A.R. Williams's Blog, page 5

Life and Liberty

Apparently, the Libertarians are getting attention this election cycle from the Republicans who can’t get behind Trump.  There are a lot of things I like about the Libertarians.  I like the consistency to a principle.  The official party platform is equally about getting the government out of regulating guns and drugs.  They aren’t big on starting wars.  They don’t think the government should have a say in who marries who, or legislating sex, or interfering with a body’s dominion over itself.  This is vastly preferable to people who want to pick and choose: no government in my gun safe, but please go police that lady’s panties.  I don’t think you can have it both ways.  

But there are flaws in the reasoning.  For example, the desire to de-regulate everything and let the market decide about everything.  Laissez Faire capitalism.  Well, the truth is that we tried that and it didn’t work out so well.  Without regulation, we ended up with monopolies that could charge whatever the hell they wanted because there was no market left to check them.  The industrial age was perfectly content with child labor, no safety precautions for workers, and impossibly low living standards for most people.  De-regulation brought us the Great Depression of 1929 and the housing crash of 2008.  Because society can’t trust a few guys behind the curtain pulling levers and belching out smoke not to sacrifice the well-being of millions in favor of adding a few more zeros to the back of their bank accounts.  Every time we’ve trusted corporations to do the right thing without demanding it of them and verifying that they are following the rules, they’ve run amok.  Every. Time.  

Still, the economic libertarians insist that fewer regulations would be better.  Just like you never hear of anyone doing a past life regression finding out that they were a minor peasant who died of influenza after a illiterate life of picking up the leftover straw from some Lord’s field, it seems like everyone advocating for true economic liberty seems to think that they’d somehow end up on the top of the dogpile.  Other people’s suffering is rarely as motivating to us as our own is, so it is fine that the people on the bottom get crushed.  Because in this fantasy, no one ever thinks that they’ll fall to the bottom.  Still, history is pretty clear that, in the absence of government intervention – basically out-bullying the bullies – you have a handful of people on the top for whom life is very good, and everyone else is on the bottom being miserable.  Government basically knocks the top off the highs and the bottom off the lows, bringing the two a little closer together.  Sure, government is still a bit of a bully.  It’s King Kong with clumsy fists and thoughtless, crushing missteps, at least sometimes.  

The thing is, you don’t get to choose between perfect and imperfect.  You get to choose between imperfect systems.  Would you rather have companies monopolizing you with the market as an unreliable counterbalance?  Or would you rather have the Government overseeing things, sometimes clumsily, and at the mercy of people you and your countrymen elect, where no one gets 100% of what they want, and fewer people get left behind entirely?  

Meanwhile, when government knocks off the lowest of the lows and the highest of the highs, society as a whole is better off for it.  So maybe the wine cellars of the rich have ten fewer bottles of priceless Brut.  Infant mortality goes down for everyone.  All these people squawking about abortion should be in favor of policies that bring down infant mortality, no?

Anyway, measuring what is important in terms of dollars amassed isn’t justified in terms of the research.  After about $70k in salary/year, more money doesn’t make for more happiness.  (Interject a little Biggie here: I don’t know what they want from me.  Seems like the more money we come across, the more problems we see.)  Read Daniel Pink’s Drive.  After people can take care of their lives, money doesn’t motivate anymore.  It’s purpose and connection that matters.  

So all of these people who want the rich to pay less taxes because they might win the lottery one day and they don’t want the government to get their hard-won money…  they are prioritizing money they don’t have and may never see over quality of life that is independent of a few million in the bank.  

In short, libertarian economic philosophy reeks of bullshit to me.  It rests on the fantasy that there is a clean answer, an ideal answer, and one that won’t come with its own costs.  The truth is that you have $100 and you’re going to have to pay $50 of that one way or another.  It’s just the price of doing business.  So who are you going to pay that $50 to?  The government, for building and maintaining the roads for everyone?  Or the troll taking a toll at the bridge?

Everything costs something.  Don’t believe anyone who doesn’t openly acknowledge that fact.  

Turn Around (Brighteyes)

Because I can’t help myself when it comes to referencing unrelated pop lyrics.  

There must be people who read more self-help books than me.  Consumers of TED talks that get to the bottom of way more presentations by earnest smart people offering the answer to everything.  But I’ve read my fair share…

It is entirely possible that I was ruined by writing poetry.  While I’d hate to be held to the poetic standard without exception, I certainly feel free to apply it liberally everywhere else: the best use of words is to say exactly what you mean with as much economy as you are capable of.  A book on Essentialism that stretches to 200+ pages is a contradiction that risks the entire premise of the book.  

Most books have this problem.  We authors tend to fall in love with the sound of our own voice in the same way that children in the midst of a tantrum keep crying: they get used to the rhythm of it and the body just perpetuates the posture.  I’m sure I am as guilty as anyone.  On the other hand, I get fussed at for writing too sparsely, so maybe it is only the blog where I wax eloquently to excess.  

Anyway, pushing aside my digressions, what I’m trying to say is this: much of the self-help advice I’ve come across comes down to a simple chunk of advice.  Turn around and face whatever it is you are trying to get away from.  

There are many ways to get to this:  

Mindfulness, which advises to approach with curiosity whatever you’re trying to squash in yourself.
The metaphor of a car in an unwanted spin – turn into the spin to regain control.  
Ariel and Shya Kane – what you resist, persists.  
Dawna Markova (I will be singing the praises of Dawna forever, but even she could have condensed), who advises readers to sit with their demons and seek understanding.  
Deri Llewellyn-Davis says fuck the fear and sends you off to do the thing that scares you the most.  

I’d never tell anyone to forgo reading.  Buy a book.  Buy loads of books.  Buy my book, while you’re at it.  All I’m saying is that you’re going to come back to the same simple concept time and time again.  To find that freedom most of us are seeking, turn around and face what constrains you with curiosity and compassion.  Stop running, and your fears will stop chasing you.  Give up, but in the nicest possible way.  Surrender.  

There.  Hundreds of dollars in self help books in two paragraphs, one bulleted list, and some tangential rambling about poetry.  

Our destiny is frequently met in the very paths we take to avoid it.  –Jean de La Fontaine

GAF

The most admired American virtue is not giving a shit.  There is something about the brash, fearless loudmouth that we can’t get enough of.  My father (a frequent topic around here) loves to claim that, now he’s an old fart, he doesn’t have to do anything he doesn’t want to do, he can say whatever he wants, and he can walk around with his fly open because he’s no longer obligated to give a shit.  

I’ll admit it.  There is something exhilarating about Donald Trump saying the unspeakable: we should have never gone to Iraq.  Our international trade agreements were made by people who would never have to live with the consequences, and the consequences are a gutted middle class.  Simply for saying these two things, these two unspeakable things, with no apparent regard for the opinion of “the establishment,” Trump has won the loyalty of a large number of Americans.  

We love the truculent.  The obstreperous.  The fearless.  The reckless.  

The horror that the coasts feel about what the world might think of us isn’t shared by a sizeable chunk of the country.  What difference does it make if the English find us crass.  Or the French think we’re unsophisticated in our understanding and our manners.  Or the Germans believe we’re undisciplined.  What does it matter to a culture that doesn’t value method, or philosophy, or decorum?  We like our guns big and our mouths bigger.  

Of course Hillary is failing.  She’s a rational choice: clearly intelligent, practiced in the halls of governance, knowledgeable about the world, pragmatic, predictable…  Exactly what Wall Street and the International community want out of an American President.  Exactly the opposite of everything America celebrates.  

We celebrate cowboys.  Rugged individualists.  We like intuition over intellect, gut over head, and all the things that the professional watchers of American politics thought were important turn out to be supremely irrelevant.  I’m not for Trump in any way shape or form, but there is a reason why Heath Ledger’s Joker casts such a long shadow: some part of us all just wants to see the motherfucker burn.  The Joker would vote for Trump.  

But there is a conflict built into the value system here.  Maybe two conflicts.  

The first is that we’re all free to buck convention because we just don’t give a shit, but no one is free from the consequences.  This is the first and most basic rule, my entry for consideration in the search for the grand theory of everything: there must be balance.  Everything costs something, every cost confers a benefit.  Matter cannot be created or destroyed, only transformed.  If you take a big helping of glee in telling everyone to fuck off, you can be sure that no one will be there to assist you when you find isolation isn’t as glorious as you thought it would be.  As a country, we can throw a giant temper tantrum (Trumper tantrum?) and have the immense satisfaction in watching the resulting bonfire, but that satisfaction is bound to be temporary.  Sooner or later, we’ll have to come to terms with the wreckage.  Pretty fire and all, but what are you going to do with the cinders?  

The second is that we genuinely do care.  So maybe world opinion doesn’t matter too much to a healthy chunk of Americans, but we love our families, our tribes, our people.  We care about eating and being pain-free and how long we’re going to live, and who we’re going to have to bury along the way.  We worry about protection and safety and comfort.  We’re the exact opposite of fearless: we’re terrified.  Terrified that our kids will fail, scared of the disconnect we feel from our communities, afraid of the future, wary of all of the changes that are pouring in on us…  Trump isn’t a solution–inserting an unpredictable quantity with a thin skin doesn’t seem like a good methodology for improving things–but Hillary isn’t selling a viable alternative.  Even if she came baggage-free (and no one comes free of baggage), she’s still not making a compelling case for … well anything.  At least not as far as I can tell.

And for the record, I do give a shit.    

The End of the World

My dad used to say that every generation thinks it is living at the end of the world.  The Romans complained that civilization was going to be destroyed by gossip.*  Growing up, we were afraid that the apocalypse was going to be ushered in by a new world order run by the UN.  There is nuclear holocaust, World War III, North Korea, climate change, flood, asteroid, plague, water shortage, or some combination of the above.  Never mind the breakdown of civil discourse, celebrity worship, willful ignorance, the breakdown of social fabric, the robot takeover, government overreach, unwashed hordes of immigrants come to undermine all the good work of the enlightenment…  Pick your poison.  

I live there too.  After the latest round of catastrophic news, whatever the catastrophe of the day is, I find myself thinking about having children.  About thrusting an unsuspecting soul into this madness, and I wonder why you’d do that.  Why would you bring something into the world in order to suffer the end of potable water, a world without polar bears or mercy or antibiotics that work…  

But the last bit of sunshine we saw here in DC included an evening walk in a quaint part of the city.  Ice cream and sunshine and good company and pizza for dinner.  After the ice cream.  There are stories and connections and affection and jokes and joy.  

Everything costs something.  Nothing comes for free.  So maybe it isn’t selfish to bring an innocent soul into this mess after all.  There is still beauty in the mess.  Curiosity.  Discovery.  Humor.  Meaning.  Connection.  Purpose.  If I’d never been conceived, I can’t imagine that absence of self even being an absence.  It wouldn’t have mattered, there wouldn’t have been any disappointment in an unplanned pregnancy that never occurred in the first place.  There would have been no perspective to feel the loss of rainbows and cuddle-monster nephews.  I’m not sad that I live in an age of anxiety.  Maybe humanity has always lived in an age of anxiety.  Maybe that’s just the price.  For access to simple pleasures and a little joy here and there, maybe it’s not that bad of a deal.  

*I read it somewhere, but google can’t find it.  I didn’t make it up, but perhaps someone did.

Politically Correct: Part Six

Don’t be an asshole.

It wasn’t that long ago that some Bernie supporters showed up to protest at a Clinton rally.  Sorry people, kind of an asshole thing to do.  You want to protest something specific like her voting for the Iraq war?  Or her hawkish approach to being Secretary of State?  Or taking wall street money?  Go for it.  All of those things are fair game for protesters.  But don’t show up to ruin the party just because you like the other guy better.  If you like Bernie, vote for him.  Call.  Talk to people in a way that they might actually listen to you.  But don’t be an ass about it.

Protesters at Trump rallies.  How can you make the argument that Trump and his supporters are assholes if you’re an asshole too?  Protest.  By all means.  Show up and disagree.  But let *them* be the assholes.  You can’t make someone else look bad by behaving badly yourself.

Again, I don’t think there was a golden age of American discourse when people weren’t assholes.  Congressmen have been known to beat each other with walking sticks.  The asshole has been with us for a very long time.  But other people are beyond our control.  All we can do is not be the asshole.  Being an asshole doesn’t win the argument.  It doesn’t change anyone’s mind.  It doesn’t make you look smart.  It solves nothing, moves nothing forward, creates no value.

And maybe we could talk less about how awful the PC police are and how it stifles dialogue if everyone could stop being an asshole.  And I mean everyone.  The world is made up of people who don’t agree with you.  People who hold beliefs and opinions that aren’t terribly considered or intelligent.  They have as much right to air and bodily integrity as you have.  Disagree.  Talk about the pros and cons.  Think about the other guy’s perspective.  Bring a little respect to the table.   Not everyone has to agree with you: the world will keep spinning.

And then don’t be an asshole.

Trumped

Someone I know, respect, and love is a Trump supporter…

What do you do with that?  Despite the calls by some to shame Trump supporters, I can’t imagine trying to make a family member feel like shit on purpose.  It doesn’t seem kind, it doesn’t seem productive.  When you’re talking about a Trump supporter in the abstract, maybe.  But no group is made up of abstractions.  We’re talking about people.  And maybe the forgotten, slipping white middle class needs to check its collective privilege, or get used to the realities of life that have been patently obvious to anyone who isn’t white for forever.  Maybe all of that is true in the abstract.  But whatever approach, whatever *truth* you think needs to be applied to a group as a whole is very different than what might have a chance in hell of working when you’re looking at a face you know and love.  

So I asked questions.  What do you like about Trump?  

It comes down to his stance on trade.  Our various and assorted trade deals have allowed companies to manufacture things on the cheap in other countries.  The reason why it is cheaper to manufacture in China than it is in the US comes down to the protections that are legally mandated here.  These protections look out for workers: weekends, safety measures, reasonable working days, minimum wage, legal working age…  These protections also look out for our environment: no, you can’t just dump your toxic sludge directly into the river.  Yes, you need to do something about the contaminants you’re releasing into the air.  

These trade agreements are the reason why the vast majority of us have a tablet, a cell phone, a flat screen TV (or three), laptops, additional screens for the laptop, shredders, printers, scanners, cameras that are mostly obsolete, game consoles, speakers, docks, headphones, and a shoebox full of old technology that we can’t figure out how to dispose of.  Most of us have some collection of the above, and some of us have all of the above in spades.  And that’s before we get to the drawers full of socks, shoes by the dozen…  jeans and teeshirts and work pants and dress clothes and weekend clothes and…  

Compared to the 1950’s, when those manufacturing jobs were in the US…  You had one TV for the house.  One phone.  Look at the housing stock from the 1950’s…  Storage is minimal.  The kitchens are small.  Imagine building one of these massive outlet complexes that currently grace the side of every major highway in 1950.  Imagine an area when you could get to five of the same in 1.5 hours?  That’s DC at this point.  Five of these bastards.  Because the demand for discount Michael Kors is that high?  

So the powers that be traded upward mobility for those segments of our country that just want a job and a house to go home to, nothing fancy, and got *stuff* in return.  Cheap stuff.  Even those who are sliding backwards economically probably own at least twice as much stuff as their grandparents or great grandparents.

I’ve not heard a reasonable argument that counters this.  We sent our manufacturing elsewhere and got a pile of plastic in return.  Who that benefited, whether we’d trade dual monitors and technology that is replaceable every couple of years in favor of those jobs is another question altogether.  

Irrefutable is this: everything costs something.  You pay one way or the other.  

Again, Trump’s status as an “outsider” is a positive.  Our political system is drowning in funds supplied by people attempting to sway things in their favor.  Laws are written by lobbyists to the benefit of corporations and then rubber-stamped by legislators.  I’d point out that answer to this is to elect Senators and Congressional Representatives who don’t take private funding, not to place all that vitriol into the Presidential race.  

The other selling feature for my pro-Trump family is the politically correct thing.  I find this less defensible.  As addressed elsewhere, there are forms of the anti-pc argument that are more clearly put like this: I liked it when I could say what I think because I’m white, and white people agreed with me, but society silenced anyone who fell outside of the narrowly-defined parameters of normal.

I asked if there was anything about Trump that this family member didn’t like.  

Nothing came up.  I brought up the violence at his political rallies.  “Well, he can’t control what people do in his name.”  Some truth to that, but also something to this question: why aren’t Kasich’s supporters sucker-punching people?  This relative dismissed some of the more outlandish of proposals – the wall, the mass deportations – as more of a metaphor than a literal thing.  

I fear (like others) that Trump supporters are hearing what they want to hear, interpreting it as they want to interpret it, and discounting the rest.  It is an approach that takes a remarkably optimistic view of the very thing they rail so eloquently about: the government.  Because if anything would stand between us and the worst excesses of Trump’s rhetoric (should he choose to follow through on proposals that would muzzle the press, for example) is that same government everyone is bitching so heartily about.  The ethics of the Military a firewall against the willful commission of international war crimes and nuclear war.  The obstructionist power of Congress to resist mass and dangerous alteration to the systems of government that have done a good job of keeping us all dissatisfied and reasonably free all these years.   

The problem with countering the Trump narrative is that the things that he says that ring true ring *really* true, especially for those who are suffering the worst effects of income equality.  Unfortunately the fears about near poverty and declining prospects get bound up with xenophobia and a longing for the good old days of law and order.  I just don’t think that you can get anywhere with the latter until the former is addressed.  

Politically Correct: Part Five

The death of nuance.

Perhaps Americans have never had much capacity for nuance.  Let’s face it.  We aren’t a particularly nuanced crowd.  We like our rhetoric in black and white.  So maybe there never was a golden age of rational people having thoughtful conversation that recognized that the right answer was probably drawn in shades of grey.

But egads.  On just about every subject that is in the public debate at the moment, the dialogue from *both* sides of the argument is simply wrong.  Not only is it wrong, it is singularly unhelpful at best and downright duplicitous at worst.  Shall we take a spin through controversy?

Let’s start with the mother load.  No pun intended.  Abortion.  First, women generally know when they are in a good position to be mothers.  They know this before they fall pregnant.  So if you really wanted to prevent abortion, you’d put a Planned Parenthood in every single neighborhood in America.  Men generally know when they’re ready to be fathers, for the record.  How about getting serious about some male birth control?  And making condoms freely available.  Right off the bat, the antipathy towards birth control gives lie to the statement that this is about protecting babies.  Because an unwanted conception that is prevented is also a woman that never has to choose.  As soon as you start shouting about shutting down Planned Parenthood, you totally undermine the notion that you want to prevent abortions from taking place.  Prevent pregnancy, prevent abortion.  Done.

On the other side.  No, not all abortions should be legal.  In most cases, you know from the day you realize your pregnant whether or not you’re ready to parent that child.  This isn’t the time for procrastinating.  The *only* reason for a third trimester abortion should be medical in nature and in that case, there is something so completely wrong with the pregnancy, an abortion is unlikely to cause the fetus pain.  If you can’t make up your mind in the first 12 weeks or so…  Whenever the research suggests that a fetus can feel pain is the point where abortions need to be banned, with an exemption for medical requirements.

Ready for the next one?  Guns.

Banning the sale of assault weapons to private citizens is not the first step in the totalitarian take over of the USA.  What do you think you need to be protected from?  Have you been watching too much of the Walking Dead?  No one needs a machine gun in their basement.

In this case, I don’t think there is a rabid opposition that demands all guns be outlawed.  There are just the NRA crazies who are convinced that Rambo is moving in next door, and therefore they need to be equally well armed.

Moving on.  Feminism.

John Kasich saying that women left their kitchens to vote for him was dumb and demonstrated that he’s incapable of thinking outside of his male experience, where women by and large do things like making him dinner.  This is just one example in a world where the evidence is overwhelming that many men think of women as accessories.  Women live with it every freaking day.  Just last week, one of my colleagues walked past my desk and commented on my hair, which was down.  I usually wear it tied up for this very reason: it attracts attention.  It’s red, it’s wavy, it’s long, and whatever stereotype you’ve heard about red heads comes out.  He wanted to know how I decided whether to put it up or leave it down and then said that he preferred it down.

Okay, it was intended as a compliment.  I get that.  He meant no harm.  But the compliment rested on the assumption that I might take what he likes into consideration when I wake up in the morning and do my hair.  The truth is that I don’t give a shit whether he thinks my hair is attractive.  I’m not there to please his eye.  If he’d said “your hair looks nice today,” I would have said “thank you,” and that would have been the end of that.  But “I prefer your hair down,” shifts the tone into something else entirely.  Most women get some variation of that kind of crap on a regular basis… this underlying assumption that a man’s opinion matters to us simply by nature of his maleness.

Why is the feminist discussion necessary?  Because many men are still incapable of seeing beyond the historical assumption that their experience and comfort is and should be the prime consideration in any given discussion.  The amount of vitriol women receive in the public square of the internet should be enough to convince everyone that this is necessary.  Thankfully, I’ve been spared thus far, but that might not last if I’m talking about this stuff.

But feminism has its failures.  The biological structure of the male brain is different than the biological structure of the female brain.  We are equal, but we are not identical.  That shouldn’t be read as an argument that women aren’t good at science or something equally stupid.  It just means that we process information differently.  Philosophy doesn’t trump evolution.  It doesn’t.  And when feminists talk about issues like sexual violence, we tend to talk about it like women are the only victims.  And there is a faction that seems to say that women have no responsibility to protect themselves or make wise choices.  Making men ashamed of being men, rejecting courtesy because it smells like patriarchy, insisting that being born a woman is to be born a victim…  These things don’t make sense to me.  Perhaps I’m displaying my privilege here, but screaming at men doesn’t seem particularly effective.  And you undermine your argument when you leave out large swaths of people in your argument for equality.  Feminist issues are human issues, and the second you treat someone like a second-class citizen, you fail.

Finally, the one subject where there is no nuance whatsoever: equal rights for everyone.  What other people do has not one damn thing to do with you.  Marriage equality for all doesn’t undermine marriage.  Look to your own marriage and mind your business.  Someone else’s gender experience has less than nothing to do with you.  Mind your business.  Unless you see physical harm being done to a child or animal (and having two daddies or mommies isn’t harmful: check the science), mind your own damn business.  If you don’t approve of abortion, don’t have one and then mind your business.  If you don’t approve of pre-marital sex, don’t have it and then mind your business.  If you don’t approve of pot, don’t smoke it.  And then mind your business.

 

Let’s Talk About Rape

Let’s get something straight.  There is one reason rape takes place.  All rapes, across genders and times and circumstances.  From the marital bed to the prison shower, at drunken parties to hospital beds.  There is one reason rape happens and only one.  You ready for this?

Rape and sexual assault take place because the perpetrator believes that they have a right to the victim’s body, which hasn’t been offered by consent.  There are multiple ways to get there: you believe that you have the right to sex with your partner, simply because they are your partner.  You think that buying dinner is the same as buying an orgasm.  You think women don’t know what they want.  You think that if someone is dumb enough to get drunk, then they get what they get.  Or you just want and it doesn’t really matter to you whether the other party thinks about the subject.

How do you stop a rape from happening?  The potential rapist must only remember that theirs is not the only set of wants that matter.  Done.

Except we aren’t done.  Because there is a logical fallacy I see applied all too liberally, which is that responsibility is a zero sum game. Or that, in a situation with two people, there is only one responsibility.  When the truth is that there are always as many responsibilities in a room as there are people.  So let’s look at Erykah Badu’s Twitter storm over skirt lengths.  She voiced an opinion that (to paraphrase) the biology of reproduction is such that a xx of child bearing age is likely to be sexually stimulating to an xy who has reached sexual maturity, so it makes sense to mitigate for that truth.

When we talk about young women protecting themselves (because the young boys who are sexually assaulted are hit with a different variety of victim-shaming), the language used to describe a xx’s responsibility to protect herself is kind of gross: stuff like how you wouldn’t walk around waving around a wad of $100 bills, therefore girls shouldn’t walk around in short skirts.  And on the other side, we have the violent opposition to what Erykah Badu said, yelling at her about how we can’t shame victims and make controlling the sexual response the responsibility of young women.

Blame the Puritans, rail against the patriarchy, but the xx body is highly sexualized in this culture.  It shouldn’t be, but it is.  We can talk all day about how these things shouldn’t be true, but yet here we are in a culture where they are still true.

Two people, two sets of responsibility which have nothing to do with the other.  First, primary, and most important is the simple fact that one person is not entitled to access to another persons body without consent.  Everyone should be able to handle that one, it isn’t complicated.

But there is another responsibility.  Whether it should fall on the shoulders of the xx or not is certainly debatable, but in recognition of our reality, the truth is that it is in the best interest of *everyone* not to do risky shit.  Risky shit: getting into a car with strangers.  Drinking with people you don’t know.  Going out as a group and leaving without one of your party.  I’ve done risky shit and been saved by the other party keeping track of the first rule in preventing rape: don’t rape.  I’ve been lucky.  That doesn’t mean I’d advocate for risky shit.

Short skirts don’t cause rape.  Boys in baggy jeans get raped.  But short skirts *do* draw attention and let’s face it. Attention in this culture – maybe in any culture – is a risk factor.  Is it right?  Absolutely not.  It’s bullshit.  But the fact that it is bullshit doesn’t make it any less true. So carry on, Mama Badu.

Politically Correct: Part Four

In which I play devil’s advocate.

Stephen Fry got on the Reuben Report recently and got into trouble for his comments on self pity, trigger warnings, and what the correct response to trauma should be.  Give the man credit for holding on to his stiff upper lip British heritage.  The question at hand is political correctness and whether or not Mr. Fry is *allowed* to advocate for a stiff upper lip and toughening up when it comes to trigger warnings.

Before I defend him, let’s establish clearly that everyone who has experienced trauma has a right to determine a path to healing.  It isn’t going to look the same for everyone.  There could be immense value in settling into the trauma for an individual.  No one can tell another person how to go through it.

But Mr. Fry is entitled to an opinion.  And let’s consider what informs that opinion, namely stereotypical British culture, which values stoicism, restraint, distance, and that proverbial stiff upper lip.  Culturally, anyone with a strong British heritage (including the dominant culture of the United States, which has deep roots in British culture) is simply uncomfortable with public displays of … well, anything.  I’m one of those people with roots back to the British Isles, and people “causing a scene” by something as innocuous as talking too loudly in public make me deeply, viscerally uncomfortable.  There is a physical recoil that happens whether I will or not.

But is he right?  Is there any advantage to be had in one method of coping or another?  I think that has to be decided on a case-by-case basis, and only by the person going through the experience.  To the first charge: stop feeling sorry for yourself.  Is there any utility in the approach?  I tend to go back to Nietzsche.  Nietzsche changed my life.  It has been years since I read Thus Spoke Zarathustra, but somewhere in that wonderful, weird book, Nietzsche says that one must own everything, even those things over which you had no control, because in doing so, you take back your power. Your ability to choose differently.  So long as all the responsibility lies externally, you are at the mercy of those around you to be decent human beings.  A victim has no agency, no control, no choice.  In a factual accounting, there is a victim and a perpetrator.  But does accepting the role of victim help someone process what has happened and reclaim some kind of solid ground?

Well, I think I had to understand myself as a victim first and then begin the process of reclaiming my agency by choosing to define myself by more than just the thing that happened to me.  But I wonder who I would have become if I had stayed there.  Owning that I had been a victim of molestation was what got me into therapy.  It colored my reading of Nietzche.  It was a starting point and not an end point.  Personally, I’d hate to see anyone get stuck there, but who am I to say what is right for anyone else.  I did, however, find *utility* in defining myself as more than what I’d been through.  Of course, he could have worded it better, but at the end of the day…  I can’t be mad at him.  I certainly wouldn’t want to shame him silent.

The second assertion: toughen up and get over your need for trigger warnings.

Would we be so dismissive of trigger warnings directed at soldiers with PTSD?  I doubt it.  Culturally, we are far more capable of being sympathetic to soldiers with PTSD than we are to victims of sex crimes, and even then, I don’t think those of us walking around with PTSD are feeling awash in understanding.  I’d suggest that Mr. Fry consider whether the “toughen up” advice would be applied across the board, and if not…  why?  Is it because we’re just that uncomfortable with the idea of bad uncles and naughty places?

Here is where I might suggest some tough love… What does Mr. Fry’s opinion have to do with anyone but Mr. Fry?  If this is an opinion you want to see drummed out of the culture, then isn’t it better for him to say it out loud and give you the opportunity to disagree?  Isn’t that where healthy dialogue and the evolution of ideas come from?  Someone saying something and someone else having the opportunity to respond constructively, teasing out the idea until it is either established as useful or discarded as useless…

Politically Correct: Part Three

When the first Shrek was out in theaters, my family and I went to see it.  About 2/3rds of the way through, Donkey mutters “what’s the point of being able to talk if you’ve got to keep secrets?”  Or something like that.  No one in the theater laughed except my family.  My whole damn family.  And they laughed hard.

Because I’m not known for my secret-keeping.  I do better (by far) now than I did as a child, but there is something in me that can’t compute the idea that there are things that can’t be discussed.  As a teenager in the Seventh-Day Adventist church, this got me into a lot of trouble.  The list of things we couldn’t talk about there went on for days.  The list of things we didn’t do was nearly as long, but one doesn’t really *do* secular humanism.  It is a concept, a philosophy, a thing you talk about.  And it, among other ideas, were verboten.

This never sat well with me.  I had questions and I wanted answers and that was unacceptable.  So I stopped being Adventist and ideas stopped being off-limits.

Except there are new rules for things that can’t be thought.  Ideas that can’t be said.  Discomforts that can’t be owned.  Recently, there was an internet meltdown over Louis CK’s fictional grappling with the concept of having maybe slept with a post-op transsexual woman.  In my perspective, addressing this subject honestly–up to and including ambivalence and not knowing what you feel–is better than putting a Brady Bunch happy ending on the subject.  Too many transsexual individuals end up dead because there is no room in our culture for muddling through the grey area of not knowing exactly how to react to this phenomenon, for being conflicted and confused.  And to put that confusion into the cultural discourse is a *good* thing.

Confusion, conflict, and ambivalence are far more true to the human experience than sitcom resolutions which take exactly 18 minutes to complete, with the minutes in-between brought to you by our overlord sponsors.

To say that confusion, conflict, and ambivalence are unacceptable forces us back into a different kind of binary, which isn’t helpful either.  Because real life happens in grey.  I personally have never felt particularly chafed by the idea that there are some conversations that I can have in private that are not for me to have in public.  I don’t feel particularly constrained by the PC police.  But I read about professors who cross Mark Twain off of their reading list because someone might be offended…  I wonder what of the unspeakables is worse: the one that comes from religious hegemony or the one that comes from a fear of discomfort.

I think I might take the religious exile of certain subjects over the secular exile of a different set of subjects.  But I’d rather not have either governing my intellectual life.  The truth is that we all think ugly things from time to time.  We all make tasteless jokes here and there.  We try out words to see if they fit before we agree with them.  Silencing racists with our censure doesn’t make them less racist, it only drives them underground.  Stifling a fictional conversation about the awkward that would ensue as you wrapped your head around the idea that you’d just woken up with someone who was born an xy and was now presenting like an xx…  Why wouldn’t that take a minute to get used to?  I’d need a minute to wrap my head around the realization that I’d just woken up with a Republican, regardless of the intellectual certainty that being a Republican doesn’t automatically make you a soulless, golf-playing, boat-shoe-wearing frat boy.  I’d still need a minute.

Ideas are just ideas.  You can’t bomb them.  You can’t shame them into oblivion.  It is never the stuff that we talk about openly that returns to haunt us, it is always the things that we’ve decided can’t be discussed.  If you really want to kill an idea, let it be spoken, let it be tested against reason, give the idea-holder the opportunity to figure out exactly how bad the idea really is.  Hell, let them live with the bad idea if they want.  So long as that bad idea doesn’t turn into someone else’s reality.

Besides, couldn’t we spend all that outrage energy on something useful, like driving voters to polling places or volunteering or writing petitions to save bees or something that has some tangible impact in the world one way or another?