In a new NYT column, conservative pundit Ross Douthat wants to know several things about unemployment. First, it’s not really unemployment “in the usual sense, where people look for work and can’t find it. It’s a kind of post-employment, in which people drop out of the work force and find ways to live, more or less permanently, without a steady job.”
Second, their poverty isn’t really that big a deal because they’re not really poor. They’re managing to get by “receiving disability payments and food stamps, living with relatives, cobbling together work here and there, and often doing as well as they might with a low-wage job. By historical standards their lives are more comfortable than the left often allows.” And that this is part of a “broader turn away from community in America — from family breakdown and declining churchgoing to the retreat into the virtual forms of sport and sex and friendship.”
The general impression is that the real issue is lazy poor people are choosing to drop out rather than work (to his credit, he does admit that stocking shelves at Wal-Mart isn’t anything to aspire too), like the selfish people they are (see umpty-zillion David Brooks columns). And that they’re not really that badly off. So there’s no need to think about the income gap, the way Wall Street crashed the economy, or the long history of sending blue collar jobs overseas.
There’s also the implication that if unemployed people aren’t actually starving on the street, and welfare pays for their food, hey, they’re not really poor! After all, it’s not like they were kulaks in Tsarist Russia or anything. Of course it’s not like the days when blue-collar workers could buy a house on a 40-hour-a-week job, but I’m sure Douthat would rather we don’t think about that either.
This is what I mean by redefining poverty: As long as you can avoid starvation, the system works right? So pundit Ruth Marcus likewise argues that if we cut Social Security benefits, everyone will make do with less, ergo no problem.
As noted at the link, the past decade or two have seen the reverse treatment of riches: If you can’t buy everything you possibly want, or if putting your children into the country’s top college strains your budget so you can’t buy a yacht too, then you’re not rich.
So in this Bizarro right-wing view, the poor are doing great, but the rich are suffering.
I disagree.
Monthly Archives: February 2013
Defining poverty down—or is it up?
A brief observation about the departing Pope
(With apologies to my Catholic friends)
One recurring defense of Pope Benedict’s Nazi past is that all he did was join the Hitler Youth. The second is that everything he did was mandatory. Both were false.
He didn’t just join the Hitler Youth. He also ran a German factory that used Nazi slave labor. Which is a good deal worse.
And while it’s true that his actions were legally “mandatory” that’s not the same as practically mandatory. Other Germans were ordered to collaborate and refused. They paid a price for refusing (concentration camps in a lot of cases) but they proved collaboration is never mandatory.
As the blogger Jeanne D’Arc once observed, that gives the lie to Ratzinger’s insistence he had no choice but to collaborate. She also pointed out that he’s running a church that glorifies martyrdom, choosing death over violating one’s conscience. It’s a conflict he’s never bothered to explain. Maybe he’s racked by guilt and doesn’t want to remember. Maybe he doesn’t really feel that bad about it (plenty of Germans did collaborate and many of them only felt bad about having it exposed). Like D’Arc I can understand collaborating (I won’t pretend to know what I’d have done in that situation), but brushing off the moral issues? Not so good.
Millions of decent Catholics around the world deserve better in their leader. Fingers crossed for next time.
Marcia, marcia, marcia—er, links, links, links!
Alicublog watches conservatives turn on themselves. In this case, turning on SE Cupp for actually criticizing Limbaugh. As noted in comments, when Cupp was a cool kid, her attractiveness was an asset; now it’s proof she got ahead on looks.
•Class warfare continues.
•Cablevision fights to offer individual channels instead of bundled packages. Good luck to them: My cable bill (when I had cable) would have been so much cheaper if I could have ixnayed all the sports channels I didn’t want.
•I’m not surprised Tucker Carlson mocks Wiccans (“Every Wiccan I’ve ever known is either a compulsive deep Dungeons and Dragons player or is a middle-aged, twice-divorced older woman living in a rural area who works as a midwife.”) but I am amazed he apologized. Here’s a more thoughtful look at witches in the media.
•Yesterday I linked to discussions of sexism at the Oscars. LGM argues that even if it was satire, it didn’t work.
•Wall Street continues to whine—why, the average bonus this year is only up 8 percent from last year!
•Jonathan Chait says the reason Repubs can’t negotiate with Obama about the sequester is that nothing, not even further cuts to the safety net, is worth even a small increase in taxes on the rich. Digby says the reason so many in the media want Obama to slash entitlements is that they’re rich enough not to give a damn.
•The Supreme Court has ruled that as the government isn’t identifying the targets of secret surveillance, nobody can prove they’ve been targeted. Therefore, nobody can sue!
•The court will also review whether companies can force arbitration on customers, even when the company’s accused of breaking the law.
•And it looks the Court may also strike down key provisions of the Voting Rights Act. Because it’s not like conservatives object to anyone having the vote any more, is it?
I’m actually wondering if all the outspoken criticism of women voting, college students voting, etc., isn’t actually shrewd politics. All those old, bitter white guys who know they’re losing the power to determine elections may feel that politicians who take away other people’s votes are just watching the white demographic’s back.
•Some on the Religious Right say the Bible justifies slavery, yet they ignore that it sanctions polygamy.
•Bank of America charges a customer several thousand dollars for a protection plan he says he never asked for or signed for.
Being interesting
Due to massive schedule cockups on mine and TYG’s part last weekend, we were only able to catch two feature films at Nevermore (even though I volunteered) and one of them had to be The Casebook of Eddie Brewer (2013(. Which did, however, get me thinking about the problem of build-up in a fantasy story.
One of the critiques I got on the earlier draft of Affairs of Honor was that if I was presenting a Colonial American world where magic works, it needed to be clear up front what sort of magic we were working with. Which, judging from reading it to the writing group this week, I’ve done successfully.
I think this is generally good advice for alternate histories (I’ve given it to other people). If you’re writing a world where the Nazis won or Chairman Mao is a vampire, it needs to be obvious up front: Writing 50 pages of straight adventure or drama, then revealing things are different is going to leave people feeling the rug’s pulled out from under them.
With an “intrusion” fantasy—it’s our normal world, except magic is somehow intruding it into it—you have more flexibility. You can take some time to set up the normal world before the weirdness starts, introduce one weird moment then let everything lie fallow (so readers have to wonder when it’ll pop up again) or slowly build to something freaky.
The trouble is, in all these cases, the mundane ordinary part has to be interesting. Which is where Eddie Brewer falls flat.
The British film has a TV reporter following the eponymous paranormal investigator around (yes, it’s another of those hand-held camera films) through his fairly dull investigations. Then we get to a supposedly haunted block of flats, where we get a few creepy incidents, but mostly a lot more talk, talk, talk about what’s going on, and more talk from people who don’t believe. And then finally we get a murky climax in which lots of weird stuff happens and people die and at the end Eddie is just left wondering what the hell happened.
This could have worked fine if the focus had been on Eddie’s character, but it isn’t; he doesn’t have anything that could be called a character arc. He doesn’t grow or change, but his failure to grow isn’t the point either. Instead, they seem to be shooting for a cinema verite depiction of life as a paranormal investigator … but even if it’s spot-on, it’s a pretty dull life (which ties in with this earlier post). I imagine they’d have cut most of the footage for the TV report. We should have been so lucky.
A minor problem is that in one scene, a girl whispers the true name of the creature haunting her and Eddie is clearly horrified. We never learn what the name is. I would count that as a cheat.
My other Nevermore film was much better, so I’ll save it for Saturday.
Filed under Movies, Uncategorized, Writing
Links in the Mist
A few quick links …
•The Supreme Court decides a warrant to search an apartment doesn’t entitle you to search the owner a mile away. However, poor performance by drug-sniffing dogs is not proof that their performance is actually less than reliable.
•Human Rights Watch reports that 249 people have “disappeared” in Mexico, 60 percent of them probably taken by the government or the cops. And in El Salvador, hundreds of children have been taken over the years.
•The NCAA says that if a college wrestler has a successful music career as well, he’s violating the rules of amateur athletics. Because the NCAA hates introducing the profit-motive in sports, except of course for universities and coaches making a profit.
•The League of Ordinary Gentlemen looks back at when date rape and spousal rape were treated as batshit-insane ideas from the minds of deranged feminists (it’s sort of what I was talking about in discussing Nackles). Much the same attitude, the League concludes, surfaces in the opposition to reauthorizing the Violence Against Women Act. Which in the House version drops protection for abused gay spouses.
•And in Indonesia, a judge says rape is fun for both rapist and victim.
•An Oklahoma politician wants to forbid science teachers from criticizing creationist essays. Florida, of course, tried the same thing several years ago.
•Obama continues refusing to divulge any details about the legal rationale for drone assassinations of American citizens. Or whether his power extends to killing Americans on American soil.
•Slacktivist argues that to support families, conservatives should support workers.
•Paul Krugman points out that David Brooks’ claim facts don’t matter includes the odd argument that since data doesn’t change people’s minds, therefore it isn’t important (of course, economic facts have never changed Brooks’ mind that nothing matters but slashing benefits to end the deficit). Krugman suggests that if so, the fault lies with us, not with statistics. However Duck of Minerva points out that the left isn’t immune to delusions about facts either.
•Speaking of Brooks, here’s another example of him getting his data wrong.
•The use of naked photos as a “revenge porn” tool. More from Yes Means Yes.
•The TSA pats down a disabled three-year-old in a wheelchair.
•A Christian conservatives argues it’s our duty to submit to even unjust governments.
•An Oklahoma doctor fights the birth-control mandate on the ground women who take birth control are “being asked to suppress and radically contradict part of their own identity.” Because all women want to be mothers.
•A Tea Party activist warns us against Obama’s scary black army.
•Rightbloggers proclaim a Day of Resistance to Obama’s tyranny!
•The government is developing a new anti-Internet piracy program.
•Repub majority leader Eric Cantor is proposing ending overtime pay because it’s better for workers.
•Echidne discusses the sexism in this year’s Oscars. The Onion tweet is the most horrific—who the hell thinks it’s funny to call a nine-year-old by the C word?
•A Missouri legislator says any legislator who proposes gun-control legislation should be sent to prison (and proposes a new bill for that purpose).
•Student reports abuse, stalking and rape to UNC (ERROR: Originally I said NC State) Honor Court. Files suit against the university for how it deals with sexual assault. Now a student attorney says the student could be charged in honor court with “intimidating” her alleged attacker.
Even if the alleged victim’s charges are bullshit, punishing someone for making a charge doesn’t serve any purpose except to intimidate and silence victims. There have been way too many cases over the years where the big concern in the community is for the reputation of the feelings of the alleged rapist. This feels like one more case.
Filed under economics, Politics, Undead sexist cliches
Uploading the whole of human experience
One of the annoying things about watching my TV on Hulu (or any of the various network websites) is that they have an incredibly limited series of commercials that I have to see again and again and again.
One that particular annoys me is an iPhone owner explaining the glories and vital importance of having an unlimited data plan: There’s an army of a billion photojournalists out there, ready to record and upload the whole of human experience! All of life is ours to capture and preserve, so why go with some data plan that caps your usage?
The minor annoyance is that no, a billion people with cellphones does not give us an army of photojournalists, any more than a billion people texting gives us an army of novelists. Photojournalism is a skill, not just a matter of pointing a camera because something interesting is happening. I think it is awesomely cool that we have the option to catch a photo any time we see something we want, but photojournalists have way better equipment (I used to work at a newspaper. Trust me, there’s a reason they carry all those lenses) and way better judgment in what makes a good picture. I’m a competent photographer—I’ve never failed to get usable photos for a story—but I’m competent enough to appreciate that really great photojournalism is way beyond anything I do.
The bigger one is the underlying premise. Sure, we could theoretically upload a lot of human experience, but what’s the point? We have the entirety of human experience already—it’s called life. What exactly do we gain if we did upload it?
Not a lot. Part of the key to taking great photos is knowing what to leave out, what not to record. Even the commercial acknowledges this: What we see are things like a mother and child embracing, a mob of teenagers throwing stones, a flower blossoming—striking moments, not the total human experience.
There are stories that attempt to capture the day-to-day sense of human experience. Slice-of-life tales, or personal histories such as Pekar’s American Splendor comics series. As John Seavey notes, this is trickier than it looks. Capturing the mundane details of everyday life and infusing them with some sort of meaning—or at the very least, not making them deathly boring—takes real skill, which may be why even successful true stories such as Perfect Storm or Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil fudge details.
If we did upload everything, it would be like Jorge Luis Borges’ Funes, his Memory (also known as Funes the Memorious), about a man who has total recall of every single minute of his life. It’s so overwhelming he’s incapable of analyzing, classifying or thinking critically about any of it. Or for another comparison, there’s Borges’ Library of Babel, where books that explain the meaning of everything are hidden in the white noise of false explanations and seeming nonsense that make up so many of the other books.
I’m glad the guy has no data cap, but I think he should find something better to do with it.
TPBs and Comics Collections
I planned to do something else but after two days at the Nevermore festival (movies to be reviewed next weekend) and a lot of unrelated schedule disruptions, I’m just going with reviews.
IRREDEEMABLE vol. 3 by Mark Waid and Peter Krause (I previously read Vol. 8) opens as Charybdis of the Paradigm super-team has just defeated the seemingly invincible Superman—er, Plutonian. So everything should be copasetic, but the team’s internal divisions and personal failings result in them falling apart even without an adversary. Good, though I still prefer Incorruptible‘s story of redemption to this series’ story of collapse.
The penultimate ninth TPB of IRREDEEMABLE (Mark Waid, Diego Barreto) is actually a crossover with Incorruptible as we look at the origins of both Plutonian and Max Damage and how they interact (though Max never puts all the pieces together), courtesy of Plutonian’s ET parents as they prepare to put him where he can’t hurt anyone any more ever (“Epiphany is not the same as absolution, child.”). Good—from the volume below, it looks like he will, in fact, redeem himself at the end.
INCORRUPTIBLE Vol. 7 by Mark Waid and Damian Couceiro wraps up the series as the Plutonian saves everyone, Max finally gets some perspective (“If he saved us, the world isn’t depending on just me—I don’t have to be perfect!”) and the world begins to rebuild. A bit too warm-and-fuzzy (ignoring past assertions Headcase is seriously messed up, for instance) but thumbs up overall.
BATMAN: Death by Design by Chip Kidd and Dave Taylor has Bruce Wayne’s decision to tear down a Gotham landmark bring opposition from architectural preservationists, a crooked union leader and the Joker. A good-looking story, but the Joker’s inclusion feels forced just to give us a name adversary.
CONAN: The Hand of Nergal by Timothy Truman and Tomas Giorello is an expansion of one Robert E. Howard untitled story fragment in which a scheming sorcerer’s plan for immortality leads to monsters walking the streets and the army Conan signed up with getting slaughtered on the battlefield. The L. Sprage deCamp/Lin Carter story Hand of Nergal does a lot better with this material (even though I’m not usually a fan of their work)—this never really comes close to fulfilling the eerie tone of the original.
Books
John LeCarre’s TINKER, TAILOR, SOLDIER, SPY brings the retired George Smiley back to center-stage for the first time since A Murder of Quality as a group of agents recruit him to investigate a defector’s claim there’s an Ultimate Mole in the highest levels of the Circus (as LeCarre now identifies Smiley’s brancy of British intelligence). A book that manages to be absorbing (this is more compulsively readable than I usually find LeCarre) despite having lots of talk and very little action; I suspect one reason it’s LeCarre’s most adapted work is that it’s neither as dark nor as heavily Cold War as Spy Who Came in From the Cold so it doesn’t age as badly. This also introduces Karla, a mastermind of Soviet intelligence who met and outwitted Smiley years earlier, and remains the running foe for two more books.
Someone in marketing screwed up the cover for Robert Bloch’s PLEASANT DREAMS as the back cover completely misidentifies the contents. Fortunately, what’s actually inside is excellent, including a creepy haunted house (“The Hungry House”), a pair of accursed spectacles (“The Cheaters”), the gory little “The Mandarin’s Canaries” and “I Kiss Your Shadow” (which now looks like a tale of a female stalker, but back when it came out would have seemed like a twisted take on how women catch and “tame” men into husbands). The weakest stories are “The Sorcerer’s Apprentice” (standard story of a mentally handicapped man tricked into committing murder) and “Sweet Sixteen” (relies too much on then-current fears of juvenile delinquencey to work now, even though the same fears recur generation after generation).
THE SHOCKWAVE RIDER by John Brunner is a 1975 novel set in a dystopian future (heavily inspired by Alvin Toffler’s Nonfiction Future Shock) where relationships are all transitory and “plug-in” and surveillance is omnipresent (both enabled by what amounts to a form of Internet), a situation an escapee from a Think Tank of Doom hopes to change (like Zelazny’s My Name is Legion he’s a chameleon who can escape detection even in a world of massive data-gathering and omnipresent surveillance). Although the lead is interest, this is unfortunately one of those Novels of Ideas where people are forever debating their Brilliant Theories about How To Fix The World rather than acting (and the issues are dated, even though the underlying theme of overwhelming change has hardly gone away)
FRANK R. PAUL: Father of Science Fiction Art by Stephen D. Korshak is a collection of cover paintings by the Golden Age artist, along with a short and interesting biography. While I haven’t always been a huge fan of Paul, this collection of massive spaceships, weird monsters and alien landscapes makes me appreciate him a lot more. Thanks to my friends MLR and freemonkeys for giving me this.
PEACE was Gene Wolfe’s first novel, a magical realist piece in which a retiree slips into his flashback booth while taking time trips to visit his dead doctors and wondering why his house seems to be growing. Unfortunately, the more fantastic aspects don’t leaven the endless mundane reminiscences of his childhood and his family enough to hold me (Neil Gaiman’s afterword insists that the closer we read this, the more amazing it gets, but it’s just the sort of book I’m more inclined to skim). More a case of mismatching writer and reader than an actual bad book, I think.
Filed under Reading
Movies and TV
THE MAN FROM EARTH (2007) is a successful example of something difficult to do—an SF story that’s mostly sitting around and talking about the SF stuff. In this case college professor David Lee Smith tells his colleagues (including Ethan Phillips, Tony Todd and William Katt) that he’s actually an immortal caveman, which leaves them alternatingly firing off questions, trying to poke holes in his story or dealing with his revelations. The Jerome Bixy script has some great touches, like all the stuff Smith doesn’t know (as he points out, even the fact he’s a Cro-Magnon is something he had to work out from reading paleontological books) but a lot of it is devoted to a lengthy discussion of religion (it seems Smith spent some time in Judea about 2,000 years ago …) which is all too familiar (the idea Jesus got his ideas from Eastern mysticism goes back 300 years or more); another problem is that the film’s night scenes are almost totally black. This could easily have been an expanded Twilight Zone episode (Bixby did quite a bit for them) but in a good way. “I just realized your name is a pun—John Oldman. Old man.”
THE GUILD’s fourth season has Felicia Day’s Codex waking up in bed with Wil Wheaton (as Chaos, the leader of a rival guild) and trying to balance what she hopes is a relationship with him with her duty to her own crew. Meanwhile Zabu’s mom returns hoping to see him for her birthday (“Lamest respawn ever.”) and Clara and Tink go into business. The Codex/Chaos bits got too embarrassingly uncomfortable, but overall another win for this Internet series.
DINNER FOR ONE is an old British skit that somehow became a New Year’s perennial in Germany (my sister having returned from there, she steered me to it online): An elderly woman hosts a New Year’s dinner with her dutiful manservant providing all the other people, which gets increasingly comical as he has to drink the toasts for four men (and with each course, a different wine is served …). Beats the hell out of me (and plenty of other people) why it caught on, but certainly fun. “The same as every year, ma’am?”
Courtesy of Netflix I caught up on the first half of the current DOCTOR WHO season as the Doctor meets the world’s most unusual spaceship hostess, rematches with the Daleks and the Weeping Angels and notices that Rory and Amy are getting older—this establishes their time with him runs 10 years from their perspective before their departure in the final episode. This isn’t drastic enough to justify all his brooding in The Snowmen (which comes after this run). Overall, good, though (Rory and Amy will definitely be missed). “I just committe to be a bridesmaid—months in advance!”
