Well, it’s really because I am fat, but the fact that gravity is stronger there than here at home can’t possibly help. And to my great displeasure, I learn that indeed, my being overweight will result in the Euros sneering at me.
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…President Barack Obama, for accepting an award for transparency in government in an unannounced, behind-closed-doors meeting. By now, pointing to Candidate Obama’s promises to implement a transparent government have become are a well-worn joke that I need not belabor; most of the meaningful components of his promises in that respect have been broken or unfulfilled, and some critics claim that the Obama Administration overuses the power to classify information. The new boss, same as the old boss.
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I was going to provide a handy-dandy spreadsheet, going point by point through the President’s remarks on the “kinetic military action” in Libya to offer guidance about when we can and cannot fight against another nation, however despicable its leader and government might be. But Jon Stewart mined the speech for comedy and sad irony much better than I could: [click to continue…]
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Seems to me that the President’s speech justifying war in Libya boils down to: “Gadaffi is a really bad guy.”
“But see, we knew that already, Mr. President.”
“No, you don’t get it. He’s a really, really bad guy!”
“Oh! Well, in that case carry on, then!”
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What do all these men have in common?
Bill Clinton
Jackie Coogan
Kevin Garnett
Jeff Gordon
Benjamin Harrison
Willy Mays
Robert Redford
Christopher Reid
Donnie Wahlberg
Ted Williams
…And I note that for three weeks in a row, there is a reference to Ted Williams. I claim a hat trick, although I think this week’s question is pretty easy.
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Longtime readers will be aware that I sometimes try my hand at writing fiction. I spare all of you my efforts in that regard because the bulk of it is simply awful. So awful that upon finishing some work and returning to it later I declare it unreadable and delete it immediately lest anyone actually blame me for it.
I have been professionally swamped and socially busy lately so writing cultural-legal-political commentary here has been enough of a challenge. Nevertheless I’ve happened on an idea that I enjoy enough to have revisited and find myself with a deep and abiding desire to return to it and enough quality to count as “merely bad.” My idea is set about two centuries in the future and therefore requires some consideration of what kind of history happens between now and the future. It’s not necessary for purposes of fiction that I pick a future timeline that will or even could actually come true, but I think it is necessary that it be plausible enough that a reader be willing to at least sustain a suspension of disbelief.
Future technologies play a role in my story, as do clashes of religious belief systems and geopolitics. I’m more worried about the plausibility of my future geopolitical timeline than I am about future technology. For instance, when looking at the future history underlying Star Trek, it’s easier for me to accept the idea of warp engines allowing faster-than-light space travel and transporter cells than the idea that nation-states on Earth would have dissolved into “factions” and the spiritually inspiring visit of Vulcans would have caused humans around the world to set aside their regional small-arms warfare between these “factions” and cooperatively knit into a global government.
Neither Star Trek‘s future politics nor its future technologies are realistic from a contemporary skeptic’s point of view, but the idea of miraculous future technology is easier to swallow than the idea of miraculous political behavior. At least for me. So when I try my hand at this, I’m not nearly as concerned that my science-fiction technology will seem silly or implausible as I am that the future history be silly or implausible. That’s where you come in, my friends — I’m asking you to tell me whether I’m so completely out of the range of what you would be willing to accept that you’d put down my book without finishing it, and if so what I might alter to support your ability to say to yourself, “It probably won’t be like this, but I could see how it could be.”
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No one who has been to a four-year liberal arts university could possibly have failed to have come across an essay purporting to deconstruct some element of pop culture from an allegedly radical point of view, arguing earnestly and for a minimum of 1,800 words that, for instance, Cyndi Lauper’s “Girls Just Wanna Have Fun” was somehow a well-disguised Marxist subversion of the cultural hegemony imposed upon society by its corporate oppressors. All it takes is a really deep understanding of Focault to see it. In fact, the degree of overwrought rationalization and ill-advised intellectual shoehorning going on in such essays reaches a point of self-parody.
Such is the case with a specimen of this genre that this sociosexual “analysis” of the quite awful video “Friday” by some random white chick I’ve never heard of before. I was for quite some time utterly at a loss to determine whether the author is offering deadpan parody or is earnest when he looks at a late shot in the video and comes up with this:
An onanistic recursion, at once Siren and Cassandra, she heralds a new chapter in the Homeric tradition. … [¶] A phallic tree trunk behind her marks the completion of the anarcho-sexual odyssey, cock as axis mundi, Moses as Lolita. Then, to further highlight the doneness of the deed, she’s suddenly in a red-lit room, a private space, sustaining a single note at once suggestive of childish tantrums, orgasmic ecstasy and Taliban ululation.
Breathtaking, isn’t it? Not since the Cliffs Notes analysis of Mystikal have I seen such deadpan humor executed so well. It’s Onion-like in its verisimlitude.
“Mr. Likko, you clearly never really understood Derrida,” I can hear the semiotics professor declaiming now, “or you’d understand that indeed Ms. Black’s apparent vapidity is, in fact, a scathing critique of the very capitalistic society and profit structure which has sponsored her. Clever girl.” The truth is, I only ever encountered one such pretentious turtlenecked freak on faculty when I attended college. But I don’t think there’s a college anywhere that’s free from this sort of thing — and that is the real magic of deconstructing what must surely be the worst music video in years.
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If you prowl the nonbeliever blogs as I do, you often come across people who are either new to the world of non-theistic life and looking for ways to express themselves to their faithful friends and family, or who are giving vent to their frustration at the pervasiveness and social power of religion. Either way, there seems to be a continuing need for such folks to justify their lack of belief. I was like this once, too. The thing is, non-theists sometimes rely on arguments that are as poorly-worded or as logically weak, as the theistic arguments that they refute. The Unreligious Right offers a quick rundown of some common claims by nonbelievers and finds some of them wanting in the validity department as either too immodest as phrased or fallacious. A useful reminder that no tribe has a monopoly on intellectual error.
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Recalling the close Packers-Dolphins game of last season, John Morgan likens the game to “… Varinia leaving for Gaul, showing their newborn son to Spartacus, saying ‘Please die, my love… die, die now my darling!’”. It was a good game, especially the back-and-forth fourth quarter, and one that left me inventing new combinations of curse words when it was all over. But really, we’re talking about the Miami Dolphins here, not the merciless and invincible legions of mighty Rome.
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I live in an inland desert city of California. Its politics are dominated, as a practical matter, by an alliance between a group of land developers and four large more or less evangelical Christian churches. Mostly, those civic leaders have delivered good government — the zoning makes sense, city services are adequately supported and of good quality. In the objective, day-to-day, nuts-and-bolts kinds of things the city does, I’ve no problem with our municipal leadership. Why they feel the need to use hot-button wedge issues to drive out their voter based when municipal elections have less than twelve percent turnout anyway is totally beyond me. But they do, and they chose a wedge issue that drives me away from offering the support I would otherwise be gravitationally attracted to giving.
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Burt Likko is the pseudonym of an attorney in Southern California. He is sometimes known as the "Transplanted Lawyer" in commemoration of a two-year sojourn in East Tennessee which was something of a transformative life experience. His interests include politics and public policy, Constitutional law with a focus on the separation of church and state, cooking, good wine, and bad science fiction movies.
Will Truman is the pseudonym of a somewhat random guy that lives in the Mountain West with his doctorly wife. He has moved around frequently, having lived in four states in the last five years or so. Part-poligeek, part-geek, sometimes substitute teacher, sometimes professional gearhead, and off-and-on amateur fiction writer. He is primarily interested in the balancing of competing interests and points of view where answers are not easily found. He does (mostly) non-political blogging at Hit Coffee and can be found on Twitter.
