Not Fit For Office: Sarah Palin
No, this is not a regular feature here. This is one of those random off-topic posts. I don’t expect many of you to agree with me here, though if you take a moment to read my arguments and understand why I would never support Sarah Palin in any position, maybe you would agree too. I am not a democrat or republican, but am registered independent. I voted for Barack Obama because he was, to me, the better candidate (he seemed to be the only one who actually had any idea what non-rich Americans were going through). I expect some of you reading this are conservatives, and that is fine. Just hear me out. In a short discussion with a friend at the University of Florida the other day, I brought up that I did not like Sarah Palin. Initially my reasons were that I considered her to be remarkably stupid (and she did a fine job making that case for me in the debates, and elsewhere), but my friend disagreed. She said that Sarah Palin was going through a lot and that she was simply folding under pressure. Why? Because Palin had, apparently, sent her son off to Iraq just prior to heading out to do all those interviews that made her look pretty much unprepared for the position she had been nominated to run for. My rebuttal to this ended the conversation because of a fundamental disagreement between us, but it is this rebuttal that I want to display here. I do not care whether or not Sarah Palin sent her son off to Iraq prior to running as vice president. Why? Because if she cannot handle that kind of pressure, how the hell does she expect me or America to believe she can handle the pressure of the oval office? What if she had been President? Would we simply give her an out because she was having a hard time in her personal life? No. And why? Because the people who run this country do not have the luxury of allowing their personal lives to affect the way they function as politicians. We have that luxury (we being non-politicians, all the various collars of workers, etc.), and as such, we expect those who make sure the gears keep turning to have the moral, physical, and psychological fortitude to do their jobs (with exception, perhaps, to unexpected serious illness, like a heart attack). If Sarah Palin were President and sent her son off to Iraq, it would not be acceptable for her to act un-according to her position; we would expect her to do the same job she should have been doing before, keeping us safe, enacting policy, etc. A lapse in that, particularly in a time of war or during a crisis, is simply unacceptable. From individuals outside of that position, perhaps it is acceptable. I do no begrudge average mothers being terrified about their sons; I do not find anything wrong with grieving or displaying any sort of emotion. I do, however, have an issue with someone in a sensitive position performing excessively poorly and other people telling me that I have to give them a break. No. If you have your finger on the big red button, I will not give you a break for pushing it in a fit of emotion, nor in any other instance in which other people might be harmed by an inability to do one’s job as President, Senator, or whatever other political position there might be. We expect more of our politicians, or we should. So, Sarah Palin’s send off of her son, assuming that’s true, is not an excuse for poor quality of action. It’s not. If that is her reason, I don’t care. She had a job to do, and she failed to do it adequately. She lost as a result and was labeled by her actions. And this is not even talking about her pre-mature resignation from the position of Alaska’s Governor, an entirely new issue that demonstrates, to me, why she is not fit for office. Why anyone would look at her and think she deserves a slot in the oval office is beyond me. She quit Alaska. She wasn’t impeached, the position wasn’t terminated without her knowledge (and that would be silly, since Alaska needs a governor), or any other reason. She quit. Just imagine to yourself, if you will, what it would be like if she quit as President. What then? Exactly. And that is all I have to say about that. Again, this will not be regular here. This blog is about science fiction, fantasy, writing, and things related to that; it is not about politics unless it is directly relevant to the previously mentioned categories. But every so often I have to speak my mind. Feel free to leave angry messages in the comments. Or argue with me, if you like.
Terrifying Experiences: A Birthday Present
So, apparently my brain decided to give me a brilliant birthday present. During my pedagogy course, it made the decision to no longer function right at the moment when the professor called on me to give an answer. The sad thing is, the thing we were talking about, and what the professor was getting at, was precisely what I was most interested in discussing in our little groups. Heck, even the professor had come over and talked with us specifically on the topic he was questioning me on (somewhat), which made clear why he called on me. But, my brain refused to work. For a good thirty seconds (maybe more) I saw there flipping through pages, trying to collect my thoughts, and all that came out was a bumbling, nonsensical answer that I have since forgotten. There’s something terrifying about yesterday’s events. It’s not often when my brain ceases to function. It either functions very well, or it functions at half-strength and I make little mistakes. This was not a little mistake; this was an embarrassing moment where I seemed to demonstrate to all but my group that I did not belong there. It also signaled to me that I might have an issue, perhaps due to stress or due to something otherwise. I’ve had a persistent memory issue for years and recently I’ve found it difficult to concentrate, to the point of even remembering what I read just moments before turning the page. I don’t know if this is due to stress, an unforeseen medical condition (ADHD or whatever), or just some problem with me on a personal level, but it’s dragging me down and causing these events. Regardless of what is going on with me, I keep reliving that moment in class and have been, thus far, incapable of shaking it from my memory. It seems my memory works well when it wants to remember an event I’d rather forget. Thank you for the happy birthday, brain. I appreciate it.
Internet Book Shopping: Why It Sucks
(There’s a question at the end of this, so if you don’t want to read my long story, skip there and leave a comment!) Every time I go to buy a book online, I end up getting stuck in this terrible “get free shipping” game. After all, the free shipping saves you $10, easy, for books you already would buy anyway. But, therein lies the problem: you have to find books to fill out that $25 limit to get the free shipping, and the Internet does not make this easy. For example, recently I found out I had $5 of “Borders Bucks” to spend. Since it would be a pain in the ass to go all the way to the local Borders on a weekend (I don’t own a car and the bus isn’t all that great here on weekends), I decided this would be a good time to a) buy a book I really want and b) get some books that might come in use later during my graduate career. So, I set out to find a good book to buy, and even asked for suggestions from all of you in the process (thanks for the help, by the way). Well, Borders, while wonderful and lovely and all that good stuff, made me work to use that $5. Half the time the books that I wanted were $5 cheaper on Amazon, which makes spending money on them rather pointless if I’m not technically saving any money. This let me to reduce my acquisitions to paperbacks. Then there was the long, drawn out process of trying to find good paperbacks to buy that weren’t too old and fit what I was looking for (“literary” SF/F). Borders doesn’t make that easy either. You see, the bookselling industry has no easy method you can use to find books that might cross over into the “fiction” or “literature” areas, even though they technically are science fiction or fantasy. So, as much as you might want to find them in the endless “fiction” section, you never will, unless you read every single page for every book (which, let’s be honest here, none of us are going to do). This meant that I had to reduce my selections to those books labeled as science fiction and fantasy. Why? Because I do not read outside of those genres unless I’m forced to (or it’s a non-fiction book that is useful to me). I like SF/F. That’s all I like. Literary fiction bores the hell out of me and so does most everything else. That’s not to say I don’t like literary SF/F (I do, a lot, actually), just that I need a little weird in my fiction to keep me interested. As I’ve said before: I live in real life; I don’t particularly want to read about it. By the time I got things narrowed down, I had already spent too much time trying to figure things out anyway. Then came the really hard part: actually picking the books. Anyone who shops online knows how hard that is. Lots of link clicking, lots of poor descriptions, missing information, and other issues that make it impossible to figure out if a book is worth your time. There is nothing that the Internet can do to make the book buying experience as entertaining or as efficient as being in an actual bookstore. Nothing. Eventually I managed to narrow things down, but it was not easy by any stretch of the imagination. This makes me wonder if I should keep a running list of “books I want” so that when this happens again I can just start at the top and snatch them one by one. The problem is that I like to buy books that are fairly recent just so I don’t end up with some old thing that’s been sitting on a shelf for five years. How do you all go about your online book purchases? I want to hear your stories and ideas!
Punking Everything in SF/F (Part One): The Present
Cyberpunk, steampunk, biopunk, and now greenpunk? When will it end? Fans have been punkifying science fiction and fantasy for decades, and it doesn’t seem like it will let up any time soon. With each passing moment, new ideas spring into the collective consciousness of SF/F fans, who, in turn, impart their selective, subgenre-crazed minds on all of us by bringing to task the next stage in science fiction and fantasy’s evolutionary ride. But are we getting ahead of ourselves, and is this constant segmentation of SF/F pointless or, at least, premature? What flaws are inherent in the frequent punking of speculative fiction? Publishers have yet to grasp onto the punk genres, and neither have bookstores, independent or otherwise. Subgenres have little use outside of the relatively isolated, and sometimes rabid, fanbase. Realistically speaking, it would be impossible to incorporate even a pinch of the subgenres in existence today into bookstores, with logical exceptions to the Internet–after all, Amazon has been kind enough to narrow the science fiction and fantasy sections into nebulous, cross-pollinating subcategories. So what is our obsession with subgenres (and sub-subgenres)? Are we inherently segmentative, meaning do we have an innate desire to categorize? That might be true, because it is without hindrance that we can see the makings of our own segmentarian nature in the desire to isolate ourselves. But here we might consider the distance of prejudice, which exists only insofar as personal grudges permeate the subgenre sphere. How many of those sub-subgenres are created simply to get rid of an unwanted swath of books? None? Perhaps we can only see prejudice as it exists in the academic, the purist academic who longs for the demise of science fiction and fantasy with an unhindered gaze. You can see the joy in his eyes when he looks down upon those who so willingly accept Margaret Atwood into their ranks. Or maybe he is a she, and the bitterness is just as strong. Who knows? What we do know is that punk, in its newest, and historically disjointed (disconnected) form is science fiction and fantasy fans’ greatest tool. Isolate the good, the bad, and the ugly, put them in the little jar of context-less wonder, and consume them as readily as a meat pie (or a veggie pie, should your personal inclination be to the earth). Punk is dead, perhaps, but alive too, reborn as a suffix with a mysterious past. And all this, the thoughts presented here, the continued arrival of punkified sub-subgenres, makes me wonder if we need to educate ourselves as to what punk actually is, or was, to properly evaluate whether our suffix-obsessive punking nature is well served in a genre so clearly complicated by its weaving in and out of popular culture and literature itself. Yes, that is where we should go next. To the punk-mobile. Let’s take our Peabody-and-Sherman-style journey into the past to unravel the not-so-distant history of a forgotten genre (forgotten, at least, by those not steeped in the rather confusing realms of cultural criticism and literary theory). Expect that post soon. For now, consider, if you will, the nature of subgenres, the drive to create them, and the question of whether doing is has a purpose other than for our amusement. And if you have thoughts, share them here, because your thoughts are of interest to me. I must consume them, like candy. Creepiness aside, comments are welcome. ————————————— Continue to Part Two (Punk), Part Three (Cyberpunk A), Part Four (Cyberpunk B), and Part Five (Cyberpunk C).
Animals and Empathy: Social Imperatives and the Future
Disclaimer: No, this will not be a long diatribe about why we shouldn’t eat animals and other such animal rights topics. It’s a brief look at our attitudes towards animals and where the future will likely take us. It’s related to science fiction. Honest. We live in a curious world where humans clash with the remaining members of the animal kingdom on a regular basis. Disrespect for the animal is two-pronged, for on the one hand we must separate ourselves from them, because they are inferior beings, but on the other, we split the human species by defining those of us who do not fit a particular cultural norm as animal. Society is resistant to anything beyond these two extremes, because we have a culture that, in most parts of the world, relies on animals for everything from social interaction to sustenance. Imagine if we changed our ways and suddenly became like the extremists want us to be? We would have to rely so much on our own kind, and whether that is something possibility within the limits of human consciousness, I cannot say. What I am getting at here isn’t so much the need for a change in how we operate; I will always consume meat, because that is my personal preference. Rather, I am proposing an examination of human attitudes, an alteration of how we view our animal brethren, and even ourselves, and an acceptance of the social/cultural imperative to use animals as tools for our survival. Nothing is suspect about the necessity for emotional maturity. We are a complicated species, no less complex than the chimpanzee or the baboon, excempt insofar as our technology dictates complexity, and within us we have the ability to enjoy empathy. The future will, undoubtedly, involve a paradigm shift in our conscious acknowledgement of the animal; vegetarians, vegans, and others will influence how we perceive the other beings that inhabit this planet, and, I hope, for good reasons. Why should we not at least understand that a cow does not deserve to be treated poorly, even if we’re just going to eat it when it gets big and strong? I suspect our distance is one of necessity, because to love our fellow animals as much as we might love a pet dog would constitute the steady recurrence of the betrayal of a social trust. You would not, I presume, kill Benji the Dog after raising him from puppyhood to the adult dog he would become, unless his existence directly threatened your own–and even then, you would likely feel bad about it if you are part of the cultural norm that seems to revere these sorts of creatures, but loathes others. Perhaps emotional distance is absolutely necessary, but such distance does not mean we cannot punish people like Michael Vick and even the myriad employees of slaughterhouses everywhere who find it necessary to mistreat the animals they will eventually butcher to feed the nation. These individuals make conscious decisions to cause pain to animals. Animals feel, even if they do not contain within their minds the ability to properly examine those feelings. Is it too much to ask that these animals get at least the most basic of comforts? After all, we grant death row inmates a final meal, and even read them their final rights, or whatever you call those religious prayers offered up as final penance for a lifetime of mediocrity. But, then we are back at square one: our resistance to the animal, to, perhaps, the unknown. Otherness. That’s what we often call this human imperative for separation. Built into the genetic structure of our kind, we are always considering new ways to segment ourselves from those that don’t meet our personal, or even societal, norms. The nerd, now seemingly adored, was once a social pariah; so too were women and people of color, constantly ridiculed and made inferior because of the circumstances of their birth. One cannot forget the resistance to animality in human culture, this push to define ourselves by an arbitrary religious or personal idea as non-animal, as separate, always and forever, from our animal brethren. Damn science for telling us otherwise. The future, however, may breed new life into the social apparatus of humanity. Slaughterhouses will become a thing of the past as artificial methods for cultivating meat become not only possible, but effective at recreating what we love so much in cows, pigs, and other edible creatures. While now we may scoff at the idea, it is only a matter of time before the consumption of the animal ceases to run parallel to the enormous quantities of slaughter and abuse. I would argue, here, that artificial forms of food production are essential to the survival of our species, unless someone can develop a method that suits all nations, all governments, and all peoples which can adequately reduce our population. Artificial means of production are the only way for our species to continue to feed itself and reproduce at our current rate, and even to potentially feed those that haven’t the means to do so themselves. That is the future, the utopian ideal that exists on the horizon. We can embrace it, or we can reject it, but ultimately, there will be a change, and our future selves will have to deal with it as it occurs. We cannot be resistant to change if it means sacrificing our ability to feel, or our ability to be human, or even biological beings equally as important to this planet as the bee or the rat or the elephant. But the assumption, of course, is that we are important, that we are special, in some way. True, we are special for existing, but the universe is a vast and complicated place, constantly making us realize how insignificant this little blue planet really is.
A Collective Chillpill For RaceFail, GenderFail, et al.
Disclaimer: Nothing in this post should be misunderstood to imply that I am inherently racist, anti-equality, or anything of that nature. I am not and never will be against any notion of quality, only against unrealistic expectations and demands. Neither am I against open and civil discussion of issues of discrimination, whether it be in literature or elsewhere. These issues should be openly discussed, and regularly, but with an understandable acknowledgement of the complexities of certain situations. Now that you’ve read this part, here’s the post: I’m about fed up with the science fiction and fantasy community. It seems like every week someone is throwing a fit about such-and-such anthology lacking content from such-and-such minorities (women, people of color, whatever). I wouldn’t have an issue with it if not for its constant, never-ending resurgence. Nothing is safe. Nothing can sit on its own merit. If an anthology is 50/50 male/female, then someone complains that there aren’t enough Asians, or African Americans, or whatever. If there are too many white people, never mind that it’s not exactly the editor’s job to screen who submits to them for what color someone is, someone throws a fit over that. If there are too many men, complaining resumes. Too many women? The same, somewhere. It’s like the SF/F community is in a constant state of bitching, because no matter how hard you try to explain away reality, nobody listens. Not enough women? Oh, well that’s all your fault, Mr. Editor, even if I don’t know the whole story, or have all the information I need to make that judgment; you’re a sexist bastard because there just ain’t enough women in that anthology. Not enough African Americans? Well, I don’t need to know how many African Americans submitted to you, or whether or not you knew that all the people you published were white, or yadda yadda; you’re just a racist asshole who hates African Americans and has a KKK sign above your desk. Do you see why these arguments are not only tiresome, but somewhat absurd? I’m not going to pretend for a moment that discrimination doesn’t exist. It does, even in the SF/F community. We’ve seen it with RaceFail and GenderFail, etc. It’s out there, and sometimes not in places you would expect. But it’s not everywhere, and assuming that racism or sexism is solely responsible for the lack of minority representation is skirting the issue. There are bound to be more reasons than we can fully comprehend. Maybe part of the problem is that African Americans or women are not big contributors to science fiction, and so the applicant pool is far smaller than that of white males. I don’t know, but before we throw fits over every anthology, maybe we should figure that out–maybe we should try to understand the broader picture and not resort to automatically assuming that editors are racist or sexist assholes who don’t give a shit. As an editor (for Survival By Storytelling Magazine), I can tell you firsthand that I have no idea how many people of color I have selected for the first issue. I didn’t ask. Why? Because it’s probably illegal, for one, and because I kind of don’t care. No, I don’t mean that I don’t care in a negative sense; I mean that I don’t care in the sense that skin color is meaningless in the face of quality writing. Whether you are white, black, blue, or red, if a story is good, it’s good. That’s it. No other criteria. If there is a disproportionate amount of whites in our first issue, then I certainly hope I won’t be called out for it. I didn’t ask, and won’t ask now. We chose good stories from whatever was sent to us, and if there happened to be a whole bunch of women or people of color who submitted, great. If not, I don’t know how exactly I am to fix that. I can’t force people of certain genders or skin colors to submit. Similar things are probably true of some of the bigger editors who collect original stories for anthologies. What are their reasons for selecting certain authors? I don’t know. Some of them are published authors that the editor approached, and others were snatched from the slush. Can we honestly say that these editors sat down and thought “this is a woman, and this story will suck”? Maybe some of them do, but how exactly are you to know? And when people in the SF/F community throw a fit over these anthologies, they potentially damage the reputation of editors who are not racist or sexist bastards. Turn it around; how would you feel if someone unjustly did the same to you? You wouldn’t like it very much, would you? The SF/F community needs to calm down. I get it; we’re in a sensationalist world, and what “sells” to the public are angry rants and controversial topics. But we need to start digging deeper than where RaceFail and GenderFail have taken us. We’ve avoided the deep end for reasons that seem to escape me, and instead of approaching the various “perpetrators” of racism or sexism with their concerns, the SF/F community has blasted them with insults and public ridicule. Sometimes such action is appropriate, but most of the time it’s not. If that’s the way you want to do things, then I don’t want to be a part of it. If RaceFail, and even GenderFail, have taught the SF/F community anything, it is that we need a greater deal of open discussion. Right now the bitching and fit throwing and angry attacks are only creating more tension. Tension we do not need. And no, I am not a racist or sexist bastard. I’m a human being.