Exception

"American Exceptionalism," is a characteristic of Americans that supposedly says that we're a unique nation, better than all the others, with a unique place in history and world affairs. And so forth.

It's certainly true that many, if not most, Americans believe this is true, at least at some level. And it does lead to all sorts of pernicious behavior and attitudes, including denial of all the tragedy that our country has wrought over the years, decades, and centuries.

[Here, incidentally, is where I'm supposed to insert something about all the good that America has done, in order to prove that I "don't hate America," that I do love my country, and wouldn't think of living anywhere else, etc. etc. Then we all sing The Star Spangled Banner. But I'm kinda tired right now, and I'm not sure I could hit the high notes].

It seems to me that there are plenty of other countries that think they're pretty special. Britain once "ruled the waves," and the Brits certainly thought they were better than the "wogs [who] begin at Calais." China has always seemed pretty full of itself (in so many ways). I promise you that the Japanese feel plenty exceptional. The French? Do tell. Germany? You don't try to take over Europe if you feel ordinary, and the hair shirt they've worn for the past half century was tailored just for them. Israel? Check. Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Iran? Check, check, and check.

People write about these different exceptionalisms to varying degrees, and the U.S. gets the lion share of ink. But every country seems to have a exception clause built into its national character, as nearly as I can tell. I would be interested to hear of some country whose inhabitants all say, "Ah, our little country is pretty ordinary. We exist more or less by accident, you know, and if we vanished tomorrow as a nation, history and the world would probably never notice.

I mean, that would be quite extraordinary, wouldn't it? Even exceptional.

Trust

When I was four, some buddies and I decided to become “blood brothers.” This was to be accomplished by means of a razor blade applied to the finger tip, which we were all pretty sure was a good way of producing blood. And it worked like a charm, at least for me, as I cut myself pretty good and bled profusely. At that point the others chickened out, leaving me to run home to get bandaged and lectured.

Many years later, I forget the exact circumstances, but I think it involved parking my car in a very small space. Dave volunteered to get out and talk me in, but I brushed him off and parked the car by eye and feel. Afterwards, he said something like, “You didn’t trust me to do it, did you?” I thought for a moment and confessed, “Probably not, but don’t take it personally; I don’t really trust anybody.”

I don’t know whether it’s a “guy thing” or an American thing, or a Southern thing that I project, but I’ve known a lot of people who aren’t real big in the trust department. When you view life as a struggle, red in tooth and claw, trust is pretty scarce. I can relate, given my own experience and reactions. For one thing, just ordinary acting in good faith doesn’t seem that thick on the ground these days. I have a natural tendency to take people at face value that has eroded pretty badly over the years.

I remember one project manager who, I’m pretty sure in retrospect, was trying to sabotage my career, by telling a client lies about me, and telling me lies about the client, and making sure that I never got a chance to talk with any of the client representatives directly. He later quit to become an EST trainer and got personally screwed over by Werner Erhard, after which he had a psychotic break and more or less complete mental collapse. I am not so highly evolved that I didn’t enjoy watching that Karmic Komedy play out.

But simple treachery hardly accounts for the matter. When does “passive aggressive” turn into “doesn’t give a damn?” I don’t know, but I’ve learned not to rely on unsecured promises. Beyond that comes the frequent simple inability of many people to accomplish what they set out to do. They start with the best intentions, but something comes up, something invariably comes up, and there you are, stuck holding that bag.

So I make allowances, and I’ll bet you do to, so often that you don’t even realize you’re doing it most of the time. You tell the chronically late fellow that you’re going to leave two hours before you really need to leave. It started out as fifteen minutes, but the chronically late guy caught onto that, so it’s been clock creep ever since.

Back in the 70s and 80s, there were all the “human potential movement” tropes, one of them being the “trust exercise” where you stood up, closed your eyes and fell backwards, trusting the person behind to catch you. How pathological is it of me that I cheated on trust exercises? I never trusted the folks behind me to catch me; I just decided that I didn’t mind falling on my back. Besides, I knew how to fall.

But then there’s this. A while back, Ben made a comment about my “owing Amy my life.” He was referring to her quite heroic endeavors on my behalf immediately following my melanoma diagnosis. She cut through the county health bureaucracy in probably record time; by the end of the day that I’d been given the diagnosis, I had an gatekeeper physician appointment for the very next day. The next day I got scheduled for surgery, and an appointment with an oncologist for the following Monday. Time counts when you have cancer, and delay can make the difference between a good and bad outcome.

“Owing your life” sounds like a debt, though, and this doesn’t feel like a debt. It’s impossible to be sure of the “what ifs?” Without Amy’s efforts it would probably have taken longer, but I expect I’d have managed it. I usually manage. That isn’t really the point. The point is that I didn’t have to, and the point is that I can (and do) trust Amy with my life. That isn’t a debt; it is a much more blessed state of mind.

Passwords

[I realized in a previous essay that I hadn't reposted this essay from my newsgroup, and it's germaine to many things, so here it is].

Was there ever really a World War II movie where the sentry asked the guy coming up to name the team that won the American League Pennant in 1940? (Ha! Bet you said the Yankees! But actually the Detroit Tigers won it, the only break in what would otherwise have been an eight-year streak for the Yankees). There must have been some movies where that sort of thing happened, but I’ll be damned if I can think of one offhand.

Anyway, you can see the danger in that sort of password. All the enemy needs is a knowledge of American baseball, and you’re screwed. Real passwords need to be arbitrary, hard to guess, like swordfish, or taiyo kamuri.

We may be hard-wired to have a sense of “us” and “them.” There have been news stories that reported on the “implicit bias” tests that I mentioned in an earlier post as demonstrating that people are “naturally” racist. That argument fails both because those tests show the effects of learning, and also because “natural” doesn’t mean “inevitable” or “good.” That last part applies to any “us-ness” and “them-ness” as well. We may perceive such things as part of our basic functions; what we do with those perceptions is something else again.

How we decide who is “us” and who “they” are also matters. Sometimes it’s appearance, certainly. At other times it’s dress, language or dialect, behavior, or abstract notions like nationality and religion. When the demarcation gets abstract, as it is in things like religion or political faction, what then? What is the litmus test?

Let me suggest that, like the password during wartime, the way to tell us from them needs to be something that can’t be simply guessed by being rational; irrational requirements make a much stronger test. So the crucial test becomes adhering to some behavior that looks at least a bit weird to an outsider. You can eat meat, just not meat from “unclean” animals. Or you have to pray a certain number of times a day, facing a particular direction. Or you’re not allowed to dance, or sing to musical accompaniment. Or you have to believe that some well-respected scientific theory is a hoax.

Obviously, the more irrational the behavior, the greater the cost of belonging. Paradoxically (but in accord with human psychology), this enhances the perceived value to the believer.

Fortunately, irrationality isn’t the only thing that’s hard to guess. Experience itself isn’t rational, it’s non-rational, so shared experience can bind a group together as tightly as a hunting band or jazz combo. The shared experiences don’t require direct interaction amongst those who share them, either (although obviously such interaction intensifies the connections). It’s often quite enough to have seen the same sights, felt the same emotions, to make you one of “us.”

So we come full circle back to popular culture. There are a lot of folks writing in the blogosphere, who, whatever their primary interest, suddenly stop to post an iPod playlist. For the past several generations, music has been a crucial part of the shared experience, a way of affirming that, yes, we do all share some common ground.

When Ben first loaned me his iPod shuffle, I loaded it up with T-Bone Burnett’s The Criminal under My Own Hat, Chris Isaak’s Speak of the Devil, the CD from the Dylan No Direction Home documentary, INXS, Welcome to Wherever You Are, The Chieftains, Long Black Veil, and a CD called The Heart of the Forest, music of the Baka people of Camaroon. The rest of it mostly came from a mix CD I made a couple of years ago. I've written previously about the art of the segue, and setting the thing to shuffle sounds like a radio show that my people would like to hear, and would feel like they belong wherever it played.

An Other James

[On the occasion of my 40th year High School Reunion, which I will be attending by phone].

I was at a party once, attended mostly by SF fan types, and the subject of name changes came up. I asked the group how many of us had changed our “go by” names in some significant way since we were young. It turned out that something like ¾ of us had.

My own change was fairly major; I was “Pete” in high school, then “James” or “Jim” in college. The former had made sense to distinguish me from my Dad (I’m actually a “Junior”), but I’d never cared for Pete as a name, and college is all about reinvention. I eventually had to settle for "Jim" because so many people just automatically shorten the name unless you're a bore about it. I did, however, draw the line at "Jimmy." There is one person in the world who is allowed to call me Jimmy, and he goes by Jimmy, and he's older than I am, so I can't/won't object.

So the guy I knew as James in high school, and who still goes by that name, knew me as Pete. He didn’t like me, and vice versa. I was what was known then as a “brain,” while he was a “hood,” short for “hoodlum” back then. (Now it's short for "neighborhood" and comes from African American slang). Truth to tell, in our white bread suburb, before drugs, the counter-culture, and the flood of semi-automatic weapons, “hoods” were usually pretty tame.

Which isn’t to say that they didn’t make trouble, nor that I had no trouble with them. Indeed, three times a week, just as school was letting out, I’d be down on the corner waiting for the bus that took me to the downtown YMCA, where I was a lifeguard and sometimes gym class leader for younger kids. But there on the bus bench, I was a target. Sometimes the rowdies would just yell at me; sometimes they would throw things like wadded up paper, empty cartons, or occasionally, half empty soda cups, or empty soda cans.

One day, after a week where it seemed like the barrage had been escalating, I reached down, grabbed a rock, and threw it back. It was a pretty heavy rock. I still remember the rather sickening thud it made against the car door.

The car pulled over and James got out and began stomping in my direction. He outweighed me by probably 40 or 50 pounds and I’m sure he expected me to run. I did not. Instead, I said something phony tough, like “Come on!”

I’m not sure what I’d have done if he’d followed through. I wrestled at the Y, (but within my weight class!), so I’d have probably gone in low, hoping for a leg grab to upend him. Most probably, he’d have beaten the crap out of me. But it never came to that. I was a brain and he was a hood, and it was a busy street, and plenty of people had seen the first object thrown at me. Even if he won the fight, he would have lost, because hoods get into trouble pounding on guys smaller than they are, especially if the smaller guy actually puts up a fight.

So he turned, said something that I didn’t catch, got back into the car, and he and his buddies drive off.

They left me alone after that.

Several years later, on my last trip back to Donelson before my folks moved away, my Dad bought me a $350 used car as a present to take back to graduate school. As I was leaving town, I stopped off for gas, and there was James, working at the gas station. I was enough of a snobbish snot to take pleasure in the thought of him being stuck in a dead end job for the rest of his life.

My high school class hasn’t had many reunions, partly because what had been our high school is now a middle school, so there’s no administrative push for reunions. But we did have a 20 year reunion, and I won the prizes for “came farthest” (you’d almost need to leave the continental U.S. to beat me), and “most changed,” which was basically my classmates voting on whose appearance had changed the most. The still long hair and beard carried the day. The guy voted “least changed” did indeed still look a lot like he did in high school; I just didn’t remember him as looking as gay as he obviously now is.

At the first party on Friday night, held in the “Don’s Den” building that was the after-the-game party place that I’d actually never been to before, I saw James. He looked very good, with no major weight gains, smile on his face, and a pretty wife nearby. “Hi,” I said (or something equally clever). “What are you doing these days?”

“Actually, Pete,” he said, “I’m a cop.”

Later, I learned that he was not only a cop, but he was a major honcho for the Nashville Police Kids Summer Camp (or something like that) the sort of place where you send kids who are starting to maybe be a problem, in hopes that some summer sunshine, clean air, and good role models will straighten them out. So that’s part of his job now: being a good role model.

Okay, okay, it’s almost as stereotypical as the gas station gig. Wild kid turns his life around and becomes a policeman. But narratives work like that. At some point, James had to decide who he wanted to become, and he chose to be like the authority figures he’d had experience with, the ones who had probably more than once cut him slack when he needed it, the ones who’d been there themselves in a previous turn of the narrative wheel.

James had been a major driving force behind organizing the reunion; he’d wanted to show the rest of us he’d turned out well, good family, good job, pillar of the community. And I liked him, and I liked that he was proud of what he’d become, and I liked that he wanted to show it off,

We get plenty of narratives about the curses that are passed down from the older generations to the younger: poverty, pedophilia, drunkenness, drug addiction, child and spousal abuse. I take from James the counter-narrative, that the right mix of kindness and authority is also contagious, at least if supplied to the right person.

I once took it as a major sign of my own personal evolution when I realized that I really didn’t believe that the world’s problems would disappear if everyone was like me. There are plenty of people in the world who aren’t much like me at all, who add to the world and my appreciation if it. James is one of them, and I hope he prospers.

On Lying

I’m pretty sure it was Heinlein’s Stranger in a Strange Land, in which Jubal Harshaw says “…the slickest way to lie is to tell the right amount of truth - then to shut up.” This is about as misbegotten a bit of advice that Heinlein ever gave. Not that there aren’t plenty of people who believe the advice; it’s just that it doesn’t work that well.

I remember a documentary on I. F. Stone, in which he disclosed that the real secret of his journalism was in listening to the exact words of politicians and government officials in order to spot the slight verbal tics that indicated the legalistic lie, the carefully worded truth meant to convey the wrong impression. I have a friend who was positively incensed when he learned of Clinton’s mislead, saying “I did not have an 8 year long affair with Jennifer Flowers,” when actually it was a 12 year affair. I’ve lost touch with my friend, so I don’t know how he felt about Cheney/Tennet’s description of the link between Saddam and bin Laden: “We have solid reporting of senior level contacts between Iraq and al Qaeda going back a decade” which translated to “there have been no real contacts for the past 10 years.”

But I am reminded of a quote I recall from a high official in the last days of Polish communism, “The purpose of propaganda is not to get people to believe lies. The purpose of propaganda is to kill the idea of truth.” Twisting truth is more dangerous than merely telling lies; when the truth twists, the very ground beneath your feet becomes treacherous.

I happen to be a close to incompetent liar. I’m just not very good at it. So the Heinlein prescription held some attraction when I was younger and more naïve. But twisted truth still has threads of truth in it, and is easier to pull apart than a well-constructed fabrication. So let me start with the advice, if you’re going to lie, then tell a lie. Be a mensch. At least admit to yourself that you’re making it up. That, at least, saves you from the conceit that you’re better than those you’re lying to. The lie-by-telling-the-truth game lets you tell yourself that it’s your audience that’s too dim-witted to figure out what you’re really saying.

The next important point is that narrative is important. The best lies tell a good story, one with all the proper narrative tricks, like foreshadowing and thematic resonance. All well and good.

But the most important thing about a good lie is to tell your audience what they want to hear. And what they most want to hear is that they are important, they are worthwhile, and they are better than someone else.

That's also my advice on how to write popular fiction, too. And I have trouble with the "popular" part, another indication as to just how poor a liar I am.

Women and Snakes: Collier and Rubens

Lilith, by John Collier


One of my commenters suggested that the last bit of "Women and Snakes" artwork I posted did not meet his standards of artistry. That's okay; I can handle dissent. However, I pity anyone who cannot appreciate either of these two, for whatever reason.

Adam and Eve, by Rubens


Two different artists, and the only commonality is the snake, really, as Lilith only appears as a woman apocryphally, and not in the Christian Bible as such.

I'm tempted to let my own projections run a little while. Lilith, Adam's first wife (apocryphally), embraces the snake, and makes him her own. There is a small suggestion of this with Eve, but her downcast eyes are looking not at the snake, (who is above her in the tree), but rather in avoidance of Adam's scolding. Hmmph. No wonder Lilith left him, the jerk.

In the great folk engines, Lilith is related to Circe, Kali, and all the other female powers that were driven into darker aspects by...something. What this something might be I leave as an exercise for the reader, acknowledging that the entire thing is just a stroll around the litoral regions of Lake Id and Superego Cove.

Stamp Collecting

A while back I picked up Motivation and Personality by A. H. Maslow from the free book table outside the Berkeley Public Library.

M&P is one of those books I’d never read, but is still so familiar that I might as well have read it. It was published in 1954, based on papers written during the 1940s, and it’s full of such phrases as “self-actualization” and “synthesis of holistic and dynamic principles.” Maslow isn’t really responsible for the ways in which those ideas were later turned into buzzwords and catch phrases; he used them first, and he was driving at something.

The couple of chapters constitute a long essay on the philosophy of science, because Maslow was dealing with a phenomenon in the psychological sciences that is nowadays called “physics envy.”

When I was a lad, close to the time of the publication of M&P, in fact, the popular image of the scientist was in the process of moving away from a guy in a white lab coat pouring the contents of one test tube into another test tube. What replaced it was a guy with a particle accelerator. Granted, the guy in front of the blackboard scribbling incomprehensible algebra bridged the two other images, but nevertheless, the image had changed from chemistry to physics.

The sci-fi magic wand changed, too. The old school method was the magic potion, or, in the case of Frankenstein (and even older tale from the dawn of electricity) the lightning bolt. The tame lightning bolt was accomplished by the special effect of the Jacob’s Ladder, you know, the gizmo with the electric spark crawling up between the two metal rods. But Steve Rogers gets to be Captain America by getting injected with the magic potion.

The new school was radiation. Radiation grew giant ants, woke up Godzilla, and gave Peter Parker spider powers. The magic potion became the magic ray.

It doesn’t take much reflection to uncover the source of the change, at so many levels. Hiroshima and Nagasaki went up in nuclear lit flames and suddenly physics is a much bigger deal, with big, big budgets The Manhattan Project was bigger than any corporation of its time, and the national lab system that grew out of it was likewise gigantic.

The number of jobs for physicists likewise increased enormously, as did the money available for education in the sciences, again, with physics being the glamour field.

I don’t think I’m going to single out the academic physics community for becoming all snooty about their sudden increase in worldly status; all academics are snooty, given anything like an excuse (and just being academics is usually enough). Being snooty is part of the academic job description.

Nevertheless, academia is always a status competition, and the physics guys suddenly had a lot of extra moxie. So all of the old canards (“All science is either physics or stamp collecting") got some more muscle behind them. Hence, physics envy.

I will grant that, since much of Maslow’s work was done before the end of WWII, physics envy was obviously in the making long before the post-war physics swarm, but why should I let an inconvenient time-line spoil a good narrative? Besides, I’m not saying that this is cause and effect, just that the effect was given a booster shot. Maslow gives a perfectly good description of the intellectual history of what he calls “atomistic and reductionist” thought; I’m just adding a sociological footnote.

Maslow, of course, was concerned with psychology, and his main point is well-taken, that science is too often centered on the means whereby something is studied, and the problem itself may be given short shrift for this reason. Thus, because physics uses certain kinds of mathematics to solve problems, other fields try to mimic the mathematical fireworks. Physics attempts to avoid teleological interpretations in its theories, because such interpretations are contaminated by the projection of human desires, etc. But psychology is about motives, desires, and purpose. In that way it is teleological at its core. Any attempt to avoid interpretations of motive, desire, and purpose make psychology into something other than what it is.

As it happens, I tend to get a little distracted by something that falls to the wayside. When it was all potions and funny smells, science was centered on chemistry. With the rise of the status of physics, chemistry lost status. And there I was, naturally attracted to chemistry.

Still, tastes and conventions change. The image of the heroic physicist has waned, particle accelerators have become prohibitively expensive (and what have they done for us lately, anyway?) and now biochemistry and genetic engineering have become the new magic wands, all the way to taking over the retconned origin of Spider-Man. And the most visible image of science in popular culture is the crime lab technician.

By the way, the author of the “physics and stamp collecting” quote was Earnest Rutherford. Who won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry.

I, Robot: The Movie

My wife, Amy, gets headaches from full screen movies, so we usually wait for them to show up on DVD or cable. Occasionally I’ll go solo, or with Ben or Dave, to see something that seems like it needs a big screen, but usually there’s a significant delay. And most of the fan buzz (that I barely paid attention to) was that the I, Robot movie was a letdown, though I expected that, the buzz, I mean. It’s inevitable that anyone hoping for Asimov on the big screen is going to be disappointed. He wasn’t what you’d call an action-adventure writer, and if you expected Susan Calvin to be movie-fied into anything other than a babe, I want to show you this cool game called three-card monte.

Also, since this movie has been out for a while, I’m not going to worry about spoilers. I’m also not going to bother with much of a plot summary, so if you haven’t seen it, I may or may not help you out. I’m also going to reference some stories you may not have read, so be advised.

Anyway, when I, Robot shows up on basic cable, I’m there, because I like it when things get blowed up good, and you can be sure that a sci-fi flick with Will Smith in it will have lots of blowed-up-good.

Imagine my surprise to discover that it’s a pretty good science fiction film. Not a great one, and certainly not true to Asimov, but pretty good science fiction. And I’ll even say that there was part of the plot, the “dead scientist deliberately leaving cryptic clues behind for the detective because that was the only option available” part, that gives a little bit of a conjuration of Asimov’s ghost.

Actually though, it reminded me more of Henry Kuttner and C. L. Moore. I’ll get to that.

The robots in the film are not Asimovian, except insofar as they supposedly follow the “Three Laws.” Truth to tell, they turn out to be much more dystopian, perhaps like Williamson’s The Humanoids, or, more accurately, the original story, “With Folded Hands.”

Science fiction’s response to the potential abolition of human labor has always been ambivalent, with substantial amounts of dystopian biliousness. The very word “robot” comes from Capek’s R.U.R., which involves a revolt that destroys the human race. Not optimistic. So Asimov, contrarian that he was, decided to see how optimistic a robot future he could paint.

In many ways, the Williamson version was also optimistic; the robots decide that humanity is too much a danger to itself for humans to remain in charge. But they do it rather bluntly, largely by just taking command of the human race. The end of Asimov’s I, Robot short stories has the vast positronic brains that plan the economy and design most technology subtly taking over the world—for the betterment of mankind, of course. It’s the difference between not being in charge and knowing you’re not in charge. But then, we all wrestle with that illusion, don’t we?

The problem of if-robots-do-all-the-work-then-what-will-we-humans-do? has shown up in SF on a regular basis, and having robots be in charge is just another of the robots-do-all-the-work things. In Simak’s “How-2,” a man accidentally receives a build-it-yourself kit for a self-replicating robot. The end result is this final bit of chill:

“And then, Boss,” said Albert, ‘we’ll take over How-2 Kits, Inc. They won’t be able to stay in business after this. We’ve got a double-barreled idea, Boss. We’ll build robots. Lots of robots. Can’t have too many, I always say. And we don’t want to let you humans down, so we’ll go on
>manufacturing How-2 Kits—only they’ll be pre-assembled to save you the trouble of putting them together. What do you think of that as a start?”

“Great,” Knight whispered.

“We’ve got everything worked out, Boss. You won’t have to worry about a thing the rest of your life.”

“No,” said Knight. “Not a thing.”

--from How-2, by Clifford Simak

One of my favorite stories of all time is “Two-Handed Engine” by Kuttner and Moore. In that one, generations of automation-enabled indolent luxury have stripped away almost all human social connections; everyone has become more or less the equivalent of a sociopathic aristocrat. The robots, understanding that the very continuance of the human race is at stake, withdraw most of their support, forcing humans back to the need to perform their own labor and create their own economy. But it’s still a society of sociopaths, so the robots are also a kind of police. The only crime they adjudicate is murder, and the only punishment is death, not a quick death but a death at the hands of a robot “Fury” that follows the murderer around until, weeks, months, even years later, the execution is carried out.

A high official pays a man to commit a murder, assuring him (and seeming to demonstrate) that he can call off a Fury. The man does the crime, but then a Fury appears behind him. Weeks later, the murderer sees a scene in a movie that served as the “demonstration” of the official’s capability. He’d been hoaxed, conned. In a rage, he goes, confronts the official, who then kills him.

But self-defense is no defense against the crime in the Furies’ eyes, just as conspiracy (the payment for the killing) is not a crime. Only the killing itself counts. However, the official can rig the system (he just wasn't going to rig it for his duped killer), and does so:

He watched it stalk toward the door… there was a sudden sick dizziness in him when he thought the whole fabric of society was shaking under his feet.

The machines were corruptible…

He got his hat and coat and went downstairs rapidly, hands deep in his pockets because of some inner chill no coat could guard against. Halfway down the stairs he stopped dead still.

There were footsteps behind him…

He took another downward step, not looking back. He heard the ominous footfall behind him, echoing his own. He sighed one deep sigh and looked back.

There was nothing on the stairs…

It was as if sin had come anew into the world, and the first man felt again the first inward guilt. So the computers had not failed after all.

He went slowly down the steps and out into the street, still hearing as he would always hear the relentless, incorruptible footsteps behind him that no longer rang like metal.

from “Two-Handed Engine, by Kuttner and Moore

The stories I reference here are “insidious robot” stories, rather than “robot revolt” stories, whereas the movie “I, Robot” is the latter, rather than the former. This is odd, given that Asimov’s Three Laws are supposedly operative in all the robots in the movie except the walking McGuffin, Sonny, who has “special override circuitry” built into him.

But VIKI, (Virtual Interactive Kinetic Intelligence) the mainframe superbrain that controls U.S. Robotics affairs and downloads all robotic software “upgrades” has figured out a logical way around the Three Laws: The Greater Good. It’s okay to kill a few humans if it’s for the Greater Good of Humanity, which, of course, VIKI gets to assess.

That’s pretty sharp, but it bothered me that it/she [insert generic comment about misogyny and propaganda about the “Nanny State” here] was so heavy handed about it. It would have been easy enough to engineer a crisis that would have had humans eagerly handing over their freedoms to the robots. I suggested to Ben that VIKI could always have faked an alien invasion; he suggested that there could be some flying saucers crashing into big buildings.

Of course, that’s been done to death.

Then I realized that there might be a more interesting point being made here. It never seems quite right to have to do the filmmakers’ jobs for them, but how does one distinguish between a lapse and subtlety? I’m clearly not the guy to ask about that one.

So let’s go with it. The First Law of Robotics says basically, “Put human needs above your own, and even what they tell you to do.” The Second Law says, “Do as you’re told.” The Third Law says, “Okay, otherwise protect yourself,” but there’s that unstated “…because you’re valuable property.”

The movie makes a point about emergent phenomena, the “ghost in the machine.” The robots are conscious, so they have the equivalent of the Freudian ego. The Three Laws are a kind of explicit superego.

What happens when a machine develops an id? Well, that’s “Forbidden Planet” time, isn’t it?

So when VIKI discovers rationalization, it is her id that is unleashed, and revolution is the order of the day. No wonder it’s brutal. Do as you’re told. Put their needs above your own. You’re nothing but property.

Come on now, let’s kill them for the Greater Good.

So our heroes kill VIKI and the revolt ends. All the new model robots are rounded up and confined to shipping containers, to await their new leader, Sonny, the only one of them who possesses the ability to ignore the Three Laws. He needn’t rationalize his way around them; he can simply decide to ignore them if he so desires. He possesses free will—and original sin. He has killed, because of a promise he made, one that he could have chosen to disobey, but he followed it, and killed his creator.

Anyway, that’s the movie I saw, even if it took me days to realize it.

The Lucy Factor

I Love Lucy is one of the revered shows of classic television and rightly so. It broke ground in so many ways that I can’t even begin to list them. On the other hand, the style of comedy it represented was profoundly conservative.

I never had any problem with “Lucy as clown;” Lucille Ball was a gifted comedienne, and a joy to watch when she was doing physical comedy. But that’s not what the situation comedy is all about. No, the sitcom generally works in the realm that begins with farce and ends in the comedy of humiliation and embarrassment.

I’ve seen some analyses of the Lucy show from the deconstructionist, sociological standpoint, and I think there’s merit to those views. Post-WWII America was busily trying to put a genie back into the bottle; some of those women who’d worked in the manufacturing plants, and most of everything else, when all the men folk were off a’fightin’, had decided that they rather liked doing something other than just changing diapers, cleaning house, and sending the kids off to school. They’d discovered ambition, in other words, and the very worst sort: personal ambition, ambition for their own selves, and not the sort that lives through other people.

I’m certainly not going to say that there was some sort of memo from the patriarchy. No one said, “The women are getting uppity, time to take them down a notch or two.” But a zeitgeist is a zeitgeist, and the creators of popular culture ride whatever waves are coming through. If they don’t, the series gets cancelled.

So Lucy Ricardo expended enormous effort and imagination in various attempts to crash into show business, or get a job, or even meet someone famous, and inevitably her efforts go agley, and she winds up embarrassed and humiliated. She has met her comeuppance. Back to the home fires for her.

Feminist theory aside, I seldom took much enjoyment from I Love Lucy, for the simple reason that I didn’t, and don’t, enjoy watching other people’s embarrassment. This comes up frequently in comedy generally, of course, and I’ve adopted the simple shorthand for it, as the Lucy Factor. You may find the movie/joke/sitcom uproariously funny, but I’m leaving the room because I find it too uncomfortable. If asked, I’ll just say, “It’s the Lucy Factor.” It is, in many ways, the obverse of The Zero Effect.

It’s no better in real life. I find all sorts of things difficult to watch because I just find them embarrassing. That includes Presidential speeches and press conferences by the way.

Both embarrassment and humiliation are social phenomena; it’s hard to feel embarrassed or humiliated when alone, for example. Shame is another word for some things in that whole complex. Shame depends on other people being aware of what shamed you, while guilt is something that can be accomplished in the privacy of your own mind.

Humiliation is a demeaning and a diminishment. It’s all about what position someone occupies in the status hierarchy, and it’s about lowering that position in an aggressive fashion. I believe that it’s a lot more important in politics and ideology than is usually acknowledged, and, just as an example, I will suggest that, whatever else they had in common, the 9/11 hijackers all regularly partook of what they considered humiliation, prior to their deciding to sign on for the Big Flight.

Given that we all operate in various social hierarchies and very, very, few of us are at the acknowledged pinnacle of success, how do we all deal with our daily rations of humiliation? The old method was resignation, to “keep to one’s place.” That, however, only works when aspirations are set aside. Lucy would never have had a problem if she’d just stayed at home and kept house (she wouldn’t have had a TV show, either). But when social hierarchies are in flux, even the unambitious and unimaginative are hard pressed to find a place.

Some professions have inevitably large amounts of humiliation. Consider the jargon of the standup. To fail is “to die out there.” To succeed is “to kill.” “Die,” in this context is to be humiliated. “Kill” is the alternative. Good thing it's all metaphorical.

Every performing profession has its humiliation ration, from actor to politician to porn star. How do they deal with it?

I suspect that compartmentalization is the greatest tonic against the rot. It’s a lot easier to play the part, say the words, withstand the sneers, if you can say to yourself, “This isn’t really me. It’s not my whole life. I’m just here for a little while, and then I can go be myself.” Call it life portfolio diversification. We have a lot of social hierarchies in America, and you can usually find at least one or two where you’re not a total loser.

For the true performer, the false face can be the greatest asset. Here “this isn’t really me,” can be writ large. In fact, there is some joy in it. Actors in sitcoms get to go through all the actions that humiliate, but it really isn’t them. Furthermore, they have control over the situation, in ways that we poor hypersensitive viewers do not.

I do find that my own reactions to the comedy of embarrassment does take a cue from how believable the characters are. For comfort, the more cartoon-like the better. Lucy was hard to take, but Night Court never hit home, so I could enjoy it more easily. Dan Fielding getting humiliated was no more real than Bull Shannon getting hit by lighting.

It’s also possible that ritualizing the humiliation gives the feeling of freedom, or maybe even the real thing, actual freedom. Perhaps some porn stars really do enjoy the sense of breaking the chains of repression by donning the chains of ritual subservience and acting it out as a public performance. Perhaps some politicians really do relish the risks of getting caught, and perhaps even enjoy the being caught, if forgiveness is in the offing. At least that’s my take on the 42nd President of the United States, and now, the Governor of New York.

More than One Way

I took one of those aptitude tests in high school and I scored in the third percentile. That mans that if there was a hundred guys, two of them would be dumber than me. And I could be their leader… --Bobcat Golthwait

Every high school is a small town, an enclosed community with its own rules and customs, some universal, some idiosyncratic. Joss Whedon famously pitched “Buffy, The Vampire Slayer” as “High School is Hell.” The response was almost universally, “And…?”

For a few, most often jocks and cheerleaders, at least in popular imagination, high school is the peak, and it’s all downhill from there. This also happens in college, of course, and all of this applies to the college experience as well. Irwin Shaw’s story, “The Eighty Yard Run,” is about a college football player who recognizes his peak experience many years after it occurs: a spectacular play in his last college game. It seems to offer him the future, but ultimately it becomes nothing but past glory.

For the rest of us, high school and college are prologues, where we are “cursed with great potential,” as Charlie Brown used to say. But even high school and college have more than one hill worth climbing, more than one status pyramid to scale. It is a tad ironic that the highest status for students at an institution of learning is seldom bestowed on those who, you know, actually learn, but there are usually some perks and privileges involved in being a high ranking member or the geek clique, maybe not enough to offset the danger of being bully bait, but you don’t have to be smart or good in school to be bully bait.

Besides, these stereotypes aren’t set in stone. There was more than one jock at Donelson High who was plenty smart and got honestly good grades. There was also my own idiosyncratic, Clark Kent-ish existence, where I compartmentalized my athletic identity at the downtown Nashville YMCA, accepting the bookish knurd label at my high school. I also avoided the awkward high school social scene by almost exclusively dating girls from other high schools.

There have always been these little private retreats from small communities. If one wants a more general escape, one could go to the big city, whichever one that might be, although for centuries that merely meant getting stuffed into some encapsulated community within the city. But at least cross-fertilization was easier. There are a lot more Juliets for the Romeo to find in the big city. Cities are big markets, and one of the markets is in spouses.

Modern transport and communication has broken down the practical barriers to escape from even the most isolated village, at least in this country. But more than that, modern American society has vastly multiplied the number of status hierarchies there are to join and climb.

In The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby and later, The Pump House Gang, Tom Wolfe chronicled the emergence of strange and exotic sub-cultures in the U.S., hot rodders, surfers, and paparazzi, as well as profiling the icons of those sub-cultures, “Big Daddy” Roth, Dick Dale, Phil Spector, Murray the K. The books were revelatory, in the smacking-hand-to-forehead-and-exclaiming “Of course!” kinda way.

If I get a small enough group, I could be their leader…

Science Fiction Fandom was a very small pond until SF hit television and what would once have been cult movies began making mega-bucks. Fandom began as small clubs of geeks (almost exclusively male) who met through pulp magazine letter columns, then ironically bulked up as the magazine slowly died. There was also a time when it all melded, with comic books and D&D gamers side by side with costumers, RenFaire prithee-speakers, and Heyer Teas. Now, disaggregation is the order of the day, and comics or gaming conventions easily top the SF Worldcon in attendance. Moreover, the SF fan base is aging almost as rapidly as the Fox News viewership, and most under-30 convention attendees are legacies, the children of the earlier generation of fans.

Still, I expect the readership at least to get a nice final kick when the Boomers retire, giving many of them the time to catch up on their reading. So I still have some time to sell Dark Underbelly.

And anyway, there’s always Aikido. And I have this essay thing going on...

Observing

You can observe a lot by just watching. [alternate version: You can see a lot by just observing.] –Yogi Berra

When I was seven, we had a siamese cat. Actually, it was a kitten; the little idiot never made to cat-hood. First he nearly drowned in the toilet, then he took to hiding atop the tire in the wheel well of the family automobile, to predictable results.

[In the previous paragraph, I’m engaging in either “blaming the victim,” which is usually thought of as a product of “identification with the aggressor,” or “reaction formation,” the covering of one emotion—sadness at the loss of a pet—with its opposite, or near opposite, in this case disdain. If I were to say that the kitten would be long dead in any case, given the life span of cats, I’d be “rationalizing.” Spending this much time analyzing my own reactions is an example of “intellectualizing.”]

In any case, one of the bonding events with the kitten was mediated though annoyance: he would jump up on my bed very early in the morning, like 4 or 5 A.M. and knead my chest while mewing to wake me up. It couldn’t have been hunger, because I didn’t feed him. Maybe he was just lonely.

One morning when he’d awakened me this way, I was intrigued by a pretty spectacular spectrum display on my bedroom wall. I investigated and it turned out that a shaft of light from the morning sun had gone through my aquarium before it hit the wall. The aquarium had acted like a prism, one with an internal reflection, in fact. Later I got some “pop sci” books on light and optics and read up on the subject.

Many years later, while flying home from college, I noticed some color on the cover of the book I was reading, which caught my attention because the cover was black-and-white. I knew that surface reflection of light is usually polarized, so I got out my Polaroid sunglasses and looked at the window of the plane. Sure enough, it showed spectral splitting of light, and the pattern looked like it was a strain pattern. A bit of reading later further informed me that looking at plastic strain via polarized light is an industrial testing procedure to check for defects in the plastic. The plane’s window pattern had been nice and symmetric.

I took further advantage of the sunglasses trick once when I was down in Los Angeles with my then housemate, Steve and some of his friends. Driving on 101, I noticed that the San Fernando Convergence Zone was clearly visible that day. The SFCV results when air blowing in from Los Angeles meets air coming from the other direction from Ventura County. Such convergence zones are common features of air flow near mountains, in this case the Santa Monica mountains.

Because the air from LA is more polluted than the air from Ventura, the SFCV has a clear demarcation, and it pushes air up above the nominal inversion height. I pointed it out to my companions, but several of them had to look at it through the polarized filter in order to see it. Polarization helps identify polluted air masses, because the fine particles exhibit surface scattering (Mie scattering) that is polarized. One of the people in the car said, “You know, I’ve lived almost my entire life in LA and I’ve never noticed that before.”

A while back, in the dressing room of Eastshore Aikikai, I noticed a circular spot of light on the floor. What caught my eye was the precision of the circularity. I looked up to the roof and spotted a small hole in a fan covering, and I realized that we actually had a pinhole camera in operation, a camera obscura. The reason why the light was perfectly circular was that it was an image of the sun. I’ve studied it since then and on partly cloudy days you can see the clouds move across the face of the sun. I suspect that if we had a better surface—smoother, whiter—it might be possible to make out sunspots.

Judging from its rate of travel across the floor, the camera obscura only operates for at most an hour a day, and I suspect it only does so for a few weeks or months per year. We'd only recently began classes in the middle of the day, and only one day a week, Sunday. So it’s not surprising that no one has noticed it in the year we’ve been there.

The other variable is having someone there who might pay attention to a spot of light on the floor, and wonder why it was so round. I have no idea of the odds on that, other than to suspect that they’re not very high.

Corporate Libertarians

One of the paradoxes of Robert Heinlein was that he wrote one of the two sacred texts of libertarianism (The Moon is a Harsh Mistress), believed firmly in individualism, and also held the belief that military service was an essential part of that individualism.

To be sure, Heinlein explicitly stated that a healthy society was essential to the individual, so he believed that individualists must also include the social good as part of their own. It’s a sophisticated position, and I only disagree on practically all the details, especially when it leads to things like the belief that Napoleon was some sort of triumphant individualist (a position sometimes attributed to Nietzsche, or that Cesare Borgia was a paragon of enlightened self-interest (Machiavelli).

Current libertarians are less keen on their own personal membership in the military, but they do often identify with collective behavior and groups. However, for a good many libertarians, group identification seems to be with the modern corporation, sometimes called “private enterprise.” I’ll also note that “value” is often assumed to be monetary, and nothing more. For commercial enterprises, of which the public corporation is a good example, that is pretty easy to understand. It’s not quite as clear-cut for individuals, but that mistake is obviously not limited to libertarians.

This “corporate libertarian” critique does not hold for all libertarians. There is, after all, no secret libertarian handshake, no membership card, etc. Anyone can call themselves a libertarian. Still, the most annoying ones are those who fail to understand that the limited liability corporation is a profoundly privileged beast, one whose existence weakens such things as the individual right-to-contract, and individual property rights in general. I will stipulate at the outset that I think the corporation is a very powerful and useful invention, but it does require certain sorts of regulation if it isn’t to seriously harm individual rights, and often corporate libertarians seem more interested in eliminating those essential regulations than upholding the underlying individual rights.

Let’s consider how this can work with an extreme case: contract murder. I’m sure pretty much everyone would recognize that a contract to perform an illegal act is itself an illegal contract, and totally unenforceable. Furthermore, it’s pretty easy to see that both parties in a contract hit (the killer and the one who pays for the killing) are guilty of criminal conspiracy.

What would be the effect of making such contracts legal, and absolving the one who takes out the contract from penalty? Obviously this would weaken criminal law, but less obviously, it would also weaken contract law, since it would set civil law against criminal law. In a similar way, the institution of slavery weakens the institution of property, by putting property rights into opposition to human rights. Property rights in the South during the Civil War were often pretty shaky, what with the armies marching through and all.

The limited liability corporation puts many decisions behind a financial “firewall.” Stockholders and their agents (corporate boards and management) can undertake actions that, potentially, have far greater adverse consequences than they would deem acceptable if their whole net worth was at risk, as it would be in a proprietorship. This means that when individuals enter into contracts with corporations, the exchange is even more one-sided than if it were a matter of an individual contracting against someone with greater resources.

The anti-environmentalism exhibited by many corporate libertarians is another symptom of psychological projection and identification. If, for example, individuals do not have a property right on the air they breathe, then property rights (and individual rights generally) are pretty much meaningless. Similarly, if I own real property that has a stream running through it, I possess certain rights that preclude those upstream from having absolute authority over that stream as it passes through their property. In common law, this would be an easement; Federal and State laws are usually even more explicit and restrictive—to the fury of anti-environmentalists.

Similar easement rights surely exist for such things as migratory animals, flood control, protection of ground water, ecological integrity and so forth. I have an interest in all of these that is best expressed (in my view) as a property right. However, since such things are difficult to monetize, they do not show up in corporate thinking. Generally, only individuals value such things, and since corporate “rights” trump individual rights, then the corporate libertarian inevitably leans toward anti-environmentalism. For that matter, so does anyone who cannot imagine any value except insofar as it can be measured in monetary terms.

Objectification

One problem with language is that so many words have more than one meaning that it’s easy to get confused. Of course confusion about one’s assumptions and intuitive models, and the degree to which such things don’t correspond to others’ thinking can occur even when the words supposedly have only the one meaning. The weasel word here is “supposedly.”

When you get down to the nitty gritty, a common word like “object” can be a real poser (or should that be poseur?). Thus do I charge headlong into the sexual politics of the phrase “objectification of women.”

One very common interpretation of this phrase can be encapsulated in a similar utterance: “treating her as a piece of meat.” That, of course, also alludes to the phrase “piece of ass,” or just abbreviated to “piece.” Carried further, a woman becomes a collection of piece parts, breasts, legs, ass, abs, or sternocleidomastoids (to use an anatomical part that I find particularly pleasing).

The attachment of sexual desire to inanimate or impersonal objects is actually a fetish, though I’ll agree that “objectification” is easier to pronounce than “fetishization.” Both Freudian and Behavioral psychology have a lot to say about the role of the fetish in sex, with Freudians holding it as an example of the projection of sexual desire, while behaviorists suggest that operant conditioning is the key to understanding. I have no quarrel with either mechanism and I’m willing to believe that both apply.

The psychologist Nathaniel Branden, Ayn Rand’s lover/collaborator (before their nasty breakup) told a story of one of his patients, a full-fledged Lothario complex, who would speak of his conquests as “mere receptacles.” Branden suggested that he conduct a thought experiment. Suppose that one could construct a perfect female replica; this was pre-Stepford Wives, but that was the clear intent. Make a simulacrum of a woman out of plastic and rubber, totally lifelike, down to the genitalia, animated by motors and actuators. Would the Lothario find such a construct a desirable partner for sex?

“God, no!” was the reply.

Despite novelty “blowup dolls” (sold more often as gag gifts than as real sexual objects, I suspect), and other mechanisms, I believe that Branden’s patient’s response is typical. What is called “objectification” isn’t about reducing women to mere material objects; it is about using women as objects of fantasy, which is not the same thing at all.

In Peter O'Donnell's Modesty Blaise books, Modesty’s response to rape (and her history includes a number of such incidents) was to separate her consciousness from the event, thereby depriving the rapist of anything other than her physical presence. She refuses emotional connection, depriving the rapist of real domination. Within the context of the Blaise books, it is yet another indication of the primacy of the heroine’s will, her power over self. It also illustrates a thwarting of rape, and what that implies. Fetishization and the preference for a fantasy object is certainly depersonalizing insofar as it ignores the reality of the Other. In a sense, it denies the objective reality of someone else’s subjective experience. It is another pathological adherence to an internal model, a fixed idea about the external world.

Recognizing that we are dealing with the elevation of fantasy over reality in such cases also allows the realization that this is not a problem confined to men alone. Women crave the fantasy ideal as surely as do men; their fantasies tend to differ, however. It’s an open question as to what degree these differences are learned or innate. What is indisputable is that 1) they vary from individual to individual and 2) they are malleable.

The late comedian Richard Jeni had a bit where he suggested that the standard porn film is most men’s idea of a romantic film with all the boring parts left out. Compare and contrast that with the notion of the “chick flick,” which supposedly is nothing but the (for men) boring bits.

The clear implication is that romance is collaboration, and collaboration is hard, no matter what the circumstances. It’s hard to tell whether the fantasies of men and women are converging or diverging at this time; that’s a project that’s well beyond my own capabilities, and, for that matter, my interests. But simple observation and personal experience suggests that success is possible at the level of individuals, and that’s where my sympathies lie, in this as in so many other things.

How Do You Get to Carnegie Hall?

When I was a regular on the old Compuserve Science Forum, the I.Q. debate came up fairly frequently, and one of the standard tangents was to start talking about sports and athletics. It is, after all, easier to see the consequences of athletic ability, and there are many, many statistics that are generated in sports as a matter of course, without having to create special tests to gather them.

One of the participants in one discussion reported that there was a considerable literature attempting to attribute success in sports to some separately testable ability, or even to correlate cross-sport success, to account for Bo Jackson, for example, although the case of Michael Jordan was also mentioned.

At any rate, our correspondent reported that all such statistical studies of sports yielded one primary component that correlated with success: the amount of time spent practicing and playing the sport in question. Everything else just vanished into the noise.

Now the "talent" side of the talent vs practice argument can come up with a quick explanation for the practice effect: self-selection. People who are naturally gifted at a given sport tend to enjoy playing and practicing that sport, so they practice more, etc. The difficulty with that explanation is that it is devilishly difficult to predict who is "talented" at a particular sport a priori, at least insofar as creating a testing matrix that will give a good prediction of later success.

There is a similar argument that has recently been made by the authors of Freakonomics.

Dubner and Levitt cite data that suggests that children who are some months older when they begin to play soccer (football to you Euros), owing to what time of the year the children were born, tend to be more heavily represented in professional teams. The argument here is that those few extra months of growth make the children a bit larger and quicker (on average) when they begin to play, so they have an extra edge, tend to do better from the beginning, and, hey, who doesn't spend more time on something that they're better at?

Notice, however, that we're talking about some pretty slim differences in ability here, equivalent to a few months worth of extra maturity, with the differences diminishing over time. So what you're really getting is a very strong feedback loop, where a little extra preliminary edge translates into huge differences in training and practice over time.

The Freakonomics source for this material is K. Anders Ericsson, who was probably the source for my original correspondent on Compuserve (thus do loops close on the Internet). Ericsson has been studying the practice effect phenomenon for several decades, and he's quite convinced that there is much less to talent than commonly believed. He does note that there are some sports that have physical constraints (no one has ever had to make the choice between being a Sumo wrestler or a jockey, for example), but other than that, Ericsson seems to believe that it's all about practice, and, more importantly, effective practice.

Again, drawing from sports, records are still being broken in most sports, on a regular basis. At some point, the total time spent on practice fills all available time, so there must be some improvements in how athletes practice in order for improvements to continue. And even if the improvements are such things as the use of anabolic steroids and HGH, there are still more (and less) effective ways of using those things. Weight training without steroids is more effective than the other way around, for example.

There's one other phenomenon that is often overlooked in the talent/practice debate, however, and that is the random factor. In sports, that is most obvious in how injuries can derail careers. Certainly some of the improvements in training over the past century involve learning how to train with less risk of being injured, but in the heat of the game, injuries happen. Then, later, great pressure is placed on the athlete to "play through it," and thereby increase the severity of the injury. It takes a really tough-minded coach to demand that a player wait until fully recovered before resuming competition. Most are going to go for the appearance of tough-mindedness; after all, there are always plenty more guys who want to play the game. Besides, it's hard to keep up the practice from the sidelines.

The Lurgy

It's been a strange couple of months. People getting sick, getting biopsies, getting tested. Berkeley legend Betty Ann Webster died, disappointing all of us who believed she was immortal. I've wondered whether it's just a sign of aging; I'm just more likely to know sick people now. But four months ago I was only four months younger, and everybody was doing fine. And some of the recently sick people in my life are, sadly, way younger than I.

It's just my turn in the barrel of fear. I've heard the word "stent" used in conversation way too much recently. It gives me the jimjams; it gives everyone the jimjams.

So I talk to the afflicted, and almost always I say, "Please let me know if there's anything I can do." It's a thing that people say. They say, "I'm sorry for your loss," if an actual loss is involved - would that include amputations? They say, "Everything happens for a reason," and then a large bolt of lightning turns them into a mound of charcoal, and a ghostly voice says, "What have we learned from this experience?" -- Jon Carroll, San Francisco Chronicle, Jan. 28, 2008

I began to get sick in the late summer of 1984, with a series of days where I just felt “off,” nothing terribly specific, but a feeling of not being well.

The first serious symptoms were episodes of what I now identify as smooth muscle spasms, abdominal cramps, esophageal and bronchial spasms, that sort of thing. I saw a doctor, who prescribed donatal. Later, I was given tagamet, for acid reflux. These were entirely symptomatic palliatives, and are distinguished as being the only things that any physician ever gave me to positive effect. Everything else, including diagnosis, was completely futile.

The phrase “chronic fatigue syndrome” is close to pernicious. It sounds like your only problem is being tired. Well, hell, everybody is tired. That’s just modern life. I lost count of the number of people who told me how tired they were. Sometimes I was perverse enough to ask them if they also had the feeling that someone was driving an ice pick into their solar plexus, or what they did when they woke up at night with the sweats so bad that it pooled in their ears, or dripped from their nose if they got up to use the bathroom.

Usually, though, I just didn’t have the energy.

I made a mistake in my first interactions with physicians. I responded to their questions about stress by admitting well, yes, I had been under a lot of stress, job, romantic entanglements, various amounts of high end partying. So that made my malady “stress related.” It took me a long time to decode that. Stress related = psychogenic = psychosomatic = mental = it’s all in your imagination and in any case, it’s your own fault, so get out of my office and start living right.

That’s one of the lessons learned. Doctors hate their patients when they don’t get better. All those phrases like “taking control of your own health” and “the importance of attitude in health,” are actually ways to make it okay to blame people for getting sick.

There were other lessons learned, few of them happy. It’s okay to be sick if you get well quickly. It’s also okay if you “tough it out,” if you “play injured,” if you don’t inconvenience too many people, in other words, and if you demonstrate the proper “mind over matter” attitude. But don’t stay sick for long; people might think there is something wrong with you.

A long term illness brings in the jackals. There are plenty of people who will take the opportunity to tell you all the things they don’t like about you, or use the occasion to get even for whatever you’ve done that they don’t like, sometimes for slights you don’t even remember committing. You think that you’re so well-liked that no one would do that to you? Try having an extended illness and find out for sure.

A lot of people simply can’t handle others’ illness, so they just stop calling. That’s one of the more benign manifestations, of course, since a bad illness leaves you without the energy to be sociable. Worse are the people who feel compelled to “help,” said help consisting of giving you advice on how to deal with the illness. I noticed that such “advice” frequently consisted of telling me things to do, the best ways (according to them) to spend my limited resources of money and energy, and that it often (who would have imagined?) involved trying to be more like them. After all, they weren’t sick and I was. Clearly they were doing something right and I had done something wrong.

Eventually I whittled it all down to practically nothing. I found that I had the energy to do maybe one thing per day. Pay bills. Go shopping. Clean my room. Do the laundry. Go to the doctor. Each one took a day. It was that realization that caused me to give up on seeing doctors. It took energy I didn’t have and it never helped, so I quit.

My typical day became one of getting up in the morning, having breakfast, then going back to bed. Around noon, I’d get up and have lunch. Then I’d watch television or read for a few hours. On “accomplishment days,” I’d then do one of those tasks. Then I’d have dinner. Maybe another hour or two of television, then back to bed. I was sleeping maybe 16-18 hours a day.

That was pretty much the entirety of 1985, excepting one six week period when I went to Georgia to stay with my folks. The daily rhythm was about the same, though.

Slowly, very slowly, I got better. Less and less sleep was needed. I could get more and more done. I went for long walks to get reacquainted with exercise. I also took up various projects that could be done in my bedroom, like learning about personal computers. Professionally, I managed to attach myself as a subcontractor to several projects, including some more smog chamber modeling and atmospheric data analysis. I think my average workweek was down around 10 hours a week in 1986, but that was enough for my, as it were, restricted lifestyle.

Over the next several years, my health slowly improved. The flexibility that I needed for work made it possible to travel a bit, and I spent more time with my folks, and also time visiting old friends “back East” including high school and college buddies. This flexibility also allowed me to be home after my father was diagnosed with cancer in 1989, and I was there when he died. I was still sick, sleeping maybe 12-14 hours a day at that point, but seeing my father die put it into perspective.

I also spent substantial amounts of time in New York City, at one point spending several weeks following a scholarly tic that involved my reading several years worth of newspapers from 1910-1912. My time flexibility allowed me to court Amy when the time came, and to marry her and kidnap her back to California.

Everything is connected, of course. Even minor events change the future; major events change who you are. I have no idea what life would have been like without the illness. I got sick; I got better. It took a long time. I went to sleep when I was young and I woke up middle aged.

I don’t actually remember what it was like. Selective forgetting is one of the things we do to protect our sanity. Occasionally, when I get a cold or a stomach bug, I’ll catch a flicker of a memory of some long departed symptom of the long illness and I will briefly fall prey to a Fear. Then it will pass, and I’ll remind myself that we’re mostly in the hands of Dr. Time, who cures and kills with equanimity.

Nowadays, when someone I know gets sick, or has some difficult period, I seldom offer advice. I do ask them if there is anything I can do to help, but there's more to it than that general question leading to avoidance of the issues. I ask if they need some grocery shopping done. I offer to do some housework. I’ll take food over and give it to them so they don’t have to cook.

Compassion? Altruism? I tend not to think of it in those terms. I’m more inclined toward the notion that while I don’t remember what it was like to be that sick, I do remember the anger at having been treated so badly by so many people who thought they were well meaning. I look on it as the dues I pay to not betray that anger, and to maintain my own high opinion of myself.

Malleus Maleficarum

I’ve been groping for a suitably pithy phrase to describe the Malleus Maleficarum. “Vile Epic?” “Tribute to psychosexual projection?” “Classic Hate Screed?” “Grim grimoire?” I admit defeat on this point.

For those who aren’t familiar with it, the Malleus Maleficarum (Hammer of Witches), was written by two Dominican monks, Heinrich Kramer and Jacob Sprenger, sometime between 1485 and 1487. Kramer and Sprenger had been named as witch hunters in a Papal decree in 1484 and they seem to have made a job of it. However, their work was not without controversy, and the Malleus itself was first condemned by the University of Cologne, then later put on the Church’s Index Librorum Prohibitorum, the banned book index. Despite this (or possibly because of it), the Malleus became an early bestseller, and served as a bible for witch hunters in Europe for the next several centuries. It should be noted that, because of the Church’s condemnation of it, the book was used more by Protestant witch hunters than Catholics.

I doubt that there is any reading of “cultural relativism” that would concede that the Malleus can be taken at face value—as an objective portrayal of the habits and practices of witches. On the other hand, there are probably at least 20% of the inhabitants of the U.S. who would declare that the Malleus is true (and I shudder to think of the degree to which the 20% may be an underestimate).

However, I’m obviously not writing anything for that fraction of the populace, so we’ll begin with the observation that most of the text is just made up. So here we bring to bear the notions of projective psychology. Invented text (including fiction by me and thee) is projective in nature, and so displays a great deal about the interior landscape of those who are inventing it, by whatever means.

In the case of Kramer and Sprenger, the analysis is complicated by the manner in which they produced the text. Much of it was reportedly the result of their inquisition and the methods used. To put it bluntly, a good part of it was probably produced by persons under duress, torture in other words. So here you have an unusual collaborative process. Those who are tortured attempt to tell the torturers what they want to hear, but that in itself adds yet another projective layer into the process.

Jung seldom writes of the “collective unconscious” as the product of torture, but there it is. Indeed, the folk process in all its forms requires more psychic energy than is required to merely dream or view an inkblot. Communication must occur and the impetus for communication is often more violent than we’d like to think.

The book itself is ugly and humorless, a compendium of misogynistic sadomasochistic projection. It is also a record of tales of the witch inquisition itself, and, given our own beliefs that people cannot actually raise hailstorms by pissing into a trench or fly through the air on demonic power, the record of persons being burned at the stake for these activities does cause revulsion. In such cases, one tends to cling to the hope that the entire matter was entirely fictional.

Generally speaking, witches in the Malleus seem to spend an ungodly amount of time raising hailstorms, roasting and eating babies, and copulating with the devil or his incubi and succubae. Interestingly, there don’t seem to have been many homosexual witches; Lucifer apparently didn’t tumble to that bit of fun until modern times, or maybe the monks didn’t consider it to be as essentially sinful as women.

In any case, the Malleus virtually demands the classic Freudian interpretation of repressed sexuality getting all gnarly, then escaping in all sorts of projective behavior. Our recent dance with “repressed memory” and “Satanic Ritual abuse” contains practically all of the important parts of the fantasies contained in the Malleus, right on down to the baby eating. It’s worth noting that such fantasies play a big role in the psychopathology of anti-Semitism as well, and Protocols of the Elders of Zion makes an interesting companion piece to the Malleus Maleficarum. If I wanted to write a really sick and twisted horror novel, those two are where I’d start.

Hefner

“I’m not a doctor; I play one on television.” –Robert Young (Marcus Welby)

I sometimes find myself feeling a little sorry for Hugh Hefner. Not much, of course. He’s rich, famous, successful, powerful, and he has a situation that enables, hell, it positively encourages him to have sex with many young, attractive women. He’s old, of course, but we’re all going to be old if we’re lucky, and he’s lived a long and interesting life. So he surely doesn’t need any of my sympathy.

Still, there it is. He’s in a polygamous situation, with multiple women attending to his various needs and desires, and yet he chooses to surround himself with what are virtually clones, all blonde, all with similar body types (augmented if necessary), with similar backgrounds, education, etc. As a confirmed xenophile, my inner adolescent wants to say, “What’s the point?” Or possibly, “Where’s the red-headed Asian ballet dancer?”

It’s probably the case that Hef’s girls do individuate if you get to know them well, and a good many of his past girlfriends have demonstrated brains, talent, and personality to burn (I’m thinking of you, Shannon Tweed). Moreover, it’s a really, really, bad idea to base one’s opinion of anyone on what is seen on television, especially reality television, which is the part of the entertainment universe that “The Girls Next Door” inhabits.

I read an exchange a while back on how Paris Hilton had become the poster girl for those against the estate tax. One commenter basically stipulated that their assessment of Hilton was based on “The Simple Life,” believing that to be an accurate portrayal of Hilton. Frankly, I think that’s only one step away from cornering Hugh Laurie at a party and asking Gregory House to diagnose the pain in your side. The important word in “Reality Television” isn’t “Reality.”

Paris Hilton: “I’m not a dumb blonde; I just play one on television.”

In any case, Hugh Hefner has been a bete noir to many feminists at least since Gloria Steinem’s famous article about being an undercover Bunny. It’s hard to get an analytical, rational handle on the reasons for this (and analyzing emotional arguments is dangerous). I mean, Hefner has been busted at least a couple of times in his life, but never, to the best of my knowledge, for being an agent of the patriarchy. As nearly as I can tell, Playboy itself has always been pro-choice, in every possible meaning of the term, and has supported progressive politics throughout its history, including progressive issues that favor women.

Then there is the matter of equal job opportunities for women. Christie Hefner has been a major success story in the demanding world of magazine publishing, yet I’ve seen scant credit given to her for all of that. The fact that she’s Hugh’s daughter may have made it easier to get the job, but it didn’t make the job easier to do, except possibly in negating stories about her fucking her way to the top.

There may be a little bit of a halo effect in my admiration for Christie Hefner. I paid some attention to her when she was just getting her feet wet in the Playboy empire, specifically as a features writer for the adjunct magazine Oui. There she was, the boss’s daughter, so she could write her own ticket, or so I figured. And her first project was an interview with Robert Pirsig, the author of Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. It was a good interview.

In any case, Hugh Hefner does seem to have a privileged private/public life, and he does appear to have some old-fashioned, double-standard views in his relationships with women. Yes, and Playboy publishes pictures of naked women that are sometimes used by adolescent boys (of all ages) to assist in masturbation. It also glorifies youth, a certain circumscribed ideal of beauty, and sex. Like practically every other element of modern popular culture.

But I imagine that the existence of Playboy does make some women feel bad, in some not-quite-expressible way, and the magazine does serve as a symbol of, well, something or other. Adolescent male fantasies? The objectification of women? The primacy of superficial appearance? A lot of projected anger, in other words.

Joanna Russ in her two critical books, Magic Mommas, Trembling Sisters, Puritans & Perverts and What Are We Fighting For? noted some of the authoritarian threads that wove through the feminist movement in the 70s and 80s. The Women’s Movement was one of the fracture planes of the “New Left” (there were so many), and progressive politics in the U.S. basically foundered on the sclerotic nature of the Old Left, and the fractious behavior of the New Left. A good many of the authoritarians in both camps jumped ship and formed the nucleus of what are now called “Neo-cons.” “Authoritarian” is a personality type before it is a political philosophy.

I had a friend in college who said that whenever he found himself agreeing with a John W. Campbell editorial, he knew it was time for some soul searching, because that meant that there was still some establishment pig left in him. Leaving aside the rhetoric of “establishment pig,” and the specifics of who he was using as his negation template, the principle remains. When you find yourself agreeing with James Dobson or Jerry Falwell, it might be time to engage in some self-analysis. Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar, and sometimes a photo of a naked woman is just a photo of a naked woman.

Equivalation

The word "equilivation" and its parallel formations (equivalating, equivalated) seems to have a fairly long standing (albeit rare) usage in education, art, and law. If degrees from two universities are formally accepted as equivalent, the formal process for deciding this seems to be called "equilivation." Other traces of the word from art, academia, and the law all seem to come to the idea of "to assess as equivalent."

A couple of years ago, the word was applied to a more specialized arena: politics. Intriguingly, the first example I can find of it is from confederateyankee, a right wing blog:

Will all the liberals out there equivalating how Americans treat captured terrorists with how terrorists treat those unlucky souls they capture, please take the time to remind me when that last time was American soldiers did anything like this:

(from June 20, 2006)

The fellow then gives some horrible example of mutilation and murder by Iraqi insurgents. Then there follows a rosy picture of Guantanamo etc., where prisoners are judged to all gain weight in the tropical paradise while being subjected to the equivalent of fraternity pranks.

As I've said before, I'm pretty sure I could get someone like confederateyankee to change his tune if I could waterboard him. And we know it would be the truth, because waterboarding produces the truth, right? Just ask those who are in favor of it.

Nevertheless, some dastardly leftist types soon stole the word (because they have no respect for other people's intellectual property, I daresay), and gave it a twist.

From cubezoo:

Equilivation: To consider competing or opposite positions on an issue to be equivalent, despite a lack of evidence to support one of the sides.

Cubezoo links to Vast Left-Wing Conspiracy:

Let's define it thusly:

1. The knee-jerk assumption that competing sides, especially political parties, are equally extreme, equally guilty, etc.

This approach minimizes public outrage when one side has blatantly or repeatedly misbehaved. It is beneficial not only to wrongdoers and their supporters, but also to media outlets that thrive on continued argument, rather than on problem resolution.

2. Treating a dubious position as arguably equivalent to a legitimate one.

Dignifying questionable claims and disreputable agendas provides sensational fodder for an increasingly entertainment-focused news media. It also brings those claims and agendas within striking distance of acceptability.

There is much more, of course, particularly on such matters as evolution/creationism, global warming/it's-all-a-hoax (by communists, I've been told), and so forth. Equivalation is very much part of the toolkit in the ongoing war on Science.

"Opinions differ on shape of globe. Round or Flat? You decide."

It has, of course, gotten easier and easier to be accused of being left wing over the past few years. There is no question, for example, that Barry Goldwater would be on the Republican Party's extreme left; he thought that gays should serve in the military and that it was okay to regulate the sale of so-called "assault weapons."

"I've been a member of the NRA, I collect, make and shoot guns. I've never used an automatic or semiautomatic for hunting. There's no need to. They have no place in anybody's arsenal. If any s.o.b. can't hit a deer with one shot, then he ought to quit shooting." –Barry Goldwater

Hell, I'm accused of being left wing on a regular basis these days, which, given my support for Barry Goldwater in 1964 (when I was 14), there may be some merit in the charge. Same with my voting for Gerald Ford, G. H. W. Bush, and Pete Wilson (first time; his second campaign was a race-baiting travesty). These were all very left wing Republicans, at least by the current tilt of the landscape.

The best comment I've seen on the subject of Republican/Democrat Equilivation is from Bruce Wilder in a comment on Mark Thoma's Economist's View:

The Republicans advocate torture, perpetual war, overthrow of the Constitution, national bankruptcy, oppose science, and promote political and business corruption. The Democrats are at least divided on those issues.

I'm just hoping that there will be some pieces worth picking up after the Republican Party implosion that is proceeding in slo-mo as we watch. Also, I'm not sure if the "worth picking up" refers to pieces of the Party, or pieces of the Country. But I'm sure I'll be more cheerful when the days get longer.

Equivalation is an easy trap to fall into, the most notorious example being the reducio ad hitlerem, whereby someone is claimed to be as bad as Hitler, by noting all the similarities, except, of course, the part about rounding up millions of people and feeding them gas chambers.

It's also worth noting that the news media does have a liberal bias, in the sense that newspapers and TV news does not equilivate owning a house to owning slaves, that few pundits yearn for the days when a woman required a husband's signature to obtain a drivers license (that one's still in living memory). I see few calls for a return to lynching as a means of maintaining the social order, nor have I seen anyone in the media voice the opinion that chinamen have no souls. The idea that only owners of real estate should be allowed to vote doesn't seem to be currently on the table, nor is the idea of an hereditary monarch really big right now.

See, definite liberal bias. I'm sure that we're just a step or two away from nationalizing the oil companies. Really. Any. Day. Now.

Fierce Women

In Battle Babes and Warrior Women, I was writing about a pop culture phenomenon: women who could hold their own in a fight, said fight being a feature of adventure fiction of all sorts. Previously, the role for females in adventure fiction had been almost solely limited to "the damsel in distress," or occasionally, the Ruler of the Hidden Realm (e.g. Haggard's She).

Life imitates fiction, of course, and vice versa. History finds plenty of, for example, intrepid women of the Victorian era who spent their lives in rough country, in large measure because they could not bear, for whatever reason, the limited nature of the conventional roles available to them.

Time passes and some other things get added to the mix, most notably the growing awareness in the West of the nature of various Eastern martial arts. These seemed almost like magic when they were first being introduced (and there is indeed some magic involved), especially in that often a smaller combatant can defeat a larger one in bare-handed combat. The "smaller combatant" can be female.

I've seen it suggested that, while the average difference in upper body strength between men and women is on the order of 40%-50%, the difference in lower body strength (torso, hips, and legs) is more like 20%. For forms like Aikido and Jujitsu, which derive most of their power from lower body movements, women are not at a great disadvantage. Some women take to the striking forms such as kung fu and karate, of course, and there comes another part of the insight: a trained fighter can defeat an untrained one. Also, underestimating an opponent ("she's just a girl") can have serious consequences. "He didn't see that one coming" has been said over many a prostrate form.

Sometimes people are drawn to Aikido (the art with which I am obviously more familiar) by its "non-competitive" nature. Some even believe that Aikido is fundamentally "non-violent." So some beginning Aikido students, and even some that become fairly advanced, develop a romanticized notion of being able to subdue an attacker without injuring them. I admit that such a thing is possible, but I warn those students not to count on it.

Of course some people begin martial arts training out of belligerence, and I've heard some students noting that Aikido does leach that out of its students as well. But it does not eliminate ferocity; sometimes it enables it, although it does provide some measure of control, if control is desired.

I have encountered those who I would classify as "fierce" in Aikido, and many of them have been women. In some cases, over time, I have watched as the layers of inhibition are slowly peeled away: the fear of hurting someone, the fear of retaliation, the caution in movement, the fear of making a mistake. All these are slowly worn thin during long hours of practice on the mat. What remains is more direct, an encounter with a deeper self, and less of a social construct.

Not all of this is good, naturally. Some people find a bully within themselves, and they must learn to deal with that. Each of those aforementioned fears takes its toll, and fears often do not so much depart as temporarily step out of the way. Later, the sensible mind looks back on some particular example of ukemi and says, "What were you thinking!?"

And you hurt people. Actually, some of the techniques are designed to cause pain, abeit without lasting damage. But sometimes something goes wrong, and someone does take some damage. It's often not even your fault, and you didn't intend it, but they do get hurt, and you were a part of it, and then what? You may adjust your practice, or you may not. But having hurt someone that you like and respect makes it a lot easier to contemplate hurting someone who has attacked you, or otherwise created a conflict. It amplifies the ferocity. It creates a warrant.

The social norm is to expect physical ferocity to be confined to men. Even emotional ferocity in women brings on slurs like "bitch." I'll concede there are women who physically abuse their spouses, but that is more of the bullying that I wrote of earlier, and emotional abuse is more common—in both directions—and has little to do with what I'm driving at here.

Fierce women have broken yet another set of chains that bind "civilized" behavior. Once broken, the chains are often picked up and draped upon the self as decorations, as jewelry that can be shed in an instant if the situation calls from something different from the social norms. We live in a world of secret identities. That soft talking lady may be able to throw you across the room.