Today and tomorrow are busy days in the Library, so posting will be light, if at all. But fear not! Spring break starts Saturday, so I’ll have something fun and thought provoking up shortly thereafter. In the meantime, check in with my pals at the Liberal Coalition. They’ll keep you informed and amused until I get back.
There’s been a lot of chatter in the blogosphere about Spain, the Madrid bombing the election and what it all means. there seems to be a contingent that says that deviating from our failed policy of bombing the bombers and towing the line means giving in to the demands of the Fundamentalists.
This attitude that we can somehow appease Al Queda just underlines the problem with our way of thinking about this conflict and the world in general: it’s too conventionally cold war. Too statist. This is not helped any by the label that the president has chosen for this conflict: War on Terror. The word “War” implies that there is a time for fighting and that one day, the fighting will end, one side will have met all their goals, defeated the other side and called out Bingo! The fighting will stop, some sort of peace treaty will be signed and we’ll all go on like before. Except that’s not what this conflict is about.
Simply put, their is no war. There are no sides. As many have pointed out, you can’t defeat terrorism, as it’s a tactic, not an ideology or a country or a group of people. You can no more fight a war against terror than you can fight a war against libertarian politics or the tooth fairy. Somewhere, someone will read the books of Ayn Rand or hear the tooth fairy story and take some action because of it.
As Lambert pointed out at Corrente, what we’re really fighting is Fundamentalism, which is a profound reaction against modernity. We’re fighting disperate groups of people who want to return to the middle ages, who want to destroy civilization (with all its discontents, maladies and shiny new fangled liberties). They aren’t trying to change the system of governance or right a wrong. They’re trying to undo Western Civilization. They’re trying to kill the modern world. So it’s not a matter of doing what they want in Spain, Saudi Arabia or anywhere, so they’ll stop. Because they won’t stop, no matter what we do. So all this blather about the voters in Spain appeasing Al Queda because they got together to peacefully make use of the mechanism of government in order to enact change as they see fit is bullshit. worse than that, it’s crass politics. The Spanish people stood up to the Fundamentalists, said, “Fuck you, we’re going on being western, civilized and modern, so stick that pipe bomb where Allah doesn’t shine.” The people of Spain should be applauded for being Spanish, not chastised by chowder headed GOP lapdogs for going against Lord Bush and his lunatic decrees.
And if you can’t see beyond Bush and his failed attempts at power and empire than you stumbling into a sort of fundamentalism of your own, complete with a desire to kill those who disagree with you and change the world as you see fit. The “terrorists” aren’t just over there, wearing turbans and chanting Wahabi hymns. They’re right here too, spitting fire and chewing on brimstone, straitening their ties and quoting Bible passages for all the wrong reasons.
via Hesiod we learn that John Kerry caused 9/11. At least, that’s what the GOP dreck machine is saying.
I think I saw him lurking around White Chappel back in �88, as well.
Every time we hit bottom with these pigfuckers, Karl Rove calls in the steam shovels and takes us just a little bit deeper into the shit.
Please! For the love of Buddha!Donate to John Kerry so we can get these asshats out of office before they drive us all freakin insane with their goofy rantings.
Time:
Administration sources tell TIME that employees at the Department of Homeland Security have been asked to keep their eyes open for opportunities to pose the President in settings that might highlight the Administration’s efforts to make the nation safer. The goal, they are being told, is to provide Bush with one homeland-security photo-op a month.
I thought this was why George Bush created Fox News, so that OHS could, you know, defend our shores from threats, not arrange fucking photo ops!
So when we have our Madrid train bombing, can we all remind Bush of just what OHS was supposed to be doing while they were stuffing his cod piece?
Fundamentalist Christians have, for several decades now, been twisted into a fit over Role Playing Games like Dungeons & Dragons. At first glance, this seems like simply a symptom of their pathological irrationality. But I think it’s a bit more deep rooted than just fear of the Devil lurking in a Unicorn Poster*. Fundie Christians hate D&D because it threatens their monopoly on overly complex fantasy worlds with arbitrary rules.
“Oh, sorry, you failed your saving role, so it’s off to the flaming pit for you.”
These concerned christians fear that their children are being led into occultism and madness by a game, despite the fact that, time and again, there is no evidence that it’s the game that makes people do anything. The few unfortunate lunatics who kill their siblings with axes have a tenuous grasp of reality to begin with and there’s no reason to believe that switching brands of fantasy, from those written by Wizards of the Coast to those written by ancient dead shepherds would effect the outcome one way or the other.
You aren’t saved from anything by believing in nonsense, even if your brand of nonsense has the benefit of 2000 years of cultural acceptance. You still believe in things that are not, and act as if they are, which is dangerous behavior all around, but is potentially fatal on a global scale if you are the President of the United States and believe that the King of the Angels shits magic ice cream every time you kill an infidel.
So what does this have to do with the Culture War?
Well, first off, what I have been referring to the Culture War is really a fictitious meme created by a few ultraconservative pundits as a way of framing the dialogue between infophobes and infophiles in terms of conflict. (For more on this reframing of the issues of the day in terms of conflict see Orcinus). War implies that there are two sides, one good, one bad, engaged in a fight to the death for the supremacy of each side’s favorite world view, winner take all (at least, this is the traditional, comic book view of war as noble champions versus despicable agressors. Can you guess which ones the Neocon Pundits fancy themselves to be?)
The Culture War is in fact, just a continuation of the ongoing dialogue between opposing viewpoints, but through the means of ridicule and name calling. We characterize these viewpoints as Conservative or Liberal, running on a sliding scale from the Far Right to the Far left. But like all arguments based on abstractions, this is a generalization that obliterates nuance and thoughtful discussion by forcing everyone with a viewpoint (which is everyone with two or more brain cells to rub together) to pick a side, cross the line and square off against an opponent. This leads to the invective and name calling that has increasingly become a part of public debate.
But reality is far more complex and dynamic than this push-me-pull-you political shorthand leads us to believe. And that’s the problem. Conservatives can�t win in a fair intelectual fight, even one they started. They need to roll with loaded dice, make up the rules as they go and then decide which rules are applied and when (and change them as they see fit). Talking common sense to them only makes them angry, because common sense doesn�t enter into the picture. The Sean Hannitys and Bill O�Reillys and George W. Bushs of the world are engaged in a dangerous role playing game. It�s dangerous because they forgot to leave their dice in church where they belong and when you point this little fact out, they stick their fingers in their ears like the intelectual six year olds that they are and scream, �Nah! Nah! Nah! Can�t hear you!� and then threaten to beat us up after school. But that�s really all we can do is try to persevere with logic and heart and gradually, chip away at their straw men and expose their lies and trickery. That�s how we won the Scopes trial. It�s how we declared our Independence from King George and why we did have to fight because he wouldn�t see reason and wanted to keep playing his Geopolitical real world version of Risk.
And that�s the only time war becomes an acceptable outcome: when the Infophobes start hurling bombs instead of just insults.
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*My wife told me once how, as a child, she had received a unicorn poster in school as a reward for completing a reading contest. She took the poster home and hung it on her wall, as children are want to do. When she came home the following day, she discovered that her mother had thrown the unicorn poster away because unicorns, being mythic creatures are thus, satanic and the poster was a doorway through which the Devil might creep into their very Catholic home and steal the silver or rearrange the flowers. My wife’s copy of the Collected Stories of Edgar Allen Poe and Stephen King’s It met similar fates.
Ed. note: I know, I promised a critique of Secularism Vs. Theocracy but I realized while writing the third part that the whole idea of the culture war was a false meme. So perhaps I�ll extoll the virtues of a Secular Society over a theocratic one another time.
On this day in 44 BC, Julius Caesar was assassinated by Marcus Brutus.
[…I]n Pompey’s theater, at the foot of Pompey’s statue, where the senate happened to be meeting that day in the temple of Venus that was part of the theater complex. The foundations of the theater survive to this day, where the modern Roman restaurant Da Pamcrazio invites passersby to dine where Caesar was slain. It’s in a wonderful part of the old city, near the Campo dei Fiori. The salad bar’s pretty good, but avoid the Texas toast, and above all, Beware the Ides of March.
I’ve taken down the link to the excerpt from my Novel, the Tragic Circus. I’m in the process of polishing the MS, getting ready for round two of my submitting it for publication. Thanks to everyone who gave feedback and comments. I’ll keep everyone posted as I recieve rejection letters and, hopefully, one day soon, the magic acceptance letter.
I heard the news on the Beeb last night, that Al Quida has claimed responsibility for the Madrid train bombing, as a retaliation for Spain’s backing of George Bush’s little Mesopotamian Excursion. What I didn’t know though was that the attack happened a week before Spain’s general election. Or that the attack happened exactly two and a half years after the WTC attack. (I think on some level I had intuited this but never bothered to do the math).
My heart goes out to Prime Minister Aznar and King Carlos and the people of Spain (see Jeb, it’s not so hard to find out who these people are).
And it makes me wonder if this is what we have to look forward to in six months: another attack on Bush’s watch. But this time he’s not going to get a chance to spin it around to his favor. It’s plain now that George Bush is an absolute failure when it comes to the War on Terror. He spent the last two years going after a shattered dictator in an unarmed country while the real terrorists were at large, plotting and calculating, just like they were three years ago when Bush was vacationing on his ranch.
That about sums up George W. Bush’s term as president: On Vacation.
Like many, I’ve been following the adventures of America’s Worst Mother (TM, TBogg industries, a joint venture of Nabisco and Lockheed-Martin). I’m amused at his snarky take on this strange, tortured, repressed woman and her lamentable children with names that make the Zappa kids sound normal. But today I actually perused Meghan Cox Gurdon’s column at the National Review.
It’s astounding. Like a opium dream crossed with an Oprah Book of the Month title (the old ones, when she was promoting single debased women authors with no talent instead of raping the corpses of the great writers of the 20th century, looking for pocket change). This week’s column is centered around a mysterious white stone, some red-leather clad teacher dancing a tango and the children foaming at the mouth over fire breathing rabbits. Either this woman is feeding her children horse doses of LSD in order to record the results ala Tom Wolf, or else she’s been spending too much time with a hookah pipe in her mouth. Either way, it’s a frightening sight to behold.
It never ceases to amaze me when I’m confronted by the level of crap that gets published these days. What’s even more astounding is that the “writers” of such shit get payed while I can’t seem to find a publisher interested in my stories*. Apparently I’m not cloying, don’t have children to exploit in some Dickensian fantasy gone horribly awry and still retain a shred a human decency. All traits that bar one from syndication these days, apparently.
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*I received another rejection letter Wednesday, this one for some short stories I was hoping to have published, hence the undercurrent of frustration.
update: In retrospect, I realize that me grumbling about syndicated columnists and moaning about my umpteenth rejection letter may strike some as a bit childish. Generally speaking, I regard rejection letters as a badge of honor. Moby Dick was rejected numerous times, as was Ulysses and Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance was famously rejected by over 100 editors before it was published and it’s now a classic. So there. But, It’s been a frustrating week, what with grad school and my wife being in another state and on the most frustrating day, I returned home to find that little gem of a rejection letter waiting for me, so it was not exactly what I’d call a cheery moment. But in the future, I will keep the bitching to a minimum. I won’t say it’ll never happen again because, well, it’s my blog and if I feel like moaning, damn it, I’m going to moan!
One of the first modern skirmishes in the Culture War was the Scopes Monkey Trial.
The early 1920s found social patterns in chaos. Traditionalists, the older Victorians, worried that everything valuable was ending. Younger modernists no longer asked whether society would approve of their behavior, only whether their behavior met the approval of their intellect. Intellectual experimentation flourished. Americans danced to the sound of the Jazz Age, showed their contempt for alcoholic prohibition, debated abstract art and Freudian theories. In a response to the new social patterns set in motion by modernism, a wave of revivalism developed, becoming especially strong in the American South.
~Douglas Linder , from An introduction to Tennessee Vs. John Scopes
This will be a reoccurring motif in the Culture Wars, all the way up to the present: the reaction to cultural advancement by “Traditionalists” who fear that their comfortable assumptions are being subverted by Infophiles bent on shimmying their way down the slippery slope to Hell. The Traditionalists (which I refer to as Infophobes) do not see the benefit of lessoning human suffering through the application of our wits and intellect as a good thing. Despite the fact that it has been, at every turn, the Infophiles that have stood for the betterment of society as a whole, by championing advances in science, medicine and social philosophy that improve the lot of humankind, the Infophobes have tried to halt progress out of an irrational fear of the new.
Who would dominate American culture–the modernists or the traditionalists? Journalists were looking for a showdown, and they found one in a Dayton, Tennessee courtroom in the summer of 1925. There a jury was to decide the fate of John Scopes , a high school biology teacher charged with illegally teaching the theory of evolution. The guilt or innocence of John Scopes, and even the constitutionality of Tennessee’s anti-evolution statute , mattered little. The meaning of the trial emerged through its interpretation as a conflict of social and intellectual values.
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William Jennings Bryan , three-time Democratic candidate for President and a populist, led a Fundamentalist crusade to banish Darwin ’s theory of evolution from American classrooms. Bryan’s motivation for mounting the crusade is unclear. It is possible that Bryan, who cared deeply about equality, worried that Darwin’s theories were being used by supporters of a growing eugenics movement that was advocating sterilization of “inferior stock.” More likely, the Great Commoner came to his cause both out a concern that the teaching of evolution would undermine traditional values he had long supported and because he had a compelling desire to remain in the public spotlight–a spotlight he had occupied since his famous “Cross of Gold” speech at the 1896 Democratic Convention. Bryan, in the words of columnist H. L. Mencken , who covered the Scopes Trial, transformed himself into a “sort of Fundamentalist Pope.” By 1925, Bryan and his followers had succeeded in getting legislation introduced in fifteen states to ban the teaching of evolution. In February, Tennessee enacted a bill introduced by John Butler making it unlawful “to teach any theory that denies the story of divine creation as taught by the Bible and to teach instead that man was descended from a lower order of animals.”~ibid
We can speculate about Bryan’s motivations all we like but we will never really know what motivated him to take up such a cause with his famous vehemence and elocution. Perhaps Bryan really was simply concerned about the Eugenicists. Given the role such proponents of racial purity would play only a decade later, it is a laudable notion that he was simply a crusader against pseudo-science and intolerance. But that spins the facts at hand in a very wide circle. One does not defend reason and good sense by beating it to death with a Bible. Though this is often the claim of Traditionalists who join such related battles as the Right to Life Movement and the Anti-stem Cell movement. they may want to defend the sanctity of the human spirit but they almost always do so at the cost of human life.
Perhaps it’s a little hyperbolic of me to suggest that the Scopes trial was a life and death struggle for the human mind. Perhaps. But the Human Mind is where we’re fighting the Culture War. And while the Monkey Trial ended 79 years ago, it does not mean that the fight against evolutionary theory has ended. if anything, the Infophobes wroth mightily at their defeat in Tennessee and have been redoubling their efforts to suppress the teaching of Evolutionary theory ever since.
As recently as January of this year, the state of Georgia considered banning the word ‘Evolution’ from its biology curriculum. An Orwellean gesture if there ever was one. How would banning a word stifle the idea behind it?* Obviously, it doesn’t and luckily, in this case at least, level heads prevaled. The “buzzword” evolution remains, to vex the Creationists with all its magical might.
But of course, their are no more Creationists anymore. No. Creationism went out with the Reagan Administration. Even Traditionalists can evolve, apparently (just don’t tell them that). Creationism now has donned a lab coat and walks about thumping it’s copy of On the Origin of Species (the one with the suspiciously well worn leather cover) and talking all about Intelligent Design (ID). Which is merely more magic words conjured up by linguistic shamans to give their favorite Zombie notions the stench of Academia, and thus credibility (Night of the Living Creationist doesn’t have the same ring to it as Intelligent Design).
In short, ID proposes the same thing as current evolutionary theory, only with the added benefit (or the superfluous, third nipple as it were) of there being a Designer behind the whole scheme. This Designer is of course never named outright (and which name would you use? Doesn’t He have nine thousand names? Hard to cite Him as a source when the bibliography runs longer than the paper). Of course, what the ID proponents fail to realize is that even a cursory examination of actual Evolutionary theory renders the idea of a designer irrelevant, based on Ockhams Law. But then they wouldn’t be Creationists if they respected scientific method, now would they?
“Well,” say the Creation Scientists, “Evolution is Only a theory! Shouldn’t we open the floor to other theories as well?” I’ll let Stephen Jay Gould field the response to this rather self serving statement:
“Well evolution is a theory. It is also a fact. And facts and theories are different things, not rungs in a hierarchy of increasing certainty. Facts are the world’s data. Theories are structures of ideas that explain and interpret facts. Facts do not go away when scientists debate rival theories to explain them. Einstein’s theory of gravitation replaced Newton’s, but apples did not suspend themselves in mid-air, pending the outcome. And humans evolved from apelike ancestors whether they did so by Darwin’s proposed mechanism or by some other yet to be discovered.”
� ” Evolution as Fact and Theory ,” Hen’s Teeth and Horse’s Toes: Further Reflections in Natural History , New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1994, p. 254.
Lucky for us Infophiles, we have such supremely intelligent and bold generals as Dr. Gould to help us in the ongoing Culture War. And though Dr. Gould has left us bodily, there remains a wealth of knowledge and guiding light in his work, to serve as ample ammunition:
“‘Creation science’ has not entered the curriculum for a reason so simple and so basic that we often forget to mention it: because it is false, and because good teachers understand exactly why it is false. What could be more destructive of that most fragile yet most precious commodity in our entire intellectual heritage � good teaching � than a bill forcing honorable teachers to sully their sacred trust by granting equal treatment to a doctrine not only known to be false, but calculated to undermine any general understanding of science as an enterprise?”
� “Verdict on Creationism,” The Skeptical Inquirer , 1988, 12 (2): 186.
In Part three, we’ll look at the two opposing base camps in the Culture War, the Secularists and the Theocrats.
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*Animistically, speaking, the word itself is the thing itself. So, banning the magic word “evolution,” makes the whole concept go poof! And all those black magicians in white lab coats subsequently scuttle off to their dank laboratories to wring their hands and mutter. At least in the mind of the sorts of folk who think Jesus spoke with a King James accent and think that Semiotics is a four letter word.
Read Part One
