model Army is supposed to sit on the bookshelf shelves next to, oh, Lois Bujold, or Vernor Vinge, then why doesn't it keep the same viewpoint throughout? Why the scene "which feels like an intrusion from a different work altogether," to quote Kincaid? Write the thing in an accepted military-SF style throughout and then it'll be normal. But it's really supposed to sit on the shelves that hold, say, Aldiss' Report on Probability A.

Kincaid comes close to picking up on what I find interesting about Roberts' work. But a satire of the kind that Kincaid envisions is organized around a purpose. That purpose doesn't seem to me to be at the heart of these works. These are writerly artifacts, and while some of them work as satires -- Roberts writes what he knows, and what he knows is SF -- they do not seem to me to pick out a direction and then set out to guide the reader along it.

Progress

2010-12-19T18:43:00.000-08:00

With the repeal of DADT, gay and lesbian people can now proudly and openly murder civilians along with the rest of our armed forces. Equality and civil rights!

However, since the DREAM act was defeated, illegal brown people can not become citizens through their military service. They have to be tracked down and deported as soon as they're done shooting other brown people. But the long arc of the sniper's bullet bends towards justice, and we can all hope that soon everyone who serves in our imperial legions will gain full citizenship.

Sanctimonious purists

2010-12-07T14:14:00.000-08:00

Ha! If anyone gives me trouble for leaving the Democratic Party for some poorly defined variety of anarchism, I'll just call them a sanctimonious purist. After all, their own party leader does.

How bad off are progressives in the U.S. right now? I'll go through the main paths for the immediate political future, assuming no catastrophe:

1. Obama loses in 2012.

In this case, it will all be progressives' fault, because they didn't support him enough. The left wing of the party will be blamed for everything the Republicans do for the next four years.

2. Obama wins in 2012.

In this case, he'll have demonstrated that he can insult his base and it doesn't matter because he doesn't need their help. No one will ever bother listening to progressives again.

3. Obama is primaried from the left in 2012 and wins the primary.

In this case, he'll actively bear a grudge against progressives. He's already shown that he's a lot more angry at them than at the GOP. Is he the type to let his personal vanity affect politics? Sure -- he just did.

The left is then stigmatized as a group of losers who weakened the party by splitting it, after which go to 1. or 2. above.

4. Obama is primaried from the left in 2012 and loses the primary.

This is the best outcome for progressives, certainly, but it's almost certainly not going to happen. If it does, then the new candidate wins or loses the general election. If the new candidate to the left loses, 1. above gets especially bad. If he or she wins, well, again that's the best possible outcome, but seems very unlikely. And in that case, assuming that there is still significant centrist support for Obama -- he's still a popular President -- there really will be a split in the party.

Wow am I glad that I bailed before this happened.

You can't leak out a social relationship

2010-12-06T13:04:00.000-08:00

Of the recent flood of Wikileaks articles, this one at 3 quarks daily by Robert P. Baird is like catnip to me for its references to langpo (did my three readers know that I think of myself as a poet? probably). But at any rate, it sets out quite well three possible theories of what Wikileaks could be doing:

1. "the blend of technological triumphalism and anarcho-libertarian utopianism that takes 'information wants to be free' as its gospel"

2. "The traditional argument for transparency is that more information will allow a populace to better influence its government."

3. "What Assange asks of leaked information is that it supply a third-order public good: he wants it to demonstrate that secrets cannot be securely held, and he wants it to do this so that the currency of all secrets will be debased. He wants governments-cum-conspiracies to be rendered paranoid by the leaks and therefore be left with little energy to pursue its externally focused aims."

I think I've criticized the first of these two sufficiently already. For the first, I'll just note that Wikileaks has a copy of the hacked CRU Emails. They weren't the ones to release them, as far as I know, so it hardly matters -- but still, when people go on about the benefits of techno-libertopia, I didn't think that they had in mind as one of those benefits that right-wing politicians would generate a storm of lying propaganda whenever a climate scientist used the word "trick" in an Email to another one. Naturally, people who actually have to fight against corporate propaganda in that area take a dim view of this kind of triumphialism. For more, see The Limits of Techno-Politics post here. The release of information is, by itself, apolitical, and doesn't make political content until someone uses it for something.

For the second, it should be obvious to everyone now that information is not power. Everyone knew that e.g. the justification for the Iraq War was a sack of lies. No one could do anything about it. Those levers of democratic power have long since been broken, if they ever existed. This article, for instance, takes Wikileaks to task for interfering with within-the-system public advocacy (before it, amusingly, becomes a press release about FAS's accomplishments), but what has that advocacy really accomplished? It talks about stockpile secrecy, for instance. All right, the size of the American stockpile of nuclear weapons has moved from open secret to acknowledged fact. Does that bring us any closer to getting rid of any of those weapons? No.

But I don't know if I've addressed the third. This is really the theory under which what Wikileaks is doing makes the most sense. As Baird writes: "If this sounds like sabotage, well, that’s sort of the point." Josh Marshall, in a post that reminds me what an establishment reporter he's becoming, writes "this seems more like an attack on the US government itself than an effort to inform American citizens about what their government is doing on their behalf."

At first glance, this seems like a common form of radical activism: "things must first get worse before they can get better." Everyone knows the problems with that: things get worse and stay worse. Or they get much worse than anyone anticipated. Making the American government even more paranoid than it is may not be a good idea. That would be the first line of criticism if you thought that this was likely to be effective in the form proposed.

But will it be effective as sabotage? I don't think so. I don't think that the important secrets of the government really were in the system that the leaked cables came from, which 3 million people reportedly had access to. But more importantly, I don't think that contemporary systems of power really rely on secrecy in any decisive way. Leaks are part of the ecosystem, and often appear as a tactic in attempts to embarrass people within the hierarchy. But no leak has the power to change policy. Power is held through arrangements of financial and military power, not through conspiracy. Sure, people find it comfortable to buy a media apparatus to put some glitter over the bare workings of the machine. But the hallmark of politics in our time is the non-denied truth. Did the last President of the U.S. openly have people tortured? Yeah, sure. He says so in his book. What are you going to do about it?

The title of this post is taken from "You can't blow up a social relationship", a somewhat well-known anarchist tract. In that sense, it's about my belief that it's futile to try this kind of informational sabotage. The government of the U.S. depends on people continuing their habitual social relationships, not on beliefs that can be changed by the revelation of the contents of diplomatic cables. And the government does not depend on protected channels of conspiratorial information in order to achieve competence at reacting to circumstances. It's quite clearly incompetent and is bungling every challenge of the contemporary era already. We will be out of Afghanistan not because our government will conspiratorially decide when that would be best, but because we will be driven out as the rest of our empire implodes.

Does it matter that I think that Wikileaks will be unsuccessful at this form of sabotage? No, not really. There are many recent articles criticizing Wikileaks for being newcomers, amateurs, for not knowing what they are doing. For instance, Greenwald here has a dialogue with a critic of Wikileaks, and Greenwald's defense basically agrees with the charge of amateurism but involves saying that Wikileaks is getting better at redacting the names of informers from its released documents and so on.

Well, of course the people who do Wikileaks don't know what they are doing. No one knows what they're doing! Some people know how to act within the expectations of the system, that is all. And they confuse this with knowing what they are doing. I don't think it's important that Wikileaks may be acting under what I think is an incorrect premise. They are still taking nonviolent action in something that might well turn out to be a right direction. It's better than doing nothing.

Wikileaks is, at least, helping to demolish the more important myth, the myth of American government in general. Look at all of the media and political gasbags calling for Assange to be arrested, killed, jailed for treason, or whatever other violent and stupid fantasy occupies their heads. No one can possibly justify that within the framework that American politics runs on in theory. It's tribal politics. Once people get over their Two Minute Hate, one more little bit of the facade of American exceptionalism will have fallen and shattered. And that's all to the good.

Edited to add: this event around Wikileaks is also revealing the hollowness of the capitalist Internet as enabler of change. Every familiar large company for Internet transactions -- Amazon, Paypal/Ebay, Visa, Mastercard -- has frozen or banned Wikileaks.

Also, oh please:

WikiLeaks coined a new type of journalism: scientific journalism.

If Assange wasn't currently imprisoned without bail on some trumped-up charge, this would be a "get over yourself" moment. But he is, so he can bloviate about scientific journalism if he likes. No one else can though.

Wikileaks

2010-11-29T07:53:00.000-08:00

Is Wikileaks an embarrassment for the U.S. government and nothing more? Well...

Look at this article, for example. It uncritically lists two of the things we've learned from the Wikileaks release of diplomatic cables as "North Korea supplied Iran with long-range missiles" and "Iran used the auspices of the Red Crescent to smuggle spies and weapons into war zones." True, the text of the article uses more accurate "the U.S. government believes that" language. But that subtlety appears to have slipped the minds of many of the commenters, who are now musing that here is new information that they didn't know.

If only Wikileaks had been around before the Iraq War. Then it could have been leaked that the U.S. government believed that Iraq was stockpiling biological weapons, and funding the 9/11 terrorists. And it would have been a leak, something that they didn't want people to know -- so of course it's correct, right?

Lest people think that I'm positing some conspiracy theory, I'm not. But diplomats and other spies routinely write back things that they confidently believe that are in fact not true. Diplomats and other spies who want to rise through the ranks also develop a talent for writing back things that they know that the politicians in charge want to hear. These leaks are pretty much worthless from the point of view of determining whether the events in question actually took place.

Doctorow's Little Brother

2010-11-27T19:16:00.000-08:00

Shorter Little Brother: Whatever you do, don't torture the white kid.

This is a deeply irksome YA book by Cory Doctorow -- irksome in the sense that it's one of those books where the author sees perfectly well what he's writing and then writes it anyway. Markus is a 17 year old white kid. The friends who we see him interacting with are all properly multicultural in various ways, but he's their leader. Marcus engages in some adolescent rebelliousness around a Department of Homeland Security squad that's been amped up by a nearby major terrorist attack and Marcus gets put through all of the by now familiar to us minor tortures: stress positions, isolation, threats that he will be disappeared, etc. Marcus then is released and swears that he'll get the DHS, especially since they disappeared one of his friends. Marcus ends up in "Gitmo-by-the-Bay" -- this happens in San Francisco -- but just as he's being waterboarded, local cops informed by a muckraking reporter burst in, arrest the DHS agents, and save him. Then the DHS is effectively kicked out of California due to the public scandal of local teens disappearing into the gulag.

They had me chained to five other prisoners, all of whom had been in for a lot longer than me. One only spoke Arabic -- he was an old man, and he trembled. The others were all young. I was the only white one. Once we had been gathered on the deck of the ferry, I saw that nearly everyone on Treasure Island had been one shade of brown or another. (pg. 352)

Let's consider that for a moment. Everyone immediately calls the prison on Treasure Island Gitmo by the Bay. Why? Because they are all familiar with the real Gitmo, of course. The book is set is a post-9/11 imaginary America that is supposed to be ours. Was Gitmo a scandal for these people in the book? No, no more than Gitmo has been a scandal in real life. I mean, it's been a scandal, but it's still holding prisoners. No one bothered to do anything about it, really. So why was Marcus' story so scandalous?

Well, because he's a local teenager. Teenagers were, of course, routinely tortured by our forces in Iraq, but he's a local kid. Local kids in California are routinely sent to prison on minor drug charges, or shipped off to somewhere if they are illegal and brown, but hey -- this is a middle-class, white teenager. We aren't supposed to do bad things to them. The reaction of the people in the book makes sense if you tacitly assume that people in California couldn't care less about torture as something happening to Others, but do care if it's a kid who looks like one of the kids of the important people.

That seems fairly realistic, actually. Good for Doctorow, for writing a grittily truthful, unpleasant book -- but wait. It's not gritty, or truthful, or unpleasant other than a few well-done torture scenes. No one really confronts this at all, not authorially and not within the world of the book. Marcus is just the natural leader of his group of non-white friends, most of whom spent significant parts of their screen time embarrassing him by telling him how awesome he is, and when his captivity and that of his white friend who got taken at the start of the book is discovered and publicized, it's just instant scandal and DHS stopped and that's a wrap.

Why do I find this irksome? Doctorow is a competent writer. His heart is clearly in the right place. I find it irksome for the same basic cluelessness that's in too much of techno-libertarian agitprop. Because that's a large part of this book: bits about crypto, and Linux, and trust networks, and all the rest. And faith that if the truth comes out, it will mean something. Will it?

What really happens in this book is that the security forces made the mistake of victimizing a child of privilege. All the rest of the book could have pretty much been short-cut if Marcus had told his parents about what happened to him when he got home, they'd told the reporter they contacted, and on from there. But instead we get lots of bits about hacking game machines, as if that would have made a difference if Marcus had instead been his Latino friend.

What's the current real-life equivalent to this book? Let's take Wikileaks as an example. Of course I support Wikileaks. They're doing good things. Historians will have a much better picture of what happened in our era because of the material they archived. But have their revelations changed anything? No. People in America really already knew that our armed forces murdered civilians in Iraq with impunity. They didn't care, and they still don't care. No anonymizer or encoding scheme or clever hack is going to get them to care. No revelation of the truth is going to matter to people who already know the truth. Evasion of our security systems will not let you evade what's in people's hearts.

Let's leave Marcus' whiteness aside for the moment. Would people really care about Gitmo by the Bay? The families of the people imprisoned would, of course. Would anyone else? Our society already has little Gitmos all over. It's quite normal for people to suddenly be sent to prison. The United States has the highest documented incarceration rate in the world, and the highest documented prison population in the world. Yes, this is a method of controlling the underclass, but sometimes a middle-class white kid has to be put away as an example. I think that Gitmo-by-the-Bay might have ended up as just as much of a nonscandal as Gitmo has been, really. Could it happen that it's a politics-changing scandal as presented in the book? Sure. But it wouldn't happen so overwhelmingly, so easily. The lesson of the Bush years, and now the Obama years, is that the truth will not set you free.

So this a book with its heart in the right place, and it's also thoroughly, although unintentionally, dishonest, or at least misleading. Irksome.

Legality theater

2010-11-19T14:23:00.000-08:00

"Security theater" has become a more and more popular phrase, especially in connection with airport security -- measures visibly taken to make people feel secure, not because doing them actually makes people more secure.

I should resist too much blogging that is simply re-citing Greenwald, but we just had an example of legality theater. An accused terrorist was put on trial in a civilian court amid much administrative self-congratulation. To quote Greenwald:

Most news accounts are emphasizing that trying Ghailani in a civilian court was intended by the Obama DOJ to be a "showcase" for how effective trials can be in punishing Terrorists. That's a commendable goal, and Holder's decision to try Ghailani in a real court should be defended by anyone who believes in the rule of law and the Constitution. But given these realities, this was more "show trial" than "showcase" since the Government would simply have imprisoned him, likely forever, even if he had been acquitted on all counts.

Yes, the Obama administration claims "post-acquittal detention power", which means that this person was going to be sent to jail indefinitely no matter what. The trial was meaningless.

Or was it? Here's where I disagree with Greenwald: the goal of showcasing how effective show trials can be is not commendable. The trial did have a purpose: to convince the public that we still live under rule of law when we do not. It was legality theater, the replacement of actual rule of law with a formal show intended to represent it.

That is the sorry pass that advocates of Constitutional protections have been brought to. "Please have the show trial, because showing the brutal reality would let the dream of justice die." Some dreams are better off disposed of. Or rather, when the reality behind them is dead, they begin to stink.

Netroots memory hole

2010-11-13T15:48:00.000-08:00

"Markos Moulitsas Zúniga, founder of the influential Daily Kos blog, said the netroots played a major role in the special election victories of Reps. Ben Chandler (D-Ky.) and Stephanie Herseth (D-S.D.) in 2004 and were also prominent (and early) backers of Sen. Barack Obama (D-Ill.) during his 2004 campaign." -- Crying Foul, Netroots Note Some Big Wins, March 30, 2006

"I went through and compared his predicted Democratic losses to the membership of the Blue Dogs, and got the following list: [...] Herseth-Sandlin [...] If the worst-case scenario comes to happen, we can enjoy this silver lining -- the brunt of the losses will be felt by the very same people who helped obstruct the Democratic agenda, who fought middle class tax cuts and the Public Option, and who fueled the "Dems are divided" narrative. We'll get rid of the hypcorites who, like their Republican BFF's, scream about "fiscal responsibility" while fighting desperately to cut taxes on the wealthiest." --Dem Blue Dogs obstructionists set to bear brunt of losses, October 28, 2010

I have a good deal of respect for what the netroots tried to do. They were really the only sign of life in the Democratic Party for some time.

But I haven't seen any explanation from Kos or any other prominent netrooter of why they should be happy to get rid of the same people that the netroots struggled to elect only one cycle earlier. Or, rather, I can understand why people would be happy to get rid of Blue Dogs -- I can't understand how that also means that in the next cycle people should go out and again try to elect "more and better Democrats", as the saying is. The netroots make a point of their loyalty to the Democratic Party. This is a good thing, in the U.S., since U.S. electoral rules mean that really only two parties can exist. But the Democratic Party is not loyal to them. How many cycles can this continue -- jubilantly electing Democrats in places where there hadn't been Democrats before, and then finding out that they are actually harmful?

I don't think the Herseth-in-2004 and Herseth-in-2010 kinds of comparisons can stay in the memory hole forever. I don't expect what worked for the netroots before to really work again. I expect that they'll start to focus more and more on primaries. If they're successful, they'll be just as successful as the Tea Parties have been for the GOP -- in other words, a net loss of seats. Places like North Dakota will never elect a Democrat who is better than the Blue Dogs.

This problem could have been finessed with old-fashioned party loyalty, enforced from the top. It can't be done from the bottom. Obama and the Democrats generally really screwed over a lot of their supporters, but the netroots, I think that they've done a real job on.

Why I'm no longer a liberal

2010-11-11T18:03:00.000-08:00

I was born in 1964. Therefore, my first political memories are of the aftermath of Nixon. By the time I got to vote, the U.S. was into the Reagan years. Since then it's been what I understood at the time as a long period of reaction. I didn't feel betrayed by Clinton, as many on the left did: it was too clear that he really was restricted in what he could do.

What was the political ideal of liberals in those years? Well, obviously there were many different ideas. But I don't think that many people really were waiting for a charismatic leader. At least in the circles in which I moved, it was a combination of community organizing and technocracy. One day the dam of reaction would break, and we'd be able to implement policies that actually made people's lives better. Then they'd see that which politics they supported really did make a difference.

That dam broke with Obama's election. Oh, it wasn't because of anything we did, or anything he did, it was because Bush screwed up so badly. Still, we had the Presidency and both houses of Congress. Yes, Obama is really a centrist, not a liberal, but he was as liberal as we were ever likely to get.

That's the last I want to mention Obama in this post, because what happened next really, I think, wasn't just his individual failure. What did we get? Well, let's just look at one really important fact. We got coverups of and immunity for torture. We got, in fact, continuing torture of people in the custody of the state, justified with the full Bush era legal justifications that amounted to anything that the President said was legal, was legal.

Don't believe me? Try here. It's the Kafkaesque news of torture victims who could not pursue torturers in court, because the fact that they had been tortured was a state secret, because it made the U.S. look bad. Or want more on Executive power more generally? Try this, about our official assassination program.

Why did this happen? Let me dismiss a few of the arguments I've heard. It wasn't because of GOP pressure. The GOP was already calling the President a traitor and soft on terror and, for that matter, a Kenyan, so they had already reached maximum rhetorical saturation and clearly weren't going to back down no matter what he did. It wasn't because of Congress. These were executive decisions, ratified by our judiciary. It certainly wasn't because no one understood that the issues were important.

And it wasn't really an individual failure either, I think. It was too widely supported. It was one of those moments that reveal the truth about political systems, via an inexplicable failure for something to occur. Somehow, despite everyone in power saying that they were against torture, we got torture. This is one of the moments when you have to realize that the system is running into a constraint that people don't want to talk about but that nevertheless exists.

America needs to torture people. Our system literally can not function without it. There can be no crackdown on it by elites, because our security apparatus is thoroughly implicated in it, our military is thoroughly implicated in it, and, to tell the truth, a near majority of ordinary people really want other people to be tortured. It's been a method of social control in America right from the start, with slavery, and continued through Indian genocides, lynchings, the Philippines, the Cold War, and the way we treat criminals in our prisons. Reagan had people tortured, mostly in Central America, so did Bush I, so did Clinton (the beginning of "renditions", if I remember rightly). Bush II made it official policy. Obama -- I suppose that I have to mention him again after all -- continued and reinforced it as official policy, making it thoroughly bipartisan.

What's been the liberal response to this? Well, take it away, Brad Delong:

Social Studies 50th Anniversary Symposium: Is There Hope for the Rule of Law in America?

That was the question asked by Denver University Professor Alan Gilbert during the morning panel.

Here is the answer I gave, as best as I can reconstruct it:

The question is: "Is there hope for the rule of law in America?" My answer is: No.

[...]

By 2001 with a Republican as president John Yoo had reversed field 180 degrees. He was making a very different set of false claims about what the law of America had been. He was then claiming that the president's commander-in-chief powers contained within them prerogative powers to torture and kill outside of legal procedure that would have astonished George III Hanover, and even exceeded those of William I Conqueror. When William I Conqueror tortured or killed, he agreed owed his barons at least an after-the-fact accounting of why if not any before-the-fact procedural checks.

Backed by John Yoo and company, George W. Bush claimed that he did not owe even an after-the-fact accounting. And Barack Obama holds to the same line.

So I see no hope.

Now, one of DeLong's often repeated phrases is "The Cossacks work for the Czar", meaning that you can't blame political decisions on underlings. Given that, I don't see why anyone should care about Yoo. He's been a convenience for two administrations, that's all. If not him, someone else would have been found. But pass on. Is there hope for the rule of law? No. That's the opinion of a middle-aged, middle class, respectable economics professor.

So, why liberalism? Everyone knows that it's failed. But they hold to it ... why? Without rule of law, really, why bother?

I don't think that there's anything to be gained by holding on to liberalism after it's failed in such a way that reveals that it never could have succeeded. I don't see anything in our remnant of a Constitutional order that is worth defending. I'm not going to spend the rest of my life working for liberal ideals that are fruitless.

Has conservatism won, then? No, of course not. No variant of conservatism is going to get anything that conservatives want. Not a smaller government, not the establishment of religion, not the suppression of non-white people. All of that is impossible for various economic and demographic reasons. Effectively, what happened is that everyone in my generation failed, all of us together. The only people who won were a tiny sliver of the super-rich -- but although they certainly have a political ideology that supports them, they don't have a political philosophy as such. Only an economic interest, one that their own success is going to subvert.

Leftism lost, for a variety of reasons, in the generations before.

What's left? Personally, I suspect that I'm going to end up as some variety of anarchist. I see no point in going into what exact type: politics is meaningless for me unless it involves practice, and I don't know of any group of anarchists I can work with locally, yet. Of course anarchism is quixotic. It has no chance, and even if it did succeed in America, the immediate effect would be to let a thousand death squads bloom. No matter. My being a liberal quite clearly had no practical effect either. The actual events are at this point turned over to the next generation. If I'm not going to affect them, I might as well not bother to be respectable, or pretend to believe in something that I no longer believe in. I always had an attraction to a form of (oh, all right) anarcho-socialism, but I figured that if it happened, it was probably going to happen a long time from now, after productivity had gone so high that it was really too much trouble to exclude people from the necessities of life. Better to be a liberal now, I had thought, and be involved in politics that had a chance of making some difference in the short term. But it doesn't have that chance to make any difference.

It's annoying, becoming a 46-year-old anarchist. I could deal with it better if I'd been one from my youth, but now, face it, it's both silly and annoying, having to start over with basic political books... I mean, these are the days in which I'm supposed to comfortably live off the seed corn I'd planted and settle into being a pillar of the community.

So much for that.

Don't vote

2010-10-29T21:24:00.001-07:00

I suppose that I have to get this in before the election, along with all the Vote posts on other blogs.

Don't vote. I'm not going to. Anyone who says that the "enthusiasm gap" affects the apolitical unemployed, and not the activist base, is wrong by at least one person. Nor will my family be donating our usual couple of hundred dollars per election cycle (unless my wife really wanted to, of course, and as of this writing she doesn't).

The people who say that in order to be serious about liberal or progressive politics, you have to suck it up and support the party at this point, are exactly wrong. If Obama and the rest of the Democrats don't feel any fear that they're losing people on the left, they will give away even more after this election. The bogeyman of the awful scary Tea Party people -- supposedly worse than all the other right wing nut jobs who have been legislators throughout my lifetime -- coming to power doesn't work. If Obama doesn't want to veto them, if the Democrats in Congress won't filibuster them, why should it be up to us?

This state of affairs is mostly Obama's fault. I don't really know where to start. Finance? "Millions for bankers, not one cent for people." The economy? "A stimulus that's adequate might cost us political capital!" Health care? "Let's lie and tell people we're supporting a public option, they're suckers." Torture and executive power? That will have to wait for a later, more serious post, if I have the energy for one.

But perhaps a mini-tour of an issue area that I know something about, environmental politics around climate change, will be illustrative. What has Obama actually done in this area? It can be summed up in one hyphenated word: hippy-punching. His main action on the climate bill was to blame environmental groups for not getting it passed because they couldn't get a single Republican Senator to vote for it. In other words, GOP party loyalty was the environmental groups' fault; Democratic disunity was evidently not Obama's weakness. Obama's idea was to unilaterally open up a lot of the coast to offshore drilling, accompanying that with a lecture, directed at environmentalists, that they had to grow up and accept reality. It was intended to be part of a bargain to get support for energy policy around climate change; Obama neglected to get any commitments from people before doing so, and of course this support did not materialize. Shortly after that, the BP well started to leak. Obama refused to use this event to pressure industry. Instead, as a crowning insult to his supporters, he finally removed his own moratorium on new drilling because an oil state Senator said she'd remove her hold on a mid-level OMB appointee if he did. He cancelled the moratorium; she did not remove the hold, saying that the cancellation was insufficient.

Obama's entire style consists of failure to lead. In a recent interview with bloggers, he said that after the election he'd continue to try to find solutions along with the GOP, and told people that he's an executive, not a boss who can do things unilaterally. Of course, an actual leader struggles against opposition and tries to alter constraints, he or she doesn't just accept them and keep on going calmly within a narrower and narrower compass. Of course people know that Obama isn't a dictator. Is he a political leader? Political leaders show loyalty to the people who work for them, they don't adopt a grandiose pose that as leader of the whole country they now need to work with everyone and their inconvenient supporters need to get lost. Ask Shirley Sherrod what Obama's loyalty is like.

In answer to this Obama points to his accomplishments. Accomplishments? He's carefully destroyed every issue he touched, wasted every chance. It took decades to agitate about the failures of health care. Obama stepped in at the one historical moment when change was possible -- not because of him, but because of GOP failure -- and made that change the minimum that it could possibly be to keep the system going. The same with the banks: he preserved the system for the elite and screwed over everyone who'd been waiting for this chance for real change. He can claim the largest progressive accomplishments in decades because he came in when the dam that had existed since Nixon finally broke. And his first action was to build it back up again.

The next objection, if anyone were reading this which I doubt, would be that not voting does nothing because the Democratic Party will never hear about it anyways, or if they do, the number of people lost will be so small that it won't matter. Yes, I'd say that's true. I don't think there will be any practical effect if I don't vote or if 1.000 people don't or 10,000 people don't. For the same reason there will be no practical effect if we do. But I'll be telling people how Obama lost me. Other people should too. It's the serious thing to do.

In fact, that's all that we have, as activists. Our individual votes are meaningless. But we tell people things and they tell other people. Let the Democratic Party know that you're displeased. Don't volunteer, don't contribute, and tell them why.

And don't fall for the scare stories about how this is putting the extremist right in power. Obama has been very lucky in his enemies. But I can tell scare stories too. Unless the Democratic Party starts to understand that they're losing people, we're going to lose Social Security. The GOP has no power to do that, but the Democratic Party does. That's the way it is with everything. The GOP failed for decades to get more offshore drilling. But Obama did it in an instant. Don't be fooled.

Coda

2010-06-25T04:04:00.000-07:00

Coda: A Play in One Act

(a post vaguely in the style of Acephalous *)

[A MAN and A WOMAN are at the science fiction section of a Barnes & Noble. A MAN is 45-ish and is dressed in the drabbest possible outfit of undecorated T-shirt, jeans, and sneakers, A WOMAN is apparently in her 50s and is in a dress and sandals. They have just done that strange social interaction in which two people who don't know each other happen to slowly walk through the section, peering at the titles, more or less at the same speed and in the same direction. Although they are 3/4 of the way through, neither of them is holding a book.]

A MAN: Whoever's been buying science fiction for this store hasn't been doing a very good job.

A WOMAN: [looks displeased, makes hand motion to encompass shelves] Yes. It's ... too many vampires. There shouldn't be so many things with vampires, you know?
There should be, well, real SF... I like Neil Stephenson.

A MAN: [slightly encouraged] You know who you might like? Adam Roberts. He's a British writer. He's pretty good ... um, his day job is as an English professor. So, you know, he knows how to write. **

A WOMAN: [nods] Robert Adams you said?

A MAN: Adam Roberts.

[pause]

[A MAN realizes that this Barnes & Noble has no books by Adam Roberts.]

A WOMAN: Robert Jordan. I really, really like Robert Jordan.

A MAN: Mmm-hmm!

[Both turn back to the shelves. Boggled, A MAN covertly glances to see if a liking for Robert Jordan means that she's wearing anything that might indicate that she likes to be spanked. She's leaning forward to see the books with her hands behind her waist, wearing many fake-gold bracelets. Hmm.]

* If this really were an Acephalous post, it would be better written and would include not only a claim that this really happened, but would also be followed by a claim that there is some kind of ill-defined documentary evidence that it really happened. This did really happen, although I of course have no documentary evidence.

** I am fully aware that being an English professor does not mean that one knows how to write.

The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas

2010-06-17T08:50:00.000-07:00

Encouraged by a comment of Adam Roberts' on my last post, I'm going to write more about the Ursula Le Guin short story The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas. Here's a link to the full text of it, for as long as that lasts.

It's a difficult short story for me to look back at. On the one hand, it's an artistic and moral failure -- one that I recognized, instinctively and angrily, the first time that I read it as a young teen. On the other hand, it deals with the aesthetic and moral issues that I've been concerned with my whole life. Therefore, it stands as a particular sort of symbol, not only a personal one, but also for an American left that has largely been a failure at articulating the very same problems over the period since the mid-70s.

1. Bland utopias

"Yet I repeat that these were not simple folk, not dulcet shepherds, noble savages, bland utopians."

That's what Le Guin tells-not-shows us. But what does she actually show us? The first paragraphs of the story show people, in theory, but they are people statically going about their roles, sprinkled with authorially desperate adjectives that try to spice them up just like the scenery. Then Le Guin tells us that she is struggling to describe happiness, and brings us through a number of attempts. Coyly, against what she calls her own puritanical thoughts, she tells us that if we like we can imagine these people having sex and drugs. (Therefore prefiguring pretty much all of Iain Banks.) Is there any human contact in the sex described? No.

"Let us not, however, have temples from which issue beautiful nude priests and priestesses already half in ecstasy and ready to copulate with any man or woman, lover or stranger, who desires union with the deep godhead of the blood, although that was my first idea. But really it would be better not to have any temples in Omelas--at least, not manned temples. Religion yes, clergy no. Surely the beautiful nudes can just wander about, offering themselves like divine souffles to the hunger of the needy and the rapture of the flesh."

In other words, for these semi-divine already half in ecstasy souffles, who you are and who they are doesn't matter in the least. You consume them, just like food, and there isn't any person-to-person contact at all, no like or dislike, no relationship however brief, no growth.

Does anyone say anything to anyone else in Omelas at all? Well, there is one direct quote (other than the words of the child, which I'll get to later.) "Quiet, quiet, there my beauty, my hope..." -- That is said to who, a lover? No, a horse. The only human speech of these great people is said to a horse, before a race. A race which is prepared for, but which never occurs in our sight, because everything is static.

Le Guin refers to this very problem:

"The trouble is that we have a bad habit, encouraged by pedants and sophisticates, of considering happiness as something rather stupid. Only pain is intellectual, only evil interesting. This is the treason of the artist: a refusal to admit the banality of evil and the terrible boredom of pain. If you can't lick 'em, join 'em. If it hurts, repeat it. But to praise despair is to condemn delight, to embrace violence is to lose hold of everything else. We have almost lost hold; we can no longer describe happy man, nor make any celebration of joy. How can I tell you about the people of Omelas? They were not naive and happy children--though their children were, in fact, happy. They were mature, intelligent, passionate adults whose lives were not wretched. O miracle! But I wish I could describe it better. I wish I could convince you."

But she can't. Why can't she? Well, in part this is a general problem, one which the left has struggled with for a long time. How can you describe utopia without making it sound boring and lifeless? In that sense, it's a universal problem. And the more-or-less acknowledged failure of the artist is also universal. It's what I call the problem of Demiurgy, the consciousness -- especially within science fiction, in which the world needs to be built as well as the people -- that the creator must work within human limitations, must be in some sense a failure. (Here Le Guin prefigures China Mieville, who would like to describe life after the socialist revolution but who really can't, since he feels that you can only describe it after you've lived through the transformation of it, and who must therefore freeze his revolution in The Iron Council and kill the scapegoat character who froze it.)

But Le Guin has her own particular problems. After the bit about sex, she writes: "One thing I know there is none of in Omelas is guilt." Really? None at all? That's a picture of inhumanity, of people without a core human emotion. And of course there is guilt in Omelas; the entire story ends up being about guilt. But perhaps she means merely sexual guilt. Still, though, it just doesn't work: every relationship, since we are mortal, means less attention paid to some other relationship. Even in utopia, there is going to be the guilty feeling that in being with someone you're ignoring someone else. To speak nothing of those people who wouldn't be, even in utopia, quite as vanilla as all that. Le Guin has a particular failure here as well as a general one.

2. The Ones Who

The second half of the story is about the abused child whose existence in some way permits the existence of the city of happiness. And here's where the authorial lies pile up really quickly. In essence, I think that this whole section comes down to flattery: self-flattery of the author smoothed over and made attractive through flattery of the reader.

The child is maximally sentimental. Its only speech is "'I will be good, ' it says. 'Please let me out. I will be good!'" This child can't curse its captors, in fact, it cant' really say much at all, as Le Guin closes down anything else with "It is feeble-minded. Perhaps it was born defective, or perhaps it has become imbecile through fear, malnutrition, and neglect." It speaks less and less often, she tells us.

How do people react to this simplified figure of pity? They get disgusted, angry; they feel shocked and helpless. Then they rationalize it away -- with a particularly bad rationalization that I won't bother to quote -- since doing anything for the child would magically destroy the happiness of Omelas. And therefore their frustrated sympathy makes them compassionate, makes possible the nobility of everything else that they do.

That might be an interesting ending for this story. Those people are so disagreeable, aren't they? And they are us, of course, minus the bit about the nobility. Because if you're allowed to see the child as plural rather than singular, and as adult as well as childish, this is a story about the middle class and its dependence on the many others who make possible their lives.

But no. There are individual heroes in this story. They take action. They are the only ones who do anything, in fact.

"At times one of the adolescent girls or boys who go see the child does not go home to weep or rage, does not, in fact, go home at all. Sometimes also a man or a woman much older falls silent for a day or two, then leaves home. These people go out into the street, and walk down the street alone. They keep walking, and walk straight out of the city of Omelas, through the beautiful gates. They keep walking across the farmlands of Omelas. Each one goes alone, youth or girl, man or woman.

Night falls; the traveler must pass down village streets, between the houses with yellow- lit windows, and on out into the darkness of the fields. Each alone, they go west or north, towards the mountains. They go on. They leave Omelas, they walk ahead into the darkness, and they do not come back. The place they go towards is a place even less imaginable to most of us than the city of happiness. I cannot describe it at all. It is possible that it does not exist. But they seem to know where they are going, the ones who walk away from Omelas."

Perhaps, re-reading this, the story would not work after all without this lie. Because this is the ultimate fantasy, isn't it? Just walk away! The people walking away may not know where they are going -- the author certainly doesn't -- but they are clearly better than any of the people whose happiness is dependent on those horrible rationalizations about their scapegoat.

What else is noteworthy about them? They are alone. They are "the ones who". They don't have a revolution, or an uprising, or even a communication with any other person. They just individually vanish from society.

Le Guin offers this fantasy to the reader -- these are the only active people in the story, and therefore invite reader identification. So of course the reader would be one of them. The reader would be one of the virtuous, risk-taking people who walk away from boring happy lives that are based on exploitation, even though they don't know where they're going. In this Le Guin echoes a whole host of bohemian fantasies that the children of the middle class hold. And as the author offering this to them, Le Guin is making herself something wonderful, giving her readers a momentary feeling of wonder and escape. Not being an authorial failure at all, right?

This short story, with its central lie, really does hold something important about our time. Le Guin wrote, in part, in reaction to a "Golden Age" of SF that I now find pretty much unreadable. She's one of SF's best writers, and some of her work is undoubtedly going to survive. But some of it is going to join what it reacted to as works that can no longer really be read.

Update: a similar read here, as linked to from here. One of the things that I didn't make clear is how Omelas stays with you. Or of course I made that clear, with this post and the last, still arguing with a short story read decades ago. It's worth arguing with: so many short stories are not.

The Ones Who

2010-06-04T11:13:00.000-07:00

for Michael Bérubé

Hello in 2010 this is the poem
This is the poem
That argues (isn't that annoying?)
They were the ones who walked away
From Omelets no Omelas stupid story
There was a perfect city and
There was an imprisoned child and
The first depended on the other
The child can't really talk		"feeble-minded"
You know how that goes, don't you?
You know how that goes in stories
They're always sweet angels or perfect sad cases
And at the end some people walk away
They walk away from Omelets		little oubliettes
		every village has one
Where do they walk to, these good people?
The author can't describe that place it must
Exist oh yes the world being Omelas would
"It is possible that it does not exist"
But they know where they are going, do they?
The world being Omelas would be
When you leave a place you find another place
Just like the first		not that hard to say
The world being would be		go around, return to start
		do nothing, you do your part
		you can't walk away

The world being Omelas, no, omelets
No one got that big O after all
We have lots of broken eggs. All over!
We make that omelet every day
Middle-aged people with children
Like you and me, that's what we do
If we didn't try to say "Look, a broken person!"
"There's been a break!" then those deaths would
Be for nothing
It would be
A waste
		The transformation of waste is perhaps the oldest
The transformation of waste		pre-occupation of man
There must be a way to take the remains
And make it whole (again?)
And make them whole again
Oh shit


Here's how the second story goes
And it's even true!
Once there was a country (and we know,
We know better than to say exceptional)
But a country in which some suspects were
Prosecuted justly. It was back in 2001
that there were 2 million people in prison
Back in 2001 that prosecutors tried
terrorists justly
and two years later six hundred thousand
genuine and legitimate! There was credibility
and integrity, then there was a radical break		two years later we built a mountain
That hasn't been fixed but we can		of six hundred thousand skulls

Yes we can

They were good people, the prosecutors
And did good, civilian trials are good,
And that's what goodness means in an omelet
It means that you can make more good omelets
And all of us would like to be good
And that's what good does it makes it good
For the people who say that we are good
And since we are good		can't stop cooking, can't step back
We can build a city on a mountain		eggs arrive, already cracked
		making omelets, nowhere to turn
		all you can do is LET IT BURN
No, we can't let it burn
The fire if it comes would be darkness not light
And anyways, middle-aged people with children,
We may not be good but we persist
We're not allowed to give up
		the transformation of waste
So yes the transformation of waste
People like the lie that once we were good
Before the break and so we will tell that lie
And maybe that will get them to be good

The living are more important than the dead
Well, the woman I knew from El Salvador
Isn't really dead but whatever!
I'll go and say that once America didn't torture
Or rather that we didn't torture openly and
Formally and perhaps that made a difference
To her when she heard the head torturer
Speaking English-accented Spanish
And I'll go spit on the grave of a Salvadoran child
(Well not the grave, they never found the body)
Who was tortured (more tolerably?) by proxy
What's a little spit?		yeah, you and what spitting army

Well.
That's a problem.
Does anyone really care what we say?
The One who matters says America doesn't torture
And that's how it is		the first lie of Omelas: there's somewhere to go
		the second is that these are children, you know
Does it matter what we say?
We aren't rescuing children
They aren't children in our prisons
(Well yes some of them are) but the bad scary
Terrorists that our America depends on
That America depends on to make us feel good
Are doing what people always do in prison,
Or when they hide out in the hills somewhere,
People who can talk: they are writing,
Writing that our system is unjust
And I think that they don't really care about
Our noble, useless spit

Or are we lying for America, for "us"?
I'd rather not lie then kthxbye


The third story is mine I don't see why not
Poetry in the first person is annoying but it is mine
why should I care about truth		the truth will never really set you free
and the lying homilies we tell about truth		it's what you do that matters, not what you see
		see what you like as long as you're yoked
My daughter's 1st grade teacher waves an		and speaking truth to power is a joke
American flag for the class, teaches a song
And my daughter sings John Lennon's "Imagine"
At the music festival two massive lies all lies
You can say there are dreamers, they are not
The only ones, but there are so many more
People dreaming approvingly
Of hellscapes she could not even imagine

I lie to her too
I tell her that things are basically going O.K.

Maybe when she's older
I'll tell her that there was a radical break
Just before she was born
When we formally approved of torture
And there's still the hope of fixing it		not even Obama can strangle hope


Why should I care? It's a hobby I guess. Like		no this is a lie too why not admit
Science fiction. Not everyone has to like it.		there don't seem to be many chances at all
		since no one knows what will make the thing fall
		might as well not be lying when standing in shit
		since none of us knows what the future will bring
"Freedom never existed		I can still be attached to true naming of things
And there's even less of it now"
Freedom is what we take, or make
While we frolic around the junk pile		memories of garbage cans and
It's not what we're given, formally		memories of garbage
Not in Omelas
If one of us sees someone about to be thrown
To Moloch then sure, say any lie you like
About how we used to not throw people
To Moloch quite in that way
(Yes not formally a lie, formally true)
And if it works, great!
The living are more important than the dead
We are the people who persist
We never give up		Did this poem work? Was my sense preserved?
But the omelets are still being made afterwards		America, you get the fucking poets you deserve
And I don't think it's a contrradiction		I don't have the time for any more tries
To say that someone was saved from the frying		Even the best of us can only apologize
With our talk of fair trials this once		When my kids ask what I did in this time
But really we'd be better off without it		I'll say that I laughed and made a stupid rhyme

Matter

2010-05-01T17:20:00.000-07:00

Some criticism of Iain Banks' SF book, Matter

Although this book was published in 2008, and I bought it in hardcover, I haven't read it till now. Why? Well, I've written a whole lot about Iain Banks' work, mostly of Usenet back in the late 90's. I watched his Culture series go from some of the books that I thought were really among the best ever to be written in Sf (Use of Weapons) to some that were really rather bad. After Look To Windward in 2000, I'd predicted that that might well be the last of Culture: Banks seemed exhausted, the contemporary political atmosphere (for these are political books) was quite discouraging for the European libertarian left, the book had an air of finality... and that's how it stood until Matter came out.

I was relieved to see that several Banks tics that had become gradually more annoying were gone from this book. No one gets righteously tortured to death in revenge for some rightist atrocity. (This was so common in previous books that I'd called it the ODV scene: Obligatory Deadly Vengeance). The aristocratic characters are not instantly type-castable as dissolute and useless. And most of all, there's finally a book where Banks does not seem to be making an attempt to write a new "dark side of the Culture", a sinister secret or flaw that will give them more drama.

What replaces this encouraging absence of writerly crutches? Well... it's a very competent novel. Serviceable. Um... very pleasant in an ordinary SF kind of way.

I feel bad for writing that. The novel really does have its good points. Its core is a fairy tale, really, which I always think is a good choice. The tale goes something like this. (Oh yes, spoilers.) Once upon a time there were three princes. Their father, a strong king, had raised the first to be a warrior, the second to be a diplomat, and the third to be a scholar. And here's the first variation from the classic tale: the first prince died, and his place was taken by his sister, a woman who went to a far land where women could be warriors far stronger than any their land could ever make. But then the king died treacherously and the land was threatened by dire foes, foes it would take combined military force and diplomacy and scholarship to defeat. In an additional fairy tale touch, the youngest of the princes became King, the others being missing, and since he was a studious youth, his enemies expected him to fail easily. But he confounded their schemes.

So far, so familiar, right? But, this being an anarcho-socialist novel, the princes and princess are not going to rule happily ever after. All three end up sacrificing their lives, more or less gracefully passing from the scene and preserving their land so it can progress to its next stage, a republic, which will be led by their former servant.

The three nobles are all somewhat played against type. Ferbin, the middle brother and the first viewpoint character, seems at first to be cut from standard Banks whole cloth. He's ineffectual and dissipated, someone who sleeps with a lot of women and runs back to the protection of his social status when he gets them and himself into trouble. But he's saved by his self-knowledge. At the beginning of the book, he's already telling us that he knows that he would be a bad king. At the end, when one of their group needs to be sacrificed to stop the lead bad guy, he throws himself in, knowing that tis a far, far better thing that he does etc. (Aided, admittedly, by brain chemicals that keep him from worrying too much. Quite a boon for cowards in general, those would be.) Anaplian, the princess, fits into the Culture with no problems at all. As an ex-royal, she's already used to not paying money for anything, already uniformly suspicious of people seeking to use her. There isn't any of, say, Zakalwe's (the agent in Use of Weapons) passive-aggressive almost middle-class "I can make it on my own" refusal to incorporate all of the Culture's benefits into herself. She's the ideal Special Circumstances agent.

Oramen, the youngest brother, is always a half-step behind. The plotter against the throne expects him to crumble immediately, and he doesn't, rather unconvincingly being able to do things like deliver convincing orations in front of real crowds without practice, because he remembers similar ones from plays. He survives one assassination plot after another through forethought, quick reactions, and a bit of authorial grease. But after telling himself to be decisive and to not be ashamed to take precautions that might look foolish, Oramen does exactly that -- although suspicious, he doesn't do anything about his suspicions at the critical moment, and he's mortally injured, though he survives long enough to warn his brother and sister.

This plot takes place within a galactic setting that sometimes works, sometimes doesn't. It doesn't work when Banks gives pages-long infodumps that are intended to tell us who is mentoring who is mentoring who within the complex, stacked hierarchy of civilizations at different levels of advancement. It does work when the effects on the lower-level civilizational leaders are presented -- they know that they are small players on a large stage, and their reaction is convincingly rather optimistic-predatory in that they feel they have somewhere to go and something to do, not the standard SF one of despair at being out-developed.

The main characters live on a sometimes-deadly piece of space junk. Oh, it's a huge, impressive artificial-hollow-planet artifact, and its perfectly understandable why all sorts of people would end up squatting on it once its builders left. But someone from a real top-level civilization, like the Culture or other Involveds, would never move onto something like that en masse. They'd just build their own artifact to whatever spec they wanted. So the civilization where the action takes place is, in a larger sense, rather like a tribe living on top of a huge junk pile, which has a certain engaging quality. Even their god, a huge and high-tech alien, is senile.

The book's title, Matter, is rather a puzzle. It's taken from an incident in which Ferbin meets an ex-Culture agent, and they have the now-age-old-within-SF discussion, or rather, college bull session, about whether the universe is a simulation, or whether it's really made out of matter -- whether it is the base reality. The ex-Culture agent opines that it must be the real world, made of matter, because such horrible things happen that any simulationeer creating the scenario would have to be an ultimate bastard, morally worse than their ability to create such simulations would imply. Or so I remember the scene. It really doesn't have any wider significance within the plot.

Here's where I queasily wonder whether I'll look like a complete jerk for having wondered whether I influenced the book somehow, because I used to write about this concept a lot and someone pretty convincingly seeming to be Iain Banks once indicated that he'd read some of my jottings. This is what I call, following James Branch Cabell, a problem of Demiurgy. The world of the novel is not the real world. It's not a world of matter, not really. The simulationeer, the creator, is one Iain Banks. If horrible things happen in that world, well, they happen because Iain Banks wrote them to happen.

And it's immediately apparent why those horrible things happen. They happen so the world will be dramatic. I vaguely remember an Iain Banks interview in which he was asked about why he didn't he write about an ordinary, non-violent Culture person going about an ordinary Culture life. He replied something to the effect that it would be like a soap opera. And there you have it! Problem of evil not so hard to understand after all, eh?

Of course, this is an artistic failure, and authors -- good authors, even great ones, as Banks has sometimes been -- have to know it at some level. If you want to write about an anarcho-socialist future world, and you really believe that anarcho-socialism is good, then you really should be able to depict an ordinary, happy life in that world as interesting. Otherwise, you implicitly agree that we need bad things to happen for life to be worth living. Which, no, Banks really does not, or so he's said. The author as Demiurge is always, inevitably, in some way a failure as a creator, and there is always some authorial guilt about that failure. I think that's as good an explanation as any for why the scene and title are there.

So, finally, back to the political part of the book. Banks didn't try to subvert his utopia for dramatic purposes this time. But is there really any reason for it to be there? The Culture, in this book, isn't really that distinguishable from the other Involved cultures. They are all advanced to the point where there are no conflicts over resources, energy, or living space; they can all afford to give their citizens as much, materially, as they really could want. So the Culture has a few quirks. They have this thing about missionary work, they're ideologically rather expansionist, and they're more touchy about full citizenship for machine intelligence and about lack of individual social restrictions than most Involveds. But you really don't get the feeling that living under one of the others would be that different, all told.

And that's rather a weakness of the book. When resources and energy and space don't matter, what matters is ideology. The real, best, ultimate Culture villains were the Idirans, the species that the Culture had its only really major military conflict with in the first Culture book. The Idirans, if I remember rightly, had a sort of religious belief that each people had a place and should stay there. And otherwise? They weren't monsters. They didn't engage in any of the Grand Guignol that far too many Banks villains engage in, committing genocide and torture and rape out of raw sadism and power-lust. They thought their system was right, and it really, really wasn't.

If there are to be other Culture books, I'm still hoping for one that has as villains standard, liberal, personally mostly well-intentioned and well-behaved politicians. To the Culture, those are really just as bad, aren't they? Look To Windward features the Chelgrians, who come complete with a caste system in which certain caste servants are routinely mutilated. Which is a cop-out. A remaining caste system like contemporary India's would be quite bad enough, for the Culture. There's something about the depiction of conflict without staged horrors that Banks captured, right at the beginning of the Culture's published works. (Use of Weapons and The Player of Games, his two best books in my opinion, aren't as directly concerned with that, being in my reading a meditation on the action hero and a bildungsroman respectively). I hope that he can capture that again.

Health care passed

2010-03-22T12:17:00.000-07:00

Duncan Black, quoted in full from here:

My marker for Obama was whether he'd get a health care bill with a public option. He didn't. A year ago passage of some sort of health care reform seemed inevitable, and not a tremendous challenge. Only a year of dithering and bipartisaning and gangs of wankers and pre-compromising and, frankly, failure to put forward something simple and popular jeopardized it.

The bill's more good than bad, but it isn't what we should have gotten. It isn't what we voted for.

I tend to read blogs written by academics, who are verbal and smart and write long, often witty pieces. And about politics, they're almost always wrong. Duncan Black has the best record I know of for any public commentator for always being right.

To add to his summary, which I fully agree with, I'm very glad that we got health care. Many people will have their lives saved by it who otherwise would have died. Many people will have much less miserable lives because they won't get substandard care, or won't have to always worry about where they are going to get medical help for themselves or their family members. There is still going to be an immense amount of work improving and maintaining this against various political challenges. (Including the Supreme Court, I'd guess.) But the situation is far, far better having won.

Obama managed to win. That's more important than anything else. There's a lot that would have been unforgivable that is forgivable now that he's actually gotten people health care. At the same time, this illustrates just where his limits are. He gave everything away right up to the point where it would have sunk his political career. Then he saved himself. Everyone else who voted for him, who worked for him, got DFH'd or dealed away or ignored. That happened right down to the end, right down to the Executive Order that got him anti-abortion votes that he probably didn't even need, at the cost of reinforcing the idea that there should be less health care for poor women. That's who he is.

As for the people who opposed health care, who wanted people to die for their own "freedom"? Let the scum whine. They lost. And for the first time since the 1980s in the U.S., there is a good chance that they are going to continue to lose, over and over, and they will never get the racist, theocratic hierarchy that they wanted back.

Obama, failed President

2010-01-28T17:47:00.000-08:00

When Obama came to office, I predicted that there would be a crisis point right about now. What would happen when Obama tried to be bipartisan and it become clear that his initiatives were going to be blocked by the GOP in the Senate? There were two basic paths that I saw. He could either want to succeed badly enough so that he became an actual, partisan political leader. Or he would refuse to adjust to reality, and fail.

The inaction around the recent hiccup in the health care bill, and the state of the union address, make it clear that it's most probable that he's going to fail. If he can't start to push, one year in, with his biggest initiative on the ropes, he's never going to. And the state of the union address included the amazingly pathetic

"We can't wage a perpetual campaign where the only goal is to see who can get the most embarrassing headlines about the other side -– a belief that if you lose, I win. Neither party should delay or obstruct every single bill just because they can. The confirmation of -- (applause) -- I'm speaking to both parties now. [...]

And if the Republican leadership is going to insist that 60 votes in the Senate are required to do any business at all in this town -- a supermajority -- then the responsibility to govern is now yours as well. Just saying no to everything may be good short-term politics, but it's not leadership. We were sent here to serve our citizens, not our ambitions. So let's show the American people that we can do it together. "

So, the GOP has been obstructing every single bill, because they can. Their strategy is to let Obama do nothing. And it's working. And his response is what? To call on their better nature? It would be comical if so many actual people's lives weren't riding on it. Real leadership, at this point, has to involve shoving them out of the way. Getting rid of the filibuster, using Reconciliation for everything, stripping out their earmarks. Becoming an actual partisan, listening to and rewarding the people who trusted you and brought you to power, not indulging in yet another false equivalence of blaming your own party as much as the GOP. Real leaders are willing to make themselves look bad by actually leading.

But Obama isn't going to. So, most probably, what's going to happen? Well, of course I don't know, but these are my guesses:

1. No major legislation will pass. Neither health care nor something on global warming. A "jobs bill" will pass, but it will turn out to consist of giveaways to multinationals, with a fig leaf of clean energy put over it.

2. Most comparatively minor legislation won't pass. Overrule the Supreme Court on corporate money in politics? Yeah, right. And since Obama is going to leave Don't Ask, Don't Tell to congress and the military, that's not going to happen either.

3. At the end of Obama's term, we'll still be in a war in Afghanistan. But I'd guess that we'll pick up another war, too. It's the standard response of American Presidents whose domestic policies founder.

4. Obama's people are barely competent enough to keep the economy from completely crashing on his watch. But there's going to continue to be 10% unemployment. His use of staggeringly damaging gestures like a spending freeze when more stimulus is needed is going to keep him from doing anything else.

5. As a result, the GOP is going to take the next Presidential election, probably with someone like Jeb Bush. At that point, the economy will crash. What people forget about wingnut policies is that they aren't just morally wrong, they also don't actually work. We'll see a quick return to Hooverism, and all the accumulated damage will come due.

What will we get after that? Who knows. But Obama has systematically destroyed the Democratic Party's credit. How can we, for example, claim to be the party in favor of civilization? Obama has adopted and confirmed Bush's use of torture, black sites, and surveillance. It's no longer a GOP aberration; he's mainstreamed it into something that both parties seemingly agree on.

What consequences does this have for activists? In the short term, it's back to the regulatory agencies. Obama has changed their leadership at the top, though they remain largely captured by industry or constrained. In the long term, the creation of alternative structures within the Democratic Party to hollow it out, since third parties are impractical under U.S. rules, and a shift insofar as possible to non-US politics. Change is still possible, far more than -- let's say -- under Bush. It's just that most of the types of change that are likely just got a lot more negative.

This was always the most likely result for Obama. I voted for him as the lesser evil, and he has been that. Things would have been worse had anyone else won. Still, history is going to look back at him as someone who, in a time of great challenge, failed his country.

What's going on

2010-01-02T18:55:00.001-08:00

For the two people who noticed that I haven't been commenting on blogs as was my wont, I've been busy. Rather, the entire local system within which I'm embedded has been busy. Oh, all right, maybe not, but let's pretend for the moment that it isn't just me overcommitting myself.

Most political blogs don't seem to have caught what's going on in the U.S. right now. There are a lot of people in America who wrote about politics in the age of Bush because they were, rightly, very concerned about where the country was going, who don't themselves work in politics. And they seem to have generally treated this administration as more of the same. Current events to keep track of -- Republicans and lunatic, blogging, right-wingers to mock -- damage control to do -- stupid things that politicians say. And it's really not that any more.

Not because Obama is a great progressive, or anything like that. He's not. It's simply that right now, progress is possible. Ever since Reagan, everyone I know at work, often for their entire political lifetimes, has been engaged in a bitter delaying action to keep past gains from being lost. Now the system has shifted to the point where we can win new ground. And that's tremendously different.

Of course, the system I work within isn't really suited to this change. As always, we all fight the last war, using the skills polished in the prior era. For my part, I've been engaged in a flurry of what is probably best described as librarianship. Ever since sometime in July or August, when everyone I regularly work with all called at the same time and asked me to work on some project, I've programmed Web sites that allow public access to data on toxic pollution, chemical accidents, governmental finances, especially around the economic stimulus... And this material has duly been used to help people inform themselves, do activism, write news stories, aid in writing reports that conceivably may influence legislation. I have to believe that it's good work, and of course it's what I'm good at. But librarianship as a response to politics always seemed like a sort of last-ditch gesture. It's "The barbarians are coming, so let's write everything down and send it out so that someone somewhere will find out about it." It's not what is most needed now. But it's what I do.

At any rate, I'm hoping that I've finally caught up to the point where I can write non-work-related things again. Poetry, SF criticism ... blog comments.

Yellow Blue Tibia by Adam Roberts

2009-06-15T16:55:00.000-07:00

A piece on Adam Roberts' book Yellow Blue Tibia.

"What do you think, Richard? Have the reviewers written useful things about this book?"

"Not that I've seen. Even Clute seemed to go through the ostensible plot, put in a few graceful adjectives--"

"Don't be so quick to say that you know about what you don't. "

"Not that again, John. OK, if we're going to talk about this, let's assume that anyone reading this knows what the book is about, doesn't care about being 'spoiled', doesn't need a plot summary..."

"All right."

"What struck me, right from the start -- you remember the scene where one of the Soviet SF writers is explaining to another that he's plagiarized all his work from Western European or American SF?"

"Yep."

"One of the titles of his plagiarized works was The Grasshopper Lies Heavy."

"OK, that's amusing. I'd guess that most SF readers would recognize that as the name of the book within a book in PKD's The Man in the High Castle. But so what?"

"So what? At first I thought, funny, so the writer within the book plagiarized PKD and used one of his titles. But he can't have, because the conversation happens when Stalin was alive and PKD didn't publish that until 1962. So the writer can't have copied PKD."

"So it's a little joke by Adam Roberts to the reader."

"No! This is a book in which one of the characters later refers to the page count by which he met one of the other characters. It's steeped in ... in ... casual metatextuality. What's the point of it?"

"I don't know, but I think you're going to tell me. Does it have to have a point?"

"Yes! It's a book about fiction, about fiction creating reality, and it's chock-full of references to famous postmodern books. Later on, there's a cop interview scene, and many reviewers wrote appreciatively about the humor in how the cop keeps turning his tape recorder on during the times when it should be off and vice versa. It's funny, sure. But he introduces himself with 'My name is Zembla'!"

"Hmm. Pale Fire was also published in 1962. But this conversation was taking place in 1986. You'd think the protagonist might have recognized the name of the cop as being something from a famous literary work."

"Maybe Soviet censorship kept it out of Russia. Maybe he didn't read anything since he gave up writing. But yeah, there's a bit too much of that; it risks making the characters look too provincial, as if they don't know about the wide world of literature, yet aren't shown as having countervailing knowledge of their own writing that's really worth knowing."

"Can you get back to the point?"

"All right. Look, I read the book while I had a fever of 101 degrees F."

"Perhaps not the best time --"

"Yeah, yeah. So I missed a lot, I'm sure. But I"m pretty sure that Gravity's Rainbow popped up in a reference to ghost rockets, there was probably something from Borges -- or there should have been -- and there were low-culture references too, in that high/low culture blend that's one of the other postmodern signatures. The male Scientologist character is a safety inspector for nuclear power plants. In other words, he has Homer Simpson's job."

"Overreading a bit, maybe."

"There's an argument a lot like the Monty Python 'How to have an argument' sketch. But all right. The two main drivers of the action are the protagonist and the other surviving one of the original group of SF writers, who has become a KGB agent. The KGB agent keeps coming back to the protagonist and insisting on having this pointless discussion with him about whether the protagonist believes in UFOs. And the protagonist -- despite being called, derisively, an ironist who doesn't believe in anything -- keeps coming back, obsessively, in little bits towards the beginning of chapters, to the idea of binary valuation. That there either are UFOs, or there aren't. And he's pretty clearly skeptical about UFOs."

"So if the KGB guy wants to actually convince him, why not show him convincing evidence?"

"I don't know. Maybe he doesn't want to -- or maybe he can't produce it. The KGB guy is a brutal killer and defender of the fading Communist regime who turns out to be right about everything, by the way. The UFOs turn out to really exist, within the book -- as far as we can trust unreliable narration. But they work by using multiple quantum realities, so binary thinking is inappropriate, so, I guess the KGB guy is right there too. And they seem to be malign, so he's justified in trying to warn and mobilize the world about them, you'd think, even if he thinks that would also work to prop up the regime."

"Justified in causing the deaths of thousands due to Chernobyl?"

"Well, let's not go down that path, either. But here's the problem of the book. The UFO believers are all more or less kooks. The Americans involved are Scientologists, and Scientologists have a special relationship to this subject. There we have a religion created by an SF writer whose most famous supposed quote is 'You don't get rich writing science fiction. If you want to get rich, you start a religion.'"

"Who knows whether he really said it?"

"Yes, who knows? It can be blurred -- everything can be blurred. Have you heard of right-wing postmodernism?"

"Oh, not this again."

"Come on, one more time. At the historical time and place in which I'm writing this -- U.S.A., 2009 -- we've just emerged from the Bush years, a time of unbridled right-wing postmodernism. One of the core elements of those years were that it didn't matter whether anything was true as long as people believed it to be true. Their belief created reality. And -- here is the particularly right-wing part -- since people in power controlled belief through mass media, people in power thought that they controlled reality."

"We saw how well that worked."

"Yes. You go along nicely until you slam into a wall."

"So what does that have to do with Yellow Blue Tibia?"

"It makes it -- difficult, I think -- to read the book for its strengths, for me, at this place, at this time. Perhaps this is an English/American difference? Look, this is a very good book in many ways. The excellent, wry dialogue, for instance, that I've clumsily copied the form but not the feel or the style of. The characterization. The initial conceit. But its ending -- love is what's important, uncertainty doesn't really have to be resolved -- just feels wrong for this time."

"But uncertainty of that sort is a tool of the aliens, who are depicted as malign."

"I guess so. But the people against them are so hopelessly doomed by history on the Soviet side, or representative of what I see as a bad part of American culture -- the disbelievers in whatever they don't want to believe, whether that's consensus history about Waco or UFOs or 9/11 or global warming or the Holocaust --"

"Hey! Godwin!"

"I guess it works if you talk to yourself long enough, too."

"Hmm. But aren't there hints the aliens are really supporting the KGB guy with their technology? He takes a fall of four stories, lands on his head, and lives, though with brain damage. Isn't that really only possible if they saved his life in the same way that they saved the protagonist's from being shot? That would mean that the aliens want there to be people against them who are unsympathetic, perhaps so that people won't believe them."

"Maybe so. I don't know. Or maybe it's some kind of reference to "major character protection" -- the way the main villain in a fiction can't ever just die. But let me get back to the thread, if anyone is still following it. Look, this is a good book. But it's the wrong book for me, right now. I suspect that what I need -- what SF needs, if I'm going to generalize my preferences -- is something like what the younger Iain Banks wrote (and hey, may write again). Something from China Mieville in a more confident mood about whether he can depict society after the revolution. Something that overreaches, because the author believes. Where they make all the appropriate writerly gestures towards there maybe being two sides to the story, or more, but in the end you know there really isn't."

"Isn't that a rather childish desire? Getting back to the grandiose, triumphialist SF that Roberts identifies with Stalin (and see The Iron Dream, etc.)?"

"It depends what it's in service of. A sort of leftist humanism? I don't see how that really goes along with genocide... of course, some might differ. But basically, I think that *literary* postmodernism took a big hit from the Bush years, at least in the U.S. Those references start to seem as dated as the Soviet culture in the book. SF, now, has to reawaken to post-post-modernism. Maybe that's what the book means."

"And you missed it because of your fever? You've gone on a really long time nevertheless."

"Oh well. What do you have to say about the book?"

"That it's an amusing book that people should read."

"That's it?"

"And it's also kind of funny that Jodi Dean, someone who parenthetically used to take a generally opposing view on literary-theoretical matters from those on The Valve, a site that Adam Roberts writes on, wrote a book about exactly this subject. Her book was called Aliens in America and it examined belief in UFOs from a postmodern viewpoint without (as far as I know) taking a position on whether the belief was really 'true' or not. Adam Roberts doesn't show any sign of knowledge of the existence of this book within Yellow Blue Tibia, so it's probably a coincidence."

"Huh."

2007 TRI released

2009-03-22T18:14:00.000-07:00

The latest version of the Toxic Release Inventory (TRI) came out on the 19th, with RTK Net's version open a day later. This year, RTK NET's version also supplies RSEI risk screening numbers -- for the first time, an at least partial answer to the question "How important is this particular release of pollution, anyways?"

EPA continued its recent trend of downplaying the data release. I don't think that they announced they'd be releasing it far in advance -- I had to find out about it through the grapevine after it was already up. I didn't see much news about it, and the news there was was unspecific. For instance, the overall release trend was down, but PCB releases jumped 40%. Why? According to this story, for one example, "EPA said that the jump was probably due to disposal of old equipment or clean up at industrial sites." Probably? The vast majority of the increase seems to be due to one site, Chemical Waste Management in Emelle, Alabama. Why not call that facility and get the actual cause for the jump? That's one of the things that would change this from a contextless, uninvestigated number into a story that people could begin to understand.

An Open Letter to the DNC's "Organizing for America"

2009-03-17T13:04:00.000-07:00

Dear DNC:

Why should I participate in "Organizing for America?"

That isn't a rhetorical question. My spouse received an Organizing for America pitch in the mail today, and I've read it. It tells me that the organization's mission will be to advance President Obama's legislative agenda, and to continue building the grassroots organization started during the Obama campaign.

But Obama's legislative agenda appears to be on its way towards success or failure without me. Specifically, health care reform and global climate change have both had a small group of "centrist" Democratic Senators write that they are unwilling to let them be attached to vehicles that require only 50 votes, and instead wish to let them be filibustered. If so, that means that they are almost certain not to become law. Is "Organizing for America" going to be a vehicle towards enforcing party discipline on those Senators? If not, what good is it?

President Obama has often said that he wants bipartisan solutions. I am a partisan. I do not want bipartisan solutions, not when one side is still fully committed to the failed beliefs of the Bush years. Why should I participate?

Or, to put it another way, President Obama made all sorts of concessions to the right and to the center on the recent stimulus bill. These concessions weakened the bill to the point where it will probably be ineffective as stimulus, and did not succeed politically in getting any GOP votes in the House, and only three in the Senate. Would my work be wasted and go towards similarly ineffective concessions?

If so, bluntly, what's in it for the liberals and the left? The centrists and the right held up laws that would be good for the country in order to pursue their own petty interests. As a result, their concerns were not ignored. The liberals and the left went along, and were ignored. What is President Obama going to do for his base? Is he going to announce an investigation into Bush-era war crimes? Go ahead and nationalize AIG? Perhaps reverse his shameful opinion that detainees at Bagram have no right to challenge their detention? Stop allowing his deputies to try to preserve the existing, dysfunctional banking system? Support a stronger push against climate change, rather than a relatively ineffective and easily gamed market-ideology cap-and-trade scheme?

And why is the pitch so one-way in an organizational sense? The mail that I saw didn't try to pull people into any genuinely netroots-style peer-to-peer effort. There was a pro forma URL listed -- www.democrats.org -- and a request for an Email address. The program mentioned was one of house meetings and gathering stories -- the sort of thing easily controlled centrally by the DNC. The materials repeat the false, Republican-framed claim that "Change doesn't come from Washington"': if people are supposed to take that seriously, why is this being controlled from Washington?

I invite anyone to answer. There's not much at stake: only a hundred or so dollars from me, and whatever volunteer efforts I can muster. But that's proportionally more than I've seen I've seen the DNC or the Obama administration put into this effort. Why does this deserve my support?

Regards,

Rich Puchalsky

So much for TRI's expanded Form A

2009-03-13T13:48:00.000-07:00

As mentioned in an article here, the return of the Toxic Release Inventory's Form A to its older reporting levels -- back to 500 pounds instead of 2000 pounds of releases, if you don't want to get technical about it -- was attached to the spending bill and signed into law. It was pretty much a race between the judicial, legislative, and executive branches to see who would get this one first after Bush left.

If you do want to get technical about it, then this particular Post article, like almost all news articles that I know something about, is misleading. A sentence reads "The legislation restores the standard established by law in 1986, compelling all facilities to inform the public of any chemical releases that total 500 pounds a year or more, lowering the 2,000-pound threshold Bush had adopted." I could see not mentioning that it was actually two thresholds that were affected (one for releases and the other for waste generated). But the standard was never set by law, in 1986 or anytime else. The law leaves it up to EPA to set a reasonable standard. That's why the threshold can change in the first place. The older Form A level, which is what we're returning to, didn't even exist at all within the law as passed in 1986 -- it was added to TRI for 1995.

Pink Triangle

2009-03-13T08:38:00.000-07:00

Listening to a classical-strings cover of Weezer's song Pink Triangle -- used as a perfect life-stages-going-by tune -- I looked back at the lyrics to the original. It's a song in which the narrator sees a girl, falls in love, imagines marrying her, and oh noes sees she has a pink triangle on. The narrator apparently isn't able to recognize that his interest in her was as an anima figure. (The guy who wrote the song mentioned, in an interview, that this actually happened to him and he found out later that she was just wearing the triangle to show support. But of course, as he didn't say in the interview, he didn't really care about her as an actual person.)

So, that's the background for what follows. The poetry group that I read to thought it was funny, anyways. This is the second recent poem in which Silliman figures as symbol of "real poetry"; reading through his link lists must be a good carrier for his aesthetics.

Pink Triangle

When I'm filled with what I've heard
I start looking around for words
Time to pay poetic rent
Maybe I'll read The New Sentence
But when I start to feel that pull
I'm just pulling off myself
My inspiration's left unsaid
Though she lives inside my head

My muse is a lesbian
Arrangements didn't go like they should
She and I are married in my mind
But poems in my mind are no good

At least we can still be friends
Though she'll sit down and pretend
Wishing she had Patti Smith
But muses don't choose who they're with
When we're feeling bad and down
Then we'll laugh and joke around
Sometimes she'll smile and touch my hand
It's all that she can really stand

My muse is a lesbian
My poetry is always third-rate
Every poem that I like is queer
Why can I only write them straight?

Knew the day was coming that
I'd get middle-aged and fat
You need youth to be emo
Going on is how it goes
I'd rather be like Bowie
Sam Pickwick's the guy I see
Since I can't be inspired
I'll do parodies until I'm tired

My muse is a lesbian
And when we have to pass on
We'll kiss and have one final sing
Of Mr. Toad's Last Little Song

Obama one month in

2009-02-21T16:55:00.000-08:00

One month into Obama's term, I'd say that things are going pretty much exactly as I expected. He's signed a number of relatively costless initiatives like SCHIP that were all but passed except for Presidential veto, affirmed Bush-era imprisonment and trial policies for people at e.g. Bagram prison, avoided nationalizing banks that need to be nationalized, and gotten through a stimulus package that benefits mostly Obama. Why that last? Because it doesn't benefit actual voters to have a bucket of money thrown at bailing out the system, not when that's only getting us out of trouble that the system got us into in the first place. It helps Obama to not have a Depression during his term, but for the rest of us, the help is rather like the kind of help you get when someone tells you "your money or your life" and you give them your money -- it's better not to lose your life, but that's hardly help. Meanwhile, Obama got the stimulus package through with politically valueless concessions that severely reduced its effectiveness, plus what should be recognized by now as his signature move, a completely gratuitous culture-war slam at his backers for just the possibility of political benefit (by which I mean what he did with money for contraception).

My inaugural poem is holding up well. I still think, of course, that Obama is vastly better than McCain would have been, probably better than Hillary Clinton would have been. But the progressive reaction to the stimulus plan was laughable. "Why isn't Obama calling on us to help push this through?" It was like Boxer in Animal Farm asking plaintively why they weren't letting him work harder. The reaction should have been to threaten to sabotage the stimulus package through pressure on a sympathetic Senator or two unless Obama bought them off with more progressive elements in it. He would have understood that perfectly well. As the poem says, my hope for change rests on that Obama is actually going to need the left for the last few votes to get past the GOP, and the left is going to wake up and start using that leverage.

At least there's $100 million in the stimulus for lead paint removal. That will do some good.

Yawnpiphany

2009-02-10T10:53:00.000-08:00

On reading a funny Adam Roberts review of Anathem, full of parody neologisms, I was struck (in the comment box) with the idea of the yawnpiphany. In some seriousness, that's the best name I've yet been able to think of for a certain New Wave SF writing technique.

It goes like this. Let's say that you want to rebel against the tired old forms of SF. In some sense, you want to be literary. But you're also rebelling against literariness itself; you don't want to merely imitate Modernist classics or join in the forming post-modernism. You want something that is a specifically SF form of iconoclasm.

That means that formal innovation is probably out. SF never had any sort of advanced formalism to reject. What SF had are "ideas" and adventure. So the best rebellion is a long-drawn-out attempt to bore the reader. Not by simply writing a bad book -- anyone could do that. But instead a purposeful, skillful repetition of the same thing over and over until the reader has a yawnpiphany that makes it impossible for them to see standard SF quite in the same way anymore.

Yes, Waiting for Godot has been done. But I think that there is a specifically SF form of this. I wrote about this a bit when considering Brian Aldiss' Hothouse, a novel of anti-ideas. A better example is his Report on Probability A, an anti-novel. But I don't feel up to considering that book at the length it deserves yet. So I'll just mention it -- there's a bit about it in the post on Hothouse -- along with two other candidate works that I immediately thought of: Norman Spinrad's The Iron Dream and Michael Moorcock's Pyat Quartet.

The Iron Dream is a work that I can't seem to convince anyone else of the importance of. It's structured as a laugh, an "oh, that's clever", a long grind, and a yell. I keep thinking that people who think that it's good but not great somehow don't appreciate the long grind. The laugh is the splash page from the publisher at the beginning, which says how popular the author of The Iron Dream, Adolph Hitler, is with SF fans and how his costumes are special favorites at SF conventions. The "oh, that's clever" is the first chapter, in which the protagonist, in a dead-on savaging of every Golden Age SF trope, sets out to save the pure humans via necessary genocide against the wholly evil mind-controlling twisted mutants. The yell at the end is the afterword by a supposed critic of the book. But it's the long grind that gets undervalued. By the end of the first chapter, you've realized that the book is an SF adventure story that recapitulates the real Hitler's actual rise to power. It goes on and on as he and his followers rejoice homoerotically as they wipe out the evil mutants and the mutant-lovers, and there's a real temptation to just skip a few chapters, since, after all, you've gotten the idea.

But you can't. Reading the same thing over and over, you start to realize -- or at least I started to realize; I don't really know whether anyone else reacts similarly -- just how often you've read the same thing over and over, better concealed, in real SF. I've referred to this as "strapping your inner fanboy down Clockwork Orange style." You know intellectually what point Spinrad is making after the first chapter, but you don't feel it, in your gut, until a point somewhere near the end. This is the yawnpiphany.

Or there's the example of the Moorcock Pyat series. I've only actually managed to make it through the first one of these books, myself. I've never read a more determined attempt to make a wholly unsympathetic protagonist. (There's a good review here). Pyat is a cocaine-fueled self-hating ultra-right schemer whose only talent, as he goes through the 20th century, is to con people into having sex with him, and to fool others and himself into thinking that he is capable of SF engineering feats which, of course, fail. He lurches from one country to another, getting involved in every fascist movement going, and escaping each one badly used and having badly used others. This might seem like a shockarama, and at the beginning perhaps it is. But it's the same thing over and over. By the middle of the first book, I was flipping pages forward, thinking that OK, I've learned all there is to learn from this horrible unreliable narrator. Is there anything more?

Again, this is intended, I believe, as a source of the yawnpiphany for every historic-fantasy-adventure book, most particularly Moorcock's own. It's the kind of thing where I can describe the idea of the book, and you the reader can think that you get it, but you can't really get it until you've pushed past the point of boredom and said, "Wow! This is really quite like..." which is when your boredom becomes identified with the slight boredom that you felt when reading, say, the middle of Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell and its strangely cute crypto-authoritarianism. Which is not a bad book, but that's the point of the yawnpiphany; at its best, it can change your whole reading of a subgenre.

At any rate, that's it for the yawnpiphany. Most of my ideas on SF, like it, are dialogically half-formed out of comment boxes, a process of uncertain value. But anyone still reading this far should really check out this really amusing post by John Holbo about the philosophical thought experiment of Lewd and Prude, complete with some fanfic I wrote in the comment box. That's really what blogging should be about.

"Wait a minute -- literal or figurative volcano?"

2009-02-03T14:11:00.001-08:00

That was how I answered the beginnings of the phone call. In this case, yes, it's literal: there's a volcano threatening to go off at Mount Redoubt in Alaska which could possibly once again (as it did a couple of decades ago) affect the Drift River Oil Terminal, a set of storage tanks that usually stores hundreds of thousands of barrels of crude oil. Chevron refuses to release information about how much oil they have left at the facility, citing Homeland Security concerns. There's a good article on it here.

How is this possibly homeland security information? Everyone already knows where the facility is, has pictures of it, and knows how much oil it generally holds. What Chevron doesn't want to release is information about how much oil it holds right now, now that they've pumped some of the oil out in response to the volcano building up nearby. Of course they have all sorts of economic motives to leave as much oil as possible there and risk it, and people concerned about the environment have opposite motives to push them to get the oil out of the river's floodplain. I don't understand how they even can claim a concern about terrorism without everyone laughing at them.

This is not the first time that terrorism has been claimed as a concern in order to avoid the release of chemical accident information. On the contrary, that started even before 9/11 -- even as industry managed to have its politicians avoid making any requirements that they actually do anything to reduce accident risk. I've worked with this kind of thing for a long time, which is why I got the call in the first place. This may be a good test of Obama's new FOIA policy. It really comes down to one of two alternatives. If the government knows what Chevron is doing to prepare for this volcano, then that information should be FOIA-able. And if it doesn't know, why not?

Brian Aldiss' Hothouse

2009-01-26T18:53:00.000-08:00

On an implicit recommendation within Adam Roberts' Palgrave History of SF, I recently finished reading Brian Aldiss' early work Hothouse. The consideration of this important book is my excuse for an extended ramble on science in SF, other works by Aldiss, grand narrative, and the unreliable omniscient narrator.

Hothouse was written in 1961 as five short stories, winning a Hugo in 1962 as short fiction, and later emerged through the SF "fix-up" process as a novel. It's apparently been recently re-issued. It manages to encapsulate everything that I feel, as a reader, about Aldiss' work in general. On the one hand, it's brilliant work by a skilled writer with literary ambitions, and deserves serious attention by literary critics. On the other, it's annoying.

Do you get the feeling that I'm going to spend more time on the second of these than the first? Since the only people who read this blog probably already know my writing style -- at any rate, first, why should everyone interested in literary SF read this book? Because, as Adam Roberts points out, it's a giant metaphor for SF. The novel is set in a future-world overgrown jungle planet, actually the Earth after the Sun has expanded. Its hapless humans have shrunken in size and in mental capability, though the last may be more a matter of lost culture and knowledge than anything else. As is proper for an SF jungle from this era, everything, including eerily aggressive plants, is a predator on everything else. (Wiki informs me that Aldiss' military service in jungles in Burma may have helped to inspire the novel, and also that he put together an anthology of Venus-jungle stories called Farewell, Fantastic Venus!.) But this is only background; the heart of what makes this a literary novel is "the morel". The morel is a parasitic fungus that acts like an auxiliary brain of sorts; when it attaches itself to a human, it can not only render them more intelligent and inform them of the contents of its own memories, it can dig through and interpret their ancestral memories as well. Again per Roberts (although any misrepresentations of his idea are mine), it acts as a cognate for the concern with "ideas" of SF itself.

The protagonist, Gren, isn't just informed and made more intelligent by the morel -- as well as being controlled by it in ultimately destructive ways -- he's also brought by it into modernity. He is changed from a person reacting within a tradition of inherited social structure to someone with a familiar, contemporary mindset that the world is shapable, controllable through thought and effort. Therefore, it's saying something about colonialism, too, which Aldiss had first-hand knowledge of from India and Indonesia. Gren's mate manages to detach the morel after it attempts to parasitize their child as well. But even after it's gone, Gren has been changed by it -- when someone from an advanced civilization wants him to do something, his choices aren't limited to refusal or agreement, he now knows how to argue.

The morel manages to later take over one of the "travellers": huge, mobile plants shaped like giant spiders that spin webs that extend from the Earth to the Moon. It informs Gren that the universe has cycles of growth and decay, evolution and devolution, and that life is about to pack up and leave the Earth. The morel offers to give Gren a ride on the traveller; other, former members of Gren's tribe are going to go along inside it, to find a new habitable planet around another star. But Gren refuses. He points out that the morel has said that the catastrophe won't occur for several human generations, so why should he care? He is "tired of carrying and being carried." He tells the morel to "fill a whole empty world with people and fungus" if it wants to. His son's grandson will live in the jungle, as he has. So he goes back to the (eventually) doomed Earth.

SF that rejects the primacy of thought, ideas, adventure, even survival -- that makes this a literary experiment. As such, it's a highly interesting one. And that "tired of carrying and being carried" is highly evocative. It works on a physical level, since Gren carries both the morel and later the sodal, a sort of person-sized intelligent aquatic creature that is proud of its knowledge, and Gren also uses the morel to be himself physically carried by various other creatures. It's also metaphorical, in the sense that people in modernity not only carry around the omnipresent mediation of their worldview, but are carried by it; the kind of people who read SF novels are probably thoroughly familiar with the concept of living off one's intelligence even if they don't personally do it. But it's also about SF, and how it likes to describe itself as "the literature of ideas," so that books are carried along by the quality of their ideas, and carry a sort of simulated science forward to their readers. Aldiss is registering some of the discomfort with traditional SF tropes that would animate the New Wave, which is usually said to begin three years after this, in 1964.

But onwards to criticism that I haven't basically cribbed from Roberts, which, sadly, is the negative part. I'm not trying to trash the book, but I don't see any value in shiny-sunny criticism that accentuates the positive and ignores the rest. I learned more from figuring out what I thought was wrong with this book than I did from appreciating what was right about it.

Why, exactly, do I find this work annoying? It starts with that jungle. The book was written before the era of popularized evolutionary biology a la Richard Dawkins' The Selfish Gene in 1976, and it shows it. Therefore, species and their evolutionary changes are always being anthropomorphized in purposeful-sounding ways; for instance, species "copy" other species' evolutionary adaptations. By itself, that's minor, and could be fixed by mentally substituting concepts of convergent evolution and so on. Where it can't be fixed is that Aldiss wants to tie the changes going on to a grand narrative of cycles of growth and decay. Evolution simply doesn't work like that.

But why should that matter? The idea of webs stretching from (tide-locked) Earth to Moon doesn't work in terms of physics, and I'm not bothered by that, even though I have a degree in astrophysics. I think that's because it's merely an incidental detail -- I don't really look for SF to have scientific accuracy. But I distrust grand narratives. Aldiss has Teilhard de Chardin'd up the place.

Why is that more serious than any amount of misplaced physics? Because it conflicts with his rejection of the SF-idea. One essence of contemporary science, as I understand it from my minimal experience of it -- I've done about as little science as you can do and still be said to have done some science -- is acceptance of randomness. Which, in its biological aspect, more often takes the form of historical contingency. The SF books that I've read that really made me sit up and say "Wow, this seems like actual science" were those from the chill, invigorating Arctic breeze of Stanislaw Lem: Solaris and, say, The Chain of Chance, or The Investigation. The SF-idea of science is almost always elsewhere tied to a narrative that neatly explains. Aldiss giving in to this, even as he calls it into question, seems like a highly troubling flaw. Nor is this something that seems to me to be dismissible as an artifact of its time. Olaf Stapledon, who wrote mystical, evolutionary SF, wrote earlier, and his work always had the saving grace in this respect, for me, of acknowledging accident -- the human race in his Last and First Men (if I remember rightly) fails to make some evolutionary jump, and who knows why? It's not part of some cosmic cycle or plan, it's just an accidental failure, so, goodbye.

Nor is this a feature of Aldiss' work that is limited to Hothouse. It appears, for instance, in one of his other major biological works, the 1980s Heliconia trilogy, one of the batch of series that depend on worlds that have unusually long seasons to drive the plot as well as provide a background of larger-than-human-scale cycles (e.g. Paul Park's Starbridge Chronicles, George R.R. Martin's Song of Ice and Fire series). But the biology in Heliconia seems to keep creeping into mysticism; at one point, the residents of the Earth think good thoughts to change the Heliconians' world-wide relationship to their communicable ancestral spirits, which seem to have some material existence. Who can say that such things are impossible? It's not the impossibility that I object to, but rather the way in which things keep getting swept up.

Worse, it's a problem that in another way affects the most splendid failure in SF, Aldiss' Report on Probability A. That's a book that certainly deserves its own post, but in short, it's an "anti-novel" consisting mostly of repetitive, obsessional, purposefully banal descriptions of what static, solitary characters are doing and surrounded by. Three men are observing a house with a woman living in it, and themselves being observed by extra-planar observers, who wish to know why they are doing it. Sadly, this last question is not un-answerable. By the end of the book -- does this count as a spoiler? it could just be my misinterpretation, I suppose -- a too-plausible theory and too much dwelling within the head of one of the three has made it far too likely that the three simply are attracted to the woman, another man's wife, who may or may not have been slightly leading them on, and that they are hanging about obsessionally as much because they can't figure it out as in unrequited attraction. How much better the book would have been if the reader had had no real idea, by the end! Why did it have to be explained? That just makes it into a novel again.

There's one other thing that troubled me about both Hothouse and Heliconia, the unreliable omniscient narrator. In Hothouse, it's probably because it's a fix-up of multiple short stories, but still-- in the beginning of the novel, the narrator confidently tells us that there are only something like five specific non-plant species surviving on the Earth, all of the other niches having been taken by mobile plants. This isn't the narrator passing on the knowledge of Gren or his tribe; it's the narrator just telling us. And it's not vague: the narrator lists each of them. Then each succeeding part of the book adds more animal species that aren't among those five. If Aldiss was going to dump all this worldbuilding detail on us, couldn't he at least make it consistent through the book? But instead it seems to change according to what theme he's on at the moment. When he wants to impress with the idea of a plantosphere, there are only five non-plant species. When later he wants to do a picaresque, well, there have to be more creatures for the protagonists to run into. And later, when he wants to get into Stapledonian replacements of one form of humanity by another over time, there's a whole lot of different species of humanoids. I can accept an unreliable narrator, but when that narrator appears to be the author that's a different matter. In Heliconia, too, details of his biology seem to keep changing slightly from one omniscient description to the next.

But wishing that Aldiss had had a more picky editor is a comparatively minor problem. More generally, this kind of thing is always going to be a problem for SF; an author as omniscient narrator who tells you what a character is thinking can almost always be assumed to be right -- after all, the author wrote the character. But SF, which tells you about a world in addition, is susceptible to contradiction by our changing knowledge of what worlds are like. You can believe that Venus is a jungle, then a probe goes on a nearby fly-by, and it's farewell, fantastic Venus. This does not seem to me to be a feature of SF rather than a bug. The fantastic-venus stories are now, in my opinion, probably generally unreadable. If they had started out as fantasies, they wouldn't be. It's a problem that has not been generally apparent because SF self-identified as SF has only been around for a century or so. But Aldiss' failure to achieve internal self-consistency makes it emerge far sooner than it otherwise would. In this, of course, he also provokes thought about the genre that would not otherwise have emerged.

Aldiss is a giant of the New Wave -- as one of the founders, he got to be one of Moorcock's Granbrettanian gods, as Bjrin Adass -- and this book is well worth reading. But its problems seem to me to mix uncomfortably with its strengths, and can't be ignored.

An agenda for the Toxic Release Inventory

2009-01-21T16:43:00.000-08:00

Today Obama signed a new Executive Order revitalizing FOIA, and spoke about transparency being one of the touchstones of his Presidency. As a sort of minor reciprocal gesture of faith, I've decided to put up an agenda of changes that I think should be made to the Toxic Release Inventory (TRI), one of U.S. EPA's most successful data programs. At any time during the last eight years, I wouldn't have talked about these ideas in any public forum until each piece was ready to be proposed formally, knowing that talking about the agenda beforehand would only give industry a heads-up to prepare to scuttle it. But perhaps being willing to talk about it beforehand will help everything go more smoothly. Needless to say, I'm also eager to hear about other people's ideas.

I have no formal authority to propose these kinds of changes at all, and am not writing this under any organizational affiliation. They are simply my personal ideas. However, I've worked extensively on the Toxic Release Inventory outside EPA since 1990, and I consider myself to be an expert on it. There are a number of organizations which I plan to work with to propose these things formally, in the event that no one else does.

I'll try to provide a little bit of background, in the unlikely event that anyone reads this who doesn't know all about TRI already. If you want to find out basic information about the Toxic Release Inventory, you can go to EPA's Web page on it, but in short it's a database, legislatively mandated to be publicly accessible in electronic form, that requires most kinds of large, fixed polluters to report their releases and transfers of toxic chemicals, as well as the toxic chemicals in waste that they generate. Unlike EPA's hazardous waste databases, it also requires that these reports be of the amount of chemical, not the amount of chemical plus inert filler, and that the reports be in common units. Facilities have to report releases of chemicals to air, land, water, and underground. These characteristics make the database EPA's most useful one for general toxic pollution issues. TRI was the model for many similar databases in other countries; these databases are generally called PRTRs, Pollutant Release and Transfer Registers.

The Toxic Release Inventory has had notable expansions during its now decades-long span -- waste data was added by the Pollution Prevention Act in 1991, Federal facilities added in 1994, hundreds of chemicals added in 1995, new industries outside manufacturing had to report starting in 1998, and data on persistent bioaccumulative chemicals was expanded in 2000. And for the last eight years, that's where it has stood -- other than a disgraceful reduction in TRI data in 2006, when the "Form A" option for facilities to avoid reporting was expanded, despite widespread opposition from the public, lawmakers, and scientists. Suffice it to say that although EPA's civil service employees generally understand the value of TRI, the administration running the agency at that time was actively hostile.

So these ideas have been around, in some cases, for many years, but there was no point in proposing them until the administration changed. Now that it has, here they are:

1. Add chemicals that cause global anthropogenic climate change (global warming)

This would be primarily CO2, methane, and nitrous oxide -- the Montreal Protocol chemicals, which also contribute to global warming, are already in TRI. I'm not a lawyer, but I would think that this would be possible under current legal authority because chemicals can be added to TRI if they cause a sufficient adverse effect on the environment, which GHGs are now known to do. The statute does refer to the adverse effect as being due to toxicity, so this interpretation is not certain. But if new authority is needed, it's going to be gotten anyways -- the Obama administration plans to do something about global warming, and you can hardly do anything about it without tracking emissions.

I can understand that people who want to track GHGs may want a new database designed for that particular purpose. (Currently EPA and DOE have a patchwork of databases, none of which were really designed for that, and which are going to have to be replaced.) TRI has certain limitations as a database tracking GHGs; what, for example, would be done about transportation sources, like fleets of trucks? But it seems to me that these chemicals should be added to TRI in any case, even if another database is created to specifically track them, as a cross-check. The information would also then benefit from TRI's well-developed distribution paths and user base. And TRI would come closer to matching other countries' PRTRs, several of which added GHGs quite a few years ago.

2. Change range reporting and speciation reporting of highly toxic chemicals

Since the beginning of TRI, people have faced the problem that TRI most easily allows comparison of raw pounds of chemicals -- but some chemicals are much more toxic than others, and some releases affect more people than others. These problems are attacked by a (in my opinion) excellent program within EPA called RSEI. But whenever there is a data release using data from RSEI -- most recently, the USA Today report -- the same thing happens, a facility reports a release range of 11-499 pounds of a highly toxic chemical like chromium compounds or diisocyanates, and this rightly is converted by EPA into the midpoint of the range, 250 pounds. (I blogged about a case of this here). 250 pounds is generally a very large release, for these chemicals, and it makes facilities pop up as major polluters and wastes everyone's time as people have to track down what is really going on. Most often, it turns out that the facility either thinks that its releases are towards the bottom of the range, or they don't release the more dangerous form of a chemical with two or more forms -- hexavalent vs trivalent chromium, for instance.

EPA could help both the reporting facilities and the public by changing the reporting rules. First, for those highly toxic chemicals that have more than one common form, EPA could require that each form be reported separately. This is already done for Dioxin. Second, EPA could prevent release and transfer range reporting from being used for these chemicals, or at least warn people who report through the TRI-ME reporting software what they are about to do.

3. Fix the Form A.

I won't write about attempts to roll back Form A reporting to what it used to be; that's already being done by various people. But whether the expanded Form A is rolled back or not, EPA should change the way in which it treats already-reported Form A data. A Form A should be treated as a range report, in the same way as TRI release and transfer ranges are treated. If someone sends in a current Form A for a non-PBT chemical, they are reporting that they release not more than 2000 pounds of the chemical, and generate in waste not more than 5000 pounds. This is not zero pounds. In fact, it's a range: 0-2000 pounds for releases, and EPA should use its well-established procedure for handling release ranges and take the midpoint, converting this to a quantity within the database of 1000 pounds. This would preserve the TRI reporter's ability to not have to take the time to fill out the additional information required for a Form R, but it would also give the public a more accurate estimation, based on best available information, of what is going on. If a TRI reporter didn't want the public to assume that the best guess was 1000 pounds, they always have the option of choosing to fill out a Form R and reporting any number of pounds, including zero.

This procedure is currently used for TRI data provided by RTK NET (described here), so I know that it's both possible and easy to do. The release media (air, land, or water) can't be determined, but a general Form A pseudo-release-medium can be assigned. No change in how facilities report would be required in order to do this; it could be done simply as an internal change in how EPA handles the data.

4. Fix Pollution Prevention Act reporting.

Pollution Prevention Act data were added to TRI in 1991, and they've never been able to be done exactly right. The waste data are currently reported as amounts recycled on and off site, burned for energy recovery on and off site, treated (destroyed) on and off site, and released or disposed of on and off site in various ways. But all of these numbers were supposed to add up to a single number, the quantity of the chemical in waste generated by the facility. That's because reporting these numbers was supposed to encourage source reduction, the practice of changing processes to reduce the amount of waste generated. But the regulation was sabotaged by ideologues at the Office of Management and Budget, and EPA was prevented from defining what a waste was, or something similar. So it could only require that facilities report the components that add up to the overall waste number, without really referring to it in a coherent way.

I don't know whether any actual change in reporting is required for this to happen -- perhaps just better guidance from EPA? Re-opening the issue with a new OMB? Perhaps having facilities total up their Section 8 waste quantities and report the total would help them realize what it's supposed to be for.

5. Re-open cooperation with other countries' PRTRs

I'm not sure where this stands, organizationally, and it's not the kind of thing I'd know about directly. (Although I have worked for the Commission for Environmental Cooperation on putting together a Web site to display combined U.S., Canadian, and Mexican PRTR data.) But it seems to me that EPA could have more of a sense of where chemicals within TRI stand within an international comparison. Just about the entire First World has some sort of PRTR -- does EPA track transfers from one country to another using multiple PRTRs? Could they, perhaps, report on how U.S. emissions of particular chemicals compare to those of other countries? I'd guess that more is being done on this score than I know about, but anything that EPA can do to make this kind of data more truly global would be highly valuable.

(I should probably note that I once tried to put together a proposal to make a free, publicly accessible database-backed Web site that would allow people to search all the PRTRs at once. I couldn't find a funder for it -- most charitable foundations and NGOs that I deal with focus on the U.S. That was a few years back, and I don't know whether anyone is doing that now, but it would still be a good idea.)

That's probably enough for now. I invite anyone who wants to comment on this to feel free to.

Poetry: For Obama's Inauguration

2009-01-19T12:48:00.000-08:00

Here's the poem I'm going to be reading for the 100 inaugural poets project that I mentioned here. I tried a number of approaches, and finally decided that the earliest influences are best. So pour out a 40 for Theodore Geisel and join me:

For Obama's Inauguration

Hail to the President of hope and change!
On this great day we rearrange
The chairs on our high deck of state
All good things come to us who had to wait
Our age, born with the Southern strategy,
Perfected by Reagan's dolt jubilee,
Produced in Bush Two the one who is worst
So hail lesser evil! Hail Barack the First!
So long have the worst been the people's choice
That now, first in decades, is our time to rejoice
The TV flicker of hange and chope
Must signal something better than Clinton's scope

Oh dear, I can't read in the sun's glare
What I thought I could see isn't quite there
I should have pasted my papers, they're blowing away,
I can't even say what I wanted to say...

Hey mister, you dropped something –

Now that you stopped, got any spare change?
I'll just drink it down, but that isn't strange
I've lived my whole life in this country
But what has America been to me?
A nation in cowardice since 9/11,
Hell on Earth so they can dream about Heaven,
More people in jail than ever before,
Eager to torture, cheering for war
You can't blame just Bush as the one selected
The second time, he was even elected
And Obama thinks he can pull them together?
Good luck, guy, in stormy weather
Hey Obama, after all they've been through
Less than half of white people voted for you!
This country's like someone with a cough
Staggering on with one leg cut off

Yeah sure, Obama is a dream
A black President's good for our self-esteem
Been waiting long, but you know what I've heard?
What happens to a dream deferred?
Does it fall like old dry grapes off a vine?
Or soar like a suit blown off a clothesline?

You first know a President by who he brings in
And Rick Warren's the minister next to him
Hey Rick! How's it feel to push down Jesus' head?
Force your words into his mouth, say it's what he said?
Rick Warren's the Anti-Christ of our days
And being a Christian's about hating gays
Obama says those divided times are done
I look around and see them going on
Obama's going to compromise and waste our chance
When we need to wake up, we'll get the same old trance...

I've been listening, homeless guy, it's not quite like that --

Sure we'll try to get some spare change shaken out
But there's hope too coming after the drought
I'm a machinist, and I work on the machine
A machine made of people is the type I mean
Not the old style, for politicians to get elected
But the new kind, to combine the rejected
Our problems can be fixed, we know how to do it
We have to break the system and push through it
The GOP showed us how, they did indeed
Because 51 percent is all you need

Obama? Yeah I know about his biz
A man in Chicago told me how he is
The more you work for him, the more you believe,
The less of his regard you will receive
That's fine. I can give that my respect
Because who does he need for his projects?
He'll try to make nice, and not make a fuss
But in the end, he has to come back to us
We're the ones who put him there, and he hates to lose
And when push comes to shove, we're the ones who will choose
It's not his strength, but his weakness that gives hope
When he finds that Rick Warren won't help him cope
He'll have to turn to the new spread-out machine
That sent him small money, sent the ballots in
He wants to “look forwards,” let the war crimes go
But things can never change if we never say no
The system doesn't work, Constitution's disrupted
With a President King and a Court that's corrupted
We need a new deal, throw the old one away
And if Obama wants our help he has to pay
By giving us more than just chope and hange
He makes deals, so our system's gonna change
And if after all that we try to preserve it
We deserve to get screwed, because suckers deserve it

Come on, now, let's put the machine together
That'll be our prayer, in every weather
To make something tireless, that'll never stop,
As each of us fall it will never drop
Until we get justice, until prisoners are released,
Until we all have food, until we have peace,
Until we can even hope for these things
Without believing that greatness is what conflict brings,
Until we don't need a leader any more
And it's automatic that we don't get ignored

Yes, let's cheer for him as he begins
Yes, Obama, we're the ones who made you win
Yes, we don't really need you
Yes, we can make you come through

It's hard to stop a global capitalism

2009-01-14T16:44:00.000-08:00

A short meditation on a corporate history page.

I haven't blogged in almost a month because I've been absorbed in projects that, while worthy, would be highly boring to write about. One of them was revamping the interfaces to data for RTK NET, which new interfaces should be released in a month or so. The other has been going through a list of 3,000 or so polluting facilities to see who owns them, for PERI's Toxic 100 project.

That last one had its moments. I must have looked at almost a thousand corporate Web sites to see whether a particular name was a subsidiary, an independent company, a holding company for something else, etc. That's always useful, because the companies that are shady and don't want to admit who owns them can be noted down as probable bad actors. One of the forthright companies provided a punch-drunk laugh -- I wouldn't have thought it was funny if I hadn't just gone through hundreds of them -- at any rate, here comes heating and air conditioning company Trane. Their corporate history page could be taken as a template for every company's page: the history going back "about a century", the lone founder, the struggle to build up a coherent, folksy story around whatever surviving corporate fragment this is. And then there's the triumphant tale of Trane's separation from its surrounding conglomerate:

On Nov. 28, 2007 we successfully completed a plan announced the previous February to separate the three American Standard businesses, leaving each free to concentrate exclusively on the markets it knows best. . Over the course of the year WABCO was spun off as an independent corporation and Bath and Kitchen was sold to Bain Capital Partners. On Nov. 28th American Standard Companies changed its name to Trane, with its stock trading under the new symbol "TT". Our new name reflects our business focus and our leadership in providing integrated heating, ventilation and air conditioning services and solutions.

New chapters in our history of growth through innovation are being written every working day. Our momentum continues to build because -- as our people have said for years -- "it's hard to stop a Trane."

Inspiring slogan, huh? But then there was a single sentence, added right after that -- I can no longer quote it because the page has been modified since, and a copy doesn't seem to have been saved. "On June 5, 2008, global diversified industrial company Ingersoll Rand acquired Trane." Luckily no one was there to see me laugh, or wonder why I thought it was funny. Nothing stops the train of global capital. Trane lasted for about half a year being free to concentrate exclusively on the market it knew best, and then someone else swallowed them up.

Of course they couldn't leave the page that way. The end of the text has now has been refocused into their acquisition "furthering its transformation into a multi-brand commercial products manufacturer serving customers in diverse global markets, and away from the capital-intense, heavy-machinery profile of its past." Wow, that heavy-machinery train that they were trying to talk up -- where did it go? All that is solid melts into air. The text has gone from a heroic-unstoppable mode to a familial-comfort one:

"With Trane now part of the family, Ingersoll Rand is better able to provide products, services and solutions to enhance the quality and comfort in homes and buildings, and enable companies and their customers to create progress."

New chapters in Trane's history of growth through innovation are being written every working day. Now as part of Ingersoll Rand, our momentum continues to build because - as our people have said for years - "it's hard to stop a Trane."

Their momentum continues to build -- embedded within something larger, something not under their control? The toy train goes around and around the play set...

The history of writing about capital is full of stories about trains, from Marx down to, say, Iron Council. This tiny little tragicomedy was just too perfect.

Dickens' The Chimes

2008-12-19T17:55:00.000-08:00

I hadn't known, before people at The Valve started reading The Chimes, that A Christmas Carol had been one of a series. Just like a genre fantasy writer today, Dickens had a success and followed it with another similar book and another until it was played out. The Chimes was the second in this series, out of five. A previous post addressed one of the key aesthetic elements of the work.

It's a political novella. The protagonist, Toby nicknamed Trotty, is a pathetically inoffensive old man, scraping out a living by delivering letters and parcels. The other poor people in his set are Meg, his grown daughter, Richard, her fiance, William Fern, a laborer who he takes in out of sympathy, and Lillian, William's young ward, his sister's daughter. Toby's ghostly vision, given to him in a dream by goblins of the church chimes that he listens to where he waits for work, shows what happens to them nine years later if Toby dies that night; all four are ground down by poverty in four different ways. Richard becomes a drunkard, Lillian a prostitute, William Fern a terrorist, and Meg decides to commit suicide with her baby daughter. These four are schematically opposed to four flat characters who represent the people grinding them down, who in contemporary terms might be described as a nostalgic conservative, a technocratic utilitarian, a social conservative actively oppressing the poor, and an aristocrat.

Many of the people commenting at The Valve don't seem to get the book, dismissing it as overly political, too didactic, not very engaging. (Adam Roberts writes some interesting comments about metallic imagery and hardness/softness, though.) All of that might be true, but it doesn't seem like a very useful way of looking at the book. Why doesn't it work, if it doesn't? I'd say that Dickens is bravely running head-on into the same political problem addressed by Marx in the Communist Manifesto of 1848 -- The Chimes was written and published in 1844 -- the problem of the "hungry forties". Or, as Cherneshevsky would title a novel that inspired a more famous work later, What Is To Be Done?

The first thing that surprised me about the book is how Marxian Dickens sounds, without Marx. Toby is called up before the goblin Chimes for false consciousness. He keeps pathetically apologizing although he doesn't know what he's done, but what he's done is believe that poor people are innately bad, taken in by the newspapers that he reads that transmit upper and middle class ideology. DIckens hammers away at the idea that the people are innately good, and only social conditions are to blame when and if they go bad. The Chimes also inform Toby that they represent historical necessity, and that anyone who goes against them is going to inevitably fall. Of course Dickens, a liberal, is not a Marxist, but there's a lot of rhetoric that I associate with Marxism that seems instead to have been common to various political tendencies of the day.

Where people seem to think that the novella fails as a narrative is that Toby doesn't really do anything. A Christmas Carol has a traditional redemption narrative that middle class people can identify with -- a greedy person changes, and then his own life and the lives of those around him become better, not only emotionally, but in terms of the actual resources that he shares. But Toby has no resources. He was cheerful enough at the beginning of the book, degradingly so to a contemporary sensibility. (I'll return to this later.) He has nothing that we recognize as a personal sin, and no way to change his ways. After his dream, everything is magically all right -- he hasn't fallen down the church tower and died, Meg and Richard haven't been discouraged from their marriage by hateful people telling them they are too poor and / or can do better -- but he didn't bring any of that about, even by word. What did he do?

Here's what he did. His action comes during the dream, not after he wakes up. He sees his daughter Meg about to kill herself, and says:

‘I see the Spirit of the Chimes among you!’ cried the old man, singling out the child, and speaking in some inspiration, which their looks conveyed to him. ‘I know that our inheritance is held in store for us by Time. I know there is a sea of Time to rise one day, before which all who wrong us or oppress us will be swept away like leaves. I see it, on the flow! I know that we must trust and hope, and neither doubt ourselves, nor doubt the good in one another. I have learnt it from the creature dearest to my heart. I clasp her in my arms again. O Spirits, merciful and good, I take your lesson to my breast along with her! O Spirits, merciful and good, I am grateful!’

He has changed from a acceptance, an even cheerful toleration of his fate, to an active hope and faith. He knows, as a fact, he sees, that all who oppress and wrong "us", the poor, will be swept away.

Is this a revolutionary conviction? It can't be, given Dickens' politics. For there is another sort of ghost haunting the novella, going by the name of William Fern. William Fern goes to London to look for work, falls asleep in a shed, and is arrested for vagrancy. He is called "a turbulent and rebellious spirit" by the authorities; they decide to make an example of him. In Toby's dream vision, here is how he ends up:

‘What have you done?’ she [Meg] asked again.

‘There’ll be a Fire to–night,’ he said, removing from her. ‘There’ll be Fires this winter–time, to light the dark nights, East, West, North, and South. When you see the distant sky red, they’ll be blazing. When you see the distant sky red, think of me no more; or, if you do, remember what a Hell was lighted up inside of me, and think you see its flames reflected in the clouds. Good night. Good bye!’

This seems to have been a reference to rick-burning. But Fern has no political program as such. He's simply been tormented into striking out.

Fern is the locus of Toby's earlier action, the real action that he takes in the book. At the start, Toby is such a servile character that I would think it's easy for a contemporary reader to despise him. Doesn't he have any revolutionary or class consciousness? Any simple fatherly pride? The oppressors insult his daughter, and say she's worthless and shouldn't get married, right in front of him, and he doesn't even have the dignity to get angry. Instead he just takes their money to deliver a letter. He doesn't even do it grudgingly, secretly resentful; he just believes them. You can't help but hate him.

But the letter is from one oppressor to another, and they discuss it right in front of him -- he's harmless -- how they plan to make an example of William Fern. Toby then happens to meet Fern. And he doesn't hesitate for an instant to warn Fern about the letter, and tell him not to visit the person he was going to visit to ask for mercy, who is going to throw him in jail. Indeed, Toby takes Fern and his daughter in, gives them shelter, and feeds them out of his meager funds. He isn't harmless after all. Although his thoughts are pretty despicable, his actions are not. If Fern was a member of a revolutionary movement and Toby was a sympathizer, he wouldn't have done anything different.

So, for Dickens, this is the revolution -- the revolution of kindness. Embittered violence, for Dickens, is self-destructive, and in any case will not succeed. Instead, people have to help each other. But it can't be merely on impulse, unthought, as Toby does. It has to be accompanied by the active faith that what is happening is wrong, that they are correcting a wrong, and that someday all that wrong will be swept away. That faith itself is what is going to sweep it away -- otherwise, individual acts of kindness are possible, but they do not add up to an overall refusal of the system.

Is that politically incoherent? Yes, more or less. As a political program, it looks like quietism. As a work of art, it doesn't quite hang together. Dickens' lower-class people can be cheery, but his Victorian sentimentality means that he can't really depict them as proud, and really what Toby needs is some pride, of a certain happy sort. But despite its incoherence, its lack of any analysis or any active plan, has it really done so badly, historically, compared to the alternatives? Certainly I wouldn't want Toby as my labor organizer. On the whole, though, Dickens' mushy liberalism at least avoids some world-class failures. Unfortunately, no one really did any better.

the Tower

2008-12-19T06:10:00.000-08:00

At The Valve people are reading one of Dickens' lesser-known Christmas books, The Chimes. I'll be writing more about the book itself shortly, but first, Dickens really did get the atmospherics of ascending the inside of a church-tower right. They are odd, liminal spaces, human constructions that rarely have a human presence, yet (unlike the inside of a large machine) are supposed to be accessible. This post is a bit about my own trip up a church-tower, with some not very interesting pictures.

The Tower, as an archetypal symbol in tarot decks, generally shows a tower being struck by lightning, with people falling out of it. Dickens makes use of it in The Chimes in much the same way; his protagonist ascends in dream-voyage, and has his worldview shattered and remade. To quote wiki, " The Tower is struck by lightning when Reality does not conform to expectation."

Once, at a UU church in L.A. -- only in L.A. could a church built early 20th century seem reasonably old, but it did -- I decided to climb the church tower during the service. I can no longer remember why I did this. Perhaps I excused it on the basis that most of the church members were reasonably old, and someone should check out this space to see if anything was going wrong with it in some obscure way. But really, I think, it was a treasure hunt, a chance to see a space in the middle of a packed city that no one had been in in years. So I borrowed the key and started up. As the rest of the church sat through a service, I was going to climb.

This being L.A. in the daytime, the atmosphere was hardly the one Dickens' used, of wind and cold. Everything was drenched in sun. But I quickly realized that perhaps I shouldn't be making this climb in my good shoes. The first room featured rusty iron braces set into the cinderblock as a ladder, up through which one went through a hole in the floor of the room above:

Which led to a long, free-standing ladder:

It was at this point that I started to wonder what I was doing. I was neither especially athletic, nor young, nor fond of heights. If I fell down one of these 15-foot spaces onto concrete, I could easily break something, and I wasn't really sure if anyone knew where I'd gone. The top of the ladder had a hatch-cover that had to be pushed quite hard to get it to move, and I didn't know if I could shift it with one hand -- using two would require having none on the ladder, and bracing myself against something I was moving. But of course this was a self-test of sorts, now:

The space above that featured a bird's nest, one of the many details Dickens included that mark this kind of structure as an oddity. No one had even been bird-watching this bird, at least not on its nest. It had a sort of privacy, right in the middle of the city:

And the space above is where I stopped. I'd heard that if you kept going up, there were old, disused bells of some kind. But in the picture above you can see that there's another heavy hatch-cover. And to push up on it, I had to stand on a sort of platform, tacked across the top of the room with two thin steel beams. Pushing up on the hatch meant pushing down on the platform with equal force; I thought I could feel it creak a little. Also, I'd heard that years back, the last time anyone had been up here, the maintenance crew the church had hired had found the top room covered in inches of guano. I had visions of finally raising the hatch against the excess weight lying on top of it, only to be showered in bird poop -- surely the opposite of glory.

So I never exerted my full strength against that last hatch. In this parody of a vision quest, I'd found out who I was -- I was a person who would finally, sensibly give up. I made my way down the hatches and ladders and wall-set braces, returned to helping to raise my then one-year-old child, and bought life insurance.

The view from near the top, though, was good:

This risible adventure, though, did make me appreciate Dickens' use of the space. When Toby or Trotty in his story finds himself at the top of the dark tower, and wonders whether he's going to climb down or fall down, that's a realistic fear. Which makes them a particular kind of psychological place as well. These spaces are the closest many city-dwellers get to the inaccessible, to, if not the religiously numinous, at least the unobserved, the tower of one's own mind.

Saint-Gobain, Northampton, MA

2008-12-11T12:35:00.000-08:00

The fallout from the USA Today report mentioned in the last post is still settling, with politicians and Federal and state regulators promising various responses. I've heard that there's the usual rush of facilities, after a TRI report like this is released, to correct their reporting errors and/or explain their reports. But I'm getting involved with this locally too; a school that I've often biked past, and that some of my friends' kids go to, is listed as the third most potentially polluted from these industrial sources in Massachusetts.

Update: after new information was supplied by the facility, this is probably nothing to worry about: see below.

Looking at the site, 99% of the estimated risk is from a single polluter here, a Saint-Gobain facility. Looking up their TRI data here, as well as their RSEI data, it's clear that the estimated risk is due to their report of an air release of chromium compounds.

I've seen many, many facilities get themselves bad publicity by reporting in the way that this facility did, when they report something like chromium compounds or diisocyanates, something with a high toxicity or carcinogenicity. They reported an air release using a release range: 11-499 pounds. EPA routinely transforms this into the midpoint of the range: 250 pounds. That's a lot of chromium. In addition, EPA doesn't have respondents distinguish between hexavalent chromium, a known human carcinogen (and the chemical that Erin Brockovich campaigned against), and trivalent chromium, which isn't anywhere near as bad.

The facility should clarify this so that everyone can get a better idea of how much concern there should be. I called their TRI public contact on the phone, left a message, and got no response -- that's no surprise; I've been working with TRI data since 1991 and have never, ever gotten a response from a public contact. So I sent the following Email to their technical contact:

Dear Mr. (redacted):

I am Emailing you because you are listed as the TRI (Toxic Release Inventory) technical contact for the Saint-Gobain Ceramic Materials facility in Northampton. I am an independent researcher living in Northampton who has worked with TRI data for some time, as well as the RSEI data used to make the USA Today report that references your facility at:

http://content.usatoday.com/news/nation/environment/smokestack/polluter/465

As you can see from this USA Today report, the Saint-Gobain facility causes the Montessori School of Northampton to rank in the top two percentile of schools nationwide in terms of schools whose air is potentially polluted by industrial facilities, as well as potentially affecting other Northampton schools. Looking at your TRI report at:

http://data.rtknet.org/tri/tri.php?facility_id=01060SNTGB175IN&reporting_year=2005&datype=T&reptype=f&detail=4

and at the RSEI data, it is clear that the potential pollution in question is listed in your report as a release range of 11-499 pounds of chromium and chromium compounds to the air in 2005. EPA routinely treats release ranges of this sort as being equivalent to the midpoint of the range: 250 pounds.

I have some questions about your TRI report and the facility's operations:

1. Do you have a better idea of how much chromium and / or chromium in compounds is actually released than 11-499 pounds? Getting a more accurate number could affect the RSEI risk screening calculation quite dramatically.

2. Do you have an idea, through testing or other means, of how much of the chromium is hexavalent chromium -- a known human carcinogen -- vs how much is trivalent [note: I originally wrote this as "chromium trioxide", oops.]? That would also lead to a better understanding of the potential risk involved.

3. Are there any plans possible or underway to reduce use of, or emissions of, chromium? Your 2006 TRI report, the latest publicly available, shows the same chromium release as in 2005.

Thank you for your attention to this request for information. I plan on sharing your reply with other people who may be concerned about the chromium emissions from the Saint-Gobain Ceramic Materials facility. If you wish to contact me, I can be reached through Email, or by phone at xxx-xxx-xxxx.

Best regards,

Rich Puchalsky

cc: (redacted), Montessori School of Northampton

I'll see what I response I get. Given that Saint-Gobain is a multinational, I'd guess that my missive may well get passed up quite a chain. But I plan on continuing to pursue this.

My guess is that the range reporting may well have inflated their reported number to be greater than what they actually released. But there's no way to know without asking them.

Update (12/12/2008): The facility says that the level of hexavalent chromium in the chromium they use is very low, so I'd think that this means there's no reason for undue concern. Their reply was:

We produce various ceramic powders used by our customers in coating applications. One of our products is trivalent chromium oxide used in wear resistance applications. This chromium product contains well over 99% trivalent chromium oxide. We have tested for hexavalent chromium oxide and the concentration tends to be around 50ppm in our product. As stated in the USA Today website that you reference “Chromium 3 (trivalent) is an essential nutrient and helps the body process proteins, sugars, and fats.”

We believe that the emission values that you reference are a conservative estimate and the actual values are likely much less. The trivalenet chromium is present as a small particle like dust. We process our internal process air through “dust collectors” that are designed to remove 99.99% of the dust in the air. This treated air is then vented back into the building. We also utilize a plant wide central vacuum system for cleaning floors and equipment to minimize dust generation during cleaning. Therefore any trivalent chromium emissions are simply any minimal dust that may escape through open doors. As you can imagine the actual number would be difficult to measure, but we feel that the actual number is closer to 11 lbs than to 499 lbs per year.

My reply was:

Thank you for your reply. The RSEI model used to estimate the risk from your facility's chromium emissions assumes that air emissions of chromium are particulates, as is the case for your facility, but it also assumes, based on industry averages, that the percentage of hexavalent chromium in the chromium released would be 34%. An actual hexavalent chromium percentage of 1% (to round up) would then reduce the estimated risk to 1/34 of the original calculation. That would lower the concern about emissions from your facility to the point where the Montessori school, and other schools in Northampton, would no longer score high on a nationwide or statewide comparison of the kind used in the USA Today report.

I should mention, however, that as far as I know, TRI estimates of releases are supposed to be made for the amount leaving the facility, not the amount "released" internally and then recollected before it reaches the outside. It's good to know that you have processes in place to reduce emissions, but the 11-499 pound estimate is presumably your estimate for the amount released to the air after your emission-control equipment has worked, not before.

I encourage you to develop a better estimate of how much chromium is actually released, sufficient for you to report to TRI with your best estimate in pounds rather than as a range. Until that is done, the public can only assume that 250 pounds is the best guess, which leads to more concern about your facility than is warranted if the true number is actually much lower. Hexavalent chromium is by far the primary concern for air emissions, but there are some environmental processes that can change trivalent to hexavalent chromium under some conditions, so it's still of interest to people to know how much is being released.

And that is that. Really what is needed is some way to change TRI reporting to discourage this kind of report from happening -- reporting chromium speciation would be good (people already report dioxin speciation to TRI, so it can be done), and there might be a category of highly toxic chemicals that range reporting is not used for, or at least warned about. I'm going to take this up with EPA once the new administration is in place.

Toxic air and America's schools

2008-12-09T20:58:00.000-08:00

There's an excellent report by USA Today that uses EPA reported pollution data and air modeling to estimate air quality at schools nationwide. It has a good database-backed Web site, too, that lets you look up your school, the schools with the worst air quality from those sources in your state, and so on.

I was involved very tangentially in this project -- I helped to work on data for PERI that USA Today used. I'm impressed by what USA Today did with it; it's better than the usual environmental toxics story. What PERI did was a bit complicated to explain, but I'll make the attempt -- there's a database, TRI, in which large industrial sources report their toxic pollution. A project within EPA, RSEI, takes the reported pounds of air pollution from each facility and runs an air model to see where the chemicals are going, geographically. They can then use Census data to see how many people live in each area affected by the pollution. They add all of this up into an overall risk screening score for each facility. PERI realized that these data could be obtained for each location on the ground, instead of being all added up to a single score for each facility. That lets you find the contribution of each polluter to a particular place where people live. (Or, in this case, where a school is.)

I only wish that I had the resources that USA Today does; their database-backed Web site is significantly more polished and user-friendly than I can generally make mine in the time that I have available to work on them. Learning how to embed databases into Google Maps is something I'm going to have to pick up. But there is one map graphic they created that I particularly wanted to call attention to: this -- or as a screenshot rather than an interactive map, so that I can show it here, the map below.

Compare this with the map of electric power generation by fuel source that I copied from eGRID for this earlier post. Or, for that matter, compare it with Joel Garreau's division of North America into "nine nations":

Industrial pollution near schools seems to be heavily concentrated in the areas of the country that Garreau refers to as Dixie and the Foundry. That's surprising, in some ways. Other places such as California certainly have industrial pollution too, but perhaps it's more spread out, or further away from city centers. Of course, this particular pollution map doesn't include non-point sources such as cars -- Los Angeles' smog problem gives it much worse overall air quality throughout its region than the vast majority of point-source-polluted sites. And this map doesn't include all sorts of other sources. But it's an example of how pollution is largely affected by regional patterns of development. If you were mapping environmental damage from mining waste, you'd get a different region of the U.S. highlighted -- national solutions to these problems often come down to regional politics.

Deciding right now

2008-12-03T20:42:00.000-08:00

"The incoming administration is deciding right now how ambitious they can be on climate and energy policy."

That's the first line in a mass Email sent out by Repower America (a good organization that you should sign up as a supporter of if you're in the U.S.). That's pretty much what I'd expected. Somewhere in the background some transition team plus Congressional staff is putting together what may become policy for the next few years. It's probably going to be cap-and-trade, since that's what Obama has said. That's highly preferable to nothing, but it's not really an infrastructure-replacement plan (like Repower America's). The acid rain program has cap-and-trade, and they have for their latest year of data 40% more pollution permits than they have pollution. In other words, the program is currently doing nothing -- people put better scrubbers on their electric power plants because of Clean Air Act requirements, easily reduced their pollution to below what the cap requires, and the neoliberal trading scheme is just sitting there, giving people a nice glow of faith in the market or something.

I'll be posting more on eGRID soon. Going through a database is a lot like work.

Bob knows already

2008-11-28T17:01:00.000-08:00

About science fiction's uncanny oracle, and U.S. politics, and Katrina. With poetry.

Science fiction has a problem particular to its genre -- how to communicate all the information about the made-up SF world to the reader. It doesn't help the reader's suspension of disbelief to have the narrator tell them. ("In this future world, people routinely flew using jetpacks" ...) A good author would have these details emerge incidentally along the course of the book. But of course most SF authors are not good. So there grew up the tradition of implausible expository dialogue in which people told other people things they already knew, so that the reader would know them. This became known self-mockingly as As you know, Bob. "'As you know, Bob, people fly using jetpacks these days,' said Fred."

Bob is rather uncanny, as you can see. He knows everything. Yet people persist in telling him what he already knows. Of course he must do it back to them too. All of his life people have been telling him things he already knew; it's the only way he's ever related to people. So he tells people things, assuming that they already know them. Sometimes they don't really already know, but it doesn't matter; there's something in his manner that makes people not listen to him, or people don't listen because there's nothing they can do anyways. He'd be Cassandra if the kind of SF that he grew from had anything remotely female about it.

For the last eight years or so, or more, what some Bush servitor named the "reality-based community" has been Bob. People already knew everything bad that was happening. But, of course, knowledge was powerless. Speaking truth to power was about as productive as speaking truth to the wind.

One of things that people knew about was what would happen to New Orleans if a major hurricane hit. There were plans aplenty to rebuild the levees, regenerate the barrier wetlands... but there was no way that Republicans wanted to spend the money. So they waited until afterwards, and then said that there was no way they could have known, just as they are with the banking crisis that everyone who wasn't in the tank predicted.

But in a sense, everyone knows. Everyone knows that the system that we're in doesn't really serve us; we just don't want to hear it, because we don't think there's anything we can do. I wrote about that in the Savior Machine post as "forgetting", but can people forget what they never really knew? No one is teaching people that the system can be otherwise -- but somehow, I think that they must know that it can be.

Let this all serve as an introduction to a Katrina poem, the best of the many that I wrote about that time. It contains Bob the useless prophet, a figure who I hope will be limited as an archetype to these last eight closing years of the twentieth century. Because if future historians don't see this year as the real boundary between the 20th century and the 21st -- if the Bush years were the first years of the 21st century -- then God help us all.

As You Know, Katrina

It was in New Orleans
That he first appeared
He was white, in his 50's
With wild hair and a strange fixed grin
And burn in his eyes
Somehow he was always facing you
He never said much
Just stood there, ticking
No one knew him

We were sitting on the curb
When someone's radio played
Weather
And we didn't pay much
Weather alert
Attention, but he was standing there
His eyes got brighter, his mouth opened
"As you know," he said
"We live in a bowl"
A bowl? People shrugged, smiled
To each other, but he went on
Something about how we knew
About global warming and
Hurricane cycles and the
Corps of Engineers and the
Levee system
No one could laugh, quite
So we went home, or just away

Over the next days
When we couldn't find a car
And were standing, talking, looking
For some wood, there he was
The first wind
Blowing his hair every way
"As you know," he said
"We live in a racist society"
And one old man said all sour
"We know that," but he went on
No stopping him, about how
As we knew
The city, the police, the plans
Were made for certain
To get out
Certain to not
We couldn't get away
But the sound of hammering wood
Drowned him for a while

The next days
Some said they'd seen him
Standing in the water
When you ran for the Superdome
He'd be by the side
"As you know," he'd say
And all about Bush and some
Man we didn't know named Brown
And about corruption
His eyes glowed so you could hardly look
It seemd like his smile
Might freeze forever
People waded by as fast as they could
Making hand signs
And somehow we knew
What was waiting

When we were trying to get out
After the food was gone
People would see him coming
And drive him off if they could
It was all jammed together
As you know
About the weather and crony capitalism
And how
As we knew
We'd never see that reconstruction money
"Stop it, stop" people would yell
But it was the same eyes, grin, hair
Always the face
The words

When we got out
We'd meet sometimes at the shelters
"Did you see him?" someone'd say
And someone'd say they saw him
Dead, water flowing through that grin
Or shot at last
Or just gone away
But we knew

We knew he'd come back

Treaties can work

2008-11-22T18:45:00.000-08:00

The recent news about climate change in the U.S. has been dominated by the EPA appeals panel's decision to block a coal plant's permit, which has stopped permitting of about 100 U.S. coal plants until the Obama administration can decide what to do about them.

But this press release (via Michael Tobis) struck me as being quite important too. Countries are agreeing to destroy stocks of CFCs, which cause global warming, under the Montreal Protocol, which was designed to address stratospheric ozone depletion. The end effect could be quite significant: 6 billion tonnes of CO2-equivalents with possibly more later.

As I wrote before, I'm not going to deal with global warming denialism with regard to science -- there will always be Flat Earthers. But there's a more subtle form of denialism that says that we can't do anything about global warming. This manifests itself, among other ways, in a conviction that countries can't agree to manage their infrastructure: their national interests will differ too much, or it will be too expensive, or, if they agree, they'll cheat. The Montreal Protocol is a standing rebuke to those people. In fact, the Montreal Protocol has worked as I expect global warming agreements to -- once people make a commitment to change an industry, it can change quite quickly, and people naturally use the new infrastructure without a lot of voluntary coaxing or permit trading. The CFC stocks planned to be destroyed are being destroyed because once people built alternatives, no one really needs them.

Update: and see this (via John Quiggin). I expect that market mechanisms to reduce carbon emissions will prove to be just as reliable and well-behaved as every other market just now.

William Gibson retrospective; or, how Bush killed cyberpunk

2008-11-20T20:54:00.000-08:00

A long, somewhat cranky piece on William Gibson, cyberpunk, and the failure of a certain kind of technological-change ideology under the pressure of political events.

William Gibson has now written eight novels, not counting The Difference Engine, and in some basic sense they are all the same novel. They are all populated by stock archetypal characters -- the Thug With A Heart Of Gold. The Finder of Art, someone with the medieval-mystical ability to find God in the ordinary, picking out sculpture or watches or cool itself. The Everyman With A Skill, the completely ordinary person, usually a computer hacker, who carries a fundamental innocence. The Wizard / Oracle. The Dupe, longing hopelessly for the world before everything broke down. The usually evil Corporate Boss. The same goes for the themes of the work, and the plots are mostly "let's get the party together -- we need a fighter, a mage, a thief, and a cleric -- and do the quest."

This is not necessarily a bad way to write. There is a peculiar energy in Gibson's best work, and Neuromancer is going to be remembered long after technically better works have been forgotten. I've wondered how to describe authors of this type, and I think that the best short phrase is "subgenre creators" -- writers who tapped into some essential aspect of their time, something that gave their work that vigor that led to many imitators, often many failed imitators. Think H.P. Lovecraft and those works now called Lovecraftian. Robert E. Howard and sword-and-sorcery. E.E. "Doc" Smith and space opera. And Gibson and cyberpunk. Before the inevitable objections, I'm aware that Gibson wasn't the first cyberpunk writer, didn't coin the word, that Bruce Sterling was the movement's chief ideologue, and so on, but without Neuromancer, I think that cyberpunk would have been a hopeful might-be-subgenre that never reached critical mass, like so many others.

Why write about the death of cyberpunk now? People have been saying it's dead since the 90s, after all, so why bother? Because it tells us something about cyberpunk and about our time, I think. In October 2008 Bruce Sterling responds to the is-cyberpunk-dead question: "It might well be, depending on how you define “cyberpunk” and “dead,” but that’s not gonna make any practical difference. Me, Gibson, Rucker, Shiner, Shirley, Cadigan, Di Filippo, I doubt any of us give that issue a minute’s thought now." That sounds about right. Gibson, in particular, seems to me to still be writing cyberpunk. It never was about the gizmos and the gadgets. It was about "the street finds its own use for things", about social change starting at the margins under the pressure of technology, about the uncontrollability of culture by governmental forces. And Bush essentially took a lead pipe to that and beat its head in.

I'm talking, here, about Gibson's 2007 novel Spook Country. Gibson has previously written novels that are simply bad, within the context of his work -- Idoru, anyone? -- but Spook Country is that rare case of a tremendous failure that points out something interesting. I'm going to write spoilers about the book at this point, if anyone cares.

Spook Country's plot concerns a shipping container full of money, packed full of the bricks of money delivered to Baghdad by the Bush administration to spread around during the Iraq war, and then embezzled by corrupt insiders and diverted. It's being chased down by the good guys not to steal it, but to render it radioactive and unuseable, and therefore to strike a quixotic blow against -- who? Certain unnamed mid-level government people for whom this was the most that they could steal, unlike the real big-timers.

Gibson clearly really wants to denounce Bush, as well he should, but he just can't seem to find the purchase to do so. Absurdly, a standard-order lecture about and criticism of the Bush regime pops out of the mouth of a junkie, directed towards a contract thug who couldn't care less. And the junkie thinks "why am I saying this?" As does the reader, and, I got the feeling, the author himself. The book might work as a sort of leftist romp -- "ha ha, you liberals, you think you can fix this system" -- but Gibson doesn't seem to really have absurdity in him. Instead what he has is a subgenre in which governments can not do what the Bush administration evidently did; take control of society, in every important sense, and turn it to its own ends, using brute force and even the momentum of failure itself. So the book is one long thrashing-around, like the apologetics of a Marxist coming up with reasons why the USSR was really state capitalism.

Gibson is forced to make every actor in his books a social marginal of some kind. For instance, he never had a handle on real, impersonal corporate power -- all of his bad guys were highly atypical, individual and eccentric super-rich people. Now he has people distressed by bricks of money being loaded into planes bound for Iraq and disbursed to who knows who -- but the bad guys are somehow not really the government. Oh, they may be in the government, but they're basically thieves; they aren't carrying out governmental policy, as the real people who sent those bricks of money were. And the people opposing them aren't trying to bring anything to light, or engage with democracy in any way -- it's just spy-vs-spy. Weirdly, there's bad apples at the bottom, and only silence at the top. Gibson is left with no way to say "Huh -- you know, maybe the government really is important after all." There's Spook Country, but no one can ever give orders to the spooks. The Cossacks do not work for the Czar.

It's not just Gibson, though. Try Bruce Sterling -- I think that Sterling is a better writer in almost every sense, and doesn't get the chops that he should, even though it seems likely that no individual work of his is going to be as influential as Neuromancer. Compare Schismatrix and Holy Fire, his in my opinion two best novels. While they're both about human attempts to transcend limits to freedom, Abelard Lindsay's increasingly slick betrayals of every ideology that would freeze his life and Mia Ziemann's fulfillment of youthful fantasy that turns into her remaking into a creative person are the actions of two actually different characters. So it's a shock in 2004 when Sterling writes The Zenith Angle, in which once again, people are maneuvering amidst the wreckage that Bush left, but the government really doesn't control anything -- Sterling puts in an offhand remark about how Bush is really a kindly dullard, mostly concerned about his daughters. So all the post-9/11 farcical war on terror just sort of happened. No one did it. It was in the zeitgeist. Sterling gets tremendous credit from me for the Viridian list, a good attempt to mobilize his SF prestige and his fans towards global warming issues, but I also remember the denial that crept in with Bush-v-Gore. You couldn't get the sense, reading the list, that this really would make a much greater difference than any kind of decentralized action by designers and technologists could.

The New Weird, the subgenre that has as great a claim as any towards picking up cyberpunk's baton, has China Mieville's Iron Council as its signature work. That's a novel in which the action is driven by social marginals, yes, but in the end, it makes a whole lot of difference which government stands and which falls. And that's what makes it a more or less living SF subgenre in our time.

Chemical security report released

2008-11-19T20:40:00.000-08:00

The Center for American Progress has released Chemical Security 101: What You Don’t Have Can’t Leak, or Be Blown Up by Terrorists. Whatever the awkwardness of the title, the report is excellent, identifying the 100+ most hazardous chemical facilities in the U.S. and listing specific actions they could take to change their operations to eliminate the hazard, rather than treating the problem as one for gates and guards. I'm familiar with the report because I spent a significant amount of time crunching numbers for part of it.

If and when I get through global warming databases on this blog, I'll write about chemical accident ones. The database used for this report, the Risk Management Plan database, has a particularly interesting history. The chemical industry and the Bush administration crippled what was supposed to be a publicly accessible database by restricting access to it to reading rooms where you could only get information on ten facilities at a time. Otherwise, they said, terrorists would use the data for targeting, even though all the actual incidents so far have been straightforward industrial accidents. And then they proceeded to block one law after another that would have required industry to actually do anything to protect people from these hazards. Computer people like to talk about Security Through Obscurity -- well, this was year after year of Security Theater For Obscurity.

Savior Machine

2008-11-18T17:53:00.001-08:00

The group of poets that I write with has decided to do an event as part of the 1000 Inaugural Poets project -- an idea of Brett Axel's, I think. So I'm going to be writing a poem about Obama's inauguration.

This brings up a problem. What am I to make of it? The ceremony itself is just a ceremony. Auden is supposed to have said that "anyone who wished to call him or herself a poet should be able to write serviceable verses, on demand, about the queen's hat" (although the only place I've found that quote is here, so it may be apocryphal.) Well and good. But that requires an approach of some kind, and harsh cynicism would be almost as much of a cliche as hopeful congratulation. I mean, I know how to write harsh cynicism. So does every other contemporary political poet. Should we all go that way just because we're used to it? (This seems to be a common problem. Check out the hilarious Historic Election May Signal Death of Flarf.)

I decided to go for a procedural-poetry approach. I'd go to my favorite free-games site, Kongregate, go to a chat room, throw the question up to the assembled 14-year-olds, and write on the theme of whatever they came up with. Sadly, all I got back was some version of "Well, how do you feel about Obama becoming President?"

How do I feel about it? I expect Obama, personally, to be something of a Clinton figure, and to probably squander our chances. But, at the same time, we finally do have a chance to seriously change the U.S., and I don't want to write a poem blaming Obama for something he has yet to do.

I think that if I can write something that works at all, it's going to have something to do with David Bowie's early song, Saviour Machine, from his 1970 album The Man Who Sold the World. Musically, this song is nothing to write home about -- it has has a good deal more 60s noodling than it really should. But the lyrics have stuck in my imagination:

President Joe once had a dream
The world held his hand, gave their pledge
So he told them his scheme for a saviour machine

They called it the Prayer, its answer was law
Its logic stopped war, gave them food
How they adored till it cried in its boredom

'Please dont believe in me, please disagree with me
Life is too easy, a plague seems quite feasible now
Or maybe a war, or I may kill you all

Don't let me stay, don't let me stay
My logic says burn so send me away
Your minds are too green, I despise all Ive seen
You cant stake your lives on a saviour machine

I need you flying, and Ill show you that dying
Is living beyond reason, sacred dimension of time
I perceive every sign, I can steal every mind'

[repeat "Don't let me stay" verse]

Bowie did some great things with internal rhyme in this song, especially the way he hits adored / boredom. I've mined the song before for bits about, e.g., the forbidden dream of being able to find every interpretation of a text ("I perceive every sign, I can steal every mind"). But it works even better for this inauguration.

Note, first of all, that the poem at first appears to be one of the conservative ideas about Obama writ large -- the "socialist" who is going to try to (as they strain to remember little bits and pieces of Edmund Burke) rationalize everything and destroy society in the process. I'm not interested in that ludicrous fantasy. Still less in the Obama-as-Antichrist one, which this also could point to. More interestingly, the song is against technocracy, as a number of art works from the time may have been -- try the discussion around Le Guin's The Lathe of Heaven at Acephalous -- but despite my own involvement in that, that's not the approach I'm looking for either.

What really works for me is that the song brings up a critique of drama itself. The Prayer, unlike so many shoddy SF computers, doesn't go bad because of innate evil, poor programming, or a twisted id-like desire for human experience that it can never have. It's just bored. Plagues and wars are more interesting to it than unending happiness and no one getting killed or going hungry. The Prayer goes on about the sacred dimension of time, and how dying is living beyond reason -- I could even imagine of sort of twisted I-want-to-inspire-you political sloganeering using I need you flying.

But the Prayer is, of course, wrong. What we need most of all right now is the courage to reject drama. To go ahead and make things better, even if that leaves some people with the nagging feeling that it means that our glory days are behind us. Remember that, up until very recently, the quote below passed for non-insane:

"But with public discussion dominated by accountants— 'there's the Republican Party tying itself into knots. Over what? Prescriptions for elderly people? Who gives a damn? I think it's disgusting that...presidential politics of the most important country in the world should revolve around prescriptions for elderly people. Future historians will find this very hard to believe. It's not Athens. It's not Rome. It's not anything.'"

That was Irving Kristol, the father of William Kristol. The supposedly respectable conservative intellectual, not the hack. Saying that it was disgusting that we should be concerned with healing people, and instead should be sending our sons and daughters out to fight and die, for no better reason than to give future historians something to write about -- to make things interesting for them.

There's been a critical failure of imagination in this country. People have forgotten how to even dream about a society in which there is not a desperate crisis of some kind going on, in which people don't have to continually watch out or else. They've forgotten how to even hope for one. One of the things that I'd like to see people writing about is how to imagine a society in which people wouldn't naturally smash utopia two seconds after making it because it's boring to do science, make art, raise children, and work, without having to kill somebody or, at least, crush them in a business deal. (There's a guy who went by CR who I used to argue with a lot, but who understood this. More people should.)

No one's really looking for a Savior Machine, of course. But metaphorically, if a version of it that wasn't bored existed -- a government that actually tried to solve problems -- it wouldn't be made by Obama alone. If it exists, it's going to be all of us, pushing Obama's administration to make the changes that need to be made so that our kids don't struggle with global warming, don't need to scramble for health care, don't lose their lives in endless wars. That means that we need the courage to push for that. To reject the subconscious idea that we need all that drama, or else society will have no reason to go on.

I don't know if I'm going to write a successful poem about Obama's inauguration, but if I do, that's what it's going to be about.

eGRID

2008-11-17T22:34:00.000-08:00

This is the second post in a series on global warming data, about the basics of U.S. EPA's eGRID database.

eGRID's home page claims that it is “the preeminent source of air emissions data for the electric power sector,” and as for as the U.S. is concerned, that is probably true. It contains air emissions data for nitrogen oxides (Nox) and sulfur dioxide (SO2), which are of concern because they contribute to ground-level smog and acid rain. It contains data on emissions of mercury, a persistent bioaccumulative toxic. And it contains data on emissions of the greenhouse gases carbon dioxide (CO2), methane (CH4), and nitrous oxide (N2O). It also has information on how much power is generated, and how much fuel of each type is used, so that you can see how efficient each plant is.

eGRID is an odd database in that it's not a data collection; no one ever fills out a form to report their emissions to eGRID. Instead, it's a combination of data from various data collections, together with model estimates. Most of the data that go into eGRID were originally collected through a scatter of databases held by EPA and the Department of Energy. For EPA for the last decade or more, it's been very difficult to get any new, major data collections, so information has to be cobbled together from a number of sources, none of them designed to exactly address the problem.

One of the advantages of a yearly data collection is that it has to be released every year. The primary disadvantage of eGRID, in the past, was that it came out irregularly and by the time it came out it sometimes used old versions of the data sources that it drew from. For instance, it's been released about once a year since 1998, except that it wasn't between May 2003 and Dec 2006. The Dept. of Energy databases that it draws from currently seem to be available up through 2006, and eGRID only has data through 2005. Still, a version has just been released – as of October 2008 – and that makes it up-to-date enough for all but the most picky and expert uses.

One of the large advantages to using eGRID is that some data quality work has been done to match the various databases together. I had to do that once, for a report for an environmental group that we couldn't use eGRID data for, and it's something that you don't want to do unless you have no other choice. Even more important, it upgrades all plant ownership, parent company, merger data and so on to a single date: December 31 2007 in this case. Electric utilities try all sorts of tricks to confuse their paper trail or to take advantage of regulatory exemptions or make financial maneuvers; there has been a lot of buying and selling of power plants among various entities. Making sure that all of that is upgraded to a single date is a significant advance. What this means is that, for instance, a power plant that last reported in 2005 will be listed in eGRID as being owned by whichever company owned it on Dec 31 2007, not by whatever company owned it in 2005.

eGRID is used in all sorts of regulatory initiatives, for environmental disclosure, and in governmental and nonprofit electricity-information Web sites such as Power Profiler, Power Scorecard, or CARMA. If you have a casual interest in your local electric power, you're probably better off with one of those. But it's good for some people to look at eGRID, because more information is available through it directly, and because it sets the baseline that so many people work from.

There are a couple of reasons why eGRID may not be the best source for generally tracking electricity, as opposed to tracking sources of emissions due to electricity generation. For one thing, it doesn't include any purchases of power, e.g. from Canada. For another, the net generation amounts that it reports subtract generation used by the power plant itself, but don't take transmission and distribution losses into account, so the electricity that people actually use will have a lower efficiency with respect to emissions than is reported in eGRID.

So how do you use eGRID? It's really just a set of three Excel files, so all you do is download them and open them on your computer – you can use OpenOffice. The most basic file holds information for each generating plant, and for subunits within plants. A second file, the aggregation file, adds things up – it combines individual plants into totals by state, owner, operator, parent company, grid, and for the whole U.S. That has almost all of the same data fields as the plant file, so once you learn one of them, you learn the other. The third of the files is for state imports and exports, and you can probably ignore it.

(Note, though, that the aggregation file handles parent companies badly, in my opinion. The people who made eGRID considered a parent company to be a holding company, not whatever company ultimately controls the plant, including the plant itself if there is no other owner. Therefore, some plants in eGRID don't have parent companies. That means that the parent company file, unlike the other aggregations, doesn't add up to the total of the individual plants. I may try to get the people who make eGRID to change this, put in a parent company for every plant, and indicate whether a parent company is a holding company or not with some kind of data field.)

But the plant file is probably the most useful. EPA doesn't like to release information about individual plants, or companies, within its general summary documents which are all that most people see if they see anything. It likes to release numbers about states, regions, industries, and so on, but saying that specific company ABC is responsible for x percent of pollution? You'll very rarely see that from EPA. So you'll have to dig it out for yourself.

The plant file contains sheets on generators and boilers: components of plants. Most users will probably skip those, although it's worth noting that they include years when the equipment went in service, which can be important for some things. But you'll probably want the information on plants themselves. There's about 5000 of them. You can look at the eGRID technical docs to explain the data elements.

What are some of the more useful data elements? Well, for the purpose of global warming, I'll look at CO2, ignoring methane and N2O for now. That's “plant annual CO2 emissions (tons)”, or PLCO2AN. A quick descending sort of the sheet by that field, and the top plant is the Scherer plant in Georgia, whose parent company is Southern Co. With 26 million tons of CO2, that's one percent of the total CO2 emissions for the whole database right there. There's only 68 plants that emitted more than 10 million tons. Those 68 plants account for 36% of the total emissions from electricity generation. That's about 12% of the total U.S. CO2 emissions from all sources, including cars, industry, houses, and residential electricity used by those light bulbs that people are always telling you to change whenever you say that we need to do something about global warming.

But those plants generate electricity too, of course. How much? Well, there the whole thing is complicated by the fact that a single power plant might generate electricity from a wide range of fuels. So just totaling up all the electricity from those plants is going to be a bit off. But I can total up the net generation from combustion sources for them. It's 31% of total U.S. generation from combustion sources – we're getting 36% of the CO2 for 31% of the power from combustion. It's 22% of our power from all sources.

What I'd like to see for these top plants is how efficient they are in burning coal. Coal is worse, from a CO2 standpoint, than natural gas, and coal burning efficiency varies by the equipment and the grade of coal used. But I can't quite see how to do it. The database includes an efficiency number that divides emissions of CO2 by the net generation from all combustion sources, but that includes oil and gas as well as coal. There's a net generation only from coal number, but there doesn't appear to be a CO2 emissions only from coal number, so I don't see how to figure out an emissions rate that includes only coal in both the numerator and denominator. Perhaps I could get it by digging into the boiler and generator data – but this post is too long as it is.

So, finally, here's a table of the 6 largest plants for 2005 for CO2 emissions, those with more than 20 million tons. You could get these yourself through the eGRID tables, but I might as well list them here for Google indexing purposes:

Top U.S. CO2 Emitting Electric Power Plants, 2005

State	Plant name	Plant operator	Parent company	2005 CO2 tons
GA	Scherer	Georgia Power Co	Southern Co	26,040,793.5
AL	James H Miller Jr	Alabama Power Co	Southern Co	22,509,466.8
GA	Bowen	Georgia Power Co	Southern Co	22,156,373.7
IN	Gibson	Duke Indiana Inc	Duke Energy	21,746,394.3
TX	Martin Lake	TXU Generation Co LP	Energy Future Holdings (TXU)	21,593,119.5
TX	W A Parish	NRG Energy		20,703,129.9

Adam Roberts' Splinter

2008-11-12T21:09:00.000-08:00

Adam Roberts is an English professor, SF writer, and critic. (And poet, and humorist, though he would perhaps rather not have those be mentioned except in a parenthetical.) His SF is often written with a strong self-set formal constraint of some kind; in the case of Splinter, thirds of the book are written in past, present, and future tense. This post is one of a series in which I try to provide readings of his work, each of them, as an exercise, playing off of the formal structure of the book that it addresses in some way.

Splinter was written with a deceptively simple setting, taken from the unendingly stirred soup stock of SF: a catastrophe leaves a few survivors in a changed world. But Roberts complicated the book with any number of agendas and references and interpretations, many of which he supplied in his own critical afterword: it was a homage to Jules Verne's most uncanny novel, Hector Servedac, journeys and adventures around the solar system (an English translation of the title, clearly), in which a comet strikes the Earth and carries part of it off, and which ends with the people on the carried-off planetoid returning to an Earth on which nothing has changed. A smaller piece breaking off a larger suggested to Roberts a book about fathers and sons and the process by which children separate from families and finish becoming adults, sometimes long after they are chronologically adult. And the odd, required-to-be-happy ending suggested ideas about stasis within SF: the way that extreme changes can happen within these works, extraordinary voyages can be taken, yet everything ends up much as it always has been. Because "the default mode for novelistic discourse, the third-person past tense, always already implies the existence of survivors [...] to relate the adventures", Splinter was written in past tense, moving to present, moving to future tense. Did you follow all that?

One of the claims that boastful SF fans sometimes like to make is that SF is "the literature of ideas." Reading the above, you might think that this is the literature of too many ideas. But note what kind of ideas they are; SF ideas are usually supposed to be about speculative science, coupled to a more or less pedestrian writing style. These were speculative ideas about literature, coupled to a more or less pedestrian SF plot. The attraction of Roberts' work, in my opinion, is that so many things are going on within it that it can support strong critical readings. These, for me, are not Roberts' own readings. He spent a good part of his afterword deprecating himself as critic of his own work, saying that he doesn't really know what it's about, although he has his theories. But a strength of his work is not you're not locked into his authorial readings; there's a lot of material there to work with, more than enough to construct your own.

My own reading is that the book worked as a savage and sometimes funny extended satire or metaphor for the history of SF. It was about the anxiety of SF, as a written genre, and its uneasy relationship with literariness -- the concerns of some authors and fans about whether it's ever going to successfully split off and become a new form of literary writing in its own right.

Adam -- I'm going to shift to a familiar, first name reference to him for reasons that soon should become apparent -- certainly assisted in this interpretation by previously writing a Palgrave History of SF, which I was able to read despite its $100 price tag because he sent me a copy. So I write this after a history of correspondence with him, and can say that my idea of what his history of SF would look like corresponds fairly well to what he's actually written. If you can afford it, by the way, you certainly should try it out. Also, and there is no need to afford this because Adam has kindly provided it for free, he has edited and re-translated a new edition of the original Verne book that served as the inspiration for Splinter, which you can read at this link.

SF crystallized its literary status anxiety some time ago, in the 1970s, and it's never really gotten through that period. A more recent representative text of the genre is Lethem's The Squandered Promise of Science Fiction, written in 1998. Reading through this and similar critical pieces, you'll see two moments mentioned over and over. First, the 1973 Nebula award that should supposedly have gone to Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow instead of the usual SF potboiler. Presumably this would have indicated that SF awards were now being judged with regard to literary value, strangely enough -- perhaps for the first time ever -- and would have sparked a mass discussion of Barthes among SF fans. The second was Star Wars, which from the point of view of literary SF readers embodied the triple threat of being dumb, visual, and popular. I don't want to get into the merits of this complex of ideas too much, although you can undoubtedly get the general drift of my opinions from the above.

At any rate, back to Adam's book. I'm not going to worry about spoilers; I don't think it's the kind of book where knowing what happens makes an appreciable difference in how much you enjoy it. The plot is simple; Hector Servedac Sr. has had psychic visions of a coming catastrophe, and has called a group of followers together to survive it on his ranch, his son Hector Jr. being the last and most skeptical of these. The catastrophe happens, and Hector Jr. spends most of the rest of the book wondering whether it is real. And that is basically it. I understand calling the book a Voyage Extraordinaire in homage to Verne, but outside flashbacks and Hector Jr.'s initial arrival, there is no traveling in this book. There's only a place where people are stuck. The book is in many ways a classic "cozy catastrophe"; the world ends and Hector Jr. thinks about this in large part as a matter of sexual possibilities. Fog-bound, his largest adventure is a collision with a sofa.

The characters are similarly somewhat skimpy, because they are seen through the eyes of Hector Jr., who is an amazingly feckless, self-absorbed person, interested in women only insofar as they present opportunities for sex, interested in his father in order to bolster his own self-image, interested in other men mostly as rivals for women. So we get little pieces of these character's back-stories as Hector dutifully listens to them while imagining someone naked, but they never come through very clearly. But that's OK, because in this reading, they are mostly symbolic roles, not quite as flat as Dickens' flat characters, but not very round either.

The elder Hector is Verne, not Verne the author but Verne the body of work, the straightforward, how-do-things-work, not very emotionally accessible patriarch. The time of Verne and Wells wasn't really when SF started -- depending on who you ask, that was with Shelley's Frankenstein. Kepler's Somnium, or the ancient Greeks -- but it was when people began to become conscious of SF as a distinct genre, and it has asserted a gravitational influence on all works following. The American Golden Age SF era is Tom, the nerdy science guy who's thrilled that the end of the world has arrived as predicted and whose first action afterwards is to get a gun. (Against whom? Ravening hordes? Like they'd shoot other survivors? His gun is silly, but very American-SFnal, and he ironically gets shot later.) Hector Jr. is people who feel that SF should be literary, but still admit to deep down being thrilled by pulp, and who are wondering how to reconcile their high-art aspirations with that. Or rather, since I'm typing people as eras, he's the British New Wave, which can stand for all succeeding literary attempts. Hector Jr. is an academic studying the arts, but there are scenes in which he admits to himself that he forced himself to prefer high culture because it's high-status; his relationship with it is at best uneasy. (There's a lot of Europe-vs-America in Splinter. Hector Sr. has a flashback to his honeymoon in Europe; almost the first thing Hector Jr. says is "the very air in Europe, it tends to stain." But this piece is long enough already without examining that.)

They are women in this book, too, but seen through Hector Jr's eyes, they can only function as Muse figures. Primary among them is Vera, nicknamed Dimmi. She starts the book as Tom's girlfriend, but calmly informs Hector Jr. that as they are among the few survivors of humanity, she's going to have a child by him eventually. (This is one of the all-time favorites fantasies of adolescent SF, by the way, the catastrophe after which, in order to save genetic variation or something, all the surviving men have to sleep with all of the surviving women. It's required, you see -- by science! It was so prevalent that Joanna Russ had to write an entire book, We Who Are About To. . ., to shoot it down.) But she refuses all his hints that she might sleep with him now, and by the middle of the book, Hector Jr. has found out that she's also sleeping with his father -- that his father is, in cult-leader style, sleeping with just about everyone. This sends Hector Jr. into paraoxysms of jealousy, of course. When is all that vitality going to get passed down to him? It's a perfect metaphor for the literary SF writer, looking back at classic SF and seeing its crudity of style, but also seeing its pulp vigor. In a tragicomic scene, Hector Jr. gets further with potential muse #2, an HIV-positive woman named Janet. But when she leaves to get a condom to protect him during oral sex, he thinks that she's not coming back, and when she returns he's already done himself. The contrasts between Dimmi's promise that she'll have his child and between Janet's in-three-different-ways-infertile sex couldn't be more profound, but Hector Jr. can't succeed even at that.

There is an element of hostile parody to Hector Jr., of course, but he's not quite completely bad. He's a delayed adolescent, someone who has made it to the point in middle age that people usually look at as the last time to decide to have children, and he casually dropped his serious relationship -- the woman who his father thought he'd bring with him to the ranch -- because he thought he could do better. His fantasies don't even involve relationships; he's still stuck on sex. He keeps thinking that he damaged his relationship with his father by giving away a large sum of money that his father gave him, though his father never mentions it. Giving away money without being a saint means giving up possibility, giving up what you can build on.

On the other hand, giving up the money that would have set him up for life is clearly what Hector Jr. did so he could try to be his own person. The problem of the book is that he never quite succeeds. He hangs around the ranch, being skeptical about his father's theories but never ceasing to take the mysterious pills that he thinks may contain some kind of hallucinogen, making abortive attempts to leave that never quite come off. The rest of the people at the ranch have thoroughly drunk the cool-aid -- by the end, they are an almost frankly religious cult based around visions of the future conferred by the alien being that has crashed into the Earth, a good metaphor for SF's attachment to "ideas" -- and Hector Jr. hasn't, but they're still his society. He's not with them, but he's of them. No matter what the literary ambitions of an SF writer, as long as they call themselves an SF writer, they still have to deal with Star Wars.

What will happen in the last part of Splinter? Hector Sr will start to die, and begin channeling Tom, who will have been shot. But most importantly, the events in the book will become an instantly recognizable (to me, anyways) melange of, say, Bruce Sterling and Greg Bear, those kind of writers. The nanoclasm, in which all matter is taken over by mysterious organic processes that can make anything out of anything. Invasive processes that download consciousness. Posthumans forming a new relationship to mortality. The postmodern sprouting of buildings next to each other, growing out of the ground without plan. Hector's future tense will be our SF present, more or less.

And finally, Hector's dad will try to set him up with a woman, growing her out of the ground for him to make up for all the real women who he couldn't make things work with. She will be "The Muse herself" -- a direct quote. And this future being will be fake. She will babble, her tongue will be partly made of something like felt, and when he'll kiss her, she'll taste weird, like smuts -- a fungal plant disease. Sure, the nano-plant-tech will perhaps be working busily on upgrading her to version 2.0, but the idea of him finally becoming an adult and having children with this simulacrum just doesn't work. The people who he spent time with? He will have forgotten their names; the plot will have been lost.

Having read Adam's Palgrave history of SF, I can see where this conclusion comes from -- he thinks that SF has passed from a primarily written to a primarily visual medium. That has to be depressing for a writer, or for a reader.

So, in a sense, the book enacts the Vernean Voyage Extraordinaire of SF. There has been a lot of motion, a lot of thrills -- heroic individuals! strange intelligences! science-catastrophe! the book hits many of the standard tropes -- but it's ended up pretty much where it started.

All in all, a good, thought-provoking book.

Larval Poets Manifesto

2008-11-12T18:52:00.000-08:00

Poetry where I live has achieved a state of universal marginality.

It is written anonymous into notebooks cached in the woods. It appears on bulletin boards. It is self-published in hundreds of chapbooks, few of which will ever exist in a hundred copies. Events and groups gather around it. And very little of this activity seems to have anything to do with the profession of poetry, which as I understand it involves getting published and getting a job as a teacher of poetry. Which is a worthy thing to do, but clearly can't be done by everyone.

In conditions of universal overproduction, why should anyone write? Why should anyone read?

I'm unwilling to think of poetry as a pyramid. There is already more good poetry written than anyone could read in a lifetime. We don't have to do violence to our sense of aesthetics and say that there is no good or bad poetry, but the final reason for poetry can't involve it being good or bad. In the dreamed community, everyone is a poet, and everyone reads their neighhbors. Because they are there.

The following is a draft, a latest attempt. Please feel free to criticize, comment, suggest, scorn, or what have you.

Larval Poets Manifesto

They keep turning up as larvae
Immature forms of insects
Fuzzy caterpillars, weevils in cotton bolls, maggots perhaps
Those are poets, poems
Feeding wherever they can
Hoping for a metamorphosis
Not knowing what they're going to be

We eat paper and silence
Leave hollowed-out paths
Jagged edges of leaves re-scalloped
By munching. The faint crunch, crunch
Can be heard at night if you listen
Heard all over Northampton

What is good for a larva? All around
The classics sit, poets have been
Eating words for centuries
Will one of us write classics?
Silly to put the question
As if one glowing maggot,
Imbued with holy light
Could creep into the ear of the muse
And hear there the distant rush
Of the passing blood

It doesn't matter
We write for each other
We fix each other's houses
If a slight whisper penetrates the cotton
Or a twig trembles from a neighboring leaf
Thousands won't hear, but perhaps dozens
Will lift their heads, mandibles in the air
And recognize

Our village Florence was named by a water cure doctor
New England to become Italy
The boiling water that makes silk
Out of a mess of larvae and mulberry leaves

But we can't be boiled down
Not like the langpo people said
Maybe I saw it on Silliman's blog
You can't like all kinds of poetry
You can't be loyal to everything
You need a theory
Maggot
Grow a hard shell, ants defend the nest

A larva can't be hard
We all try to get better
Going in all directions blindly
Trying to moult to our next instar
We amble along our twig a little further
There isn't one direction we can go
Poems don't need your loyalty
Styles don't, movements
Only poets need loyalty

And that is what it means to be a larval poet
To hear the distant crunch of a neighbor
And wonder what they will be
And listen
Gnawing, hungry
And someday find a discarded shell
Your, theirs, it doesn't matter
And think, there was a poet