The workers’ flag is bluest blue
According to a recent poll [PDF] with a three-point margin of error:
- 55% of likely voters think think that the phrase “a socialist” describes President Obama “very well” or “well”.
- 51% of likely voters disapprove of how President Obama is doing his job. When asked why they disapproved, only 8% of those who disapproved described him as “socialist” or “communist”.
I wonder what proportion of voters both consider Obama a socialist and approve of his job performance.
Married white man, creative, seeks sadist
As I mentioned a while back, I am getting back into SF-writing after a long absence. I have a story written and and almost (I hope) submission-worthy, but I would like to get feedback from some more people before actually sending it out. So I am willing to let you read “The Blessed Ones”, this 11,500-word story of mine, if you would only repay me with a thorough and ruthless critique. Everything is fair game: plot, characters, world-building, science, sex/race/class issues, etc.
Herewith, the teaser.
When Diana Rosenberg was six, she asked her father how to spell those strings of nonsense syllables that her mother said to him every morning and evening, sounds that she could not quite imitate and that didn’t resemble any language she heard in school, even on the playground. Her father explained that men could never remember what the Five Blessings sounded like, and anyway, they weren’t exactly words—they were sounds that touched a different part of the brain. The First Blessing, he said, was for housework; the Second was for out-of-house work; the Third was for fidelity; the Fourth was for listening; the Fifth was for safety. Her father spent a long time explaining “fidelity” to her, but the other four terms seemed perfectly clear to her.
By the time Diana was in fifth grade, she understood that “safety” was a euphemism. By the time she was in eighth, she realized that she would never hear her mother give her father the Fifth Blessing; even mentioning the topic to her parents earned her a cold look.
If you want to see the rest, drop me a note. If you don’t… I have more where that came from, bwah-hah-hah.
IMPORTANT BUSINESS PROPOSAL — BUY THIS BOOK
Every once in a while my kids get a book about Africa from the library, and invariably, it reinforces the image of the continent as one massive wildlife preserve with the occasional village. You’d never know from these books that, for example, Lagos and Kinshasa are among the largest cities in the world.
Adaobi Tricia Nwaubani, born and raised in Nigeria, the daughter of an accountant and a teacher, apparently had a similar problem. In this interview, she says:
Most of [the books I read as a child] were about African children living in mud huts and hawking oranges to pay their school fees. I read so many of these books that I began wishing my family also lived in a mud hut with thatched roof, and subsisted on proceeds from our yam farm.
She went on to write I Do Not Come To You By Chance, a novel about urban, internationally connected, 21st-century Nigeria. My children are about ten years too young to appreciate it, but you, Gentle Reader, are not.
The novel describes the coming-of-age of Kingsley Ibe, whose college-educated parents raised him to believe that hard work and a good education are his tickets to success and respectability. Except… in spite of his college degree and his excellent grades, Kingsley remains unemployed. As his family’s financial situation grows more desperate, his only source of help is his uncle, a high-school dropout who has become fantastically wealthy running 419 scams. Hijinks, as they say, ensue.
The novel hits almost all the right notes: the characters are engaging, the plot moves right along, and it is intriguing to see the whole world of Internet scams from the other side. The only place I lost suspension of disbelief is in a brief scene where Kingsley meets an old classmate who works in the United States, and rattles off the degrees that he and his American relatives have picked up. (A master’s in “Data Transmogrification” from Yale?)
I don’t know if this is the author’s intention, but I can’t help reading the novel as a commentary on itself. Given the asides that explain Ibo culture and Nigerian politics, Nwaubani appears to have written the book deliberately for a foreign audience. Unlike the 419 scammers, she gives us honest value for our money. But like them, she can prosper by presenting a certain image of her country to people much wealthier than her compatriots. So when her depiction of Nigeria rings true, is it because her depiction is true? Or is it because she tells me what I want to believe? I’m betting on “is true”, because judging from the interview I linked to above, people in a position to know what Nigeria is really like don’t see anything amiss in the novel. And if Nwaubani had wanted to use her literary talents to make a dishonest buck, she could have been a kick-ass 419 scammer.
My fellow American religious fanatics
Living in Israel for eight months, even as a student in an almost-entirely English-speaking environment, made me feel very American.1 One of the features of Israeli political culture that caught my eye was that in Israel, the state serves to allocate privileges and duties among groups, and not just among individuals.
The Israeli educational system illustrates the phenomenon. There are not only separate public school systems for Jews and Arabs, but separate systems for secular and Orthodox Jews. Haredi families who consider the state religious schools to be too left-wing can send their children to schools in the Chinuch Atzmai system, which is not run by the Ministry of Education but receives heavy subsidies from the state.
Israel is a peculiar country, especially when it comes to religion/state relationships, but when it comes to state-sponsored religious education, among developed Western2 nations, the United States is the real outlier. In Germany, Catholic, Protestant, and Jewish religious education is provided through the public schools at state expense. In Great Britain, daily worship is mandatory (although, apparently, it is often pro-forma) and religious education is part of the standard syllabus; furthermore, parents may send their children to faith schools that are run by religious bodies, funded by local governments, and regulated by the national government. In some Canadian provinces, Catholics or Protestants can form parallel school systems in areas where they are religious minorities, and other systems for subsidizing religious education exist, depending on the province. Turkey has vocational high schools that train students to become state-employed imams.
The Religious Right in America hopes some day to reverse Supreme Court decisions that shut down religious observance in the public schools, but as far as I can tell, they do not hope to reproduce the Israeli or German system in America: that is, they do not want a multi-confessional school district to set up separate classes or parallel school systems for Baptists, Pentecostalists, and Catholics. They simply want school boards to have the same constitutional power to establish a school-prayer text as they currently have to schedule football games. In recent years, some conservatives and libertarians have taken a different approach, advocating for school vouchers. But here, the emphasis is on empowering individual families to choose a school for their children, not on empowering religious bodies to establish schools where those children might attend.
The American separation of church and state can also be contrasted with the French practice of laïcité, where friction with the Catholic Church over administration of churches led to entangling the French government in the process for nominating bishops, and where anxiety over overt expressions of Islam led to a ban on wearing conspicuous religious symbols in the public schools. If such laws were passed in the United States, liberal organizations like the ACLU would fight them as vigorously as they fought against mandatory school prayer.
In both liberal and conservative visions of the US Constitution, there is no recognition of religious communities as entities apart from voluntary associations of religious people. An American is free to profess the Catholic faith, pray according to Catholic traditions, and join with other Catholics to incorporate churches, schools, and so forth. Catholic voters and legislators may use their influence to move public policy in a direction closer to their religious beliefs, to the extent that the Constitution permits. But Catholicism as such is no concern of the state.
Our human relationships are defined by more than just citizenship; our religious affiliations are not just associations we have chosen, but reflect powerful feelings of identity. But American political activists who agree on little else share a disinterest in elevating those identities to legal personhood. The individual is both the object and subject of the law.
In other words: We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. — That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed.
1 Or, as one might say in Spanish, muy estadounidense.
2 As far as I can tell from Googling, Japan and South Korea do not have any kind of sectarian religious instruction in their public schools, nor do their governments sponsor religious schools.
An unpatriotic thought
If it weren’t for those trouble-makers in 1776, my fireworks and barbecue would be three days earlier.
PSA: How to recognize that someone is drowning
The Instinctive Drowning Response… does not look like most people expect. There is very little splashing, no waving, and no yelling or calls for help of any kind. To get an idea of just how quiet and undramatic from the surface drowning can be, consider this: It is the number two cause of accidental death in children, age 15 and under (just behind vehicle accidents) – of the approximately 750 children who will drown next year, about 375 of them will do so within 25 yards of a parent or other adult. In ten percent of those drownings, the adult will actually watch them do it, having no idea it is happening.
If you don’t want to be one of those adults, read the rest.
via kdorian
Getting the point
The Seven-Year-Old had been spooked by a book he had been reading in his bed, and I was looking for something to distract him from his fears. I picked up Sally Miller Gerhart’s Wanderground, flipped through it, and then thought better of offering it to him.
“This probably isn’t a book for seven-year-olds,” I said, recalling that although the world the book portrays is bucolic, some of the stories within are less so. “It’s a book about a bunch of women who live without any men.”
The child, who had seen the map in the frontispiece, asked, “Is ‘Dangerland’ where all the men live?”
“How did you figure that out?”
(I do actually recommend Wanderground… to grown-ups. For the purpose of this book, puberty is probably a necessary condition of grown-up-hood, but not a sufficient one.)
Writer’s trance
After a long long hiatus, I am using some of my Copious Free Time for writing science fiction. Not wanting to repeat the mistakes that I saw in a certain Internet imbroglio last year, I am also trying to give myself a better multicultural education, and one of the first books that came to hand was called, natch, Multi-Cultural Literacy. In one essay from that book—“Tlilli, Tlapalli: The Path of the Red and Black Ink”, by Gloria Anzaldúa—there is this passage:
When I create stories in my head, that is, allow the voices and scenes to be projected in the inner screen of my mind, I “trance.” I used to think I was going crazy or that I was having hallucinations. But now I realize it is my job, my calling, to traffic in images. Some of these film-like narratives I write down; most are lost, forgotten. When I don’t write the images down for several days or weeks or months, I get physically ill….
I believe this is the sensation that, in the fanfic community, is known as “plotbunnies”.
Missing the point
Scene: A father is reading And Tango Makes Three to his three-year-old son.
Father: “…Roy and Silo taught Tango how to sing for them when she was hungry. They fed her food from their beaks. They snuggled her in their nest at night. Tango was the very first penguin in the zoo to have two daddies.”
Three-year-old son: No. One of them has to be the mommy.
Unprophetable art
If we the infidels of the United States were actually groaning under the heel of an Islamist dictatorship, a government that dealt out harsh punishments to those it perceived as enemies of the faith, it would make sense for us, as a protest, to organize an Everybody Draw Mohammed Day. Defy the regime! Fill the jails! Fight the power!
If America swarmed with jihadists who, in spite of the best efforts of the police, could execute some random sample of those who offended their religion, then an Everybody Draw Mohammed day would do nothing to stop them from killing again; it would just give them a broader selection of targets to choose from. The proper response to such a terrorist campaign would not be more drawings, but more criminal indictments against the terrorists.
Here in the real America, about five years ago, we already had a controversy over cartoons depicting Mohammed, and despite much hand-wringing from American newspaper editors (including, to their great discredit, the editors of the Boston Phoenix) along the lines of “OMG we’re afraid to publish these”, those who did publish the pictures did not suffer terrorist retaliation; the publishers were college newspapers at the University of Illinois and Dartmouth, not exactly hard targets. Here in the real America, within the past six months, we have seen one would-be terrorist set his underwear on fire and one who didn’t know how to construct a car bomb that actually exploded. I would be a lot more frightened of al-Qaeda if their Department of Exploding Human Resources could recruit some higher-quality terrorists.
If your Muse inspires you to draw a picture of the founder of Islam, your right to do so is fully protected by the First Amendment, and anyone who retaliates against your art with threats of violence should be prosecuted. But this campaign to épater les imams is not a bold strike against the forces of intolerance. At best, it’s wanking; at worst, it’s a rallying point for bigotry.
If you as a civilian are inspired to put your life on the line to defend the United States Constitution against terrorism, please consider, instead, volunteering to be an escort at an abortion clinic.
