Thanks to Lauren McLaughlin for pointing this out:

Starbucks has capitulated to Christian fundamentalists who protested Starbucks putting a quote from Armistead Maupin on its cups. So now Starbucks cups have an expressly Xian message: ?You were made by God and for God, and until you understand that, life will never make sense.?

Boycott those cowards! Show ?em what we want on our cups! ? er ?

If you?re mourning the relative failure of Serenity and the fact that, barring some miracle, there won?t be any more Firefly adventures, there?s one bright spot in the ?Verse. Apparently Pocket Books are gearing up to release at least two original novels set in that universe, and a dozen authors have submitted proposals, including Keith R.A. DeCandido, who novelized the movie and is one of the best writers of media tie-ins. (That?s not faint praise, incidentally. Good media tie-ins are hard to write, and when they?re done well, they can be downright literary.)

Well-known speculative fiction author Steven Brust has apparently written an entire Firefly novel on spec for Pocket Books. This strikes me as somewhat insane, because if Pocket rejects the thing, what is he going to do with it? I always assumed with media tie-ins that you would just submit a writing sample and an outline, which would probably be subject to change.

But it sounds like a pretty great read, and hopefully we?ll get to see it one way or the other.

It just shows how much love people have for that show/movie (even though I understand from Claire?s complaints about the lack of Asian characters to go with the trappings). And it shows that the line between fanfic and ?official? products is getting blurrier all the time. Especially with things like Doctor Who, which is now being made by avowed fans.

How cool is this? The seeks to use public pressure to get more actors of color cast in major roles in Hollywood. More specifically, you send postcards to major directors asking them ?to cast minority actors as the main protagonists and Euro-Americans (whites) as main antagonists for two years.? Pipe dream? Sure, but a nice one.

Which brings us back to the controversy that seems to have died down now over at Hyphen magazine?s staff blog, where I posted a complaint about Joss Whedon using Chinese language to indicate Chinese cultural/economic dominance in his future world in Serenity, without using any Chinese or Asian actors or characters at all. (Liz posted a similar, but less angry, complaint below.)

What was annoying about the comments on my post was that they assumed that I was simply uttering the now-familiar truism about minority casting in Hollywood, and somehow deciding to pick on poor Joss Whedon while I did it. This was not, in fact, what I was doing. There are two seperate issues here:

1. overall lack of minority casting in Hollywood, especially for major, positive roles, under which there are two sub-issues:

1. a. lack of casting of actors of color in any roles i.e. in roles that were written without a specific race or ethnicity in mind that could technically be played by anyone (who is American and can act white, that is)
1. b. lack of creating characters that are specifically people of color, i.e. creating important or central characters who are specifically supposed to be of a particular non-white race or ethnicity.

Issue #1 has become a truism, but is no less true for all of that. Not enough minority actors are cast in Hollywood. Not enough minority characters are created in Hollywood. They need to do more. Period. Argue with that, if you dare.

Issue #2 is a seperate thing, something which has become common enough to identify (see Star Wars and Blade Runner,) without actually becoming a trend (yet). Opponents of Issue # 1 want the American public cultural forum to recognize the diversity that already exists within American society and to promote a much-professed and little practiced multiculturalism by mirroring this existing diversity in our cultural products. Opponents of Issue #2, on the other hand, want the American public to recognize that culture does not exist seperately from the people who make it. Issue #2 is about facile appropriation of aspects of non-western cultures, without respect for those who created the culture, and without respect for the integrity of culture itself. It?s cultural syncretism without understanding of how syncretism works, without understanding that syncretism is an utterly two-way street; without understanding that you can?t meld without ? uh, melding. Issue #2 protests the increasingly popular idea that American culture can be ?conquered? or infiltrated by non-western cultures without white people, or current European American values losing supremacy. Do I really need to explain why this is problematic?

Sad as this is, movies are our best way of getting ideas across to each other and of reaching mass audiences. why is it so hard to get Hollywood directors with their massive budgets to call in a consultant or script doctor every now and again, to make movies that don?t have so many huge, yet simple, problems in them?

Not to be simplistic and cynical, but I don?t think the current clash of cultures between the largely Christian , Western Kulturraum and the largely Muslim, middle-eastern one, is religious, ethnic, or even entirely cultural. I think it?s economic. But I?m pretty ignorant on the complex of subjects and am totally willing to hear a variety of viewpoints, telling me I?m wrong.

Especially if they come couched in good prose ? and especially if well-padded with fun and fiction. So I?m really excited about my novelist friend Nicole Galland?s current project. Her third novel is going to be a historical fiction based on the monty-pythonesque comedy of errors known as the fourth crusade. Although the crusade never made it to the Holy Land, the political machinations are illuminating, when viewed in a contemporary context. Plus, fun!

Nicki?s been sending back terrific journal entries from her ports of call, giving crusade history tidbits and narrating her ? often comical ? efforts to find the sites of crusade events buried under the asphalt, diverted rivers, and military installations of the modern urban landscape. I convinced her to let me put them all together in a blog, called Chasing the Fourth Crusade by Nicole Galland. Check it out. It?s a good read.

Opera on ESPN! Other magazine contributor Elizabeth Searle has written the libretto for an opera about Tonya Harding and Nancy Kerrigan called Nancy and Tonya: The Opera. Even though it won?t be performed until next spring, the opera has gotten covered on ESPN and MSNBC. Because it?s about sports! But also because of the chicks and jealousy and violence thing, of course.

Searle constructed the libretto from her story ?Celebrities In Disgrace? as well as actual quotes from Tonya and Nancy, as well as other participants in the scandal, from newspapers and FBI reports.

?Adjusting gender attitudes is the open heart surgery of the soul, and there?s no anesthetic. However, the thing about surgery is that it?s a lot better than the alternative.?

Dear God, please turn me into the essayist who wrote this blog entry/essay. It?s long but reads like a dream, and makes so, so much sense. Would that we all wrote so intelligently, clearly, forcefully, and well.

The threat of physical danger focuses anyone?s mind, male or female. When faced with an unknown man, women go through some millisecond decision-making about the need for fight or flight or whether they can go off red alert. After all that, if he?s trying to be friendly, comes the question of whether he was worth all the bother. The sexual landscape women have to live in is so different from the one inhabited by men that obvious male sexuality is often considered repellent rather than attractive. That makes as much sense as men being put off by sexy women. Imagine how much damage it would take to achieve that effect, and you start to have an idea how much crimes against women complicate everyone?s life, male and female.

thanks Wendy for the link!

When I first started watching Firefly earlier this year, I remember blogging about how it?s funny that you never seen any Chinese people in that universe although people are speaking Chinese. In fact I annoyed everyone around me by trying to extrapolate the society?s history. How come you never see them? Maybe because they?re super privileged and the characters aren?t and don?t come into contact with many people who are. If that?s the case you would expect the Alliance officers to be mostly Asian. But no! At least I don?t remember it if they were, and at some point in the series, I started looking. In the movie, we did see River?s teacher was east asian? supporting my theory. I thought that maybe Simon looked a little bit hapa, and sometimes Kaylee if you look hard enough. But really? I couldn?t make a good theory to explain it and it?s pretty clear that? they just didn?t think about it, which is disappointing.

I kind of liked it that the actors seemed to be speaking actual Chinese. Then I looked up transcriptions and read some interesting criticisms by Chinese speakers saying that obviously the translations or scriptwriting of those bits were done by an ABC, american-born chinese, basically that no one in China would talk quite that way. (Whether they could even assert this with certain authority, I?m doubtful; I don?t know all the dialects of the U.S. or how people could be expected to talk ?naturally?.)

But also, how come people swear in Chinese? Obviously, the out of character reason is because they could get away with doing that on TV in the U.S. In character, it seems against the principles of historical linguistics that a population would swear mostly in the language of the dominant culture. They don?t just swear, but they seem to bust into Chinese when under stress or feeling emotional. I?d love to hear what linguists have to say about this. It seems unlikely for a whole culture to do this. Though I?ve done it myself with Spanish, to avoid being understood by little Anglo kids on the playground; swearing or scandalous gossip.

So, I also thought about other examples of cultural mixing-up or appropriation in science fiction, where you have a future of U.S. and Asian mixing. This could be a huge long essay, but I don?t have time so I?ll just mention a few books it would be worth talking about. There?s The Man in the High Castle where Japan conquered and colonized the west coast of the U.S. There?s Neuromancer, that has a bunch of scenes in Japan, and I remember thinking in some ways it was a book expressing something about 80s meme of ?Japan is going to take over economically & culturally,? a meme that comes and goes and is back right now as a sort of ?everything from Japan is cool? anime-o-philia, or the idea that everything happens faster there, their culture and tech is more cutting edge somehow, and while the U.S. is not directly conquered in the Neuromancer-future, the future is less U.S.-white-culture-dominated than most. I thought of Geoff Ryman?s recent novel Air, set on the border of western china. I also thought of some fantasy novels where the ?exotic? culture is based on something vaguely asian, like in Tamora Pierce?s Protector of the Small series where Keladry, the preteen warrior cadet, is super good at martial arts and using the Not-Japan weapons, and it?s taken to the point of pleasant ridiculousness, like when she suddenly busts out into some kind of razor-blade fan juggling group folkdance with the visiting Not-Japan palace women. I wrote something about this a year ago maybe, but couldn?t find it on my blog?

All of those books seem to me to have done a better job at extrapolating than the Firefly series. Firefly, it?s like someone said, ?Hey, I know, we?ll make it so that in the future, China kind of won the space race, or at least shared it, bigtime, instead of that old-school future history thing where there?s some Russians. ? And someone else went, ?Yeah, neato, they can swear in Chinese, and there?ll be some samurai swords, and they can wear kimonos, and people will eat dim sum all the time, and worship both jesus and buddha, and yet, they?re all white redneck space cowboys, wouldn?t that be mindblowing? ? And then someone else went, ?Duuude! yeah, let?s hire someone to write some of the script IN CHINESE and hire a language coach for the actors, and we won?t subtitle it!? And that?s about as deep as it went, and it didn?t occur to anyone that maybe some actors in the series should be Chinese or at least asian. It?s just not particularly thoughtful, and so? it ends up being annoying. Or thoughtless. Or fluffy. Or cultural appropriation. Or rude. Or racist. In fact, all those things. It?s part of racism and of imperialism for white people in the U.S. and Europe to do that. (And then to expect people not to notice or if they notice, not to care.)

Class is the focus, and race/ethnicity thrown in thoughtlessly as a sort of decoration.

I?m in a mode where I enjoy watching it and then I want to pick it apart — not in a ?dammit, how racist? mode, but more like ?oh look, it?s That Thing again, that the U.S. does, it?s a perfect example of it.? I still love the series and the movie. (The same way I love Gene Wolfe?s Book of the New Sun series, and think it?s amazing, but could talk about gender problems in his books for a year without stopping.) I would have liked Firefly and Serenity even more if the history were deeper, and the ?multiculturalism? well thought out. If it were really hybrid - I like Guillermo Gomez-Peña?s ideas about hybrid culture. In fact I had hopes that the movie would fix some of the problems of the series. The good thing is that our expectations are higher. I think more people are noticing and pointing out loudly that ?surface multiculturalism? is not only annoying but actually racist and harmful. It?s good to point it out and to expect better of our best writers!

Which is what I hope everyone does ? go see the movie and support it, but write to the producers in detail about what was done wrong, and write more articles about it, so that Joss & co. will pay attention.

And I haven?t even scratched the surface of other races and what goes on with blackness in the movie - you could write a whole book about it.

***update - This whole post really should be a footnote on Claire?s article over at Hyphen - thanks for the link, Laura! Now I feel like a dirty apologist for Joss. I might have to see the movie about 12 more times for purposes of analysis. ***

So apparently Unicef has decided people are numbed to images of violence and destruction in the third world. So for their latest ad campaign for a fund to help former child soldiers in Burundi, they?re using a film of the Smurf village being bombed. It?ll only be shown after 9 PM, but a clip was shown earlier in the evening, on the news, and traumatized some kids. Apparently the footage of the smurf baby crying amongst all the burned smurf corpses is pretty chilling stuff. The ad agency that made it wanted to go further ? with Smurfs losing heads or limbs ? but they were told to tone it down a bit.

?It?s so un-Smurf-like,? a spokesman said. ?It might get people to think.?

I love boingboing. They pointed me to this, the perfect stereotype of male desire: twats ?n? beer.

I was reading this article about the ruckus in the House over an energy bill? and this bit about Nancy Pelosi caught my eye:

But as the vote stretched beyond 30 minutes, Pelosi took to the floor to denounce the process.

?This is bringing dishonor to the House of Representatives for this body to act in the shameful way it is acting,? Pelosi said.

?The gentle lady is not stating a proper parliamentary inquiry!? shouted Rep. Mike Simpson, R-Idaho, the presiding speaker, banging his gavel to silence her.

Gentle lady? How odd it sounds, especially for someone who was standing up to denounce. Like? Simpson wishes she would be a gentlewoman.

My friend Laura Quilter of Chilling Effects and Derivative Work was giggling with me about this, and she said that in Massachusetts, lawyers on opposing sides have to call each other ?my sister? and ?my brother? instead of ?the opposing counsel? That?s so odd.

Maybe we can start a new custom, extending this kind of enforced polite discourse, so that at rallies and protests, and on giant bloggity flame wars, opposing ranters must call each other sweet endearments. will be all like, ?As always, I completely disagree with my beloved snookums and life partner, Amanda Marcotte.? And Amanda will go, ?Darling pumpkin, Dawn, honey, your eyes outshine the stars, but, you?re batshit crazy about politics and women?s rights.?

Two totally unrelated news stories today caught my eye, both of them from Europe. In Italy, the Vatican ruled that gay men can be Catholic priests as long as they can prove they?ve been celibate for three years. This raises the fascinating spectacle of would-be priests having to produce all the names of people they didn?t have sex with. Or possibly demonstrating absurdly high sperm counts. How do you prove a negative? I?m dying to find out.

Meanwhile, in England, a judge sentenced two hackers to nine months in jail despite accepting that they didn?t use the TK internet worm for any nefarious purposes. Andrew Harvey and Jordan Bradley were able to prove they were only using the worm to set up a secure Internet chatroom, not to spy on people?s computers or mount distributed denial-of-service attacks. The judge commended them for their restraint, but still imposed a stiff sentence for infecting computers with a tool that had such devastating potential.

So let?s recap. The Vatican says that gayness is no problem as long as you don?t, um, exercise it. But Judge Beatrice Bolton says a tool, such as the TK worm, can be inherently bad and destructive, even if you don?t use it for any destructive purposes. To be fair, at first read-through of the hacker story, I didn?t realize they?d actually infected some computers, which does sound worse. Still, which is it? Is it the facility for evil, or the use of it? Inquiring minds want to know!

Not to use this as an excuse to plug my own writing, but? my first legit fiction publication last year, entitled ?Pigs In Space?, had humans collecting porcine methane in installations in solar orbit. Yep, they were collecting pig shit and farts to convert to an energy source.

After telling him about my story, my friend Jose Marquez turned me on to ?Pig City?, a four-year architectural project by Dutch architectural company MVRDV . The Netherlands is the primary producer of pork in the EU and MVRDV estimates that, with the greater space needed per pig in an entirely organic pig farming scenario, plust the amount of land dedicated to growing pig feed, 75% of Dutch land would be dedicated to pork production. Mmmmm ? bacon. In addition there are issues of energy expenditure, pig waste management, and disease prevention, and transportation of the product into urban centers. In a nutshell, ?Pig City? proposes centralized high-rise pig farms to solve the problems of space, disease prevention, recycling, and transportation in pig farming.( Here is the MVRDV ?Pig City? site, which I can?t make give me any information about the project itself.)

I can?t tell you how exciting it is to find that great minds think alike. But the discussion about the project on the architecture website, makes me want to scream. Why must every speculative project have a political message at its core? Couldn?t this have been something, oh, I dunno ? investigative? You know to come up with a feasible, self-sustaining, urban pastoral plant out of sheer field-of-endeavor exuberance? Plus, if all it is is a way of getting a message across, as a prompt for an extended discussion of ethics Pig City is a bit underwhelming for a writer. I mean, they spent 4 years on this project? They could have come up with a plausible sounding project (using a science fiction writer) in 4 days.

Anyway, maybe the following comment proves that I live too much in my future scenarios, but I don?t see why this is so ethically compromising. To produce the amounts of pork they already produce means they rely on battery farming anyway. So anything?s an improvement, even ? no especially sanitized high rises. But I guess to have architects and engineers openly, publicly treating contemporary western pastoralism as what it is ? a highly mechanized industry ? is still a no-no to a western population so desperate to cling to its illusions that parts of it still think ?intelligent design? is ? well, intelligent.

I go for weeks and months without ever thinking about the way I talk. Because I usually have better things to worry about. But last month I gave a reading from a story that appeared originally in , a story which I guess in some circles could be called a little racy, though nothing graphic or ourageous. An audience member (who apparently identifies as a Christian and claimed to be employed by Homeland Security, which sounds dodgy to me) was so outraged by the reading that he left a frothing phone message to complain about it: although six people read that night, he saw fit to single out only two of us. ?The Lesbian? (Katia Noyes, author of the brand new novel Crashing America), and me.

?The woman with the stutter.?

And suddenly I had that third-grade-playground feeling, the same way I felt when I would be told as a kid, ?don?t act upset when they bully you, you?re only making it worse.? Every year in elementary school, my concerned teacher would send me off to the sad little speech therapist?s office for a screening, and the lady would talk to me in a slow and condescending way, wary, like you would talk to a person who doesn?t speak English, and ask me to repeat sentences back to her. And invariably she would report back that although I did repeat some words and sounds and get stuck in a few spots, it didn?t fall under a category serious enough to qualify me for therapy. And on I merrily went, into adolescence and adulthood.

It?s only come up a handful of times, and all of them hurt. In high school I asked a teacher to write me a letter of recommendation for a scholarship intended for kids who had overcome some major hardship. Having gone from psych hospital inpatient to straight-A student in a short period of time, I assumed this was what she would write her letter about. I ended up not applying, and opened her letter, out of uncontrollable curiosity, to see what glowing things she?d said about me. I was horrified to discover that she?d written instead about my ?disability"— the stuttering. ?Just saying a sentence out loud in class is excruciating for her,? she wrote, ?but Suzanne has earned the respect and sympathy of her classmates.? Sympathy. I found this letter again recently and a decade later it still makes me want to punch something. A year or so after the letter incident, a college counselor told me that speech therapy would improve my chances of getting into a good school. ?You only have a short time to make a good impression in an interview,? she said. I stopped speaking to her at that point, fearing she?d pull out a diet plan next.

Stuttering is a strange and mysterious condition. No one really knows what causes it or how to fix it. It affects men far more often than women, which makes me an even rarer bird. I?ve bonded over stuttering stories many times with male acquaintances, but I?ve never met another female stutterer. I did listen very carefully to a few Joan Didion interviews, where she seems to pause, repeat herself, and draw out words in a practiced way, and I suspect she is a (post-therapy) member of the c-c-c-club. Stuttering typically stops when speaking in unison with others, singing, or when you can?t hear yourself talking. Two different friends with very bad stutters have told me that they ?graduated? from speech therapy because they no longer stuttered in the therapist?s office, though there was no effect on their speech in normal life. Maybe it?s an aftereffect of having to distract the world from the way you talk, but all the stutterers I?ve met have been very quick, funny, charming people with active social lives, jobs, romantic attachments. You would never suspect this from the despairing tone of the various stutterer?s advocacy organizations.

A severe stutter is absolutely a disability, and I?ve met people who say that speech therapy saved their lives. Mine is so mild it?s barely an annoyance, and the annoyance comes from the reaction of others. I would LOVE to never hear the following sentences again:

1. ?You should just relax and speak slower.?
Wait, I should what? Oh my god! I never thought of that, but now thanks to you all my problems are solved. I am forever indebted to you, Amateur Armchair Speech Pathologist. Turns out there was no need for the foundation, the in-ear mechanical devices, the clinical trials, or this cafepress shop.

2. ?Wow, it?s so weird! Ever since I started hanging out with you, I stutter too!?
When dating a stutterer, the moment you utter this sentence is the moment the relationship ends. And yes I?m talking to YOU, Every Every Guy I Dated Between The Years 1998 And 2002.

Are you out there, stammergirls? let?s hhhhear your story.

check in to express more screamin? Katrina outrage.

Former FEMA chief Michael Brown?you know, the one directly responsible for the 1000+ deaths?? while he ?transitions out?. Yes, that?s right, folks. He?s being paid to explain why he fucked up and destroyed hundreds of thousands of lives. I guess there would have been no other way to compel him to stay and answer some questions ? like, say, a subpoena?

Here?s another idea: You know those swear jars some workplaces have, where you have to put in a quarter for every swear word you use, and at the end of the month the money buys everyone a treat or something? What do you think would happen if FEMA instituted a dead body jar, where they took $100 out of the responsible person?s paycheck for every person who died in an emergency, then used the money to ? I don?t know ? pay for aid to the victims? Ya think Brownie woulda taken that job in the first place?

Here?s a report from a gay Iranian man who recently escaped from Iran and is seeking asylum in a gay-friendly country. He was denounced by a gay acquaintance, then caught in a sting operation set up by the basiji (a para-police force tasked with the regime?s dirty work) on a gay chatline. He has been arrested, harrassed and tortured in the past several months, and finally threatened with death.

I don?t know if this sort of thing has been happening in Iran consistently in the past 25 years, or if we?re just seeing a recent upsurge of anti-gay feeling. The recent election of a conservative hardliner to the presidency could have touched off an anti-gay campaign. Or, it could be that the recent hanging of two gay teenagers in Iran has simply focused media attention on a problem that?s been bubbling along quietly this whole time. There is now some controversy over the conviction of the two gay teenagers, who may have been hanged for consensual homosexual acts, or for the rape of a 13-year-old boy. As US Reps. Barney Frank, D-Mass., Jan Schakowsky, D-Ill., and Tom Lantos, D-Calif put it in a recent letter to Condi Rice, asking her to get to the bottom of the story:

The exact details of the case remain unclear, and because the conflicting reports about the nature of the charges against the two boys make it difficult to react appropriately, we urge the State Department to do everything it can to clarify the circumstances of this case. Initial reports were that the 16-year-old and 18-year-old boys ? were punished for homosexual activity with each other. In other reports, the Iranian authorities claim the teenagers were accused of raping a 13-year-old boy. Some human rights groups suspect that this charge may have been trumped up as an excuse for the brutal treatment of gay people and to undermine public sympathy for the boys.

Project GayRussia.Ru interviewed editors of the online gay Iranian magazine MAHA shortly after the election about the hangings and about the state of homosexual tolerance in Iran. They had this to say to the question of what the situation of gays in Iran was:

The GLBT situation in Iran has changed over the past 26 years. The regime does not systematically persecute gays anymore, there are still some gay websites, there are some parks and cinemas where everyone knows that these places are  meeting places for gays, furthermore it is legal in Iran that transsexual applies for sex change and it is fully accepted by the government. There are some medias which sometimes (not often) write about such issues. Having said that, the Islamic law, according to which gays punishment is death is still in force but it is thought not much followed by the regime nowadays.
 
You may remember the Soviet days, there was not much info about homosexuality in your country, families and the society could not accept it and the regime did not allow GLBT to have their organisations or to spread info about the issue. The situation is pretty much the same in Iran today. But thanks to Internet and contact with the International community, people get the info and Iran society has changed a lot and support for GLBT rights is growing in Iran though we still have a long way to go.
 
In the recent elections there was a candidate who put “RESPECT FOR DIFFERENT LIFE STYLES” in his program. And it was something new. We do not know if he really meant gay life but we know that his front is not anti gay. In addition there is a famous political person, Mr. Akbar Ganji, who also openly talks about RESPECT FOR DIFFERENT LIFESTYLES. Add to that GLBT which is still in the beginning of its journey but it is young and determined to fight for GLBT rights. There are also opposition political groups in exile and some of them voiced their support for GLBT rights in their program.
 
So, on the whole, we are optimistic about the future as Iran’s situation can not continue like that and people are pushing for reforms and changes.

I suppose improvement in one?s situation should be looked upon with optimism. However, the editors noted elsewhere in the interview that there is still very little information available for LGBTs in Iran ? and of course, the death penalty for homosexuality, even if not enforced, still applies. What can we do?

Please do keep an eye on Iran and demand a better life and respect for Iranian GLBT. Your support means a lot for us and gives us energy and encouragement. Despite the fact that you may not hear from Iran GLBT regarding your support, please rest assured that we hear about it and we welcome it but sometimes it is not easy to work and be in touch with our friends abroad.

I can?t possibly bear to write or speak another word today about disaster relief work. Until 10 minutes from now when I start babbling again to anyone who will listen.

So what to write about? Something witty and clever and cheering? Something ranty, yet not using the words ?FEMA? or ?inbred assclownz"?

Kids? books? They?re pretty cheerful and silly. Aren?t they?

I?ve talked before about how the Harry Potter series is moving towards this interesting subtext. Its message is that truth is a fluid concept, and authority is not necessarily to be trusted. That?s fairly subversive, though on the surface the books never seem particularly radical. I?ve talked about this on my own blog, and a reader, blog-friend, and mild-mannered librarian, Elsewhere, pointed out to me that J.K. Rowling pays homage frequently to Jessica Mitford, a radical political activist and notorious over-the-top prankster.

How about another insanely popular series, the Captain Underpants books by Dav Pilkey? I?ve got ?Captain Underpants and the Invasion of the Incredibly Naughty Cafeteria Ladies From Outer Space (and the Subsequent Assault of the Equally Evil Lunchroom Zombie Nerds)? right here in front of me.

The heroes of Capt. U are two fourth grade boys who draw comic books about their principal, Mr. Krupp. (Oddly, I just read Neal Stephenson?s first novel, The Big U, and noticed that the school?s top administrator is named S.S. Krupp. Coincidence? I think not.) Mr. Krupp by a trick of fate turns into Captain Underpants, a superhero, if he hears fingers snapping. If you pour water over him, he turns back to the mean principal. So, I have never quite figured out why the boys are so hot to rescue him and restore the status quo! They freak out and save him every time! They like him, and worry that he?ll get into trouble! It?s all about exposing that adults have secret, scary dark sides that get exposed suddenly, and how then they have to be helped to stuff their Ids back into a box. So it?s training in a way for the kids to do that with themselves: the book, like many great children?s books, is like a little hegemony installation system. While it?s on the surface an annoying book about fart and booger jokes, it?s deeply ?status quo restoring?.

But the 2 comic-book drawing bad kids also save the world by their abilities of naughtiness and prank-playing.

Both HP and Capt. U. share the idea that naughtiness, in fact, extreme, dangerous, thuggish badness, can be a very strong site of political resistance. That?s kind of cool!

Then, thinking about the gender politics in play? I wondered if I could come up with examples of that level of thuggishness being a site of resistance for girls. The Akiko books? Nah. They?re great, but Akiko triumphs over adversity by being Nice and having lots of cool geeky friends. That?s fine? Hmm. Nausicaa or other Miyazake books? Nah again. Girls win by being nice. Gail Carson Levine?s Princess series? That?s more fruitful? the rewrite of the story about the sister who drips jewels from her mouth vs. the one who spits out disgusting vermin and insects was quite excellent. The jewel-drooler does okay in life, but is dull. The bug-spitter has a rip-roaring time. But it?s not? socially or politically subversive.

Where are the kids? books about nasty, lying, weaselly, booger-joking, shoplifting, rule-breaking, bitchy little hellcat girls who set off bottle rockets in school? And then who grow up to be bomb-throwing revolutionaries or who save the world from alien invasions? Instead, girl-badness in stories comes later, with sexual maturity and misbehavior. That seems so dumb and limited. I?m just wondering.

Citizen! Stop living your life! Do not attempt to be an individual! Or you risk discovering that your life is wrong according to the most venerable of journalistic bludgeons, the unsourced trend piece. The New York Times is here to tell you the way ?many? people are living their lives ? which of course just happens to be the most conservative wet dream possible.

The most recent example, of course is the Times? which allegedly proves that ?many women? at elite colleges are planning to abandon their careers for husbands and kids, pretty much as soon as they graduate. As various bloggers, including Kevin Drum, have pointed out, the story is based on nothing. Basically Louise Story had a good hit of a crack pipe and then decided that she glimpsed a trend in the fumes. There are not only no statistics, the piece is based on a handful of interviews and a smattering of emails that Story sent out to a skewed sample of women.

The Times also recently had a trend piece about South Asians in the U.S. deciding to have arranged marriages, only with veto power. This piece was similarly conservative, and similarly based on absolutely no data, except for a few interviews. And the liberal use of the word ?many,? as in ?many people think the New York Times is full of crap.

I still haven?t forgiven the Times for letting Judith Miller hype non-existent ?intelligence? about WMDs in Iraq.

But really, the Times is just one example of the decrepitude of print journalism. The goal is to present a stultifying world view that encourages people never to try and challenge any of the idiotic aspects of the status quo. Remain in your brain-dampening chambers, citizens! ? Do not attempt to exercise brain activity! ? The brain-orderlies will come and administer an extra dose of Soma shortly!

I?ve thought a lot lately that we don?t talk about the central facts of our age nearly as much as you?d expect ? global warming, extreme income inequality, our massive debt, and other signs that we?re living in a way that is drastically unsustainable in the short term. (Plus the housing bubble, and the widespread predictions that the world?s supply of oil will peak soon.) People have said that sort of thing for decades but it seems truer than ever now. And we do talk about all those things ? but at the same time, we sort of talk around them more than we talk about them. They?re sort of on the horizon but not squatting on our heads like ugly birds. They should be all we talk about, not just things we talk about occasionally.

And I think the media actively work to keep us from discussing the only things that matter in our world. In favor of bullshit celebrity news, or manufactured controversies. But also by focusing us on ?trends? that let us know that everything is fine, ?many? people are behaving in an orderly, obedient manner.

So I was away, then dealing with job transitions and general madness, have not posted in a long while and may not post regularly, but here I am now. I admit to feeling a bit inadequate when my fellow Otheries know all kind of stuff about the news and stuff, and I know about Mr. T. Now, I also know about ?Dog The Bounty Hunter", which may be the greatest show on TV and I have been watching the A&E marathon all week.It?s a reality show about a bail bondsman and the bad guys who he hunts down and helps with his own brand of tough love, with the help of his gigantically breasted wife Beth and really, really attractive son Leland. I can?t help thinking, though, that spectacularly mulleted Duane ?Dog? Chapman calls himself ?The world?s greatest bounty hunter", but they are based in Honolulu. How hard could it be to hunt down impoverished meth-heads?on a small island? Especially when their moms and girlfriends call your office to tell you exactly where they are? But quibbles aside, my heart was in my throat when hot, hot Leland was sent to capture a kickboxer during a match. He waited until the guy won the fight, then arrested him IN THE RING to the boos of the crowd. But he got through it, and not one hair on his waist-length ponytail was out of place. (everybody on this show has excellent, highly dramatic, enormous hair.)

I?m fascinated by the show because of the respect they have for the suspects. I don?t know if it?s a Hawaii thing, or just a Dog thing, but they routinely do things like give jobs to the teenage kids of the women they arrest, or help a guy get out of jail quicker because they know he?s the only one who can lift his legless mother in and out of bed. When they have to arrest a broken-down Native Hawaiian for public drunkenness, they acknowledge that ?alcohol is the white man?s curse on native people.? If all cops in this country acted like these guys?looking every arrested man in the eye and acknowledging him as a human being with a family who is having some serious problems and needs a lot of help, problems of his own making as well as economic and racial realities that he is up against?I think the crime rate and the prison population would drop dramatically. But it?ll never happen.

And my first ever post got several bitchy responses from an American Apparel employee. As far as I can figure, Am. Ap. gets google alerts when they are mentioned in a blog, and then an employee posts an indignant message about how professional they are and offers a factory tour to prove how saintly and good they are and not coke snorting, orgy-having ass grabbers. I honestly don?t care enough about the subject to keep talking about it. So there.

I meant to blog about stuttering, and stutterers as an overlooked minority group. I promise to write about that next time. I have a lot to say about it. And I?d rather say it in print so I don?t have to see that look people get when watching me get through a moment of Stop-Plosive Consonant Disfluency.

In the meantime, please have a look at Fixed Gear Enthusiass, a site for anyone who likes bicycles and/or men in underpants.

Some of you may have seen this by now: a group in Massachusetts is publishing online a list of names and addresses of people who sign an anti-same-sex-marriage petition. .

The website, KnowThyNeighbor.org, states about this campaign:

In the fall of 2005, extremists will attempt to convince 65,825+ Massachusetts voters to sign a petition that would add anti-family language to our state constitution. Those who sign it will be listed here.

Quite straightforward. Now, there is nothing illegal in this. It?s all open and aboveboard. And furthermore, I have no objection to activists using social pressure as a tactic. That?s the point of boycotts, protests, letters to the editor, and pretty much every other weapon in the arsenal of the political activist. Plus, this seems like it might actually be more effective than most of the small arms lefties carry. So there?s that.

But I?m just not comfortable with the fact that this tactic so obviously employs intimidation. Because it?s clear that this will only work if people are too afraid to be seen by their neighbors online to actually sign the petition. If people didn?t care, or were passionate enough about restricting same sex unions to do it anyway, then this effort would be wasted. What?s having petition signatories available online gonna hurt, if the petition gets delivered with sufficient signatures anyway?

The org itself indirectly acknowledges its intimidation tactic by warning the sites users not to actually, ya know, intimidate people:

KnowThyNeighbor.org hopes to inspire Civil, Legal, and Respectful Discourse on the topic and discourages with its fullest conviction the actions by anyone to harm a person or their property in retribution for exercising their democratic right to sign the petition.

Yeah ? right. You know what this reminds me of? The whole argument for permitting the government to use torture to interrogate terrorists. The threat of possible torture has been shown to be very effective in interrogation. Therefore, proponents argue, if you publicly permit torture, you mostly don?t have to use it. But if you really do prohibit torture and everyone knows it, then you?ve lost your most effective, non-torture tactic.

Likewise, this effort only works if the threat of neighborly retribution for ?exercising their democratic right to sign the petition? stops people from signing. If they know that those lefties are too pc pussified to attack, then the website has failed. Like with torturing terrorists, KnowThyNeighbor.org operates in the shadowy zone between threat and fulfillment.

Furthermore, if we move out of the shadowy zone, KnowThyNeighbor can?t be expected to take responsibility for the actions taken by those who read the website and actually exact retribution. But the cause benefits from the added intimidation factor that would create.

I don?t like it. I know, I know ? but I don?t like it.

My new favorite author is Ken MacLeod, a Scottish science fiction writer whose political space operas always have three crucial ingredients: fully-realized characters, lots of interesting speculative politics, and super-cool aliens (or cyborgs). Plus, spaceships. Did I mention the spaceships?

I fell in love with MacLeod while reading a manuscript version of Newton?s Wake that had been sent to me gawd knows how long ago when I was a book review editor. It languished in my ?to read? pile for over a year before I read the first paragraph, noticed that the main character was an ass-kicking female ?combat archeologist,? and dug in. Combining witty pop culture references (separatist, Christian farming communities on terraformed planets call themselves ?America Offline") with a tale of gray market interplanetary trade routes ruled by a group of off-the-hook capitalist Scots, the novel manages to explore both the future of social democracy and the sexuality of synthetic humans.

I promptly went out and bought MacLeod?s ?Engines of Light? trilogy from Borderlands, and I?m about half-way through the second book, Dark Light. There?s more political intrigue ? communists vs. anarchists vs. capitalists vs. tribalists ? and a lot of terrific commentary on gender roles. Two of the main characters in the novel are more or less cross-gendered: one is a male-to-female transsexual from a tribal culture which views gender as a function of social role, and therefore people can switch genders if they want; the other is a female machinist from a proto-social democracy where her interest in a male-dominated profession makes her something of an oddity. Plus there are polyamorous aliens, computer geeks, and a mysterious alien plot to relocate humans from all eras in earth?s history to a bunch of remote planets in a ?second sphere? of the universe.

Even better, I found MacLeod?s blog, where I discovered to my great pleasure that he is a terrifically thoughtful Marxist and all-around leftist curmugeon. I highly recommend the novels and the blog ? but mostly the novels. Smart, politically-astute science fiction with a leftist, queerish, feminist bent is hard to find. I?m glad I found MacLeod.