Submission guidelines for online magazines are often informative and hilarious. Here’s a particularly awesome gem from Eyeshot’s Hindenburg Complex of Infidels & Crusaders:¹

… we are always open to reading anything you want to send (as long as it doesn’t involve dentists — lately lots of people have been sending dentist-related fiction and we’d prefer never to read anything dentist-related again).

Sigh. Guess I’ll have to submit “Cannibal Zombie Dentists from Planet Dentist” elsewhere.

Check out this fantastic, and award-winning, short film by my friend and fellow Clarionite, Justin Whitney: Rumpled (click on film #18, “Rumpled”).

Based, no less, on a short story by another friend and fellow Clarionite, Keyan Bowes.

Good times.

“I will END you!” screamed Chainsaw Timmy.

Frank stopped whimpering, and his terrified gaze turned uncertain.

“End me?” he said.

“That’s right. End you!“

“You mean kill me?”

“Well … yeah.”

“Oh.”

There was an awkward pause.

“You know. End your life.”

“No, I get it. It’s just a little …”

“What?”

“I don’t know. Histrionic, maybe? Precious? Hackneyed? Something.”

Chainsaw Timmy turned off his chainsaw. He seemed dejected. “Yeah. I’m not really sure. It sounded good on paper.”

“Maybe you could just say you’re going to kill me. Simple. To the point.”

“Right, no, I hear you. It’s just that telling people I’m going to kill them all the time gets monotonous. I wanted to spice things up a bit.”

“Yeah.” Frank thought for a moment. “How about ‘terminate’?”

“I will TERMINATE you!” said Chainsaw Timmy, then shook his head. “It’s a little antiseptic, don’t you think? I might as well say I’m going to homicide you. Does that instill terror? I don’t think that instills terror.”

“No, you’re right.”

“Really, I want to say my piece, as quickly and simply as possible, and then get right to murdering you.”

“Well, how about that? I will murder you!”

“Eh,” said Chainsaw Timmy, fingering the tines of his chainsaw. “I don’t know. Murder, kill … it’s all very accurate, I suppose, but I want this moment to be memorable. There’s a time and a place for prosaic statements of fact, but, honestly, I don’t think this is one of them.”

Frank’s eyes widened, and a slow smile crept over his face. “What if you lead with the verb?”

“What?”

“Yeah, and make it imperative. Make it an order. You know what I mean?”

Chainsaw Timmy narrowed his eyes. “I think so. But give me an example.”

“Die!” said Frank. “Die … you!“

“Huh. Not bad. Not bad at all.” Chainsaw Timmy mused. “But I’m not sure about the ‘you’.”

“You need a noun there, though. You have to personalize it.”

“No, right, I’m not disagreeing. But ‘you’ is just lame.” Chainsaw Timmy thought about it. “How about ‘motherfucker’?”

“Well, I don’t think there’s any need to curse.”

“No, but listen. Die motherfucker!“

“Whoah. Yeah, that’s good. That’s very good.”

“Die motherfucker!” said Chainsaw Timmy, trying it out. “DIE motherfucker! Die motherFUCKER!“

“I like the middle one. I think putting the emphasis on the impending death is the right move here.”

“Right, right. Ok. I think we have our winner.” Chainsaw Timmy started up his chainsaw. “You ready?”

dan2bit said this perfect thing about William Gibson today, while we were chatting about his latest:

Spook Country was good, in that elliptical Gibson way, where you know he’s done a ton of research in order to write the perfect throwaway paragraph about a barstool.

Couldn’t have said it better myself. In fact, I’ve spent a lifetime not saying it better myself.

I love Gibson’s stories, but I love the way he tells them more.

Feingold reacts to Obama’s depressing desire to legalize indefinite imprisonment without trial:

You have discussed this possibility only in the context of the current detainees at Guantanamo Bay, yet we must be aware of the precedent that such a system would establish. While the handling of these detainees by the Bush Administration was particularly egregious, from a legal as well as human rights perspective, these are unlikely to be the last suspected terrorists captured by the United States. Once a system of indefinite detention without trial is established, the temptation to use it in the future would be powerful. And, while your administration may resist such a temptation, future administrations may not.

Exactly, and obviously. It beggars belief that this has to be pointed out. Given the choice between an illegal program of incarcerating people without trial forever, and a legal program of incarcerating people without trial forever, I’d pick the former, in a heartbeat. But are those really our only choices? Sanctioned or unsanctioned outrages against basic human decency?

The Bush-era torture memos that Obama released last month make for some horrific, gut-churning reading, but not necessarily in the way you’d expect. The Enhanced Interrogation wing of the Republican party would have us believe that it’s not torture until someone gets drawn and quartered, and certainty there’s none of that kind of stuff in here. If you’re looking for some Dante-esque carnival if horrors, you’ve come to the wrong place.

If, on the other hand, you’re looking for documents that carefully, surgically, and systematically gut the moral corpus of an entire society, then you’re not only in the right place, you’ve hit the motherload. You’ll find this:

Several of the techniques used by the CIA may involve a degree of physical pain, as we have previously noted, including facial and abdominal slaps, walling, stress positions and water dousing. Nevertheless, none of these techniques would cause anything approaching severe physical pain …

And this:

To violate the statute, an individual must have the specific intent to inflict severe pain or suffering. Because specific intent is an element of the offense, the absence of specific intent negates the charge of torture. … We have further found that if a defendant acts with the good faith belief that his actions will not cause such suffering, he has not acted with specific intent.

And, this:

As we explained in the Section 2340A Memorandum, “pain and suffering” as used in Section 2340 is best understood as a single concept, not distinct concepts of “pain” as distinguished from “suffering”… The waterboard, which inflicts no pain or actual harm whatsoever, does not, in our view inflict “severe pain or suffering”. Even if one were to parse the statute more finely to treat “suffering” as a distinct concept, the waterboard could not be said to inflict severe suffering. The waterboard is simply a controlled acute episode, lacking the connotation of a protracted period of time generally given to suffering.

Now, it seems to me self-evident that, once you’re in the business of carefully parsing the word “pain”, once you’re cheerfully debating the atomicity of the phrase “pain and suffering”, then you’ve entered a dark and scary place. And if, furthermore, you happen to be sitting in the justice department while you’re doing this, and your mad ravings not only have the force of law, but will in fact be put into practice as soon as your leather-winged emissaries can beat a path to whichever fetid torture chamber your opinions were expressly written to justify, then the whole country is in a dark and scary place.

To be clear: what’s frightening about this whole thing is not that these people legalized torture — it’s that they changed the definition of torture so that they wouldn’t have to bother. You don’t need congressional approval to eviscerate words, or to stuff their hollow carcasses with your own twisted, self-serving perversions. What you need, apparently, is faceless lawyers in dark subterranean cubicles scratching out poorly-argued legal opinions on preordained decisions. What you need, most crucially, is moral vacuities with their hands on the level of power, people willing to subvert goodness and decency in the name of — what? Security? Paranoia? Power? Probably all those things, and a lot more. It doesn’t matter. What matters is that one of the core assumptions of our democracy — that you can codify morality in law, and place those laws in the stewardship of human beings — is now null and void. If you control the language that underlies those laws, and are willing to subvert that language, all bets are off.

So who owns morality? The obvious answer here is religion — but religion is, if anything, a worse steward than the law, precisely because morality is kind of the point of religion, and because it has so routinely failed us. I’ve seen arguments that the Old Testament contains some of the earliest moral arguments in human history, and I suppose that’s true. Commandments five through ten are still good, solid advice: don’t kill, don’t steal, don’t cheat on your wife, honor your parents, don’t covet your neighbor’s stuff. However — the prime real estate in that list of to-don’ts, its first four items, are devoted to the proposition that God will absolutely kick your ass if you worship other gods, or make statues, or say His name in any context other than base supplication, or work when He doesn’t want you to work. The Ten Commandments are half moral treatise, half naked power grab.

Which is, in microcosm, the problem with all religions. They start with the premise that you are here to please your creator, and all the other stuff — all the good works — are ancillary considerations. It’s a key tenet of Christian theology that being a good person will not get you into heaven: only believing in Jesus Christ — which is to say, getting down on your knees and subjugating yourself to His will — will do that. You can spend your life feeding orphans and pulling children out of burning buildings and donating organs to strangers, but if you happen to believe in Buddha you’re going straight to hell. And you know what they think of orphan-feeders down there.

Say it another way: the problem with religion, organized religion, is that it’s just another power structure, a pyramid of oppression with some god at its apex. Except it’s not really god up there, it’s whichever obese corrupt sanctimonious cleric has declared himself the voice of god.

I don’t think, for example, that anyone outside the Bush Administration would argue that the Catholic church’s sordid history of holy excruciations were shining example of Christian morality — were anything but the opposite of moral. We don’t have anything Inquisitional in the current state of Christianity in this country, of course, but examples of Inquisitional thinking, small and large, abound: whether it’s televangelists blaming gay people for hurricanes, or political parties using outdated religious mores to browbeat the devout into submission, or befuddled born-again presidents signing off on torture.

Having said all that: I find myself, against all odds, going to church on a pretty regular basis, and listening, every week, to a couple of hours of demoralizing cant about my flyspeck irrelevance in the face of the sacrifice that Jesus made for us 2000 years ago. I’ve been doing to this for several years now, and I must say I find it all no more convincing now than I did when I started.

But — if I grit my teeth, and ignore the fables and the dogma, I find it extremely pleasant to be surrounded, every Sunday, by a group of people who genuinely care about each other, and spend large portions of their lives doing stuff for other people with no expectation of getting anything back for it: they go on missions trips, and work at soup kitchens, they do community cleanup for no other reason that they think it’s right. And the pastors, for all their afactual pronouncements on the nature of life, the universe, and everything, are devoted, caring people, who preach without pretense or sanctimony. They’re honest-to-God role models, and I like and admire them immensely.

I don’t want to romanticize this. Churches, in the abstract, aren’t morality mills, by any means: a Pew study found that 54% of churchgoers think that torture is a right and proper way to treat your enemies. Some of that comes from the unfortunate linkage of fundamentalism with the current malign strain of Republicanism, some of it from the evil genocidal stuff in the first couple of chapters of the Bible. And you certainly find lots of this kind of selflessness outside of churches and mosques and synagogues. But I’m starting to believe that, if you could strip away all the oppressive cruft and focus exclusively on the core message of the more enlightened religions — peace, love, empathy, etc — we wouldn’t need any laws, civil or religious, to legislate right behavior.

Because somewhere between our innate savagery and the outer, societal savagery with which we’re daily besieged, there’s a diaphanous skein of moral fabric that whispers the truth. More often that not, it’s drowned out by the clangor of our own worst instincts, or by the vile prattlings of the snake-oil salesmen whose primary charter is to subvert our built-in knowledge of right and wrong. It’s there, though. I didn’t used to believe it was. But, these days, I do.

There’s a book by CS Lewis, called Mere Christianity, that starts out with one of the loveliest expressions of this core idea I’ve ever seen:

Now this Law or Rule about Right and Wrong used be called the law of Nature. Nowadays, when we talk of the “laws of nature” we usually mean things like gravitation, or heredity, or the laws of chemistry. But when the older thinkers called the Law of Right and Wrong the “Law of Nature”, they really meant the Law of Human Nature. The idea was that, just as all bodies are governed by the law of gravitation, and organisms by biological laws, so the creature called man also had his law — with the great difference that a body could not choose whether it obeyed the law of gravitation or not, but a man could choose either to obey the Law of Human Nature, or to disobey it …

These, then, are the two points I wanted to make. First, that human beings, all over the earth, have this curious idea that they ought to behave in a certain way, and cannot really get rid of it. Secondly, that they do not in fact behave in that way. They know the Law of Nature; they break it. These two facts are the foundation of all clear thinking about ourselves and the universe we live in.

Lewis goes on to ascribe this Moral Law to Heaven, of course, but I’m willing to bet that plain old run-of-the-mill human beings started it all. I don’t know why our species would choose to invent something as toxic to its natural savagery as morality, but there’s probably a good reason for it — evolution has little patience for the unnecessary or the vestigial.

I realize that this is all just a bunch of handwaving: another kind of faith. But, again, I’d choose terrestrial handwaving over supernatural handwaving any day of the week. The problem with attributing our morality to an Infallible Omnipotent is pretty obvious: it doesn’t work. Something as creakily defective as our moral sensibilities clearly aren’t the work of an Intelligent Designer: they feel like the work of a Bumbling, Inept, Compromised, Conflicted, Occasionally Good-Hearted Designer. Which is to say: us.

But wherever morality comes from, the fact remains: even the best moral instruction isn’t actually teaching us anything. It’s unlocking things we already know.

So where does that leave us? In a not-very-good-place, I think. Morality is, first and foremost, a very personal thing, and second — if you’re very lucky — an intimately shared experience, one person to another, community to community. A kid helping a blind man across the street. A mosque sponsoring a poor child in a country thousands of miles away. An engineer giving up a six figure salary to teach in a low-income district. Morality is a lovely and fragile thing, a butterfly flitting through the landscape of the apocalypse, and when you see it in its purest form, it’s beautiful, and devastating.

But as soon as you try to scale up to the institutional level, it disappears: evanescing off the hide of the Beast like mist. It’s not that corporations, governments, and religions aren’t moral entities: it’s that they cannot be moral entities¹. Morality is a personal affair, and large institutions are apersonal: they’re controlled mobs, basically, both more and less than the sum of their parts. Sure, these giant entities sometimes make gestures toward the moral: but the gestures are always hollow, hedged, and easily compromised.

Which makes things difficult. Every aspect of our lives is controlled, in one way or another, by these institutions, and there’s little hope that they’ll ever govern according to moral principles. It feels like the only thing we can do is what we have been doing: muddle through, keeping an eye on the leviathans, and relying on people who are willing to slingshot their moral sensibilities at the bad guys until they stagger, and fall. Then gird ourselves for the next onslaught.

Maybe there’s another way. Maybe one day we’ll evolve a species of morality that’s better able to withstand the annihilating pressure of the institutional collective; maybe we’ll find a way to govern from the base of the pyramid, and filter our innate sense of right and wrong up to its apex. I’m not optimistic. But as long as this thing is inside of us, I’m hopeful.

A useful way to look at politicians is as bags of action and rhetoric that approximate some set of ideals. I’m talking about the big-box ideals, certainly — conservatism, liberalism, etc — but also the more specific ones, like commitment to transparency in government, or freedom of the press, or a reformed penal system. And then, once you’ve got them boiled down to their policy essence, judge them on how closely they hew to your ideals.

That’s kind of obvious, I suppose, but it’s remarkable how hard it is to do — for me, anyway, and I suspect for others as well. The only way you can possibly explain the eight-year purgatorium of the Bush presidency is as a triumph of personality over substance. This seems counterintuitive, given the vacuous what-me-worry personality we’re talking about here, but it’s inescapably true that, in 2000, a certain segment of the population saw in that amiable nullity a vessel for their own beliefs. I think that was Bush’s secret. Before he morphed into a monstrous purveyor of torture and low-grade fascism, he seemed to be, above all else, a slightly dimwitted outline of a man, a color-by-numbers figure who you could make your own. It’s not so much that politicians of this stripe flip-flop, or deceive, or morph to suit whatever constituency they’re trying to hoodwink today¹. They don’t have to. We do it for them.

Barrack Obama is a different phenomenon. Clearly a much smarter, more capable, more thoughtful man, he achieved his brand of mass appeal not by emptying himself of content but by filling himself with it. If you’d spent the last eight years suffering under the reign of zombie right wing ideology, then he represented, explicitly, everything you were longing for: some form of universal healthcare; a rejection of the pervasive culture of secrecy; an end to torture; an exit from Iraq; a recognition of, and an appreciation for, the rights of labor. You didn’t have to invent things for Obama to stand for: he came prepackaged with then, a Messiah of Particulars, with the ability to both convince and inspire.

But, really, all of this is just the beginning. I’d like to say that, in the last election, I just took a steely-eyed look at the agendas of both candidates, calibrated them against the evidence of their past deeds, cross-referenced everything with the matrix of my own convictions, and came to a purely empirical decision. But that would be bullshit. Not complete bullshit, because I clearly do line up better with Obama than McCain, ideologically, and if both candidates were reduced to a couple of anonymous policy papers, I’d certainly pick his. But, if I’m being honest, a lot of what I responded to was the man himself. I liked him, and, more importantly, I trusted him.

And really, there’s nothing wrong with that. The sad thing about being human is that it’s more or less impossible to get inside someone else’s head. You can take a long hard look at your candidates’ policy positions, temperament, eloquence, intellectual rigor, etc. But ultimately, what it comes down to — what it must come down to — is trust. Trust has to be earned, of course, and it should be based on deeds as much as it’s based on words. But, ultimately, it’s a leap of faith: Do I believe this guy will do the right thing? ²

So, yes, by all means, trust. Follow that trust to the ballot box, and let it guide your hand, and walk out of there with a clear conscience. But, as soon as the election is over, and your candidate is (joyfully, miraculously) in office, it’s time to put trust aside. Because he’s a very different animal now — he’s a president, and presidents can’t be trusted.

Which isn’t a very radical statement, especially in this country, whose government is founded on — and organized around — the principle that human beings are fallible and untrustworthy. We have three branches of government, and a constitutionally-protected free press, that are supposed to be keeping a close eye on each other. Lately, they’ve been doing a very poor job of that, but the point remains: the founders were clear-eyed about our limitations, and they enshrined their misgivings in an essentially confrontational system of government riddled with checks and balances.

Obama did himself — and the country — proud the other day, by releasing a bunch of memos, written by Bush administration lawyer/ghouls, that detail in legalistically gruesome detail the kinds of suffering we, as a country, have felt comfortable inflicting on our prisoners for the past decade or so. These memos represent a shameful blot on our history, one that needs to be acknowledged and atoned for. Obama started that process last week.

But he also seemed to stop it, by saying that no one in the CIA should be prosecuted for torturing people. Because the past is the past, we have to look to the future, blah blah blah. I’ve always found this particular line of reasoning (whether it’s applied to the millionaires who ruined our economy or the sadists who ruined our soul) profoundly ridiculous, and fundamentally incoherent, and I don’t know why Obama keeps using it. No doubt there are a lot of issues to consider here, and he had to take all of them into account in plotting the best way forward. Or this may be part of some giant Obama-esque master plan — built out of equal parts ambition, moderation, patience, and intelligence — that will eventually get us where we need to be. But, in the absence of better information, it’s dangerous to see this as anything other than a betrayal.

I like Barack Obama. A lot. I don’t think I’ve ever liked a public figure more. And, again, there’s nothing wrong with that. Unless, that is, I allow my appreciation of the man to distract me from my scrutiny of the president.

It is generally believed that the first “programmer”, in the modern sense of the word, was Ada Lovelace, who wrote theoretical code for Charles Babbage’s never-built analytical engine. But this is untrue. The first programmer was, in fact, Mad Annie Splatterkill, born in 1562, a prolific and insane serial killer who, when she wasn’t roaming the streets of Elizabethan London eviscerating gentlemen and eating their wives, spent her time writing the first known instance of a binary sort, devising increasingly elegant Fibonacci sequence generators, and expounding at some length on the relative merits of tail recursion. Unfortunately, her audience was more often than not (1) illiterate; (2) unversed in the finer points of computational theory; and (3) headless. The only known record of her considerable brilliance is preserved in a flat in London, whose walls are covered with what is generally believed to be the first computer program — a lovely, concise piece of code, written in blood, that implements an ingenious algorithm she called Dead Gentleman Sort. a tight little O(log n) affair developed in a language of her own devising. Her genius died with her, alas, on a gallows in the center of London. Her last words — “Fuck yer fucking friend functions! ‘Tis a blatant violation of the principle of encapsulation, ye addled halfwits!” — befuddled all present, and put many out of sorts. But all regained their good cheer when she managed to gnaw off her executioner’s ear, just before the trap door opened beneath her feet, and whisked her away from a world unprepared for all she had to offer it.

Fred Brooks, author of The Mythical Man-Month, takes a stab at explaining why programming is so much fun. An excerpt:

Fourth is the joy of always learning, which springs from the nonrepeating nature of the task. In one way or another the problem is ever new, and its solver learns something: sometimes practical, sometimes theoretical, and sometimes both.

Finally, there is the delight of working in such a tractable medium. The programmer, like the poet, works only slightly removed from pure thought-stuff. He builds his castles in the air, from air, creating by exertion of the imagination. Few media of creation are so flexible, so easy to polish and rework, so readily capable of realizing grand conceptual structures.

He neglects to mention the groupies. But a good list nonetheless.

The problem with being an intelligent zombie is that you’re forever trying to eat your own brains. For just slightly intelligent zombies, this is only an occasionally debilitating issue — you’ll sometimes find them gnawing at their reflections in mirrors that they’ve had the misfortune to stumble upon in their shamblings. But eventually the mirror breaks and they move on. The real victims here are the very intelligent zombies, who actually figure out how to eat their own brains, usually through some gut-wrenchingly horrible — but ingenious — rube-goldberg perversion. Once the deed is done, however, these poor creatures revert to the normal dumb zombie mode, and are free to roam the decimated countryside in the traditional vegetative haze, looking for brains other than their own to consume.