My writing group noted that my new story, though a different setting, is also a post-apolcyalypse tale, or at least post-disaster. One colleague included my novel in that theme, even though in my novel things are good, but about to get worse. It’s pre-apocalyptic, she said.
Something in that. My faith is that humanity will persist, but a lot of bad things are going to happen. By the standards of the past they already have. Like my mentor Philip K Dick, I’m less pinpointing details of the great shift, just exploring scenes after upheaval, where people have adapted to far different norms of environment and behavior. I no doubt absorbed this from my family history, for my parents fled war and Soviet occupation, and my own late 20th century life, where we took on huge social changes, and where the rest of the world changed vastly more. I greatly admire writers like Jim Shepard and Harlan Ellison, who change up place and time each story yet keep consistent in their approach and style.
Perhaps I’ll be more sensitive to this strain of pre-apocalyptic. I hope it will give me a way to glide across genre. I would enjoy writing historical. (more…)
Category: politics
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The pre-apocalypse
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Russia, a cautionary tale
A short note, for those who read my last post: I made my goal, reducing my novel 10.2% down to 124,400 words. Not merely a slimming — at least ten passages, or one every 15,000 words, needed a complete rewrite just to make sense, and in some cases had to grow. It was a grueling process, and I was exhausted for several days after. But it’s done.
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Russia haunts my novel. I say haunts because I only gave it a short nod, but it wound up reappearing, unintentionally but naturally, in surprising ways.
My earliest inspiration, my reassurance that I could use fantasy to describe the heart of a real people, was Mikhail Bulgakov’s The Master and Margarita, a satiric romp in which the Devil holds a grand ball in the heart of an atheistic society. Now it is viewed by those who lived under communism as a true document, a history of the soul’s sadness in those times. If only I could find a way to tell my times through that same lens, I thought, and my story was born.
I only meant to use Russia in my novel as a light on my character Gabriel — on his rigidity, his desire for order and clarity, his deep angry passion; his refusal to drink alcohol, forbidding himself the only Serenity Prayer that Russians allow; that Gabriel learned Russian at birth, educated by Cold Warriors for the world they expected to continue until Armageddon — until the Wall fell, making Gabriel and his Russian know-how into a thirteen-year-old buggy-whip.
But Russia kept returning, in scenes comic and topical. Of course an East German of Gabriel’s generation would speak better Russian than English, allowing a secret language to the security guards of Eurocentric technocracy. Of course new Silovik money would seek the status markers of golfing and Scotch whisky. But why my immortal smoked Russian cigarettes, why a Haitian loa told a Pushkin joke, why Gabriel’s mother found happiness through a different Pushkin joke — ask my muse. I can see the connections in retrospect, and credit my unconscious with wisdom. But maybe in the great Immateria where stories are born, Russia bullied my muse, as if offended by (or sniffing opportunity in) my casual usage. So you want a taste? Russia said menacingly. That makes it my pie.
I think it’s saying the same to the whole world right now. (more…) -
Two Riffs on Edward Snowden
1) The Great Success of “Operation Snowden”
Three months ago, the Washington Post’s alpha-wonk Ezra Klein noted the double-think in Washington, that we could obviously create a vast enterprise to monitor all human information (using closed-source tools), but obviously the effort to provide healthcare to all was inevitably doomed by the same contracting procedures.
Of course, those in endless opposition to Obamacare are less likely to fuss over the NSA’s work (pace Rand Paul, and assuming they even see the true costs of the latter), and when Klein wrote, people hadn’t yet counted on the NSA hollowing out encryption standards from the inside. Nonetheless:
…. it’s hard to believe that [the] technological incompetence [of] HealthCare.gov and [the] technological omniscience of PRISM can both exist, exactly as currently understood, in the same institution.
Perhaps Klein was in too much of a rush to get to the obvious answer (certainly the bracketed text I had to add points to this – in case they fix it, here’s a screen shot).
But you can see it, can’t you? Say it with me: The operative known as “Edward Snowden” is the NSA’s greatest operation (more…) -
Shutdown blues 2013 in the fissiparous USA
Two years ago I was in a tizzy about the political battles that risked our financial system. Now I am blasé. The government shutdown is a great mistake, an injustice to the needy and a body-blow to our feeble economy. It was alas inevitable. One group is intent on demonstrating its faith in a strong set of beliefs. Zealots don’t stop until they’re broken.
The shutdown will end when it hurts political donors. I am unconvinced that it will solve anything. Zealots don’t stop. The Roman politician Cato the Elder signed every document ‘Carthage must be destroyed.’ Stay on message for decades, you can get your way.
Things can change fast. The Soviet Union dissolved peacefully in three years. Why couldn’t America dissolve?
And as peacefully as the Soviets did, resentments and mistrust notwithstanding. Share certain operations – roads, ports, armies and navies. The like-minded regions need not be contiguous. If during nuclear tension we could run West Berlin, we can master rights-of-way between red or blue zones.
This is brainstorming like for a fictional setting, not reasoned analysis with data. But sometimes the novelists get one right too. -
Tinkerers and the Tea Party
Recently on Slashdot I read a thread about how 3-D printing — the technology of making an object layer by layer, as opposed to carving it out of a block of matter or forming it in a mold — is limited by the difficulty-of-use of 3-D design software. As threads on Slashdot do, it quickly became a forum for all kinds of venting and debate. One especially nerdy (and I mean that as a compliment) rebuttal explained a system for recreating sheet-metal parts in software, as a way of showing how “easy” it is to digitize a flat object like a gasket.
I suppose if I described exactly how to build my garage shelving out of 2x4s and plywood it would be even longer, but most people will read that post and be glad they have a hardware store to run to when their garden hose is dripping.
Tinkerers persist in society despite the vast system of production and shipping that we humans have created. This is of course usually seen as a blessing — where would we find innovation if not for such people — but the people doing this seeing are often faux-wistful columnists who would not at all be happy if they had to design their gaskets, or even their paper clips, from scratch. (more…) -
Nobody knows anything (Boston Marathon bombing)
It’s weird to post a long-mulled-over essay about potential violence in America only to find one’s social page filled up with actual violence. I already put a stake in this ground but I’m not crediting myself with any foresight. Nobody knows anything, except for the investigators. It’s tempting to guess, but stupid.
After the Oklahoma City bombing, the initial guessing on US news was that it was the work of Islamic extremists. Only three years earlier, followers of the “Blind Sheik” Omar Abdel Rahman had tried to destroy the World Trade Center with car bombs.
The night of the bombing I was with a friend, switching news channels along with most of America. At one point when she left the room, I added Univision to my rotation. I admit I was unsure of my Spanish when a University of California professor suggested it might be the work of Americans disaffected with their government.
It was days before I heard the same on Anglo media. Nobody knows anything.
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Surly fearful white people in the Age of Global Browning, part 1
Twenty years ago my friend W___, a Westerner and a conservative, talked to me about the growing resentments of his fellow Western conservatives. He foresaw them going off the deep-end and putting their considerable armories to work to change the course of our nation’s politics and culture. This was in the early years of President Clinton’s administration, and the very fact of him was provocative enough to these people, not to mention the recent attack on the Branch Davidian compound in Waco. “They’re angry,” W___ told me. “They’re going to explode.”
Sure, why not. Twenty years ago, despite our recent victory-without-nuclear-winter in the long Cold War, apocalypse was the meme of the day. Harold Camping said the Rapture would be in 1994, nerds put software-driven armageddon six years later, and Terence McKenna and the Mayan Calendar pointed to 2012. What had once been Yugoslavia had collapsed into “ethnic cleansing,” and Rwanda would soon follow suit. The Handmaid’s Tale was a bestseller. We weren’t so interconnected then, multiculturalism was a suspect and derided concept, and “militias” were getting ready for guerrilla acts against the government.
Then came the Oklahoma City bombing. (more…) -
I met the President for fifteen seconds
So, obviously, it’s a photo-op at a fundraiser.
Two hundred people line up in a U, along the walls of a largish beige hotel conference room. Our bags and purses taken away. No bar. Still there’s a buzz. A third of the room is hidden by navy blue sheets on movable barriers, like privacy curtains from old hospital wards. Behind them, the President of the United States. The President. How often does one meet the President? And he’s waiting to meet us!
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Jesus’s wife and the weirdness of patriarchy
So Jesus might have been married.
Whoop-de-do. Son of a God who never picked a female prophet; who never chose a female disciple; who didn’t seem to think it a big deal to have his feet anointed by a woman’s hair — would have made a difference if he were married?
Maybe it would have. Maybe it did. Jesus was already challenging local religious authority, and materialism too. Maybe he was an activist for gender equality; in a religious tradition where only two sacred texts were named after women (and shy retiring ones at that — assassin Judith only got brought in by early Christians), he wouldn’t have had to go very far to be one.
I am neither historian nor religious scholar, but the Abrahamic religious traditions are so monolithically patriarchal that it beggars belief, save as the result of millennia of censorship so active and complete it would even impress North Koreans. Apocryphal gospels — ones not included in the Bible — make Mary Magdalene much more of a player; there is even a Gospel of Mary. In the canonical Gospels, Mary Magdalene is less important than the love interest in most action movies — and even then, Pope Gregory still went out of his way to label her a whore, six centuries after the fact.
Either women are completely useless in the realm of the spiritual — and, really, how likely is that? — or they were made so by leaders threatened by their power. I don’t mean their feminine wiles either — I mean the inherent differences between the genders in matters of thought and spirit, which have their roots in biology but have their expression in life. These differences are still going on — as I wrote this I listened to yet another discussion on the “gender gap” in the Obama-Romney election. I’m not saying one is more right; I’m just saying, we need both.
The deep-seated patriarchy in modern Western spirituality needs serious attention. Even in these days of growing political and economic parity, women are still being shut out of the guidance of our minds and souls, to great and I believe disastrous effect. At the very least it leads to skewed priorities, as we see from Catholic authorities more concerned that nuns advocate against contraception instead of for the needy. The 9/11 hijackers were rigorously kept in a male-centered world; Mohammed Atta didn’t even want women at his funeral.
Maybe this curious piece of papyrus might light the way to a discussion of just what the women were doing in Jesus’s day, and what they might do for us now. Something needs to. -
Anonymous, but not ephemeral
I’m reading Parmy Olson’s book We Are Anonymous about the notorious yet not-well-understood online/hacker movement/lark. It’s a journalist’s book, clearly written in a rush, but fascinating. Also, to me, inspiring and heartwarming, which was probably not the author’s intent. When Olson describes the misfit kids falling out of the real world into the looking glass of 4chan, where the grossest of insult and the nastiest of porn coexist happily with the most destructive of code, I doubt she considered it might be someone’s happy trip down memory lane.
We had no Internet when I was fifteen, but we had a network — of rude t-shirts and engineer boots, of vinyl albums with crude black&white art, pricetags in British pounds, songs saying horrible wonderful things. Johnny Rotten’s snarling contempt, Jello Biafra’s amused disdain, Minor Threat’s guerrilla righteousness, The Feederz’ … just, the Feederz. Fuck were they nasty. I couldn’t even find Feederz recordings on The Pirate Bay, and that’s saying something. Feederz was /b/ before /b/ was /b/.
Épater les bourgeois, my cosmopolitan mother would sniff: shock the easily-shocked. (But even she loved London Calling.) It wasn’t just the rawness. You didn’t have to agree with the leftist politics of Crass and Rock Against Reagan, you could squirm (though you’d never admit it) at the layered brutality of “Holiday in Cambodia,” but it was grounded in the real world, for a change, even as it rejected conventional wisdom.
But yeah, it was the rawness too. You didn’t have to be anything but young and weird to enjoy escaping suburbia for all-ages shows in the city. I got mosh-pit bruises back when they called it “slamdancing.” I stage-dived at a Circle Jerks show and I didn’t even know what a circle-jerk was (and didn’t quite believe it when I learned). Though DC’s “straight edge” no-intoxicant ethos didn’t keep me away from drugs, harDCore kept me away from the Grateful Dead long enough for Jerry Garcia to die, and I am very grateful.
Of course we grew up, we mellowed out, we saw how big the world was and how tough it is to change it just by shouting. My youth is now a very worthy Kickstarter project. “Marriage is when we admit our parents were probably right,” Billy Bragg sang. Perhaps the same things will happen to the Anonymous. Perhaps repeated exposure will drain the pus from their aggression. For my parents, flaming skull tattoos were the fearful armor of bikers; my son had a Don Ed Hardy baby-onesie. Maybe my grandchild will look cute with a Guy Fawkes rattle and an apron that says “diaperfag.” It’s an old story.
But this time it might be different. Punks could at best inspire others to act, usually by making more culture, and mostly harmed themselves. They could work jobs too shitty to get credit-cards, but couldn’t close down credit card sites — and banks are a lot harder to mess with than utilities. The newspapers talk about the coming cyberwar with China, but no one’s suggesting what seems obvious to me — that some kids might engineer a home-brew Day The Earth Stood Still, where hospitals and homeless shelters have power but the rest of us don’t — or just shut down the water supply, for the lulz.
Anonymous is an outsider art with root access to the infrastructure of modern commerce. People involved in it and central to it are often marginal in real life — people under poverty, people in remote locations, people trying resolve identity issues, people who are just not right. The arts have always been a path for outsiders in; Gatsbys with gumption make their way from low circumstances to power and even philanthropy. But there was a structure and a system to accept these people, even if it didn’t welcome them.
Today’s elites no longer stand on stable ground, especially if they keep reusing the same passwords on all their logins (and they do). Thorstein Veblen predicted the engineers would eventually run things; I just don’t think he expected so many of them to be self-taught, capricious, and angry.
I hope to give my child a good solid life, a two-parent family, answer his needs and most of his wants, even the frivolous ones — in other words, give what I had. But I also hope to give an awareness that there is more, and that more will come: from people not so lucky, from places not in plain sight; things that just aren’t right until they are, things that won’t ever be right. The Rules of the Internet are brutal and strange and funny, and they may be the rules of our future. I need to help my kid keep that in mind. And so do you.
We need to watch out, in the best and the worst ways, for the people we don’t see, the people rewriting our world — Anonymously.