Eleanor Arnason's Blog, page 72

The Mystery Man

There seem to be two theories about Barack Obama. One is he's a spineless invertebrate and a terrible negotiator, who keeps being outmaneuvered by Mitch McConnell and John Boehner.

The other is he's fiendish Machiavel, who only pretends to be a Democrat and who achieves Republican goals while appearing to be outmaneuvered by Republicans.

I am not sure either is true. If you look at his behavior in areas where he has control -- foreign policy, war and security -- he has continued and expanded Bush policy. He has continued two illegal wars and added four more (Pakistan, Yemen, Libya and Somalia). He has kept the illegal prison at Guantanamo open. His Justice Department has refused to go after Wall Street criminals, but has been active is going after whistle blowers and peace and environmental activists. Check Glenn Greenwald's fine blog for details on all of this.

This makes him look like a Republican -- or a Democratic hawk, of which there have been many. His natural impulses seem conservative and authoritarian, and he is obviously interested in managing appearance, rather than changing reality.

However, when you look at his legislative history, which is not fully in his control, he looks less like a fiendish 11-dimensional chess player and more like a clueless idiot.

Look at the debt ceiling mess, which went on apparently forever and ended in a terrible deal and a downgrading of the country's bond rating. Obama looked dishonest and inept throughout.

There are other examples of ineptness -- The year-long struggle to create a national health plan which resulted in a godawful mess of a bill, which does not solve the main problem: the cost of health care.

His handling of the economic collapse doesn't look especially smart to me. And in what way is it fiendishly clever to ignore global warming? Is he planning to move to Mars?

Now -- you can say these are all signs that he's a weasel working for the bosses. But remember that capitalism is not monolithic. There are corporations that would benefit from infrastructure repair, clean energy, affordable health care, honest banks, and a planet which can be inhabited...

How is it good for capitalism to have a financial system that might collapse tomorrow, or an economy that may never recover, or a planet that is largely desert?

If you can't see and deal with obvious problems which threaten your existence, you are not much of a fiendish plotter in my book. My villains always have a clue.

Footnote from the Oxford Dictionary of Literary Terms:

Machiavel [mak‐yă‐vel], a type of stage villain found in Elizabethan and Jacobean drama, and named after the Florentine political theorist Niccolò Machiavelli, whose notorious book Il Principe (The Prince, 1513) justified the use of dishonest means to retain state power. Exaggerated accounts of Macchiavelli's views led to the use of his name—sometimes directly referred to in speeches—for a broad category of ruthless schemers, atheists, and poisoners. Shakespeare's Iago and Richard III are the most famous examples of the type.

NASA APOD

The sands of time are running out for the central star of this hourglass-shaped planetary nebula. With its nuclear fuel exhausted, this brief, spectacular, closing phase of a Sun-like star's life occurs as its outer layers are ejected - its core becoming a cooling, fading white dwarf. In 1995, astronomers used the Hubble Space Telescope (HST) to make a series of images of planetary nebulae, including the one above. Here, delicate rings of colorful glowing gas (nitrogen-red, hydrogen-green, and oxygen-blue) outline the tenuous walls of the hourglass. The unprecedented sharpness of the HST images has revealed surprising details of the nebula ejection process that are helping to resolve the outstanding mysteries of the complex shapes and symmetries of planetary nebulas.

Nomination

My story "Mammmoths of the Great Plains" has been nominated for the Carl Brandon Society's Kindred Award "for an outstanding speculative fiction work dealing
with race, ethnicity, and culture."

Pretty cool.

Letter to my Congresspeople

I lay in bed last night and drafted a letter to my Congresswoman and two Senators on what Congress and the President are not dealing with:

1. Global warming. This is the big one. Failure to reduce greenhouse gases could lead to the planet being largely uninhabitable. This is not an exaggeration.

2. The financial system, which remains both crooked and fragile. Right now, there is good reason to believe most big banks are bankrupt. Only creative accounting makes them look solvent. We need to clean up this mess: take over the banks, determine what they are actually worth, break up the too-big-to-fail banks and create new banking regulations. If this isn't done, we will have another crash like 2008 or worse.

3. The economy. It looks as if we are sinking deeper into recession. Another Great Depression is possible, if the governments of the US and Europe do not intervene.
Intervening does not mean saving banks. It means saving people and countries.

4. Infrastructure. The basis of American society -- roads, bridges, water mains, sewer lines, buildings -- is falling apart. Everything needs to be repaired or replaced.

5. Health costs, which continue to rise and suck wealth out of the entire economy. The way to control costs (and provide health care to the nation) is a national health care system like Canada or the European countries or Medicare or the VA.

6. Sustainable energy. We need it.

7. Sustainable agriculture. We need it.

This is long enough list for now. The solution is obvious, though not easy. Break the power of FIRE (Finance, Insurance and Real Estate). These sectors of the economy are parasitic, sucking wealth that is needed for productive work. Tax the rich. Use the money to rebuild the nation: new infrastructure, new energy, new kinds of agriculture, new housing. All of this will create new jobs.

We have the resources: people who are out of work, factories that are running under capacity, considerable natural resources, and a developed (though deteriorating) economy.

The problem is, the rich won't give up easily. If they win, those of us who remain alive will be living in a wasteland. If we win, we are likely to have an entirely new society.

Being on Panels

I've decided to take a break from reading political news, because I find it depressing. But I still want to begin my day by reading on the Internet. So I've read a mixture of stuff, including Michelle Sagara's post on how panels are not about you, the individual, maybe-not-so-famous author.

I did a little cringing, because I was on a panel at Convergence on the short fiction of Eleanor Arnason, and I took the panel over. I don't know what came over me: a brief fit of madness, maybe. Anyway, I talked about current writing and future plans for writing and actually described plots. I don't usually do this, and I wish I had kept quiet and let the other panelists talk about me.

In any case, Michelle Sagara is right: telling the plots of your fiction is a no-no, though I have always done it. But not usually on panels.

But I'm still inclined to think the panels I'm on are about me and my ideas. I don't do panels unless I have something to say about the topic, and then I really want to say it. If I am lucky, the other panelists will be equally interested in the topic and eager to talk.

I should add that I spent years learning how to talk intelligently in front of an audience, and I usually do not walk into panels cold. I have thought about the topic and sometimes have notes.

I've decided to take a break from reading political news,...

I've decided to take a break from reading political news, because I find it depressing. But I still want to begin my day by reading on the Internet. So I've read a mixture of stuff, including Michelle Sagara's post on how panels are not about you, the individual, maybe-not-so-famous author.

I did a little cringing, because I was on a panel at Convergence on the short fiction of Eleanor Arnason, and I took the panel over. I don't know what came over me: a brief fit of madness, maybe. Anyway, I talked about current writing and future plans for writing and actually described plots. I don't usually do this, and I wish I had kept quiet and let the other panelists talk about me.

In any case, Michelle Sagara is right: telling the plots of your fiction is a no-no, though I have always done it. But not usually on panels.

But I'm still inclined to think the panels I'm on are about me and my ideas. I don't do panels unless I have something to say about the topic, and then I really want to say it. If I am lucky, the other panelists will be equally interested in the topic and eager to talk.

I should add that I spent years learning how to talk intelligently in front of an audience, and I usually do not walk into panels cold. I have thought about the topic and sometimes have notes.

NASA APOD

What's that strange bright streak? It is the last image ever of a space shuttle from orbit. A week and a half ago, after decoupling from the International Space Station, the Space Shuttle Atlantis fired its rockets for the last time, lost its orbital speed, and plummeted back to Earth. Within the next hour, however, the sophisticated space machine dropped its landing gear and did what used to be unprecedented -- landed like an airplane on a runway. Although the future of human space flight from the USA will enter a temporary lull, many robotic spacecraft continue to explore our Solar System and peer into our universe, including Cassini, Chandra, Chang'e 2, Dawn, Fermi, Hubble, Kepler, LRO, Mars Express, Messenger, MRO, New Horizons, Opportunity, Planck, Rosetta, SDO, SOHO, Spitzer, STEREO, Swift, Venus-Express, and WISE.

Poem

The Mars photo (and the current situation in Washington) remind me of the Shelley poem:

I met a traveler from an antique land
Who said: Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed;
And on the pedestal these words appear:
"My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!"
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.

NASA APOD

What has the Opportunity rover found on Mars? While traversing a vast empty plain in 2005 in Meridiani Planum, one of Earth's rolling robots on Mars found a surprise when visiting the location of its own metallic heat shield discarded last year during descent. The surprise is the rock visible on the lower left, found to be made mostly of dense metals iron and nickel. The large cone-shaped object behind it -- and the flank piece on the right -- are parts of Opportunity's jettisoned heat shield. Smaller shield debris is also visible. Scientists do not think that the basketball-sized metal "Heat Shield Rock" originated on Mars, but rather is likely an ancient metallic meteorite. In hindsight, finding a meteorite in a vast empty dust plain on Mars might be considered similar to Earth meteorites found on the vast empty ice plains of Antarctica. The finding raises speculations about the general abundance of rocks on Mars that have fallen there from outer space.

I read the news this morning, which is almost always a mistake. I think we should vote every politician in Washington out of office and elect cats instead.

More on Writing

I finished Natalie Goldberg's Writing Down the Bones and am still working on Julia Cameron's The Artist's Way.

There's a lot that I like in the Goldberg book especially. She is absolutely right when she says that you have to read a lot and write a lot, if you want to be a writer.

But both books still seem to argue that anyone can be a writer. I'm not sure. Most people in our society are literate and can put words down on paper. Does that mean they can become good writers? I've known people who worked for years on writing and never became very good. Why not? A refusal to listen to criticism, often. An unwillingness to study their craft closely. A lack of imagination. A lack of feeling for language. Maybe simply a lack of gift, whatever that may mean.

Cameron and Goldberg are both teaching people how to be saner, which is great. But the focus required to be really good at anything may not result in a well-adjusted person. I am very much a fan of sanity. I would never encourage anyone to be less sane and happy. But being good at anything requires a lot of time, a lot of energy, a lot of focus. It may make you a wee bit unbalanced.

For example, there is this story:

Olivia Gentile's Life List is the remarkable story of Phoebe Snetsinger, a woman trapped by her life as homemaker, who found liberation in bird watching. Diagnosed with terminal cancer, she began traveling the world, not seeking a cure, but in search of rare birds—becoming a kind of ornithologist's heroine, and living another eighteen years.

What this review (by A.M. Homes) does not mention is that Snetsinger flew the coop, left her family to chase rare birds. She was a very focused lady, whose achievements were remarkable.

She died in 1999 in a car accident in Madagascar. Her last bird, per Wikipedia, was the Red-shouldered vanga, only known to science since 1997.

Maybe I'm being defensive. I have spent my life learning to write. I organized my life from early on to allow for writing, though it meant I gave up certain things. I'd hate to think that anyone can take a class from Cameron or Goldberg and equal me.