Debating gun control with false equivalence

Is there a difference between callous, gutter partisanship and working hand in hand with the victims of a tragedy to make a difference? Some people would say no. But that’s because they choose to debate issues of national importance with fallacious logic and false equivalence.

This week I blogged abut the Arkansas politician who sent out the following tweet while me and the rest of my community were trapped in our homes as police hunted for the at-large suspect in the Boston Marathon bombings. The politician, Nate Bell wrote:

I wonder how many Boston liberals spent the night cowering in their in their homes wishing they had an AR-15 with a hi-capacity magazine?

This garbage infuriated thousands of people, including me. We were not cowering. We were not dreaming of holding a gun. We were waiting for the police to do their jobs. And they did.

Some people want to defend Bell by saying liberals are just as guilty of scoring political points in the face of tragedy. Perhaps some liberals are guilty of that, but one commenter on my blog would have me believe that demanding stricter gun control in the wake of tragedies like Newtown is no less repugnant.

Commenter David D. wrote:

How is this different than Pres. Obama using small children from Newport [sic] Connecticut to further his agenda? Do you condone this type of action, so long as it coincides with your personal beliefs, but respond with righteous indignation when someone dare do or say something that hits to the right of your viewpoint?

Let’s assume that David D is referring to Newtown, and not Newport.

Never mind the fact that the parents of those Newtown children who were murdered by a lunatic with an AR-15 are demanding stricter gun control, as are the victims of the Aurora shootings, the Tuscon shootings, the Virginia Tech shootings and many, many more.

Instead, let’s look at David D’s logic. He would have me believe that Bell’s cynical statement about “Boston liberals cowering in their homes” and “wishing” for AR-15s is somehow equivalent to Obama standing up with the parents and siblings of murdered children to demand meaningful gun reform. There is no comparison.

Bell’s statement was a cheap shot at the expense of people who were under siege. Obama’s actions were a response to a demand for reform by the victims and their families.

Describing our people as “cowering” “Boston liberals” was meant as a pejorative slur, and I think Bell knows it. Otherwise, he wouldn’t have deleted the tweet. A truly equivalent statement from the left side of this debate, would be something distasteful and callous. Something such as:

I bet all those police officers who are getting shot at in Watertown right now are wishing we had stricter gun control laws.

Isn’t that disgusting? If someone truly said this in earnest, I would happily condemn him. But I didn’t see such a statement. Did you?

I also expressed my frustration with Republican Senator Lindsey Graham’s eagerness to withhold the bombing suspect’s Constitutional rights by designating him as an enemy combatant. I asked why Republicans are so eager to defend the Second Amendment while they trample upon the rest of the Bill of Rights.

David D. disagreed with me again.

Let’s turn this around shall we, why is it that Democrats and other liberals [are] so protective of the First Amendment’s free speech, but so blithe about eroding the protections of the rest of the Bill of Rights, especially those rights afforded by the Second Amendment? Why is it that Mr. Bell can write words that so many find offensive, and you can publicly criticize a government official, and neither of you are even the least bit concerned about being yanked from your beds at night and thrown in jail?

Again, this logic crumbles under scrutiny. Liberals are not blithe about the Second Amendment. We just look at the entire text of that amendment and demand intelligent interpretation. The amendment begins:

A well regulated militia being necessary to the security of a free state…

Liberals do not want to infringe on the right to keep and bear arms. We just think regulation of that right is justified. And none of the rights guaranteed by the Bill of Rights are completely unfettered by reasonable controls, including the First Amendment that David D. referred to.

As we all know, I cannot stand up in a crowded theater and falsely yell “Fire!” without facing legal consequences. I cannot slander someone without facing legal consequence. I cannot invade the privacy of an individual and publish the results of that violation without facing legal consequences. The right of free expression does not allow for such abuse.

I argue that that owning weapons that are designed to inflict mass casualties, such as an AR-15 with a large-capacity magazine, is an abuse of the Second Amendment that should be curtailed. I do not say that “blithely.” I say that soberly. I say that as a reasonable person who is offering compromise. I am not asking that gun owners give up their hunting rifles and their handguns. I’m asking them to submit to background checks, national gun registries and reasonable restrictions on lethality (assault weapons bans, clip size limits).

David D. also wrote:

I also thank God each day that we don’t live in a perpetual war zone where the need to keep and bear arms is a necessity and not a right.

He is right. We don’t live in a war zone. So why are we armed to the teeth?

The Marathon Bombings: An emotional journey

I have no anger in my heart today, and it feels so good. How do you feel?

When the Boston Marathon bombs went off, I was on a plane bound from Boston to Texas, and from there to California. I took off just an hour before the blasts, and I learned about the bombings from the passenger sitting beside me, who had received a terse email about them. I logged onto the in-flight Wi-Fi to learn more. The details of the horror spilled through that tenuous network connection as I flew farther and farther away from my home and my feelings evolved from initial disbelief to anger that flowered into hatred.

By the time my plane landed, I wanted to turn around and go home. But I had business to attend to on the West Coast. As I finally started my journey home to Boston on Thursday, the FBI released grainy photos of the suspects, whom we now know as Tamerlan and Dzhokhar Tsarnaev. I saw those photos, and my hatred was in full bloom. I wanted revenge. These two men had walked among the people of my city with bombs on their backs. How could they do such a thing?

When I got home at midnight on Thursday, I didn’t want to go to bed. I wanted to watch the news. I wanted to see these evil men caught and punished. Little did I know that they would engage in a gun battle with police just miles from my home. Over the next 24 hours as we were all trapped in our homes, my hatred burned itself out.

When Dzhokhar finally surrendered himself, all I saw was a skinny, 19-year-old boy. Yes, he is a murderer. Yes, he killed precious people with his brother and maimed so many more. But I couldn’t summon up that hatred I had felt when I first saw his photograph. All I felt was relief.

You could see that relief on the faces of the thousands of people who cheered the weary police as they withdrew from Watertown. You could see it on the faces on everyone. I went to bed feeling relief and a sense of peace. I woke up today feeling the same way. No anger. No hatred. I think those feelings may be gone.

I’m not saying that we should absolve the Tsarnaev brothers of their alleged crimes. Dzhokhar should be prosecuted. He should spend the rest of his life in prison. He should live out his year racked by guilt for the horror he committed, regardless of whether he was a puppet of his older brother or a full and equal participant in the act of terror. What I’m asking myself and you isn’t about how Dzhokhar should be treated. I’m asking whether we should let the relief we all feel turn into something more beautiful. Can we be at peace after such horror? Can we let this relief heal us?

There are dozens of people who have been maimed physically and emotionally by these events. Families have lost loved ones. People have lost their limbs. They have suffered. I have love in my heart for them and I hope they heal. I hope we all do.

But I also know that September 11 left an indelible wound on our country. We were all so very angry and sad for such a very long time. We went to war. We hunted down and killed the people who murdered our people. But I never felt good about the revenge we took. Much of it was necessary. Much of it was right, but our vengeance and our justice did not bring me peace.

When the police took Dzhokhar alive last night, I felt differently. There was no revenge. There was no more bloodshed. And it felt right.  I don’t have hatred in my heart anymore, and it feels right.

Political lowlights of the Marathon bomber manhunt

I spent nearly 24 hours trapped in my home because a heavily-armed, murderous terrorist was hiding in a boat just miles from me. I spent most of that time watching the news, following police scanners, digging into social media and texting my neighbors in a desperate attempt to be informed about the crisis that was facing my community.

While all of the Boston metropolitan area was in lockdown so that authorities could hunt for the surviving Boston Marathon bomber, some people decided to use the crisis as an opportunity to score cheap political points and to further flawed policies.

In Arknansas, state representative Nate Bell, a NRA-loving Republican, called Boston liberals cowards in this since-deleted tweet.

I wonder how many Boston liberals spent the night cowering in their in their homes wishing they had an AR-15 with a hi-capacity magazine?

Bell managed to crassly politicize an ongoing tragedy by dragging the whole crisis down into the muck of gun control partisanship. He also managed to call Boston liberals cowards.

Never mind the fact that the ongoing investigation will undoubtedly reveal that stricter gun control probably would have prevented these two young men from arming themselves with assault rifles.

The Tweet ignited a firestorm of criticism, which prompted the cowering Nate Bell to delete his original tweet. Then he posted a non-apology on his campaign Facebook page.

I would like to apologize to the people of Boston & Massachusetts for the poor timing of my tweet earlier this morning. As a staunch and unwavering supporter of the individual right to self defense, I expressed my point of view without thinking of its effect on those still in time of crisis. In hindsight, given the ongoing tragedy that is still unfolding, I regret the poor choice of timing. Please know that my thoughts and prayers were with the people of Boston overnight and will continue as they recover from this tragedy.

So he doesn’t apologize for calling Boston liberals cowardly. He doesn’t apologize for his crude attempt to score political points in the face of tragedy. He only apologizes for doing it while the Boston area was still under curfew. When would the timing be appropriate? After more people have died? After more bombs have gone off? After the amputees have been released from area hospitals? After the hundreds of people affected by these events have finished treatment for PTSD or completed a one-year period of mourning?

The bottom line is that there is no good timing for when to behave like a partisan hack and call the people of the city which fired the first shots of the American Revolution cowards. Centuries ago Boston bled so that the Constitution could be born and Bell’s precious Second Amendment rights could be codified. Boston is the crucible of democracy and freedom. Boston was the first city to drive British soldiers from its soil.  Boston is the city whose people ran into the carnage on Marathon Monday and used their belts and shirts as tourniquets while the smoke still hung over the bleeding masses.

But Bostonians cowered in their homes and dreamed of owning AR-15s? I don’t think so.

Speaking of the Constitution… aren’t our national leaders sworn to uphold that document?

Senator Lindsey Graham, Republican of South Carolina, took to Twitter to pressure President Obama to treat the surviving bomber as an enemy combatant and withhold his Constitutional rights, such as a right to a trial by a jury of his peers?

If captured, I hope Administration will at least consider holding the Boston suspect as enemy combatant for intelligence gathering purposes.

It’s become clear that the government will use the public safety exemption to delay reading the bomber his Miranda rights, but the president also made it clear that the kid, who is a naturalized U.S. citizen, will be tried in a civilian criminal court. This is a good thing, because we are a nation of laws. We have a Constitution.

Still, Graham and other Republicans will continue to push for this kid to get the Gitmo treatment, because it’s a political position they have staked out since 2001, never mind the damage it might do to our Bill of Rights.

Why is it that Republicans are so protective of the Second Amendment’s right to bear arms, but so blithe abut eroding the protections of the rest of the Bill of Rights. Treating a U.S. citizen as an enemy combatant takes away the rights guaranteed by the Fourth, Fifth, Sixth and Eighth Amendments. Why is Senator Graham so ready to toss out those rights while fighting any legislation that tries to make reasonable changes to the Second Amendment?  Votes. Republicans have relied on the politics of fear ever since 9-11. They’ve relied on it since gay people started demanding the right to marry. They’ve relied on it since African Americans demanded an end to Jim Crow.

In fact, fear is common thread that runs through the politics of both these crass political hacks. One man would have us cling to guns in fear. The other would have us sanction torture and indefinite detention of a 19-year-old out of fear.

I am not afraid. I don’t need a gun to feel safe. I don’t need to waterboard a boy to feel safe. Last night as I listened to the sirens  and the urgent radio calls of police officers under fire, I did not give in to fear. I simply waited for justice. Both of these politicians would have us pursue a path that would deny that justice. Rather than try this boy, they would shoot him, torture him and throw him in a hole. That’s not what our country stands for. That’s not what our Constitution demands of us.

Zombies and politicians, Oh My! Mira Grant’s Feed

Have you ever forced yourself to finish a terrible book just to confirm to yourself that you are right: It really is terrible?

I picked up Feed by Mira Grant after it scored a Hugo nomination and a lot of good buzz from the science fiction press. It featured an intriguing premise: A political thriller set 20 years after a zombie apocalypse, told through the eyes of a blogger/journalist. I love politics, I’m a journalist, and I’ve recently renewed my interest in zombie literature after becoming a fan of The Walking Dead comic. So, I thought I’d enjoy Feed.

Unfortunately the experience of reading this book is like a clinic on how NOT to write a book. I suffered through all 571 pages primarily to emphasize to myself what I should avoid in my own writing.

Let’s start with the exposition. The information dump is the most treacherous trap in genre fiction writing. When you are building a world and placing your characters in it, you have to explain how that world works, whether it be some alien world, a sword and sorcery kingdom or a zombie-infested United States. The best authors do this efficiently and with subtlety. Mira Grant does not.

Her narrator dumps information relentlessly. She dumps info on everything. The nature of the zombie virus, the complicated and absurdly unbelievable mechanics of the blogging industry in her future, the process of earning a license to go out in the wilds of a zombie-infested world, the construction of zombie-proof buildings and vehicles, the laws about how to handle people who have been infected.

It seems like Mira Grant is more interested in information dumps than she is in telling a story, because when she does set out to tell the story between information dumps, almost nothing happens. There’s a scene late in the book where the narrator is setting up a video conference session with dozens of fellow bloggers to discuss a huge conspiracy. She devotes pages and pages to the details involved in setting up the conference call and securing it and getting everyone into the call. Then the video session commences and NOTHING HAPPENS. Seriously, you’re expecting her to tell her colleagues something interesting. She doesn’t. She fires everyone, then rehires them in some sort of contractual procedural madness that doesn’t matter to the plot. Then she pulls a couple people aside for some one-on-one discussions that, again, involve nothing interesting. I was expecting some plot advancement. In the end, all there was were empty dialog and information dumps. End of chapter.

What’s a good way to get a story going if you’re struggling with your plot and need to get out of information dump mode? How about some dialog? Mira Grant doesn’t know how to write dialog. Her main characters are bloggers in their early, early 20s (youth is fetishized intensely in this book). The main characters, narrator Georgia Mason,  her brother Shaun and their colleague Buffy are all kids. And they are all extremely unlikable. Mira Grant believes that snarky repartee makes for good dialog and character development. She is dead wrong. Get it? Dead.

Here are Georgia and Shaun and colleague Rick investigating the cause of a zombie horse outbreak at a ranch:

“If anything odd happened here, we might find signs of it around their stalls,” [I said].

“Under the six hundred gallons of gore,” Rick muttered.

“Hope you brought a shovel!” Shaun called, sounding ungodly cheerful.

Rick stared at him. “Your brother is an alien.”

“Yeah, but he’s a cute one,” I said. “Start checking the stalls.”

And here are Georgia, Shaun and Rick reflecting on a tense encounter with soldiers pointing big guns at them.

“That really upset you, didn’t it?” [Shaun asked.]

“What, you mean the part where the nice guys with the big guns demonstrated over a live feed that I can be incapacitated by taking my glasses away? That didn’t bother me one bit.” I shoved Shaun’s feet off my lap. “Sit up. This isn’t a cruise.”

“Behold the bitchiness of George when she hasn’t had her beauty sleep,” said Shaun, pushing himself upright. Twisting around to face Rick, he said, “So, Ricky-boy, you seen your ratings? Because I have some ideas to spice things up. Let’s start with nudity.”

Don’t you just want to spend 571 pages with these people? Cocky, pseudo-journalists who don’t report the news. All they do is self-aggrandize and editorialize and toss impersonal snark back and forth. The reader knows this because every chapter is book-ended with excerpts from their blogs. Ugh.

Next problem? Repetition! In a world where fears of viral zombification are constant, everyone is constantly getting their blood tested to prove that they’re not about to go undead. Entering a restaurant? Blood test. Checking into a hotel? Blood test. Entering your own house? Blood test. Unlocking the door to your car? Blood test? Entering a highly secure area? Blood test, blood test, blood test. That’s right, multiple blood test check points, where the character gets their fingers pricked by a needle and light flashes back and forth from red and green before settling on a color (Hint, red is bad. It means a bullet to the brain).

After the first few chapters, the reader is clear. Blood tests are everywhere. After 400 pages, I don’t need the author to devote a page or two in every chapter to the details of every blood test. I don’t need the narrator describing the different brands of blood test kits. Let’s give it a rest. Get to the story. Oh, that’s right, there is NO story.

The repetition doesn’t start and end there, either. Don’t get me started about narrator Georgia’s medical condition, related to the zombie virus, which has rendered her pupils permanently dilated and forced her to wear sunglasses everywhere. Rather than have nightmares about hungry zombies, I’m going to have nightmares about the countless pages devoted to Georgia’s light-induced headaches, moments where she gropes around for her sunglasses in the morning, and misunderstandings at security checkpoints where dudes with guns demand that she remove her sunglasses. Please, make it stop!

I could go on with the reasons why this book falls on its face… like its horrible inconsistencies. For instances, Georgia’s eye condition has disabled her tear ducts, which means she can’t cry with tears. She even remarks late in the book about how she wishes she could cry, but the virus that damaged her eyes have robbed her of that. How poignant… and yet, in the middle of the book she does cry. With real, live tears and everything. Anyway, moving on. Let’s get to the heart of why this book is a whole lot of suck.

There is no payoff. You suffer through all this mediocrity expecting to see some sort of revelation that is mildly interesting, but there isn’t one.

[SPOILERS FOLLOW]

This book is about a muddled, half-developed conspiracy. Georgia and Shaun and their follow bloggers are part of the press corps traveling with a front-running candidate for the GOP nomination for president, Senator Ryman. He’s an aw-shucks, down-to-earth, country boy with “straight white teeth,” who is about as one-dimensional as a line on a sheet of paper. His eventual running mate is Governor Tate of Texas. This guy might as well have “bad guy” tattooed on his forehead.

The book turns into a quest to find out why someone is trying to assassinate Ryman and/or derail his campaign by murdering the people around him — murder them with ZOMBIES!. Of course the bad guy is Tate, the asshole running mate who spouts off constantly about propriety and morality and God all the time… all while being really really really mean to Georgia and her fellow dirty bloggers. Any reader who is spoiled by the previous sentence should really get a blood test for the zombie virus, because you are BRAIN DEAD.

Anyway, in this book it’s up to Shaun and Georgia to discover he’s the bad guy and prove it. Why the CDC, the Army, the Secret Service and just about anyone with half a brain missed the obvious clues is beyond me. At one point a clue literally gets stuck in the bottom of Shaun’s shoe. No joke!

Even worse, when the bad guy (Tate) is confronted and revealed, his only explanation for why he was trying to kill Ryman and do assorted other bad things was to say that someone had to restore the “moral fiber” of America. Oh, please. Don’t we hear enough of this stupidity on MSNBC and Fox News?

Oh, and did I mention that this is the first book in a sequel about bloggers in zombie apocalypse? The next one is called Deadline, in which our surviving heroes seek out the conspirators who helped Tate do all his dastardly deeds.

This book is awful. After I read it, I tried to find some reviews. I’d only heard glowing endorsements, so I needed to dig deeper. I’ve been shocked by the majority of reviews that rave about it (mostly blogs and genre sites since no mainstream reviewing bodies have bothered to touch it). User reviewers are mostly positive, too. Probably 80% of Amazon reviewers gave it four or five stars. This is where you need to look hard at the bad reviews. The one- and two-star reviews. Read them closely and see if the complaints made by disgruntled readers (like me) are reasonable.

Don’t believe the hype on this one. Feed is terrible. I wouldn’t suggest it to anyone, even a diehard zombie fiction fanboy. Just don’t do it to yourself.

Reading a complete history of a world gone mad in World War Two

You were our liberator, but we, the diseased, emaciated, barely human survivors were your teachers. We taught you to understand the Kingdom of the Night.

Those are the words of holocaust survivor Elie Wiesel. He wrote them about the American soldiers who arrived at the Buchenwald concentration camp on April 11, 1945 and freed him and other ragged survivors of Nazi Germany’s brutality. His words are quoted by Martin Gilbert in his epic and sorrowful book, The Second World War: A Complete History.

I grew up with a father who was always fascinated by the history of World War Two. We would watch John Wayne movies together when I was young. He had a tattered copy of a Time-Life book on the history of the war that I would page through occasionally. I remember it mostly for the black and white photos, particularly the graphic images of dead soldiers lying on beaches and meadows, their eyes closed and their mouths open in some unending gasp of pain.

For all I knew of the war, I never fully understood the scale of it, nor the mechanics of how it all happened. Who attacked whom and why? How did the different alliances form and collapse? How did Germany and Japan go from unstoppable conquerors to cowed and shattered occupied nations?

To get a better picture of all that happened, I decided to pick up Gilbert’s complete history.

How can you capture a “complete history” of a war that spanned six years, killed more than 45 million people and engulfed an entire world? Gilbert did it within 750 dense pages. It’s a blow by blow account. It isn’t a deep reading of events. It won’t tell you why Adolph Hitler came to blame the Jews for all the world’s miseries, nor why Germany decided to follow him down a path of murder and depravity.  You can go elsewhere for those answers. You can read any number of books about D-Day at Normandy, the struggle of the Allies against the Japanese in the South Pacific, or the battle of Stalingrad. Hitler, Stalin, Churchill, Roosevelt. They’ve all had their biographers. Their deputies and generals, too. There are so many stories to tell.

But Gilbert takes a high-level view of the war. From beginning to end he summarizes every major battle in a few sentences or paragraphs. He explores the major events and the grand strategic decisions.  And he lists the dead. He offers name after name of people who lost their lives in battle, who were exterminated in death camps, who were tortured in dungeons, who drowned at sea. And he lists the nameless, too. One hundred gypsies dead on this day, 475 Jews dead on the next. The numbers just grind you down. The scale of the madness and murder is heartbreaking.

German soldiers rounding up Jewish women and children in the Warsaw ghetto

This book was a journey into the horror and the evil that was unleashed on the world in 1939. It is a portrait of a world gone completely insane. This book reveals Elie Wiesel’s Kingdom of Night, where madmen and banal cynics built gas chambers and crematoriums to exterminate Jews, Gypsies, Communists, homosexuals and anyone else they could blame for their own dreadful failures to live as decent human beings in a challenging world.

That madness lurks in our world still. There is so much hatred and fear. And there are still evil men who are more than happy to bend that hatred and fear to their will in pursuit of power and satisfaction of petty, ugly urges. Jihadism is an expression of that madness. So is the backlash against peaceful Muslims by bigots who firebomb mosques and beat up dark-skinned shopkeepers.

The eyeglasses of victims of the gas chambers at Auschwitz concentration camp

This is why I read history. I like to learn lessons from the past. They say learn from the past so you don’t repeat the mistakes of those who came before you. Well, I say you learn from the past so you can see what’s coming. Madness, hatred, fear, stupidity. It’s a toxic mix that lurks around us. Seventy years ago it drove grown men to line up hundreds and thousands of innocent men, women and children against walls in hundreds of cities and shoot them dead, all because they were different. They worshiped the wrong god. Their skin and their hair was a little too dark. They spoke Yiddish or Polish or Russian. Is it so hard to imagine it happening again? Did it really ever end?

The final line of Gilbert’s history of the war talks about unfinished business. “The great unfinished business of the Second Word War is human pain.” That pain never went away. It festered. It is still with us. It expresses itself in the Sudan, in Southeast Asia, in Mexico and on our own streets. Pain breeds hatred and with hatred comes madness. There is so much hatred in this world. A war wasn’t able to kill that hatred. Who knows what could. But hatred can be defeated by good-hearted people who have the courage to stand up and shout down the cynics and the demagogues. In 1939 there weren’t enough voices ready to drown out the ravings of Hitler and Tojo and Mussolini. Who offers up their voices today?

An angry republic

So many bullets flew in Tuscon, Arizona on Saturday. A little girl died. Grandparents died. Someone’s future husband died. A judge died on his way home from church. A congresswoman was crippled and maimed while meeting with her constituents in a grocery store parking lot. Isn’t that sad?

That horror sounds very sad to me. So why have I felt so angry?

The political right in this country is angry because the duly and lawfully elected president has implemented policy that is somewhat left of center.

The political left in this country is angry because the political right uses inflammatory and violent rhetoric that certainly intimidates people and possibly influenced a lunatic who was bent on violence.

The political right is even more angry because the political left says they should tone down their rhetoric.

Do you see a pattern here? It goes back and forth like a tennis match. And it just won’t stop.

I’ve been angry for a few days at people who talk about bullets and ballots and use rifle crosshairs on maps. I’ve been angry with radio talkshow hosts blubbering about how people like me are happy that this happened because it gives us a chance to attack right-wingers. I’ve been angry at people who refuse to consider thoughts like, “Hey, maybe I should stop demonizing people who disagree with me.”

But after listening to President Obama talk tonight, I feel really, really sad. And that’s so much harder to deal with than being angry.

It’s so easy to be angry. It feels kind of good to hate something. You let it all out. You let all the bad feeling flow through you and at someone else.

It’s so much harder to feel sad. It’s hard to let yourself feel the pain. To take it in and deal with it. It’s hard to think about that little girl who died because some lunatic had so much hate pouring out of him. It’s hard to feel sad for her because it can hurt. But maybe hurting like that is good for you. Maybe it teaches you a lesson.

The Windup Girl: Incredible world-building

If you’ve ever read science fiction you know that world-building is a key ingredient in most books of the genre. Whether an author is writing about a galactic civilization set thousands of years into the future or imagining New York City in the year 2075, he has a lot of moving pieces to assemble: history, technology, politics, distant worlds, new cultures, alien races. World-building is a key component of a book’s setting. It can drive the plot. It can contribute to character development. In other words, it’s the backbone of the novel.

World-building is what distinguishes Paolo Bacigalupi’s The Windup Girl from the other books published last year. It is set more than a century from now, on an Earth that’s been devastated by global warming, corporate-sponsored bio-terrorism, the collapse of fossil fuel supplies and a world-wide shortage of food.

Bacigalupi has not only assembled a nightmare vision of the future. He’s also imagined how humanity has adjusted and survived. He shows us bio-engineers trying to resurrect long extinct crop plants. He imagines technologies for power-production, such as flywheels spun up by genetically enhanced elephants. He’s described an international network of “calorie companies,” enterprises which bio-engineer food, patent and license that food, and invent pestilential viruses and bacteria to wipe out the food of their competitors.

Ultimately the world-building of Bacigalupi serves as the back drop to the story the author is telling, which in itself is excellent. It won the Hugo and the Nebula last year, after all. But what I found most striking about this book is the mature vision of a speculative future that Bacigalupi brings to the table with this – his first novel. He world-builds like a veteran. It’s not easy. So many science fiction novels collapse under the weight of an author’s absurd and poorly constructed vision of an another world.

The world Bacigalupi created is so interesting and so terrifying that I want to go back to it again. Rather than read another book about the characters featured in The Windup Girl, I want to return to this world. It was a thought that ran through my head the whole time I was reading the book. This is an intriguing vision of the future, a future that is certainly possible. Exploring what it’s like to live in a future that is a consequence of the issues that loom over us today, such as global warming and fossil fuel depletion, is terrifying and yet compelling.

The Dispossessed: A society is only as good as its people

Do you believe in the perfectibility of mankind? I think all of us like to believe that there is some kind of template for a society that will bring out the best of everyone, where a person will do what is right and just and make decisions that are in the best interest of everyone — not just themselves.

And yet, how many novels have you read about some utopian society which turns out to be anything but a perfect world.

I think utopias are bunk. There is no ideal society. Any society is only as good as the individuals that live in it. Human nature trumps structure. Mostly, the world sucks, and we only have ourselves and our neighbors to blame. That’s the message of Ursula Le Guin’s The Dispossessed.

I’ve been mixing some classic scifi into my reading in 2010 (such as Zelazny’s This Immortal). It’s been fun. Older scifi doesn’t always age well, but there’s still some entertainment to be had and some wisdom to be gained. Ursula Le Guin’s The Dispossessed exemplifies that.

I recently listened to Tony C. Smith’s interview of author Connie Willis on his Star Ship Sofa podcast. Willis astutely pointed out, in so many words, that when scifi or any literature makes its political message plainly obvious to the reader, it loses its power. Le Guin’s message is rather plainly made, and that makes for a heavy-handed approach. She creates a whole world, inhabited by 20 million people, who are performing a 150-year social experiment. That seems pretty unlikely to me, but Le Guin depends on this as a device to prove her point.

Still, despite the heavy-handed approach, there’s a powerful message in The Dispossessed. The book is a tale of two worlds: Urras and Anarres. Urras is a big, verdant, and messy planet full of individual nations vying for political domination of the globe. It is a physical paradise with lots of political and economic problems. Anarres is a dry, harsh world colonized 150 years before by millions of anarchic, communist idealists from Urras. It is a harsh world where people live without government, yet they organize to work together to shelter themselves and stave off starvation.

The residents of Anarres think they live in a perfect society. They’ve eliminated the concepts of ownership and power and authority. There is no money. There are no leaders or bureaucrats. Everyone works collectively to serve the common good. They make decisions together on how to organize their resources. Everyone is supposed to be 100% free to pursue their lives as they see fit, so long as they contribute something to the world. They view Urras as “hell,” an ownership society where poor people work for low wages, oppressed by the wealthy and the political classes.

But Le Guin’s genius is on display when she reveals that the ideal society of Anarres isn’t quite a utopia. The main character, Shevek, is a physicist struggling to prove a scientific theory that is so advanced that no one on his planet can understand it, not even Sabul, the physicist who serves as his mentor at his university. Only a handful of scientists on Urras can follow his work.

Because the science is so esoteric, Shevek’s work is devalued. He is also ostracized from academia. Sabul works behind the scenes to strip Shevek of his ability to teach about his theories and he inhibits Shevek’s communications with the Urrasti scientists who understand his work. How can this happen? Sabul shouldn’t have the power to do that. No one on Anarres should have that power.

Well every society needs someone to make the decisions. On Anarres decisions are usually made by syndicates of experts who are supposed to rotate in and out of their positions. Sabul is a mediocre scientist who has found that he has much more aptitude as a bureaucrat. So he’s decided to build a little fiefdom in academia for himself. He uses his power to oppress Shevek, mostly because he doesn’t approve of the type of work Shevek is doing, but also because Shevek refuses to let Sabul take partial credit for the work. How does Sabul get away with this? Probably because there is no one in a position of authority for Shevek to appeal to. Even in an ideal society supposedly free of the power structures that people use to oppress others, that society can only be as good as its individual members.

This corruption of the Anarres ideal is on display throughout the book. A playwright who pens an unconventional comedy is ostracized by the public because people don’t understand his black sense of humor. The syndicate that organizes theatrical performances determines that his play is offensive to Anarres ideals and blacklists him.  He has no way to express his art anymore, so he’s forced to do manual labor as a vocation. Eventually he goes insane.

Le Guin makes it clear with countless examples that anyone who promotes ideas that defy any of Anarres’ conventions is met with scorn, hostility, harassment, and even violence. How is that possible on a world where personal freedom is placed above all else and individual wealth and power are banished?

Any society is only as good as its individual members. When enough of those individuals give into their own selfish desires, their fears, and their prejudices, those desires fears and prejudices can manifest themselves into something oppressive. We’ve seen it happen throughout history with slavery and Jim Crow and the Nuremberg laws of Nazi Germany. We’ve seen books banned from schools and libraries over trivialities. We’ve seen people burned at the stake. And in Le Guin’s utopia, we see it again. On a world  where millions of people have committed to serve an ideal, individuals who give in to their base desires and fears can ruin it for everyone else.

Read on the street: Winning over the ladies

Here we have a proudly owned Ford truck with a modestly lifted suspension. It’s parked in a Whole Foods lot. Yes, a Whole Foods lot. Not exactly the typical ride of that store’s clientele, but here it is. We encountered it there after doing a little bit of late-night shopping following a trip to the local movie theater.

I decided to share this classic ride here in the inaugural post in a series I’ll be doing on this blog on interesting and ridiculous things I’ve read while walking the Earth.  What’s there to read on this truck, you ask?

Let’s take a closer look.

Isn’t that classy? I imagine this guy is a heterosexual, and his ultimate goal is to find a girlfriend, wife, or some other female companion. If so, someone needs to tell him that he’s doing it wrong.

What self-respecting woman would step up into a truck with that trash stenciled on it? None, most likely. In fact, only a woman with no self-respect would ride in this rolling travesty.

Long story short, this guy ain’t winning over many ladies with this truck, at least no ladies with a minimum of half a brain and a hint of dignity.

The joys of fanboy crossover madness

I love to read. I love to watch great TV.  The experience of reading a great book or watching a great show is nearly matched by introducing a friend to the same experience. In the years since I originally picked up A Game of Thrones, the first book in the “Song of Ice and Fire” series by George R.R. Martin, I have convinced about six people to read the series. All of them have loved it as much as I have. It is THE best fantasy series I have ever read. I love it more than Tolkien’s classics. I love it more than Jordan’s “Wheel of Time” series, which fell off the rails nearly a decade ago. And every time I see or hear of someone writing it, I get a little thrill. It allows me to recall the wonderful experience of reading the book for the first time…. sort of a vicarious thrill.

The Martin series is fantastic because it combines the epic grandeur of Tolkien with incredibly well-developed characters that readers fall in love with… Everyone I’ve introduced it to, whether they are fantasy fans or not, has loved these books.

Then there is Battlestar Galactica (the reboot). The TV series was perhaps the greatest hard scifi television program I have ever watched. From beginning to end, I loved it. It had its ups and downs, sure. And many were unhappy with the finale. But the show remains the standard for scifi television, and its departure from the airwaves has left a gaping wound in many fans’ hearts.

For many geeks, Battlestar and Ice and Fire stand at the pinnacle of their respective genres. Many fans still mourn the loss of Battlestar and they despair at Martin’s years-long delay in writing the fifth installment in the Ice and Fire series.

As a fan with a deep emotional connection to both of these franchises, I was struck mightily by a tweet I saw on Twitter recently. Tricia Helfer, the actress who played Six, the leggy blonde cylon on Battlestar tweeted from a hospital waiting room:

Almost 1/2 way thru A Storm of Swords. I wonder if I’ll get thru the rest of it on this long day of waiting. Prob not, it’s 1180 pages!!

A Storm of Swords is the second book in the Ice and Fire series. Not only did I get the usual thrill of knowing that someone else is reading these books for the first time. She was someone who was connected to one of the other great scifi/fantasy franchises I’ve experienced. These two worlds collided in a fun way that fanboys all over could buzz about. Helfer even tweeted a photo of her book, along with a lunch she was munching on, while sitting in a hospital waiting room. I guess this is a mix of nerdy fanboy exhilaration, voyeurism, and a sense of joy that yet another person is experiencing these wonderful books for the first time.