Netroots memory hole

"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

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

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

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

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

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

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.
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