Zack Kopplin cheered for blasting Bachmann

At M-Brane Press, we defend rationality, sanity and science. Over on my personal journal, I tonight declared 17-year-old Zack Kopplin an M-Brane SF "Anti-Douchebag" for his campaign to repeal Louisiana's idiotic Science Education Act, which opens the public schools wide to Creationist bullshit, and for directly challenging Congresswoman Bachmann to cough up her alleged Nobel laureates who actually believe in "intelligent design." The occasional acknowledgement of a regular civilian who has done something great to defeat stupidity used to be something that I just did personally, but now it is an "Official" program of M-Brane SF and M-Brane Press. Stupidity and anti-science are on the march everywhere in the United States. M-Brane stands against this madness.

Gay Marriage: Will Fletcher appoint Supreme Court?

BREAKING—Anonymous sources confirm that M-Brane President-for-Life Christopher Fletcher is about to announce the formation of a “Supreme Court” which he claims will have “planet-wide jurisdiction over the question of the legality of gay marriage.” For months, sources within the Brane’s administration have indicated that Fletcher has become increasingly impatient with “the sheer idiocy of the anti-marriage-quality position and the slow pace of reform by conventional Earth-based governments. And also dumbassity.”

Said one member of the administration, speaking on condition of anonymity, “It’s all he talks about anymore. His entire throne room is acrid with the smoke of burning Maggie Gallagher and Jim Demint in effigy.”

Though the composition of this new court remains unknown, critics fear that Fletcher will stack the tribunal with judges sympathetic to his own position on the matter. Possible nominees to the new court include the following:

Theodore “Teddy” Altman (aka “Hulkling”): Superhero and member of the Young Avengers. Conservative critics of the M-Brane regime claim that Altman cannot be unbiased on the matter of gay marriage since he himself is gay. It is unlikely that this argument will gain much traction within M-Brane Tower.

Jonny Quest: Raised by same-sex parents, Quest is thought to be sympathetic to marriage equality, though his own sexual orientation is unknown. Conservatives insist that Fletcher would never consider Quest for appointment to his new court if he were not already confident of Quest’s bias on the matter of gay marriage. Also, Fletcher’s recent frequent visits to the “Questworld” compound in a subset of aetherspace have drawn much attention.

Magneto: Possibly the most controversial choice; conservatives decry his attempt of a few years ago to use the “Cerebro” device to find and possibly kill all of the “humans,” which they read as code for “straight people.” Also, suspicions linger that Fletcher has recreated a Cerebro machine at the apex of M-Brane Tower. Fletcher’s close relationship with the rogue mutant has been a subject of controversy for years.

Jeff Lund: It is assumed that Fletcher’s life partner would be a guaranteed vote for the government position. Liberal critics, however, point to Lund’s frequent condemnations of marriage as a concept (for all people) and suggest that he is a loose cannon whose vote cannot be predicted.

Legal scholars remain divided over whether M-Brane Tower, as an extra-planetary domain, can in fact assert worldwide jurisdiction on the issue of marriage rights. They also differ in opinion on a recent “legal finding” by the regime which decrees that a new court, if constituted, may not hear arguments based on religion or “the Bible,” as these would be ruled automatically to be not “rational.” It is expected that when the court is convened, opponents of gay marriage will have thirty days to prove their position “rationally.” It is assumed that they will face an uphill battle if religiously-based arguments will not be heard. Also, it is expected that the “gay sex is icky” argument will be excluded from consideration.

Amazon's ebook lending scheme unsettles the usual suspects

Amazon has a new feature for Kindle books where someone who has bought one may lend it to someone else for a limited period of time. I'll skip all the really boring details that would only interest a publisher--if even. I'm a small publisher, and even I find the numbers and terms and little nuts and bolts of it really fucking boring. But for Kindle users, it seems pretty damn cool. But for some small e-publishers, it's the end of the goddamned world because people will illegally steal all their books, because Amazon is a hegemonic Great Satan, they will opt out and even pull all their titles from Amazon, et cetera (at least today, and really just in the way that everything Amazon ever does is the end of the world for a day or two until everyone either forgets about it entirely or takes a pill).

I'm a lurker member of a forum for digital publishers. I keep up on what they discuss by way of emails from a Google Group. I have only commented to the group twice in about a year and a half because I generally don't know much about what they are talking about since I am not as big an ebook publisher as most of the other members and I don't feel as smart as most of them on most topics that they discuss. The first time I spoke up in the group was to suggest to some members that they call off the hysterical lynch-mob mentality over that douche in Colorado with the stupid pedophile book on Amazon (that no one would ever have heard of were it not for internet echo chambers). The second time I commented was just a little while ago this evening. This is what I said in response to a thread of comments that seemed overwhelmingly of the "AMAZON IS THE DEVILLL" and "PEOPLE ARE STEALING OUR STUFF" bent:

What about the possibility that lending could attract new readers that you don't have now to buy new titles? That's exactly how it works with print books. Nearly every author that I have gotten excited about and bought books from is one that I learned about because someone lent me a copy of a print book that that they liked or I read something cool that I got from the library and then ended up buying my own copy or buying other titles by the same writer. Or bought a used copy of something and then later bought new stuff from the same author. This is especially true of some of the more obscure and unknown stuff.

Things are always changing with e-publishing and none of it's perfect yet, but I think that any publisher who believes that they can expand their business by NOT dealing with Amazon is living in a total fantasy world. Amazon's not going away and they are not going to give up on all their plans because a few minor pubs are worried about file-sharing. And opting for a lower percentage to avoid the lending scheme is going to do nothing but reduce your royalties and probably ultimately limit your readership. We'll see how this plays out over time, but I will be shocked if anyone loses a dime because of this. Because the people "borrowing" your reader's copy weren't ever going to buy it from you anyway--you didn't even have that customer to begin with and probably were never going to get them. But now you might because someone new, some friend of friend, might say, "Wow, this is cool! Where do I get more?" Almost everything on my shelves of print books got there in exactly this way, and it can work like that with ebooks, too.

So, what does anyone think about this? Did I make any sense, or am I totally smoking something? It just seems like common sense to me that if you have an interesting book and author to offer, then the more people who know about it will ipso facto result in better sales. My little press makes no money, but it brought in a lot (relatively speaking) more in Year Two than it did in Year One. Year Two was a year in which I straight up gave away lots and lots of content just to get it in front of some new people. I'd really like to sell a lot more copies of M-Brane SF Quarterly #1 (a print book, not a Kindle book). While it has not been made available as an ebook, I do have a PDF of it that I could release if I wanted to. I bet that if I gave away a hundred copies of that for free and encouraged those hundred recipients to share it with at least one other person, I would sell at least ten copies of the print book to people who had never heard of M-Brane before. And I'd have at least two hundred people who would have thought about us recently and might buy something from us later. And what I would lose? Nothing. In fact, I'd gain about thirty bucks in royalties from selling ten print copies and I'd get new readers that I didn't have before. Who might buy stuff later. Because of how frakkin' cool our stuff is. I'm considering it. 

Right-wing submissions

I got a snarky email the other day which seemed to allege that I am something of a hypocrite because I "act all liberal" and yet won't publish anything in M-Brane SF that is of a right-wing bent. In fact, I have published a few stories related to economic and climate issues that come from an obviously right-wing point-of-view, and I am about to publish a story in M-Brane #19 that is obviously political but which is also uncomfortably ambiguous as to where it sits on the political spectrum, and it may raise some eyebrows because of that. 

But the fact that I "act all liberal" should actually be a clue that I don't generally want conservative politics in my zine. I don't see the fact that I reject, as a matter of policy, items that seem to advocate for religious fanaticism, sexism, homophobia or Glenn Beck as being inconsistent with how I represent myself. Being a "liberal" (which I am) does not mean I have to be liberal about putting up with bigotry and irrationality. In fact, it means quite the opposite. Indeed, to put a finer point on it, it means that there is an actively enforced (if unwritten) policy of not accepting such material for publication. So the emailer, or any other submitters, should not be surprised if I pass on so-called "Christian" material or items which advocate by implication the assassination of President Obama. Indeed, it should be assumed that I would be repelled by such. And it's not "censorship" that I reject expressions of such deranged ideologies, since most of the rest of the media seem very open to them. It's a "free market" in general. But this particular one happens to be closed to such nonsense.

It's like they think they have "caught" me in something: "Ah ha!  He says is open-minded, yet he rejects the 700 Club!" As if that's an inconsistency.

Back to the slush.

Irrelevance

This recent post from Jason Sanford gets to the heart of something that has bugged me for years, and he gives a great example of it by pointing to a micro-press lit mag which says in its writer's guidelines: "Unsolicited submissions must be accompanied by a receipt for a hardcover or paperback from a real-life bookstore." The rationale for this piece of douchebaggery is: "We believe that there are more people who want to be published in literary magazines and small presses than there are people buying these magazines and books. This program is not meant as the solution. There is no one solution."

There's a lot that's wrong with this. Sanford, in his concise rebuttal, points out that not everyone lives near a brick-and-mortar bookstore. This is not only true, but getting truer by the day. A couple weeks ago, I needed new glasses and I had an eye appointment and bought new glasses at the Lenscrafters store in the St. Louis Galleria, the biggest fanciest shopping mall in the St. Louis metro area. While I could give a fuck about 99% of the contents of the mall, I figured I could at least pass the hour while I waited for my new glasses to be made browsing in the bookstore (or, at the very least, wander into Abercrombie & Fitch and gaze at wall-sized photos of comely half-naked youths). I vaguely remembered that they once had two bookstores in that mall. I figured that wasn't true anymore, but I thought the crappier one of the two still existed. But no. This gigantic "upscale" shopping aneurysm that is the Galleria has ZERO bookstores in it nowadays. Not a fucking book or magazine to be found anywhere in all its square mileage of retail valhalla. Oh, and there's not even an Abercrombie & Fitch either! And this in a mall that has north AND south locations of Sunglass Hut AND Sunny Shades (not even counting their in-store kiosks within the anchor stores). I was so freakin' bored, I made phone calls. Phone calls! I couldn't even go browse in the Apple Store because it was iPhone pre-order day and the whole place was under the control of Imperial Stormtroopers.

But I digress. The real point is that times, as usual, are changing. A lot of people never lived near a bookstore in the first place. A lot of people have seen their nearby bookshops vanish. And a lot of people (like me, for example) who do have some bookstores nearby (though not in the Galleria) often prefer the convenience and selection of the online retailers. People can piss on Amazon and B&N and the ebook publishers all they want, but the existence of these things has made more authors' work more available to more people than what was ever possible in earlier decades. People who live in the backwoods of Idaho or Manitoba can read the same stuff that someone in New York City or London can nowadays, and that was absolutely not true years ago without a lot of work and expense on the part of the person living in a remote area.

But this is all a sort of side issue. The real problem is that there are simply not enough readers of any kind anymore. In the US, the percentage of the population who buys and reads book is tiny (single digits). And of that tiny wedge of the population, the percentage that reads fiction of any genre is incredibly small. And of those who read fiction, the number who are reading "literary fiction" in "literary" journals is smaller still. Smaller to the point of being virtually non-existent outside of the literary and scholarly types who themselves would like to write and publish such fiction. This probably sounds familiar to any genre editors who wish more people would buy their zines. Ever wonder if we're doing it for anyone other than other writers and editors? So, in the genre press, we have this problem as well, and we are way more popular than the "literary" zine press. It's pretty discouraging, and I'd love if the lit mags would find an answer to the problem, but I think the problem is too big and they're too small. And getting smaller all the time. Making writers send receipts showing that they walked into a "real"  bookstore won't stop the shrinkage.

Impending ICE STORM

A possibility exists that my operations may be knocked offline for an unknown length of time should power outages and internet outages occur here due the the oncoming hellacious ice storm. This one is predicted to be as bad as the December 2007 event which wrought much destruction and mayhem in this area, and is expected to be nearly as horrendous as the Christmas Eve blizzard in some respects. I will attempt to publish M-Brane #13 Thursday before the storm hits and tend to some other business, but if I go dark, then it is due to the storm, and I ask for patience from people who may have pending business with me in the coming days.

"The Face of Evil..."

Read this post on Brandon Bell's blog about the proposed anti-gay law in Uganda and the role of Christian right-wingers from this country in it. While I have of late been keeping most of my political comments over on my Live Journal in recent months, more people read this page, so I am mentioning it here.

SF in the age of the irrational: Shall we fight?

Writer Ian Sales recently posted on his website a thoughtful article titled Science Fiction: last bastion of the rational in which he examines whether or not sf as a genre ought to be didactic. He says he never subscribed to the Hugo Gernsback attitude that sf ought to be about "educating the public on the possibilities of science," and he also initially doubted the "Mundane SF" movement  of writers like Geoff Ryman as well as the call from Jetse DeVries to have sf be a deliberately optimistic genre.

"To me, sf is a literary mode," says Sales, "not a teaching tool, not futurism." But he goes on to discuss the continuous attack upon science, reason and fact by the right wing in the US and the UK and wonders if perhaps sf should take a stand against this and play a real educational role. He also takes a swipe at the fantasy genre and its current popularity as something that supports or is maybe symptomatic of the retreat from rationalism in our cultures. That may be overstating the case since, while there are currently a lot more avid fantasy readers than avid sf readers, the total reading population of all books of any kind at all is incredibly tiny in this country (I think reading remains more of a habit in the UK, but I'm not sure). The genre that is more popular by far than even fantasy is, sadly, right wing political screeds by douchebags like Bill O'Reilly and sociopaths like Ann Coulter. 

I wish I knew if there was a productive role that our genre could actually play in blunting the march of lunacy and denialism and bugfuck craziness that seems to be overwhelming every discussion in the US and (I hear) in the UK as well. We live in a world where not that many people do any long-form reading and where so many people are simply not interested in facts or reasonable arguments. People pick their facts, or simply invent them, to support their opinions. 

Here's a recent example of people making up shit: A few weeks ago NPR reported that some gun nut group (not the NRA, a different smaller one, can't remember name, something like Gun Owners of America) sent letters to all of the United States senators asking them to not support health care reform on the grounds that it would be an assault on gun owners' rights. How so? Well, first the evil Obama would presumably decree that having a gun in the house is a health risk. But how would the health system itself have knowledge of who owns guns? Because the Big Government would somehow enter this  information into the "national medical records data base" created  earlier this year by "the stimulus package." Senators who support this, these gun nuts warned, would face some consequences, because this groups next action would be to focus their efforts on those states with the best chance of recalling their Senators.  Ok, well, here's just some of what's wrong with that: 1) There is not now nor is there likely to ever be this national medical records data base. It doesn't exist and 2) it certainly was not created by the stimulus legislation; it's paranoid fantasy, delusion, totally made up, no such goddamned thing, and probably even impossible or at least discouragingly difficult to do; 3) And about recalling the Senators?  Can't be done. No provision exists in the Constitution to recall a United States senator. Very few ways exist to remove a Senator aside from death in office or losing an election, and one of those ways is not voter recall. 

So the entire thing is a fiction designed to shore up a ridiculous political position and insert still more hysterical propaganda into the "debate." It should be embarrassing to the people behind it. But it's not. They don't care. They're True Believers in their own made-up "facts." And now there are probably a lot more people running around this benighted land thinking there is a Big Government Medical Database with notes in it about their bloody guns. What can the remaining rational people do against a giant phenomenon like this? Will reason and fact perish forever or will there eventually be a backlash? Does science fiction have anything important to say about it? I hope so.

Rant: Rage against Walmart

This is a tough issue, and I don’t have a good answer. But I know where I stand on it.

Check out this article about this ridiculous pricing war among of the giant discounters on their on-line sale price for new bestseller-category books. I was alerted to this situation this afternoon by a good friend, known perhaps to some of you as “The Little Fluffy Cat,” and @littlefluffycat on Twitter. She was calling on the Twitterati to stand against this rapaciousness and douchebaggery and instead buy their copies of Stephen King’s new book Under the Dome from an independent bookseller instead of Walmart, Target or Amazon.

Yeah, I get it that it can be more expensive to buy stuff that way. I understand that many people (like me, for example) live in the hinterlands and there simply aren’t any other options if you want a brick-and-mortar store (but we do get the internet here). Well, part of the reason for that lack of options is that the big box operators are so huge that it’s nothing to them to literally lose several dollars per copy on a book just so that they can have the best price. An independent operator can’t afford to lose money like that. So they go out of business or never go into business in the first place. And for what? So Walmart can win?  Walmart and its ilk don’t give a fuck about offering the best price on a Stephen King novel. Walmart doesn’t make its money selling books at all. Walmart makes its money by being the only goddamned store in town for groceries, toiletries, paper products, automotive supplies, clothing, pharmaceuticals and everything else that people need to buy whether they want to or not. How do they get to be the only store in town? By suckering all of us into their stores for the “best price” (and poorest selection, and worst service, and shoddiest merchandise, but so what?). Every time one of these eyesores sets up shop, it’s like a nuke explosion: everything dies within a wide radius around it. This dumb price war among the store’s online operations is just another manifestation of it. What, do they want the whole world wide web to also turn into suburban commercial blight? Disgusting.

Perhaps this is one of those things that I am getting too exercised about. After all, what does it have to do with me? I can’t afford to buy new hardcover books anyway, even at the discounters’ prices. Part of the reason for that is that I lost everything I ever had financially, in part as a casualty of the big box economy, and I have yet to recover (those years I spent in business for myself are nothing but failure on my resume, in the estimation of most employers). But if I wanted Stephen King’s new book and had the money to spend on it, I’d try like hell to buy it from someone whose real business is selling books.

Because if the day comes that there are no dedicated booksellers left (online or in meatspace), and it’s all in the hands of the mega-retail monsters, then where will you get those special treasures, those beloved book that are not Stephen King or Dan Brown novels, those books that really matter to you after the bestseller lists are forgotten?

GUEST POST by SUE LANGE-- Michael Moore: The Conscience of America

[Welcome Sue Lange to the M-Brane blog with this interesting and timely item.--CF]

October 3, 2009: I was all set to do a shill post on my latest release (Uncategorized, BookViewCafe.com/Kindle; $1.99) which is obliquely related to M-Brane SF because the collection contains my story “Zara Gets Laid,” first published here in the June issue. I was all set to promote myself, but then I realized the world has bigger fish to fry. There are more important things to do than try to wrench a buck out of the unsuspecting science fiction reading public. And I discovered that because last evening I attended the opening of Michael Moore’s latest film, Capitalism: A Love Story.

Moore has a tendency to do that: make you rethink your priorities. With him, trouble’s always brewing somewhere and you and your irrelevant ass need to check it out. The trouble in the case of this latest movie happens to be the foundation of everything we know and love: our economic system.

This is not new for Moore. He started out knocking the biggest of the capitalists, GM. Since Roger and Me, his movies have portrayed formidable cracks in the American armor in the form of racism, gun affinity, selfishness, indifference to the poor and weak, and they all seem to come in some way from our undying belief in capitalism.

This movie, while not presenting anything overly new, does a good job of wrapping up Moore’s philosophy and illustrating why he feels the way he does. He makes a good case, especially since he hasn’t changed his spots over the years. Ever since GM pulled the rug out from under Flint, he’s been singing this song.

There are often moments in Moore’s movies when you have a tendency to say, “C’mon Mike, you can do better. Really now, how can someone lose a home they’ve had in their family for generations? If that guy hadn’t taken out a mortgage just to buy a new big screen TV and pair of Nikes, he wouldn’t have found himself subjected to the cataclysmically rising interest rates. And why do people go for those variable rate loans in the first place? Could Mike’s subjects just be dumb?”

And by the way, why does doesn’t his cameraman speak English? Are their chinks in Moore’s armor as well as in America’s? Lots of people think so. I don’t know. He doesn’t seem to hide his faults. He shows us everything about everything himself included. His best exposé, though, is when he shows us something creepy and dirty in the powerful. In this movie he showed us multinationals taking out life insurance policies on their employees, naming themselves as beneficiaries. It’s such an incredible idea, you almost have to laugh. Like a bad Monty Python routine: twisted, marginally funny, and in a language Americans have a hard time understanding. (Don’t get me wrong, I love my Monty, but that twit sketch was just this side of offensive.)

Moore has a way of distilling what seems to be a mass of convoluted and insurmountable problems down to a simple fact or idea. In this case the bad idea is each American’s belief that he or she will one day be a member of the 1% club. This group contains the 1% of Americans that hold 95% of the money. Yes, most of us believe that we will one day party with Bill and Sergey. Apparently we live in Lake Woebegone, Minnesota where all the children are above average.

This belief that we are special promotes a personal greed in each of us. From every guy that mortgages his children’s birthright to Roger Smith who pulled the rug out from under an unsuspecting city in the rust belt, we are all too greedy because we think we’re special.

I like Mike. I think he’s the conscience of America. He’s abrasive. He bugs us all at one time or another. Even Ray Bradbury, the conscientious icon of science fiction, is pissed off at him. And for what? For stealing the title of his own political statement: Fahrenheit 451. Seems he would have been on board with Mike, but Mike can do that to you. When he was filming down on Wall Street at quitting time, he was calling out to the traders as they were leaving the building. He wanted someone to explain derivatives. Most ignored him, but when he asked one guy for some advice, the stock broker said “Stop making movies.”

Good thing Mike has a thick crust. He’s going to need it, because this time he’s pulling out all the stops. He’s going to lose sympathy for this one. Pay attention to the song at the end. I don’t want to spoil it, but I’ll just say it’s not sung in French or with a Liverpool accent. Americans will understand the words. And recognize the tune.

And if there’s one thing Americans won’t tolerate it’s Satanism. Did I say Satanism? I’m sorry, Mike did not once mention Satanism in his movie. Doesn’t matter. Americans equate the actual word he used with Satanism. And that, folks, may be why we have a problem.

Sue Lange’s story, "Kangaroo Wars," is in M-Brane SF #9, out on newsstands now. Well, maybe not newsstands. M-Brane has not capitulated to the military-industrial complex and so does not have national distribution at all the Hudson newsstands across the continent. Get it: here. [Editor's note: Now is possibly the best time ever to start subscribing to M-Brane, and you can do it for free by pre-ordering Things We Are Not! New subscriptions will start with issue #9, containing Sue's fine story.]

Announcing GreenPunk

It seems that no matter how hard status quo-oriented people want the world of the last few decades to carry on forever, it is obvious that the old days are not only ending, but perhaps actually ended a long time ago. Consider these facts:

1) Finance-Capitalism has collapsed. No matter how Republican you want to be, it is, as you have known it, done, down in the ash-can of history, dead forever. Finished as surely Stalinism was. The party’s over, and it probably should have been cancelled long before the food and the band showed up;

2) The planetary climate is undergoing a shift that is currently and will continue to be perceptible within the lifetimes of people living now. The estimates of how long it will take to move radically toward a warmer and much different-looking planet are starting to look way too conservative and, (sorry to my neighbors, the “I-Don’t-Need-Facts-I-Got-Faith” folks of Jesusland) there is no serious scientific doubt anymore that something is happening. None at all. You can argue all day about how and why and what to do about it, but it is happening, and continuing to pollute the hell out of the planet is not going to help;

3) We have created (and by “we” I mean, collectively, the people of countries where people get to sit and type on computers like I am right now) mountains and heaps and rafts and flotillas of—excuse my language—shit. There is shit heaped everywhere, towers of manufactured crap, hordes of cheap and useless consumer goods, monumental barge-loads of human-made garbage as far as the eye can see. There’s a vortex of water bottles, trash bags and other plastic crap the size of Texas out in the Pacific ocean for eff’s sake! This is simply unsustainable in a world where the level of human anguish and the depth of planetary exhaustion and the complete and total fuck-all-this world-pain demand profound change at nearly every level.

End of lecture. But I said all that as a preface to presenting the following: Matt Staggs’ “GreenPunk Manifesto,” published yesterday on his fine blog Enter the Octopus. He proposes to identify and promulgate a sub-genre of fiction centered around this premise:

“GreenPunk: a technophilic spec-fic movement centered on characters using and being affected by the use of DIY renewable resources, recycling and repurposing. GreenPunk would emphasize the ability of the individual – and his or her responsibility – for positive ecological and social change.

“Rejecting steampunk’s romanticism while embracing its focus on approachable, ‘knowable’ technology (as opposed to the ‘black box’ nature of digital tech), GreenPunk envisions a world in which the detritus of consumer culture as propagated by the Elite is appropriated and repurposed by the masses toward the reconstruction of a devastated ecology and the address of social ills.”

Please go to Matt’s page and read more. A lot of people have posted interesting comments suggesting some already-existing literature that may fit under this umbrella or which may presage it. Also, according to recent Twitter updates from Matt, there will soon be a full-blown web resource for GreenPunk (if it hasn’t been launched already), and I will update as appropriate. Finally, I will commit right now to using M-Brane resources, such as they are, at some level with producing an anthology of new GreenPunk fiction should that seem to be demanded by the Movement.

[I’ll note that the website www.io9.com also ran an article about Matt’s post today, but (as is common on that site) somewhat missed the point (at least in user comments) that this is first and foremost a written fiction concept and not just a visual aesthetic. That may come later, but the TV/movie/videogame fanboys who like to dump on book-related ideas are not yet the whole intended audience for this. Also, I swiped that image of a library with trees growing in it from Matt's own post.]

Duncan demolishes another moralizing phony-baloney homophobe

Please enjoy this fine, fine item by Hal Duncan, one of my favorite writer/bloggers. He always says what I would say if I were even half as smart as he is:

Notes From The Geek Show: An Open Letter to John C. Wright

A rant over at "Region Between"

I have posted a rant about the health care reform debate at the Region Between. It makes references to time travel, and so could be of tangential interest to M-Brane readers who may not otherwise wish to endure such a rant.

Independence Day thoughts

I’ve been at work on Independence Day every year of my working life, and will be again tomorrow, so I don’t give much thought to the traditional recreational activities associated with it, and generally take the grouchy view that the holiday is little more than a flimsy excuse for non-service sector people to get an extra day off from work (even when it’s on a Saturday). I do, however, like to affirm my patriotism which expresses itself in two major forms: 1) my appreciation for and willingness to fight for our country’s remarkable and resilient Constitution, and 2) my concern and compassion for our military personnel abroad who are in increasing danger as both of the wars enter new phases. Things I don’t do: festoon the house in flags and placard my car with “support the troops” stickers. The first is a phony me-too gesture and the second is useless.

A(nother) moronic political event has happened in my temporary home state that seems well-timed for this holiday. It’s often said that the people get the leaders they deserve. If that is true, then the people of Oklahoma must be some real scumbags. Or at least two thirds of them, the percentage of the electorate that tends to vote for the likes of Jim Inhofe and Sally Kern. Let me tell you about Sally Kern, because you will not have heard of this slavering beast since you do not live here. She’s an OKC-area state legislator who made some news last year with her insistence that homosexuality is a worse threat to America than terrorism. Yesterday she conducted a press conference unveiling her Oklahoma Citizens Morality Proclamation. If you can stand to read this prose-form turd (it’s torture), and if you can get past the first paragraph with all the lurid religious boilerplate, complete with eighteenth-century-style capitalized nouns as if it’s the Declaration of Independence, you will notice two things:

1) It is laced with both direct and indirect references to homosexuality. This is my favorite passage: “WHEREAS, deeply disturbed that the Office of the president of these United States disregards the biblical admonitions to live clean and pure lives by proclaiming an entire month to an immoral behavior.” Aside from the gibbering dumbassity of that statement’s apparent meaning, please note also its clunky syntax, its amateurish style, its near incomprehensibility. The whole document is like that.

2) It is one of those typical, ever-more-common attempts to make a raving nutcase Christian fundie statement sound like it would be endorsed by the Founders by means of cherry-picking quotations or creating dishonest paraphrases of things that people like Thomas Jefferson said. It has become a standard line from the fundies that America is a “Christian nation” founded by “Christians” (and so should always be a country only for Christians, by which they means racists and homophobes—make no mistake: this is a publicly acceptable cloak for white supremism and neo-fascism with all their attendant prejudices such as anti-Semitism, gay-bashing and Muslim-baiting).

Here’s something that Thomas Jefferson—the Founder of Founders, non-Christian deist and the author of the document that Kern’s proclamation parodies—said about it: “Christianity neither is, nor ever was a part of the common law.” Here’s something else: “But it does me no injury for my neighbor to say there are twenty gods or no God. It neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg.” And he said many, many other things about the topic, not one of which ever endorsed a position the likes of which Kern and her baboons in human guise proclaim. In fact, he was so doubtful about the usefulness and veracity of the Bible, he famously created his own version of it by excerpting the passages that he liked and discarding the rest. Jefferson was no fundamentalist and neither were his contemporaries. Yet this myth persists and is propagated once again by Kern’s stupid proclamation. No real American historian (and by “real” I mean a PhD-holding published professor at an accredited non-sectarian college or university who has studied history from primary sources) advocates or would even be bothered to consider this fundie revision of American history. Let me say that again in a slightly different way, just to make sure that my meaning is clear: the exact number of real scholars who believe in the Kern concept of American history is as follows: zero. It’s one of these made up, phony-baloney debates that the extreme right makes their whole domain of discourse. They make up a debate topic and then blab about it on the 700 Club and their silly grunting radio shows until the general public starts thinking that it’s a real debate. Another example: Creationism. No debate exists about this among scientists—none at all—and hasn’t for a century, yet the fundies have created one and have convinced the majority of Americans (who don’t study it and don’t really know much about it) that there is some kind of epic debate in the realm of science that will be settled in their favor any day now. Another example: Torture. No debate exists about this among people who have studied it, yet the majority of people have been persuaded that torture is a valid debate topic and that on Independence Day, our great nation can somehow remain great if we engage in such behavior.

On Independence Day this year, I am making my own proclamation, or maybe it could be called a secular prayer: “WHEREAS Stupidity has beset and overwhelmed the Nation and the People and eaten out our Sanity, we strive for the Restoration of Reason to the Land.”

[The images are of Marines in Helmand Province (Afghanistan) and Sally Kern in OKC (Dumbfuckistan) asserting her Constitutional rights...that those troops are defending. Hardly seems fair.]

Some random Real World Crap (TM)

Yeah, it's one of those days. I'm cranky about some Real World Crap. But I will try to lighten the mood of this rant by including a science fictional tie-in with each segment of it:

1. The far right and the far left are wrong in their assessment of Obama's handling of the Iran election situation. What Americans need to understand is that most Iranians, regardless of their position on their own internal politics, distrust the United States government. The last thing the opposition to the regime needs is the perception that the American President is weighing in on it in a meddlesome fashion. When Senator McCain insists that Obama ought to rant and rave like a nutcase about how the Iranian election was a corrupt, fraud, sham etc.  he just makes me even more glad than I already was that he is not currently our President. The right needs to understand that the opposition to Ahmadinejad does not necessarily consist of people who would be pro-American if they were to prevail. The left needs to realize that these courageous young protestors that we see in pics via Twitter probably all believe that the US provided Saddam Hussein with the chemical weapons that Iraq used against them during the war in 1980s, and they all know for sure about how we and the British overthrew their elected government in the 1950s and re-installed the despotic Shah. Sure, the US has some legitimate gripes with Iran, and we should all deplore their regime's thuggish behavior and theocratic ideology, but the Iranians have plenty of very good reasons to not like our government either, and those reasons are shared by people across their political spectrum. It will take a lot of time and work to undo the distrust in both directions. [SF tie-in: In Frank Herbert's Dune, the Emperor Shaddam IV miscalculated the seriousness of the unrest in Arrakis' native population. Had he not cast his lot with the Harkonnens and turned a blind eye to their excesses, he may have avoided the sequence of events that led to the collapse of his government and his own exile to the prison planet Salusa Secundus.]

2. This one will piss off some people. I recently unfollowed all of my Twitter gays who seemed to be doing nothing with their Twitter time other than complaining about how Obama has "betrayed" them because he hasn't already managed to end "don't ask/don't tell," repeal the stupid Defense of Marriage Act (signed into law by our last Dem Prez, by the way), and other things. I want all this stuff to happen, too, but I am bright enough (and have a long enough memory) to understand that he is not going to frak away the whole first term of his Presidency by engaging with these things immediately before he has done the big-ticket stuff like health care reform. As one who worked on the Clinton campaign in '92, I remember with great pain and bitterness how the first thing President Clinton did upon taking office was to embroil himself in the gays/military issue and ended up creating the moronic DADT policy.  I want it gone, and I believe Obama will do it, but we need to wait a little bit longer. He's got a lot of stuff to do thanks to the Long W Dark Age that preceded his still-brand-new administration. [SF tie-in: In the newer Battlestar Galactica TV series, Laura Roslin becomes President immediately after the near-total annihilation of the human race. Though she is a liberal on social issues, she is forced to make a deal with anti-choice religious fanatics so that she can proceed with her overall agenda of saving humanity.]

3) Sorry for the triviality of this next item. It's way too low-brow for this fancy and high-minded blog, but anyway...I saw people on Twitter retweeting about a dumb petition to get shlock internet/TV celeb-gossip slug Perez Hilton removed the list of nominees for an award of some sort at an event called the "Fox Teen Choice Awards."  I am quite completely out of touch with what's popular on TV with the kids nowadays, but this is evidently some kind of big-ass hoo-ha with the adolescents, and apparently Mr. Hilton's nomination for one of these awards is drawing ire and fire from parental units and other people who have assigned themselves the fraudulent task of guarding the purity of American youths. Look, I can't stand that dude either, but after examining the petition to block his nomination, it appeared that the only problem the originator of the petition specifies with Hilton is that he supposedly places "uncensored gay porn" on his website. Which makes me wonder if there's not a tinge of homophobia behind this. Maybe not, but it feels a bit like that (since a gay-related offense is the one and only thing mentioned in the single short paragraph that explains the petition). Of course, the official story on this would be that his online behavior is not a "good role model for teens." Well, duh. Why the hell would anyone think that a pop culture douche-bag would be a good role model in the first place? Why would you look for role models in the kinds of venues that people like Hilton and others like him inhabit anyway? Someone is going to win that dumb award, and if it's not Hilton, then it will probably be some other vapid creep. Maybe they can give it to the former Miss California. [SF tie-in: In the film Soylent Green it is eventually revealed that the titular food product is made out of human corpses.]

The future crept up on us

When I waste a post on Real World Crap (TM), I generally apologize for it. This time, however, I intend to offend a certain segment of the population, specifically two-thirds of the voters in my temporary home state and probably nearly all of the non-voters.

Though The Future--the fabled Twenty-First Century--as day-dreamt of by a little boy in the 1970s (me) has not offered the space stations, Lunar colonies, Martian cities and alien invasions for which I had hoped, it has offered some "futuristic" episodes.  Do you remember Paul Verhoeven's classic film Robocop? It depicted an America gone into severe and permanent decrosion, where the Constitution and the rule of of law had been suborned by self-serving corporate interests, where power rested not with the people but with a class of political nincompoops who lived in the crotch-pockets of monied assholes, where ridiculous gas-guzzling automobiles roamed the streets as gigantic surrogate penises for their shrunken-balled, limbic-brain-driven drivers. Fiction on film in the 80s.

Then, in December of 2000, W was appointed President of the United States in a 5:4 decision by the Supreme Court. (Remember, this was well before the Terminator became governor of California) Our first court-appointed President's administration seemed, at first,  one that would pass rather inconsequentially. He had no serious agenda other than the usual GOP-type tax cutting and budget-wrecking, and seemed content to wile away his Presidency being on vacation 3 out of 7 days (not counting weekends). Then the 9/11 horror happened and the country lost its collective mind.

Fast-forward to November 2004: W is elected President (elected this time, not court-appointed). And America has become a country in severe decrosion, a land where the rule of law has been suborned by self-serving corporate interests, where all power is held and exercised by a class of crass political nincompoops, where ridiculous gas-guzzling vehicles roam the streets as gigantic surrogate penises for their shrunken-balled, reptile-brained drivers. And where we send kids to die on a daily basis in a war of choice, designed by men who want to line their pockets with its filthy spoils.

Fast forward again. In 2008, the genius of the Founders and their Constitution saw their  greatest validation in the election of a new leader who was then able to peacefully displace the old one.

Yesterday when I was listening to the highlights of President Obama's speech in Cairo, I was repeatedly struck by how the plain-spoken, common sense things he said were a lot like...well, what a smart person would say. You know, like someone who has thought about stuff for more than a minute and has maybe read some books in his life, and maybe paid attention in school a couple times. A few years ago, when I dreamed of an imaginary future President who was not a Book-of-Revelation psychopath, I imagined a man or woman who would say things about how progress toward peace on Earth will not be made by wallowing in the drooling, blithering, Texas-sized dumbassity of the past, how America and the so-called "Islamic World" need not be at war, how Hamas needs to quit being a bunch of rocket-firing suicide-bombing fuck-bags, how the Israelis need to unambiguously stop their goddamned colonization activities in the occupied territories, how Ahmadinafuck needs to quit denying the Holocaust, and so on. And that's actually what the real-life President of the United States said in Cairo in the year 2009 (albeit in slightly different language). It felt futuristic, kind of like the Bush election, but in a good way. The old hopeful kind of feeling about the future that I had as a boy.

Well, in Oklahoma, most people beam with pride over their U.S. Senators, Tom Coburn and Jim Inhofe. They're both right-wing Froot Loops complete with striped novelty toucan beaks,  and they are all-around douche-bags from the heyday of the Massengil era. If there were ever a Senate vote that went 98-2, you'd know who the two were without needing to Google it. But of the two of them, it's Inhofe (prick, pictured above left) who is the real piece of Frankenstein work. Coburn at least makes a serious and principled--if nearly always factually and ideologically  erroneous--stand against wasteful government spending. That's his brand, and he is semi-credible at it. Inhofe, on the other hand, is a classic Washington fat-head with an Okie accent: he is one of the biggest pork-barrelling, pig-shit-shoveling "conservatives" in the entire Congress. I don't have all day here, so I can't list (or even summarize) all his grotesqueries, so I'll limit it to these few examples: today he carries the right-wing water by complaining about government spending all day while at the same time fighting hammer-and-tongs to preserve Okiehomie's share of Pentagon waste that even the Pentagon doesn't want anymore (think weapons to fight the Soviet Union in WWIII in 1985); in the Dark Times, when the GOP controlled Congress, he was the unlikely head of the Senate environment committee where it seemed to be his main job to deny and denounce science that has long since been conceded by everyone on Earth save for Limbaugh, Coulter and a few other extra-chromo mutant throwbacks; he routinely uses public money to go on religious junkets abroad and doesn't even bother to apologize for it (cuz it's for JuhEEzus, y'know); and now, just today, he is all over the local news calling President Obama a traitor, and wondering "whose side he's on" for telling the fucking truth.

Senator Inhofe, aside from his other excesses, opposes equal civil liberties and equal justice under the law for all Americans, and, in so doing, violates his oath as a Senator and rejects the founding principles of this nation. It is he who is un-American, is a friend to extremism, and it is he whom I flip off with a big foam novelty hand with extended middle finger and say that he can get the frak out of my country right now and go join his nutcase buddies in "the border regions of Pakistan." Yeah...that's what I mean exactly: this guy's outlook on the world--with its intolerance, social-issues stick-up-the-assedness and religious bigotry--is much more similar to that of our nation's arch enemy, Osama bin Laden, than it is to the traditional values that most Americans cherish. So suck that, wingnuts.

Which brings me, at blessed bloody last, to the bitter conclusion of this screed. The truth, of course, is that it's not merely Senator Inhofe who is a joke. He is the duly elected representative of the people of his state, and it is they, the Okie voters, who are the real problem in this whole affair.  I lack the sulfuric-acid tongue and rhetorical fire to properly address them, so I will rely, as I often do lately, on quoting Harlan Ellison, when he said of an entirely other group of people: "I do not think I malign them too much by characterizing them as eminently average...I do not think I demean them much by perceiving them as creeps, meatheads, clods, fruitcakes, nincompoops, amoeba-brains, yoyos, yipyops, kadodies and clodhoppers." [An Edge in My Voice, 126]

It's back! The creeping crud!

I hate to even bring this up here, but it's a comfortable place for me since people can read it or not and it will not be seen by anyone in my immediate vicinity (J has never read one post on this blog ever), which is sometimes for the best. About once every year or so, I find myself way down deep in some kind of morbid depression (as in much much worse than my normal everyday dim view of current circumstances). I've sensed it massing for a few days, and I spent all day today deliberately doing things that normally keep me cheerful in hopes I can push it away. It didn't work. I failed at each thing, even cooking dinner which is normally a guaranteed moment of success for me no matter how frakked up the rest of the day is. I never ruin dinner...but I did tonight. Just one symptom.

It would be so easy to just list objective things that seem to contribute to my foul state. Like the usual shit: I hate my day job, I hate this city that we stupidly moved to, and so on. But that's not it. All of that was just as true yesterday and last week and last month and six months ago and it didn't cause this feeling, this creeping crud that's almost a palpable and visible thing around me right now.

This despair happens, as I said, on a fairly annual basis. But this time, the timing could probably not be better. This is happening within days of the release of M-Brane #5. I am locked into that. It is happening on schedule no matter what. Last time I found myself in the crud was during the pre-M-Brane era. I didn't have the zine, this blog, Twitter, any email correspondence to speak of, no other hobbies or pastimes of any sort really--wasn't even seriously working on any fiction--so I was able to thoroughly wallow in my stupid self for days on end and do nothing else. That option is not available to me this year, and I'm so glad of it.

It's just a temporary (albeit recurring) neuro-chemical fuck-up, a mess of synapses not firing in the right way, the "wiring" between memory and current circumstances all dicked up somehow. It's easy to say (when you're not feeling it), "It's all in your head." But I guess that's literally true, isn't it? There is no palpable, visible crud other than what I imagine. I'm entirely sick of it and myself tonight, but I bet tomorrow will be better. I even think it will lift a bit when I hit "publish post" in a few seconds.

[Accompanying image represents the cleansing fire that I've been thinking I need tonight...not REALLY, but hmmm....]

A little triptych of annoyance and douche-baggery!

I’m going to talk about some Real World Crap (tm) again, but I will endeavor to have a science fiction genre tie-in for each of the three topics below:

1) I participated in a scheduled swamp-the-White-House-switchboard action this afternoon on behalf of Lt. Dan Choi, a soldier (with Arabic translating skills) who has fallen afoul of the Pentagon’s “don’t ask-don’t tell” policy. While he is just one example of many thousands of people who have been caught up in this nonsense, his cause was picked up as emblematic of it by people who have decided it’s time for the new President to get going on making good his campaign promise to change this policy. My views on this issue can be guessed easily by any of my regular readers, so I won’t go on about it length. I’ll just say, as I did in 1993 when the Clinton team made a mess of this issue, that the President needs to settle it by executive order as President Truman did in Executive Order 9981 racially integrating the military. The Commander-in-Chief has broad power and discretion in matters of Pentagon policy, and I’d like to see our current President use it. No more dumbass Congressional hearings with right-wing Senators calling eighty-year-old retired admirals and other assorted homophobes to testify for weeks on end. There’s no rational basis to carry on like this, all their arguments have been thoroughly debunked for ages, and it’s time for the President to simply end it. [SCIENCE FICTION TIE-IN: In Haldeman’s Forever War, they get used to gays in the military…in a rather radical way.]

2) From the NPR Talk of the Nation website: “Rachel Lehmann-Haupt turned 35 and started to think about freezing her eggs. After two years of researching the doctors and the technology, she froze eight eggs, enough to try for one pregnancy. Lehmann-Haupt [is] author of In Her Own Sweet Time…” I listened to this segment on the radio at work today and got kind of annoyed. I am myself a feminist and would take up arms in the street to defend women’s rights to control their reproductive choices, and would not normally want to bag on someone like this about an issue like this…but I found her thesis about the “new options” for women and child-having to be incredibly upper-middle-class in its point-of-view and very out of touch with the real options for ninety-nine percent of people. Freezing eggs at a cost of tens of thousands of dollars for use later in case “Mr. Right” doesn’t come along until one is past optimum childbearing years? Renting a womb in India? If you’ve decided not have a kid until your fifty or sixty, does it just have to still be your own biological one? There’s always a lot of pre-existing ones to adopt. This attitude that it is somehow a right and need to have a family by exactly the perfectly ideal method at exactly the perfect time in one’s life seems really out of touch with reality for most people. It also seems tone-deaf to the tenor of the times…and frankly pretty douchey, too. [SCIENCE FICTION TIE-IN: In Robinson's Red Mars, the mysterious Hiroko Ai gets hold of the sperm of a whole bunch of “Mister Rights” and, along with her own ova, brews up the first generation of Mars-born kids in ectogene tanks in her secret south-polar hideout. Wild!]

3) I listened to an audio clip yesterday from talk-radio personality Laura Ingraham’s show. Evidently, the talk show people and the teabagger circuit tried to gin up a stupid controversy over President Obama and VP Biden’s recent lunch at a burger joint where the President—get this—ordered his cheddar burger with mustard on it, no ketchup. “What kind of man,” Ingraham wondered, “gets mustard on a cheeseburger?” Hmm. Maybe an adult one? Maybe one who is not a three-year-old? This weird right-wing fixation on what “liberals” eat is perhaps one of their most irritating traits. As a professional chef and an omnivorous foodie, I CAN NOT STAND it when these people suggest that be a real American or a real man (whatever that fuck that is), then you also have to display ignorance of and distaste for variety and quality in food. Mustard, for eff’s sake! How weird and un-American and unmanly! I am so happy that we finally have a President who is smart, speaks intelligibly, knows stuff…reads books even. This silly food thing that they do sometimes is just another manifestation of their crazy anti-intellectualism: “He eats mustard on burgers: he is, therefore, an effete snob, not a real man!” I got news for you Ingraham, et al : geek is the new chic, smart is cool, and dumb is sooo 2004. A virtual Vulcan is President, and it is the era of the nerds’ righteous revenge! As a card-carrying member of the elite foodist clique, I love this President and his condiment choices. [SCIENCE FICTION TIE-IN: A black man is elected President of the United States, and shortly thereafter orders mustard—oh, wait…that really happened! The future is here!]

And now some "real" world crap...

Regular readers know that I don't do this every day--talk about things out of the real world that trouble me--but I need to get this topic off my chest here since no one I know personally wants to listen to me talk about it.  I'll do another post about something fun later today to make up for it.

It's no secret, even in the mostly non-political M-Brane world, that I like President Obama a lot and that I hope and believe that he is making the correct decisions toward fixing the stupid old Bushed-up world.  But here's a couple decisions that he'd better be right about or I will be very disappointed: 1) the increase in our "investment" in Afghanistan and the implied support for its outrageously inept and corrupt government; 2) the slowness of our military withdrawal from Iraq and our continued support of the Iraqi government.

My reason for concern is the same in both cases. Aside from the probable ongoing waste of American "blood and treasure," I find it grossly inappropriate that American troops' lives are put on the line for governments that appear to have values as repugnant as those of the regimes of the Taliban and Saddam Hussein, or which are at least heading that way. Two examples, one from each country:

1) The Afghan government, apparently conceding that it stands no chance of having legitimacy and asserting authority over its country, is caving in to nutty whack-job demands that a little thing that we usually call "marital rape" (or just "rape") be legal among Shia Muslims in the country. Or what the law actually says, as I understand it, isn't just that a man is not breaking the law when he rapes his wife, but that she is breaking the law by resisting him (thus "making" him "need" to rape her, I guess?). This is ridiculous. This is the sort of thing our troops are fighting for? Really? Fuck that. I know they are never going to come up with what we would recognize as a Western-style democratic society--and Obama has acknowledged that--but this is way too much to stomach. 

2) The Iraqi Interior Ministry, law enforcement and their government at the highest levels seems to be doing nothing at all about the wave of torture/murders of gay men and boys in Baghdad. This, of course, was incited by a whack-job issuing a crazy decree, including announcing on satellite TV channels that "sodomy" must be punished by death. I will not describe (nor show the photos) of one of the methods used to torture to death these boys, some of whom apparently survived the attacks but then were denied care at the hospital. Again, as in the above example, what are Americans doing there if this how things are to be? Granted, there are plenty of other societies where atrocities like this go on, but we didn't pay for all of them in blood and money like we did for this one. And it's not just an expected feature of it being a Muslim society (before anyone starts telling me about that, Mom and Fox News): while homosexuality is far from popular in any such societies (fundamentalist Christian compounds like Oklahoma don't dig it either), people who are gay don't always have to live in fear of being literally murdered in an ongoing serial murder campaign in more moderate places like Jordan and Lebanon. 

What I said, part 2

Referring back to one of my April 3 posts...add Vermont to the list!