Notes

I feel like my blog needs an identity, some kind of format I can stick to.... maybe I should go back to the "In which we shall see" bit. I dunno.

In the meantime, I'm finally buckling down to work on my paper, and dropping off a few of my distractions here:

NYTimes Editorial on the British Gov't Response to the Riots

and

Looking at 9/11 in the Context of the Last Decade (interesting, because I'm all about context)


More later!

Politics and Religion and the Arts (Y'know, the Little Things)

It's linky time!

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I used to have at least a grudging admiration for Sarah Palin. I thought she was occasionally interesting, and might have some worthwhile things to say. Not anymore.

Sarah Palin trashes the National Endowment for the Arts - stating that NPR, the National Endowment for the Arts, the National Endowment for the Humanities, etc... are all 'frivolous', shouldn't be funded by the government, and, if she has her way, will be headed for the chopping block.  Sarah Palin, you are dead to me (in a metaphorical sense, since I have never met her and now hope I never will). In the words of a PhD student at my school: " We are entering an conceptual age that will be dependent on adaptability and innovation to remain a dominant force of industry. How are the next Apple or the next Google going to thrive without an understanding of design, storytelling or empathy? Art is not a luxury but an essential part of life and the human experience." (Dierdre McLaughlin, FB) 


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If you have much interaction with the Arts (thanks to the NEA, *phplggbt*), you're probably aware that the Tony Awards, the ones that deal with 'excellence' in American theatre, were broadcast a week ago. If you're reading this blog, you're probably also aware that I'm Mormon. It was a matter of some interest, therefore, when "The Book of Mormon" musical won all kinds of awards last week. Best musical, Best Score, Best Book, among others - and lots and lots of my friends from back home have been raving about how funny and terrific it is. Here's the thing:


When did it become OK to mock a mainstream religious organization, particularly when most of your "research" and "documentation" turns out to be completely false? Cheap jokes are still cheap, even when they're cleverly written or set to a catchy tune. Here's a collection of responses from a range of writers and University educators. This article talks about the potential cultural embarrassment the musical could provide, likening it to the bigoted minstrel shows of the previous century (and the article was written by a non-Mormon). Here is one of the the full columns briefly referred to in the Deseret News piece, and it deals with how to respond when being egregiously ('gently') mocked and condescended to. (Excellent advice.)

And with at least a small nod to my previous post, I say: as the show is also being noted as the 'filthiest' in Broadway history (I believe I read there were at least 49 major obscenities just in the script) I wouldn't see the show even if it weren't about my religion. I don't care how 'clever' it is - if you can't find a more interesting way to be funny than to resort to crass 'humor' repeatedly, how clever can you really be?

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I respect people's right to create Art. "The Book of Mormon" Musical is not art: it's a flashy minstrel show with catchy tunes and lucky timing. I doubt that it will have any legs. That's not important, though - what is important is that we keep telling stories and talking about the stories and about the telling and about finding new ways to do the telling and the talking. The BofM Musical's time is limited - Art is here to stay. And anyone aiming for high public office who cannot acknowledge that fact is an idiot.

As a bonus article, here's one about an experience with material-free live art. It's very interesting, full of intriguing ideas - and I'm not a person who's usually intrigued by experiential live art!

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I will now go back to learning how to be a 'blessing to society' through my choice of profession. (I can take advice.)


  

Politics Are Everyone

I recently read a novel by Orson Scott Card called Empire. The tagline is "A disturbing look at a possible future" and proposes cause and effect and a particular scenario leading to a second American Civil War. It was fascinating reading (being Orson Scott Card), and the afterword (in which the author talks about the set-up of the writing of the novel as well as current politics) was interesting and powerful. Take a look - it's long, but it's worth the time.

Keeping Things Civil

Afterword to the novel Empire
by Orson Scott Card

---

The originating premise of this novel did not come from me. Donald Mustard and his partners in Chair Enterainment had the idea for an entertainment franchise calledEmpire about a near-future American civil war. When I joined the project to create a work of fiction based on that premise, my first order of business was to come up with a plausible way that such an event might come about.

It was, sadly enough, all too easy.

Because we haven't had a civil war in the past fourteen decades, people think we can't have one now. Where is the geographic clarity of the Mason-Dixon line? When you look at the red-state blue-state division in the past few elections, you get a false impression. The real division is urban, academic, and high-tech counties versus suburban, rural, and conservative Christian counties. How could such widely scattered "blue" centers and such centerless "red" populations ever act in concert?

Geography aside, however, we have never been so evenly divided with such hateful rhetoric since the years leading up to the Civil War of the 1860s. Because the national media elite are so uniformly progressive, we keep hearing (in the elite media) about the rhetorical excesses of the "extreme right." To hear the same media, there is no "extreme left," just the occasional progressive who says things he or she shouldn't.

But any rational observer has to see that the Left and Right in America are screaming the most vile accusations at each other all the time. We are fully polarized -- if you accept one idea that sounds like it belongs to either the blue or the red, you are assumed -- nay, required -- to espouse the entire rest of the package, even though there is no reason why supporting the war against terrorism should imply you're in favor of banning all abortions and against restricting the availability of firearms; no reason why being in favor of keeping government-imposed limits on the free market should imply you also are in favor of giving legal status to homosexual couples and against building nuclear reactors. These issues are not remotely related, and yet if you hold any of one group's views, you are hated by the other group as if you believed them all; and if you hold most of one group's views, but not all, you are treated as if you were a traitor for deviating even slightly from the party line.

It goes deeper than this, however. A good working definition of fanaticism is that you are so convinced of your views and policies that you are sure anyone who opposes them must either be stupid and deceived or have some ulterior motive. We are today a nation where almost everyone in the public eye displays fanaticism with every utterance.

It is part of human nature to regard as sane those people who share the worldview of the majority of society. Somehow, though, we have managed to divide ourselves into two different, mutually exclusive sanities. The people in each society reinforce each other in madness, believing unsubstantiated ideas that are often contradicted not only by each other but also by whatever objective evidence exists on the subject. Instead of having an ever-adapting civilization-wide consensus reality, we have became a nation of insane people able to see the madness only in the other side.

Does this lead, inevitably, to civil war? Of course not -- though it's hardly conducive to stable government or the long-term continuation of democracy. What inevitably arises from such division is the attempt by one group, utterly convinced of its rectitude, to use all coercive forces available to stamp out the opposing views.

Such an effort is, of course, a confession of madness. Suppression of other people's beliefs by force only comes about when you are deeply afraid that your own beliefs are wrong and you are desperate to keep anyone from challenging them. Oh, you may come up with rhetoric about how you are suppressing them for their own good or for the good of others, but people who are confident of their beliefs are content merely to offer and teach, not compel.

The impulse toward coercion takes whatever forms are available. In academia, it consists of the denial of degrees, jobs, or tenure to people with nonconformist opinions. Ironically, the people who are most relentless in eliminating competing ideas congratulate themselves on their tolerance and diversity. In most situations, it is less formal, consisting of shunning -- but the shunning usually has teeth in it. Did Mel Gibson, when in his cups, say something that reflects his upbringing in an antisemitic household? Then he is to be shunned -- which in Hollywood will mean he can never be considered for an Oscar and will have a much harder time getting prestige, as opposed to money, roles.

It has happened to me, repeatedly, from both the Left and the Right. It is never enough to disagree with me -- I must be banned from speaking at a particular convention or campus; my writings should be boycotted; anything that will punish me for my noncompliance and, if possible, impoverish me and my family.

So virulent are these responses -- again, from both the Left and the Right -- that I believe it is only a short step to the attempt to use the power of the state to enforce one's views. On the right we have attempts to use the government to punish flag burners and to enforce state-sponsored praying. On the left, we have a ban on free speech and peaceable public assembly in front of abortion clinics and the attempt to use the power of the state to force the acceptance of homosexual relationships as equal to marriages. Each side feels absolutely justified in compelling others to accept their views.

It is puritanism, not in its separatist form, desiring to live by themselves by their own rules, but in its Cromwellian form, using the power of the state to enforce the dicta of one group throughout the wider society, by force rather than persuasion.

This despite the historical fact that the civilization that has created more prosperity and freedom for more people than ever before is one based on tolerance and pluralism, and that attempts to force one religion (theistic or atheistic) on the rest of a nation or the world inevitably lead to misery, poverty, and, usually, conflict.

Yet we seem only able to see the negative effects of coercion caused by the other team. Progressives see the danger of allowing fanatical religions (which, by some definitions, means "all of them") to have control of government -- they need only point to Iran, Saudi Arabia, the Taliban, or, in a more general and milder sense, the entire Muslim world, which is oppressed precisely to the degree that Islam is enforced as the state religion.

Conservatives, on the other hand, see the danger of allowing fanatical atheistic religions to have control of government, pointing to Nazi Germany and all Communist nations as obvious examples of political utopianism run amok.

Yet neither side can see any connection between their own fanaticism and the historical examples that might apply to them. People insisting on a Christian America simply cannot comprehend that others view them as the Taliban-in-waiting; those who insist on progressive exclusivism in America are outraged at any comparison between them and Communist totalitarianism. Even as they shun or fire or deny tenure to those who disagree with them, everybody thinks it's the other guy who would be the oppressor, while our side would simply "set things to rights."

Rarely do people set out to start a civil war. Invariably, when such wars break out both sides consider themselves to be the aggrieved ones. Right now in America, even though the Left has control of all the institutions of cultural power and prestige -- universities, movies, literary publishing, mainstream journalism-- as well as the federal courts, they feel themselves oppressed and threatened by traditional religion and conservatism. And even though the Right controls both houses of Congress and the presidency, as well as having ample outlets for their views in nontraditional media and an ever-increasing dominance over American religious and economic life, they feel themselves oppressed and threatened by the cultural dominance of the Left.

And they are threatened, just as they are also threatening, because nobody is willing to accept the simple idea that someone can disagree with their group and still be a decent human being worthy of respect.

Can it lead to war?

Very simply, yes. The moment one group feels itself so aggrieved that it uses either its own weapons or the weapons of the state to "prevent" the other side from bringing about its supposed "evil" designs, then that other side will have no choice but to take up arms against them. Both sides will believe the other to be the instigator.

The vast majority of people will be horrified -- but they will also be mobilized whether they like it or not.

It's the lesson of Yugoslavia and Rwanda. If you were a Tutsi just before the Rwandan holocaust who did not hate Hutus, who married a Hutu, who hired Hutus or taught school to Hutu students, it would not have stopped Hutus from taking machetes to you and your family. You would have had only two choices: to die or to take up arms against Hutus, whether you had previously hated them or not.

But it went further. Knowing they were doing a great evil, the Hutus who conducted the programs also killed any Hutus who were "disloyal" enough to try to oppose taking up arms.

Likewise in Yugoslavia. For political gain, Serbian leaders in the post-Tito government maintained a drumbeat of Serbian manifest-destiny propaganda, which openly demonized Croatian and Muslim people as a threat to good Serbs. When Serbs in Bosnia took up arms to "protect themselves" from being ruled by a Muslim majority -- and were sponsored and backed by the Serbian government -- what choice did a Bosnian Muslim have but to take up arms in self-defense? Thus both sides claimed to be acting in self-defense, and in short order, they were.

And as both Rwanda and Bosnia proved, clear geographical divisions are not required in order to have brutal, bloody civil wars. All that is required is that both sides come to believe that if they do not take up arms, the other side will destroy them.

In America today, we are complacent in our belief that it can't happen here. We forget that America is not an ethnic nation, where ancient ties of blood can bind people together despite differences. We are created by ideology; ideas are our only connection. And because today we have discarded the free marketplace of ideas and have polarized ourselves into two equally insane ideologies, so that each side can, with perfect accuracy, brand the other side as madmen, we are ripe for that next step, to take preventive action to keep the other side from seizing power and oppressing our side.

The examples are -- or should be -- obvious. That we are generally oblivious to the excesses of our own side merely demonstrates how close we already are to a paroxysm of self-destruction.

We are waiting for Fort Sumter.

I hope it doesn't come.

Meanwhile, however, there is this novel, in which I try to show characters who struggle to keep from falling into the insanity -- yet who also try to prevent other people's insanity from destroying America. This book is fiction. It is entertainment. I do not believe a new American civil war is inevitable; and if it did happen, I do not believe it would necessarily take the form I show in this book, politically or militarily. Since the war depicted in these pages has not happened, I am certainly not declaring either side in our polarized public life guilty of causing it. I only say that for the purposes of this story, we have this set of causes; in the real world, if we should ever be so stupid as to allow a civil war to happen again, we would obviously have a different set of specific causes.

We live in a time when people like me, who do not wish to choose either camp's ridiculous, inconsistent, unrelated ideology, are being forced to choose -- and to take one whole absurd package or the other.

We live in a time when moderates are treated worse than extremists, being punished as if they were more fanatical than the actual fanatics.

We live in a time when lies are preferred to the truth and truths are called lies, when opponents are assumed to have the worst conceivable motives and treated accordingly, and when we reach immediately for coercion without even bothering to find out what those who disagree with us are actually saying.

In short, we are creating for ourselves a new dark age -- the darkness of blinders we voluntarily wear, and which, if we do not take them off and see each other as human beings with legitimate, virtuous concerns, will lead us to tragedies whose cost we will bear for generations.

Or, maybe, we can just calm down and stop thinking that our own ideas are so precious that we must never give an inch to accommodate the heartfelt beliefs of others.

How can we accomplish that? It begins by scorning the voices of extremism from the camp we are aligned with. Democrats and Republicans must renounce the screamers and haters from their own side instead of continuing to embrace them and denouncing only the screamers from the opposing camp. We must moderate ourselves instead of insisting on moderating the other guy while keeping our own fanaticism alive.

In the long run, the great mass of people who simply want to get on with their livescan shape a peaceful future. But it requires that they actively pursue moderation and reject extremism on every side, and not just on one. Because it is precisely those ordinary people, who don't even care all that much about the issues, who will end up suffering the most from any conflict that might arise.

Source: http://www.hatrack.com/osc/articles/empire_afterword.shtml

The "New" American President

By now, we all know that President Obama did not, in fact, attempt to "indoctrinate" 3rd-graders, unless by "indoctrinate" we mean "encourage to work hard, stay in school, take responsibility, and make something of themselves (paraphrased)", which we don't. No one can honestly take much exception to the speech itself... and yet the debate continues.

This morning I was reading an online newspaper article about the speech and which schools showed it, kids and parents that opted out, etc... I was browsing through the user comments when I came across one that really surprised me. I quote:

"I'm offended that people tell me I should make my kids listen to Obama and then deprogram them later. I don't make them watch pornography to teach them purity, and I don't make them smoke to teach them about the word of wisdom. Greatfully, my kids were in the Nebo school district where they didn't have to watch. And I don't need to watch it either to know it's ill effects. There are plenty of people on the media who have dissected it for me so that I know that it was simply a media ploy to get to our children."

There were ridiculous comments from people complaining about what the President SHOULD have said, comments about the health care program, issues with BUSH, all kinds of crap - this one jumped out at me as one particular pinnacle of irony. I'm fairly certain that one of the President's points was taking personal responsibility, right? This parent is raising his/her children by way of the MEDIA, instead of doing it himself/herself. Excuse me, but WTH? I'm not sure I see the parallel between listening to a brief speech for school-age children with pornography and smoking. It sounds to me like this is one of those people who expect everyone else to raise his (whatever - call it generic) children. It's like assuming that one can blithely send the kids off to school each day knowing that they'll be perfectly safe while the parent goes about their business, and that there is no real need to discuss or explain (er, "deprogram") much of anything at all with said kids. How can any parent possibly assume that children are "safe", that the local neighborhood is no kind of place that requires deprogramming?

I have a sister who lives on a blueberry farm in a rural area in the Northwest. Her young children come home from school with all kinds of questions about things they heard from their friends, topics that I wasn't even aware existed until high school or even college. Fortunately, this parent has created an atmosphere in which children feel welcome to question and discuss, and they understand that if they hear anything that makes them curious or uncomfortable they are free to talk to their parents first - and that they will recieve a non-condescending answer appropriate to their level of understanding (which, if I may remind all of us, is much more developed than it was in my day. Get off my lawn, whippersnappers!). Another family I know has children so repressed and sheltered that they don't even know what questions to ASK, let alone how to discuss current topics.

I taught high school for a few months recently, and I saw that the lack of parental responsibility was rampant - translating into a lack of student responsibility. Parents, stop giving your kids what you think they want, and start giving them what they need!

OK, sorry, something of a tangent. I see that the main problem buried in the furor over the President's School speech is not his message, or even really his potential message, it is the fact that we, as a collective people, no longer trust the office of the President of the United States. It's a loss that has been eroding for quite some time now, with major motivating force powered by Nixon and getting a healthy boost from Clinton (yes, Reagan wasn't perfect, and yes, issues have been had by many with both Bush Sr. and Bush Jr.), and culminating with a current President who started off with extraordinarily high expectations and falling rapidly through major economic difficulties and public perception problems. Guess what? It's not Obama's fault. He needs to take responsibility and make changes, YES, but...

... SO DO WE.

In a way, I'm pleased that so many people have gotten so up-in-arms about this relatively small issue of the President's School speech - maybe now they'll pay attention to the larger issues at hand, educate themselves (by reading and listening to more than just one talk-show host or talk-radio station), encourage and expect the President and our other elected officials to take responsibility for their actions, and translate that behavior into taking responsibility for themselves and their children. As American citizens, it's the least we can do.

Really.




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In a not-really-related-but-sorta sidenote, I watched the season finale of "10 Things I Hate About You" on ABC Family (the TV series, not the movie - don't be "judgy") and the main character, Kat, led a school protest of uniforms and civil rights violations. Eventually, the protest ended with her father coming to her: "suspension", "college", "stop it and go to class." She didn't like it, but she did decide to concede for the "big picture" and because her father told her to. The thing I thought was interesting was that as she explained to the last two protesters that she was calling off the fight she didn't tell them her dad made her stop (which was the truth). She took responsibility for leading the protest and she took responsibility for calling it off. (Later, she also took responsibility for sticking with her principles anyway, but that's a different point.) Taking responsibility... what a concept.

Ethan Peck, grandson of Gregory Peck - "Patrick" from 10 Things. Yeah. Good show. It's entirely possible I would vote for EP if HE ran for President... I'd listen to his State of the Union Address like it was a Top 40 radio hit. Seriously. Just LISTEN to his voice!

Ahem.