Taken from a post on an internet message board that I frequent:
A former coworker put it very well (about running something through a table saw w/o glasses or something). “If something goes wrong, I’ll spend the rest of my life wishing I had this moment in time back so I could make a different decision. I have that moment now. Let me make the decision I’m going to wish I made. “
This five-day long celebration of books and music has been going on for a good few years; this is the second time that I made the five-hour long drive from San Antonio to participate in the Hall of Texas Authors. The Hall – that’s the main display room at the Abilene Convention Center, wherein local authors and a handful of publishers (some established and well known, some whom only hope to be established and well known at some future date) have a table-top display of their books on the last day of the festival. All during the week there are concerts, a medley of free and open events, readings and panel discussions. All of this has several stated intentions: to benefit the Abilene Public Library system and to support their programs, for one, to spotlight local and regional musical and authorial talent, for another, and for a third, to promote Abilene as a cultural Mecca and tourist destination. It isn’t New York or Las Vegas, by any stretch of the imagination yet, but that isn’t for lack of trying.
Abilene, you see, was established in the boom years of the Wild West: every element embedded in popular imagination about the Wild West was present there for one reason or another, from the classical wood-frame buildings, wooden-sidewalk and dusty streets visualization of a typical frontier town, the railways and occasional Indian warfare, to cattle drives and gunfights in the streets and saloons. (And the Butterfield Stage line, buffalo hunters, teamsters, traders and Army posts, too.) A lot of interesting stuff happened in and around Abilene, and a fair number of interesting people passed through town, or nearby. Many of these people are featured in a state-of the art museum called Frontier Texas, where there was a nice get-together for visiting authors, for volunteers and various members of the Abilene literary scene on Friday evening. I was especially interested in meeting one of the two big-name featured authors: Scott Zesch, whose book The Captured, was an account of white children kidnapped by Indians in raids on Hill Country settlements during and just after the Civil War. The story of his great-great-uncle, captured as a boy of ten or so, and eventually returned to his white family haunted me. Such a cruel thing, to loose a child, get the child back years later – and then to discover that the child has been lost to you for all time; I simply had to make that a plot twist in my own book. He’s from Mason, and from one of the old German families who settled the Hill Country. Anyway, interesting person to speak with, and listen to: he spoke briefly at that gathering and at the awards luncheon the following day. He is another of those completely convinced that a place like the frontier was so filled with interesting and heroic people, of fantastic events and things that seem too bizarre to be true (but are!) – and furthermore are almost unknown – that a writer can’t help but try and make a ripping good yarn out of them.
The second featured writer had done just that, with creating a novel about a relatively unknown hero: Paulette Jiles, whose book The Color of Lightning was about Britt Johnson – supposedly one of the inspirations for the storyline of the movie The Searchers. It looks like Britt Johnson may get a movie in his own right, according to what Ms. Jiles said at the awards luncheon. The script for a movie based on Color of Lightning is in the works – all about how he went looking for his wife and children, taken by Indian raiders in 1864, and went back again and again, looking for other captives. He was, as Ms. Jiles said in her own remarks, very proper classical hero material: on a quest for something of great value to him, against considerable odds, blessed with a companion animal (his horse), good friends, and lashings of pluck and luck, so it is only fair that he get to be better known than in just dry-as-dust local historical circles. (The Daughter Unit and I inadvertently toured the Frontier Texas exhibits with her; just three of us and a hovering volunteer/docent. I didn’t recognize her – not being good at remembering faces. That is, I recognize people that I have seen before, but not always remember who they are or where I know them from.)
I sold a few sets of the Trilogy in the Author’s Hall the next day, and passed out a lot of fliers about my own books – including the one that’s due out in April, 2011 – but it’s not about sales, it’s more about getting out there and connecting with readers and potential readers.
And some darned nice BBQ, too – but that came later, from the Riverside Market in Boerne, on the way home. Only in Texas!
But not professional enough to proof-read, apparently, at least in Ohio.
Police said the semi went over the sidewalk on a turn, his trailer snagged a tree and came apart and then the trailer gave way in the middle.
The killer quote:
The truck driver was not injured, but he was traffic for the traffic violation.
Huh? LOL
My surfing of the information superhighway today led me to a blog post by one of my favorite authors, Elizabeth Moon. As I began reading her post, I really liked what she was saying about good and bad citizenship, and what is expected of citizens.
The first paragraph drew me in – how could it not? (emphasis mine)
I was on a “Politics in SF” panel at Dragon*Con which once more convinced me that a lot of people should’ve been made to read “The Man Without a Country” a few more times. Though, with the sneering generation (Baby Boomers, starting a year after my unnamed contingent, were spectacularly good sneerers) that probably would not have had the desired effect…my desired effect, at least, which would be to remind people that the person with no loyalty to anything but his/her own pleasure is not a noble hero of individualism, but a pathetic failure as a human being.
Well, I liked it up until the paragraph I quote below… the next few paragraphs after this one also irk me, because she only picks on conservatives and business-people (Pres. Bush & Ken Lay, respectively), without noticing that what she describes cuts across party lines.
The post I’m quoting can be found here: click me. Again, any emphasis is my own.
This nation was founded with an overt appeal to universal rights of mankind–those stated (but not stated to be all) being life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. But the survival of this nation depended then, and has depended since, on citizens taking responsibility, not just liberty, as one of the rights of mankind. Had the signers of the Declaration been as wedded to personal liberty as the right wing today, there would have been no successful Revolution. For these men, who pledged their “lives, their fortunes, and their sacred honor” to the cause, did not want total freedom for themselves–they did not demand that others bear the burdens so they could ride in the well-sprung coach.
Ummm… I don’t think it’s the right-wing that demands others “bear the burdens so they can ride in the well-sprung coach.” I think it’s the folks who want to do away with the colonial Jamestown edict that he who did not work would not eat. Although again, I’m confident it cuts across all party lines.
They were familiar with, and based their concept of citizenship on, ancient understanding of citizenship–that courage/fortitude, integrity, temperance, sound judgment were all desirable virtues which, if held by all citizens, would knit together a culture otherwise tolerant of diversity. They knew enough of human nature to know that no nation had yet achieved such a citizenry–that it was unlikely to exist in future even with the best possibilities–but they knew it was worth trying for.
She moves on to talk about 9/11, and The Mosque. You know the one – it’s been in all the news, and all the blogs, and all the emails. That Mosque. And her words have aroused a firestorm among certain people, folks who are fans of her books, and would most likely agree with her comments that I quoted above, and the paragraphs that followed after it.
…in order to accept large numbers of immigrants, and maintain any social cohesion, acceptance by the receiving population is not the only requirement: immigrants must be willing and able to change, to merge with the receiving population. (snip)
Whether a group changes its core behaviors and values after immigration or not, it must–to be assimilated later–come to understand the culture into which it has moved. To get along, it must try not to do those things which will, sure as eggs is eggs, create friction, distrust, and dislike. (snip) A group must grasp that if its non-immigrant members somewhere else are causing people a lot of grief (hijacking planes and cruise ships, blowing up embassies, etc.) it is going to have a harder row to hoe for awhile, and it would be prudent (another citizenly virtue) to a) speak out against such things without making excuses for them and b) otherwise avoid doing those things likely to cause offence.
The firestorm was such that she has since deleted the comments and closed comments on the post. But she says things that have been said here, and in other blogs that I read, and on other message boards that I read, and she speaks the truth, no matter how unpalatable that truth may be to those who are now up in arms and ready to boycott her. I’m not quoting the portion everyone took issue with, I’m quoting the portion that we don’t hear often enough.
But Muslims fail to recognize how much forbearance they’ve had. Schools in my area held consciousness-raising sessions for kids about not teasing children in Muslim-defined clothing…but not about not teasing Jewish children or racial minorities. More law enforcement was dedicated to protecting mosques than synagogues–and synagogues are still targeted for vandalism. What I heard, in my area, after 9/11, was not condemnation by local mosques of the attack–but an immediate cry for protection even before anything happened. Our church, and many others (not, obviously all) already had in place a “peace and reconciliation” program that urged us to understand, forgive, pray for, not just innocent Muslims but the attackers themselves. It sponsored a talk by a Muslim from a local mosque–but the talk was all about how wonderful Islam was–totally ignoring the historical roots of Islamic violence.
I can easily imagine how Muslims would react to my excusing the Crusades on the basis of Islamic aggression from 600 to 1000 C.E….(for instance, excusing the building of a church on the site of a mosque in Cordoba after the Reconquista by reminding them of the mosque built on the site of an important early Christian church in Antioch.) So I don’t give that lecture to the innocent Muslims I come in contact with. I would appreciate the same courtesy in return (and don’t get it.) The same with other points of Islam that I find appalling (especially as a free woman) and totally against those basic principles of the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution…I feel that I personally (and many others) lean over backwards to put up with these things, to let Muslims believe stuff that unfits them for citizenship, on the grounds of their personal freedom. It would be helpful to have them understand what they’re demanding of me and others–how much more they’re asking than giving. It would be helpful for them to show more understanding of the responsibilities of citizenship in a non-Muslim country.
And then she ruins it all for me with her final line.
(And the same is true for many others, of course. Libertarians, survivalists, Tea-Partyers, fundamentalist Christians, anyone else whose goals benefit only their own group. There’s been a huge decline in the understanding of good citizenship overall.)
Elizabeth Moon. Award-winning author. Texas Native. Former Marine. Statist. *sigh*
So it begins – the seeing of what was screamingly obvious to me a good few months ago; the horrified realization among the politically connected (especially in the GOP) that the loose confederation which amassed under the yellow Gadsden flag with the coiled rattlesnake motif and goes by the name of the Tea Party is not just a sort of mass temper-tantrum, or a collection of irate voters to be gentled, tamed and gelded to better serve the purposes of the Grand Old Party. Nor are they – being a loosely connected and leaderless network of fiscal conservatives, free-market small business owners and strict constitutionalists – a tool and Astroturf organization deliberately created by the machinations of the Dark Lord Rove. Nope – the fact the Dark Lord himself got downright pissy over the fact that Christine O’Donnell scooped the primary in Delaware over the favored GOP candidate . . . and then went on to demonstrate that financially, she has no need of the established lords of the GOP and their deep coffers. It’s not just a case of the tail wagging the dog; the high lords of the established American political process (Republican Division) have discovered to their absolute horror that in this political season, the Tea Party is not the tail . . . but the dog itself, and they have been reduced to being the tail. Or possibly the materiel which emerges regularly from a little bit south of the tail – but I don’t think they will be the first to come to this realization, nor will they be the last.
See – if you really had paid attention to the Tea Party, or been deeply involved from the get-go, you’d have known a number of things about them. One of those things is that – although a fair number of original Tea Partiers are social conservatives, even evangelical Christians – the fiscal-conservative/free market/strict constitutionalist mindset trumps all that. There’s also a strong libertarian bent among them, and a prejudice towards individual responsibility. Basically, it’s ‘let me alone to work out my own economic/personal salvation’ which usually results in statist tools pouncing triumphantly and saying things like “Ah-ha! So you don’t want roads, or police departments, or an FDA screening dangerous drugs, or social security – hah! You hypocrites!” This is something of an exercise in straw-man construction when it comes to Tea Partiers; generally we acknowledge that a government is good for something: roads, delivery of the post, defense of the nation, and a care for the health of the public are good things, and the rightful interest of a representative government elected by the people. It’s just that a good thing taken too far eventually becomes a bad thing . . . and in the words of that wonderful document, the Declaration of Independence ‘destructive of those ends.’ The way to Hell is paved with good intentions – in the eyes of Tea Partiers, a cold and unsparing look at the long-term results of those various good intentions is way, way past due, as well as a reconsideration of maintaining such programs which grew, like Audrey in Little Shop of Horrors, out of good intentions some thirty, fifty or eighty years ago. Or even severely modifying them – because one of the other unspoken tenets of people who tend to become Tea Partiers – is that if well-intentioned laws, programs and practices have a bad result in the real world, than perhaps such laws, programs and practices out to be revised, amended or terminated.
All the good intentions in the world do not – repeat, do not – excuse or justify a destructive result. In the real world – that one where one in which most of us live – that which has a bad result should not be continued, full stop, end discussion. It has also been noticed that frequently those who insists that such a law, program or practice ought to be continued with just because of the original good intentions were noble, and that it hasn’t worked because we haven’t worked hard enough at it – have a vested interest in such continuation. As it looks to be shaping up this election season, that kind of blind devotion to principles, lack of consideration to results and self-interest has consequences, some of them severe. Life-threatening, even. Certainly career-threatening, to judge by the way that long-time career Dem politicians are distancing themselves at speed from bagatelles such as Obama-care, and top GOP strategists are regarding primary victories by Tea Party oriented candidates over the properly anointed candidates with horrified disbelief. I can almost hear them saying ‘OMG – they are serious about small-governments and the Constitution!’
PS – as it turns out, O’Donnell is said to be a witch! Three Beers Later…: O'DONNELL 2010“>This kind of witch, I think…
So, what do you call it when you – theoretically speaking – have a certain designated freedom bestowed upon you, such as freedom of speech or thought . . . but you are afraid to exercise it, for whatever reason? What then, oh wolves; are you then truly free if you are constrained from exercising that right because . . . ? If honest discussion of certain topics is essentially forbidden because it is infra dig, or rude, or may cause hurt feelings to another, or offend a segment of society, then can we still claim that we have freedom of speech, or any sort of intellectual openness, even if convictions for sedition or blasphemy are relatively rare in the West? That speech is still unspoken, those thoughts un-aired are still un-aired, whether it is fear, social pressure or the rule of law what keeps them so.
Which brings me back to the matter of the Danish Mohammad cartoons – even after four years, the matter is still resonating: at the time I wrote this:
(It) depresses me even more, every time I think on it. For me it is a toss-up which of these qualities is more essential, more central to western society: intellectual openness to discussion and freewheeling criticism of any particular orthodoxy, the separation of civil and religious authority, and the presence of a robust and independent press. The cravenness of most of our legacy media in not publishing or broadcasting the Dread Cartoons o’ Doom still takes my breath away.
They have preened themselves for years on how brave they are, courageous in smiting the dread McCarthy Beast, ending the Horrid Vietnam Quagmire and bringing down the Loathsome Nixon – but a dozen relatively tame cartoons? Oh, dear – we must be sensitive to the delicate religious sensibilities of Muslims. Never mind about all that bold and fearless smiting with the pen, and upholding the right of the people to know, we mustn’t hurt the feelings of people . . . The alacrity with which basic principals were given up by the legacy press in the face of quite real threats does not inspire me with confidence that other institutions will be any more stalwart.
The latest iteration in this farrago of freedom of the press is the fatwah on American cartoonist Molly Norris, who originally created “Everybody Draw Mohammad Day.” The fatwah originated in Yemen, a place which I am sure a great many members of the American public would have difficulty pin-pointing it’s exact location on a map of the world. But the tentacles of the murderously offended reach a long way. She is now in hiding, and in various discussion threads, a dismayingly large number of commenters are blaming her for provoking Moslem ire.
But that is my point – what good is it to have brave principles about open, intellectual discussion, freedom of the press, of thought and expression, if in the end they are not exercised out of fear?
Here’s the thing – the other half of the intellectual freedom thing; there is no right of the individual never to be offended. In a free and open discussion, there will be differing opinions and interpretations, and there may even be people offended by the exercise of it. God knows, the artistic set have been cheerfully offending the bourgeoisie for decades, on the principle that it is good for us to be shaken up now and again, just to make us all consider or reconsider our preconceptions, or expand our consciousnesses or whatever twaddle they will use to justify themselves with. And the good bourgeoisie, even if offended, usually wasn’t motivated to do much more than grumble and write a letter to the editor; they didn’t go around chopping off heads. One might therefore have grounds for suspecting that in the case of the Danish Cartoons o’ Doom, and Everybody Draw Mohammad’ that a good part of this sudden unwillingness to offend is plain old fear.
Compounding the irony is the fact that those who are the most fearful of repercussions are also afraid to openly admit their fear in the first place – that some Islamic radical nutbag would come after them with a knife, or a car-bomb, or even just get their asses fired for ‘Islamophobia.’ So much easier to transfer the blame, and never have to admit that intellectual freedom has been stifled – not by law, but by fear.
(I wrote this a couple of years ago, and posted last year on Open Salon – reposed for today)
Supposedly, seven years is the time it takes for a human body’s cells to regenerate, to have new cells completely replace the old cells. I don’t know that factoid is true, strictly speaking, or if it just applies to the skin. It wouldn’t surprise me to find out that it’s not true at all, but is just one of those curiosities which seems right, if somewhat startling at first thought.
Seven years – eight years now, by the calendar; long enough for the scar tissue to grow over, for the breaks in the solid rock underpinning our universe to calcify, to heal over – and for us to become accustomed to living in a world without the silhouette of a pair of silver towers gleaming in the sunshine of a cool September morning. Long enough to become used to the absence, and accustomed to the wrenching changes, to acclimate ourselves to a new reality. But not long enough to become used to the absence, to the space in a life where a husband, a wife, a son or daughter, or a friend used to be. Never long enough to forget the sight of a tall building – first one and then the other – falling into itself, dissolving into a dark blizzard-cloud of smoke and debris, and taking the lives of thousands of people with it. No, never forget that; it’s the vision I see now, whenever I listen to Mozarts’ Requiem.
Eight years of change since that morning, the morning when our world shuddered and for many of us, wrenched itself onto a new track. The changes have come so thick and fast, that the glorious September morning now and again seems to have happened a couple of decades ago. Two wars, one which seems now to be perilously won and the other still in balance, two presidential elections, the rise of a new media, the slow implosion of the old – the aftermath of a violent hurricane devastating the Louisiana-Mississippi Gulf Coast,and any number of other events which strutted and fretted for their moment on the national and international stage; all of this moved the events of one day, the day of 9-11-01 away from a current event and into the pages of history.
But for today, and just for today, we set down the burdens of today for a moment, and remember.
This is the letter I wrote, over the following days, to my next-door neighbors in Athens, upon realizing how worried they would have been.
“Dear Penny and George:
I mailed a cheerful letter to you on Monday, with pictures of my garden and Blondie, but today I have woken up in another country. One of the NPR radio announcers was saying that, today when I was listening to the news, and it’s a bit melodramatic but correct. After Tuesday morning we are all in another country. I know from what I have read, and my mother says so also, that the America on Monday morning, December 8, 1941 was not the same place it had been twenty-four hours before. A lot of things were very, very different. Some of the changes came all at once, some developed more slowly.
I wanted to let you know that I am all right, and so is Blondie and the rest of my family. The trip to Egypt that she was going on is cancelled, a good thing to do considering the circumstances. Being military, we were already acquainted with the idea that your nationality and your uniform make you a target for people you have never met. The sick feeling in the pit of your stomach passes away after a couple of days, and you just take proper precautions and do your job and try not to be too paranoid. The Pentagon being a target was about par for the course, other bases and facilities have been blown up and threatened, it happens all the time. Someone told me once that the Hellenikon base got telephone bomb threats on an average of two or three a night, it was a big yawn and mostly a joke to us. But using commercial passenger planes, full of hundreds of people, crashing them into a huge office building, that goes so far beyond vile that most people cannot even find words.
I was the first person into the office on Tuesday, and I was listening to classical music on the radio and sorting out Mr. P—–s’ appointments. A woman who had his first appointment at 9:00 called to say she would be late, and she was almost hysterical, telling me that an aircraft had crashed into the World Trade Center, she couldn’t stop watching CNN, the building was on fire and I should turn on the news. I switched over to the news at once, of course. The two guys in the back office came in at 10:00 and tuned their radio to another news channel and for the rest of the day we could hardly bear to be out of the sound of them. Blondie kept e-mailing me from her office at Camp Pendleton, where the Marines had access to a higher grade of rumors than even the talk radio channel had, telling me to leave the building and go home at once. It seems that there were several other commercial airliners that could not be accounted for at once, and she insisted that one of them was headed for Texas. As noted frequently, Texas is a big place, and the Mercantile Building (which I work in) is comparatively small, and I had enough work to do, thank you anyway. She called in the afternoon, and when I answered the phone she yelled “I thought I told you to go home!”. The military is on Threat-Condition D, the highest there is. I don’t think we were ever in Threatcon D, even during the Gulf War. She says all the Marines in the unit were very tense: she walked up behind one of her male buddies and tickled his ear, and he jumped a mile, and nearly slugged her. Mr. P——–s’ sister called from South Carolina, also begging him to go home at once. Blondie begged me to call my parents, have them warn my sister and brothers. I did, just to get her to calm down, and when I got home that night, I called them again. My sister works at Jet Propulsion Labs, in Pasadena— they were sending everyone home at midday.
I walked over to the mall across the road today, to get some lunch, and I have never seen it so empty. All commercial aircraft were grounded, and still are. I have begun to miss the aircraft sliding down past our window on approach to the airport. I went to the grocery store last night on my way home, since I was out of milk. The parking lot a bit emptier, the clerks and other customers seeming a bit abstracted, but plenty of stuff on the shelves. The mail is being delivered, all the little things gratifyingly normal.
Later: Sept. 13
I can’t give blood, since I lived in Europe for so long. (Mad cow disease— and I couldn’t afford beef on the economy anyway!) When I retired, they presented me with a flag in a little triangular case, and I have a bracket on my front porch but no flag staff. I stopped at the hardware store to buy a four-foot length of dowel and some safety cup-hooks, and hung out my flag. People are putting them out on their houses. In my neighborhood it’s mostly the military and the military retirees, but more and more other people are doing so. The cashier in the hardware store told me she had fifteen American flags in stock that morning, but had sold every one of them.
I don’t know what they are writing in the English and the Greek newspapers about “The Mood Of Americans” after Tuesday. It’s a very odd, grim mood,, rather more the post-Dunkirk, stiff-upper-lip, all-in-this-together, get-the-job-done sort of mood that one associates with the British. I think a lot of people (myself included!) would expect Americans to be a bit more demonstrative, even a bit hysterical, but that’s just not the mood at all. Even as the numbness is wearing off, people are being very calm, very rational in accepting that war has been declared on us. And that has been accepted almost unanimously across the board by intellectual and otherwise, and by all political parties. There are the usual loudmouths indulging in petty violence and threats against Moslems, of course. But they are being told firmly to sit down, and shut up. This calamity fell across economic and party lines. There are cleaning women and heads of corporations among the dead, a political commentator, an actress and a couple of TV producers, ordinary people by the hundreds, certainly by the thousands. There were families on the aircraft, and hundreds of New York police and firemen. The single saddest thing I have read so far was of a fireman who was off-duty on Tuesday morning and taking his children to school. He saw his ladder company responding to the first crash, their truck passed him on the street, and all thirty or so were in the collapsing building twenty minutes later. We will not know for weeks how many were still in the Trade Center then, although it has now been well past time for people to have returned home on their own.
I won’t know until they publish a list of the Pentagon dead if any of them are people I knew. So we wait. This morning I drove through my neighborhood on my way to work, listening to the classical station as usual. I noticed more and more flags hanging from the houses, and the radio station began playing Elgar’s “Nimrod” variation, very sad, stately music, you would recognize it. And I was in tears, as I was driving down the street. Perhaps I am a little less numb this morning.
I am all right… just in another country.”
Later – found this through Rantburg (click through for all the pictures)
So, now in the multitudinous fall-out from the Ground Zero Mosque, or Cordoba House or Park51, or whatever the heck it’s being termed – is a threat by a Florida whack-job minister to burn Korans as a public demonstration of something or other on Saturday. Cheesncrackers, people, just when I thought this whole issue couldn’t get any more demented. Is there someone I have to sleep with, in order to live on a planet with sane people, preferably ones with a sense of proportion and humor, not to mention toleration for those who don’t agree with them in every aspect of existence?
Frankly, I’d like to set the good Iman Rauf and the good Reverend Jones down on the other side of my official Sgt. Mom desk for a nice discussion of principles. And those would be principles which would apply to both of them, and yes, I expect to be the one doing the talking.
Yes, there is nothing in this supposedly free country which would prevent the Reverend Jones from incinerating copies of the Koran, as a demonstration of his lack of appreciation for Islam and his ingratitude for the many blessings that the strict practice of Salafist Islam brings to the modern cultural table. And yes, there is also nothing which would legally prevent a mosque/community/cultural center from being established adjacent to that place where there were 5,000 people (give or take) crushed or incinerated when a pair of hijacked airplanes were deliberately crashed into two tall and shining skyscrapers nine years ago to the day by representatives of the Religion of Peace.
So, established – they each can do this thing which they want to do, for whatever reasons. And Andres Serrano can take pictures of a crucifix in a vial of his own pee, and Chris O-whatever can adorn a painting of the Virgin with mounds of elephant dung, and Danish cartoonists can do cartoons about how fear of drawing a picture of Mohammad leads to self-censorship, and Salman Rushdie can joke around with Satanic Versifying and all of that is perfectly OK in a free country, or it ought to be.
But where is the line to be drawn, then? And if you are offended by one or the other, than what is the acceptable response? Letter to the editor, an angry post on a blog, a boycott? Threatening violence? Should the fear of violence lead one to self-censor? What about a fear of offending people? Why is it OK to offend one particular class of people by your actions in support of religion or art, but tip-toe around giving offense to the other? Exactly what is the standard at work here, and who decides to apply it? And hey, isn’t the poor old bourgeois getting a little tired of being constantly epatered?
Just as a final aside – the copies of the Koran that Reverend Jones is planning to flambé – are they English translations of the Koran, in which case it doesn’t really count as a Koran, per se, because the only Koran that counts as a Koran is the one in Arabic. Revelations straight from The Big Guy to Mohammad has been my understanding. Everything else is just a translation, and so it really isn’t the Koran, except for when it is. And I think Pastor Jones looks amazingly like the historic John Brown, of Pottawatomie, who tried to kick-start a slave insurrection, pre-Civil War. If The Reverent Jones really wants to cover his posterior for this little venture into protest, he ought to announce the Koran-B-Que as a piece of performance art and apply for a NEA grant. Your mileage may vary. Discuss.
At the risk of being viewed as a skinless person in a sandpaper world, I have to admit that in the last couple of years or so, I have really added more and more actors, entertainers, musicians and writers to my own private boycott list – in fact, I have added more in the last year by a factor of twenty to one than I ever added over the last three decades. I still can’t decide if this is because my toleration of stupid celebrities mouthing off has just withered away to the thickness of tissue paper in recent years, or there are just more stupid celebrities who feel obliged to step up to the plate and make a demonstration of their general f**kwittedness in those intervals when they are not actually entertaining us.
Jane “Hanoi” Fonda was the first actress that went on my personal no-dice list, for historic reasons which should need no explanation here. Hasn’t made a movie in years, but I skipped the exercise tapes as well, just on general principles. Next on the list – Cat Stephens, following the 1989 fatwa issued on Salman Rushdie for the Satanic Verses. Mr. Cat publicly supported the fatwa issued by the Ayatollah Khoumeni. Frankly, the only output of Mr. Cat which merited my boycotting was his hit Peace Train– which had achieved the status of a Golden Oldie by that time. Eh – we had a library full of Golden Oldies, when I was working as a AFRTS radio dee-jay. I was happy to play anything other than Peace Train for all the rest of my time serving in this duty. I suppose I ought to add in Marlon Brando, post-Apocalypse Now, for general serious weirdness, elephantiasis of the ego and screwing up what could have been a fairly decent movie. And as much as I could, I avoided John Landis. Not for anything he said – but for directorial incompetence in setting up a film-stunt involving a hovering helicopter in the Twilight Zone Movie, which managed to kill Vic Morrow and a pair of child-actor extras. Basically, he skated away from manslaughter charges on that one. Call me Miss Judgmental, but I cherish my grudges.
Move on into this present century, and what riches there are, as far as Celebs Mouthing Off! Really, one is spoiled for choice. Induction into my personal hall of shame is reduced from something that would resemble Grand Central Station at rush hour through the happy chance of not being particular fans of certain directors, actors, musicians and writers anyway. Having never watched anything of Oliver Stone’s oeuvre after Platoon, and nothing at all of Michael Moore’s – eh. Is it really a boycott if you never watched them anyway? Or a star who never really appealed, like Barbara Streisand? On the other hand, it’s a bit of a mild wrench to walk away from actors and writers whom I really did enjoy watching, or reading, once upon a time; Susan Sarandon, Matt Damon, and Jane Smiley. (Hey, I loved Moo, and the Greenlanders.) Rosie O’Donnell once was funny; she had the best lines evah! in A League of Their Own. I suppose the biggest wrench of all was not listening to Garrison Keillor any more. I used to love Prairie Home Companion, and never missed an airing of the show on Saturday afternoons, or the repeat airing the next day . . . but GK just got too one-sided with the political comedy, too snide and mean-spirited, and finally it just got too much.
Really, I would have preferred to think of actors, singers and the like to be just another sort of well-trained, costumed, performing monkey. Put on the costume, go out on stage or on the set, say the lines, and then go the hell away; don’t lecture me about politics, religion, the environment, politics or nuclear war from the bully pulpit of your celebrity. The odds are that my opinions on any and all of those matters will probably differ, and in some cases, differ substantially from a large chunk of those in the audience – and presuming to lecture me from a position of presumed moral authority on your part will have the effect of seriously annoying me. It may seriously annoy me to the point of not going to your movies and shows, watching or listening to them on radio and television, and never buying any of your DVDs or CDs – ever again. Look what happened to the Dixie Chicks and think of that as a cautionary tale. I am sure that they felt all morally-superierly after kicking their fan-base in the teeth, but having an appeal which is becoming increasingly selective does translate to a smaller audience; not a good thing in the long run. Audiences do not remain around forever, Wayne Newton to the contrary. Encouraging them to head at speed for the exits – not a good long-time career move.
Which is not to say that celebs shouldn’t have opinions or take up causes near and dear to their hearts. Heck, save the whales, adopt an orphan, dish up meals for the homeless, come and help bail out a flooded area, convert to an off-brand religious sect, whatever. Just don’t beat us over the heads with it, ‘kay? Walk the fine line, keeping in mind that we’ve got our own causes and our own problems.
Been kind of amusing, surfing the blogosphere in the wake of the Beck rally last weekend – the usual quibble over how many people were actually there, as if a threshold of so many people crammed elbow to elbow at the Lincoln Memorial actually will confer legitimacy/credibility in the eyes of our so-called bettors, looking down their lorgnettes from the lofty heights and sniffing “Oh, honestly, who do those plebs think they are?” Still, 300,000 or half a million, sweating in the hot sun in a crowded venue; for every one who actually attended, how many would have been there, but couldn’t afford it in these economic hard times, or had obligations elsewhere. How many watched it on television, or on streaming video, and wished they had been there?
How many more will come to the 9/12 rally – more than last year? I know very well that the Restore Honor rally was more of Glenn Beck’s ecumenical religious revival thing, whereas this years’ 9/12 march from the Washington Monument to the Capitol is intended as a tax-payer’s protest and organized by a far wider coalition of groups generally lumped together under the heading “Party of Tea.” In a fair number of so-called elite minds, though, the two are pretty much conflated, if only because it’s pretty much the same kind of citizen participation in both. There is a lot of overlap – no sense or utility in pretending otherwise, but the difference in focus is a subtle one. I’d have to say that generally the Tea Partiers I knew put the fiscally-sound, strict Constitutionalist and free-market principles first, and then the socio-religious principles standing about a half-step behind. Which means that they’ll make common political cause with the gay atheist libertarian any day of the week, and probably enjoy each others’ company enormously to boot, especially if beer and tuna hot-dish is involved.
This might have the common run of moderately-leftishly-liberal bloggers would be quivering in their boots as well, if they ever cared to look beyond the grotesque caricature they have created of a Tea Partier. Now and again, a commentator on Open Salon (and in other places) will venture out among Tea Partiers, rather in the sense of an Anglican arch-bishop venturing among the cannibals, and return either startled at being treated politely and respectfully, and how very . . . very nice they all are. Usually, they are jumped upon by their peers, and brought back around to the correct way of thinking toot-sweet. But they are worried on some level – I would guess, just from the level of vituperative comment.
There will be a great many attending 9/12 rallies; there maybe even more than the Beck revival at the Washington one, or so I am presuming, given the level of deep unhappiness welling up. Not uncontrolled lynch-mob anger as the elites of our political/media/academic class keep assuming, picturing something like a rightist version of anarchists protesting at the G-8 summit. The anger is real, but it’s cold and focused, not easily baited into acting or speaking foolishly, and somewhat beneath the surface of things, rather like a deep ocean current. The very existence of that current must have a lot of other people – in media, and in politics-as-they-are waking up in a cold sweat at night. Because November 2010 is coming, and after that, November 2012 – and I just don’t see things improving for our very own established professional political class in the next two years. If I have observed anything of the current administration over the last year or so – it’s that everything they have tried to do to fix a problem area has just resulted in making it infinitely worse. Even the redecorated Oval Office looks worse than it did before. (Yikes – 70ies earth tones, back again!)