Entries from May 2005 ↓

I saw Revenge of the Sith on Friday. It’s been getting glowing reviews, so I went in with very high hopes; hopes that were dashed against the sharp, pointy rocks of cinematic suckitude. This is not a good movie.

Even the film’s inexplicably numerous fans admit that the script is a disaster. George Lucas isn’t just a bad writer. He transcends badness, redefines it. He’s the dark prince of bad writing. He’s Darth Badwriter. If the quality scale was circular, he would have wrapped around past good back to bad several times over by now. But it’s not circular; it’s a straight line that stretches out into infinity. And Lucas just got there.

Perhaps you think I’m overstating this, but, really, there’s no way to overstate it. Everything — from Obi Wan’s flat humorless levity, to Yoda’s persistent, senseless inversions, to the recycled melodramatic tropes (”Nooooooooo!!!!”), to the “love scenes” between Anakin and Padmé — is nearly unbearable.

Actually, the love scenes are unbearable. They go something like this:

Padmé: I love you.

Anakin: I love you more.

Padmé: No, I love you more.

Anakin: But how can you love me more when I just told you I love you more?

Padmé: Because my more is more than your more, my love.

Anakin: [eyes turning red] Kill all Jedis! Kill everyone!!!!

Padmé:

Anakin: I love you more infinity.

The real tragedy here is that this is a great story. Honestly, I didn’t expect much out of the prequels at all, but Lucas really has crafted a complete history here, a consistent and believable world: the story of how a pseudo-religious order can grow weak and complacent; how good turns into bad, and rationalizes that transformation; how tyranny can grow out of the impulse for security. It’s hard to see beyond the muck of the excruciating dialog, the wooden acting, the terrible direction, but there really were three great movies in there.

Lucas didn’t make those movies, though. He made something else. Something very, very bad.

Update: Clay has just posted a much more reasoned, coherent review of the movie, and all of its multifaceted crappiness. Joanna has a nice entry as well.

So what does it mean to be a Democrat? The party’s charter has skittered across the political landscape in the past couple of decades, but I think one thing remains constant: Democrats want to be the voice to the individual. To stick up for the rights, the security, and the well-being of everyone, not just everyone who can afford it. That sounds incredibly corny, but, at least in the abstract, I think it’s true.

The Republican majority in congress will claim the same mandate, of course, but the work they’ve done, or have tried to do, during the long dark age of their reign says otherwise: the successful elimination of the estate tax, the attempt to kill social security, the lickspittle obeisance to Corporate America, the determination to cut social services to the bone: these are not populist policies, no matter how much they may try to doublespeak their way out of admitting it. Eliminating the tax on dividends does nothing for people struggling beneath the poverty line; cutting Medicaid funding does nothing to help people who can’t afford their own insurance; eliminating the bankruptcy bill does nothing for men and women caught in financial quagmires not of their own making.

I’ve always thought of Maryland, my adopted home, as a sort of oasis of sanity in a desert of capitalism-run-amuck, but that faith has been sorely tested of late. My representative, Albert Wynn, was one of the 73 House Democrats who voted for the vomitous bankruptcy bill, which effectively removed the right of individuals to declare personal bankruptcy. I was completely blown away when I found out: this bill is an obvious gift to the credit card companies, who have lobbied for it for years. How can a person calling himself a Democrat actually support a bill like that? How can a person I voted for support a bill like that?

It gets worse: we have a Republican governer, now, and he’s just finished vetoing several worthy measures that would have done much to improve the lots of the people of this State: one that increases the minimum wage by $1, another that forces Wall-Mart to provide healthcare to its employees, a third that heightens oversight over our juvenile justice system. He even threw in with the hetero-fascists, nixing a bill that would have given homosexual partners the same rights as married people. It would have interfered with “the sanctity of traditional marriage,” he said, echoing the Robertsons and Dobsons and Bushes of the world.

My oasis is shrinking.

Update: Dug up this kos article quoting a House Democratic staffer on why so many Dems voted for the vile Bankruptcy bill. Long story short: for various reasons, the left is very close to the big companies in the financial sector; those companies wanted this bill to pass very badly; and the Democrats knew it would pass anyway, so figured why not throw their biggest contributers a bone.

This doesn’t make me feel good or anything, but at least it explains things: moneygrubbing, rather than moral treachery. Bleccch.

In his 2006 budget, Bush is proposing to increase funding for anti-poverty programs run by faith-based organizations, while at the same time cutting funding for their secular brethren.

Bush’s 2006 budget proposed slashing public housing subsidies, food stamps, energy assistance, community development, social services and community services block grants — programs that for decades have constituted the federal anti-poverty fight …

At the same time, Bush’s budget proposal for next year contemplates adding $385 million in new religion-based programs to this year’s eventual total. The federal government awarded more than $2 billion in such grants in 2004 — nearly double the amount awarded in 2003.

Now, to be clear, I have absolutely no problem with pumping more cash into the coffers of churches who want to help the poor and desperate climb out of their poverty and desperation. I’ve often railed against the basic intolerance built into Christianity, and the dangerous absolutism of Christian dogma, but there’s a beauty to the faith, too, a gentle love of humanity that stems directly from the teachings of Jesus. The church has its tyrants, to be sure, but they’re far outnumbered by the people down at the grass roots who daily extend their hands to the needy out of nothing but friendship and love and a genuine desire to help the less fortunate.

But why de-emphasize the role of secular organizations? Why is their work less deserving of the government’s support? Bush says it’s because churches can do the work more efficiently, but I think we can safely assume he’s pulling that one out of his ass. What he really wants is to assert the primacy of religious life in the day-to-day affairs of this country. He wants to bring it out of its place in the nation’s spiritual consciousness, and give it a seat at the table of government.

Why he wants to do this is a little muddy, to me. He certainly talks a lot about his faith, so this might be the product of a sincere belief that the world would be better off if God’s lieutenants ran the show. But I can’t help believing that at least part of his motivation comes from the need to pander to the faithful on the far right wing of his party, who have done so much to ensure his continued reign. The Republicans have a gold mine of support in this segment of the population, which is willing to blithely ignore Bush’s demonstratively ruinous tenure over the last four years as long as he stays on the “right” side of certain hot-button social issues, floated by party apparatchiks at opportune moment during the election cycle.

He’s playing a dangerous game. Theocracy has a long history of spiritual, mental, and physical brutality, one the Founders were well aware of when they cut church off from state. This may not be what Bush wants, but it’s what he’s setting in motion.

One of the great things about writing, we’re told, is that it gives you a window into your own mind. There are parts of your hidden self that refuse to percolate to the top of your consciousness along the normal routes, but will sometimes make their way down your arm and through your pen and onto a piece of paper; they enter into your awareness like strangers, even though they live just a few ganglia down the road.

It’s a massively inefficient way to travel, equivalent to going down to the kitchen to get a snack by clambering out the bedroom window and padding around the house and up the porch to your frontdoor, then banging on it til your wife lets you in (Wilma!). But the mind is a strange and stubborn creature, and sometimes that’s the only way to make it understand itself.

I’ve never subscribed to this notion, at least when it comes to my own stuff. I write about ghosts and gods and robots, about time travel and serial killers and animated, sentient chairs. I don’t write about my own experiences. Not much to write about there, I reason to myself, and myself tends to agree.

It’s starting to agree less, though, because I’ve lately began to wonder whether my backbrain is feeding me data on the sly. Your subconscious can be as maddeningly vague as Nostradamus, sometimes: which means that the large reeking barbarian with the battle axe and the speech impediment I wrote about last year might be a stand-in for something else. Probably not, in this case, but you get my point.

That point was driven home solidly this morning, when a friend sent me her critique of a story I just finished. It’s about a woman haunted by the ghost of her husband, and what she does to get rid of him. That’s what it should be about, anyway. What it’s actually about, as my friend pointed out, is how this woman rides the tides of her misery, helpless and out of control, until she washes up on the shore of the story’s climax. Throughout, she does nothing but suffer through her circumstances and acquiesce to her fate.

This has been a persistent pattern since I started writing seriously. All of my characters are victims of whatever’s happening to them, moved along like puppets from one thing to another, mere spectators to their circumstances. They are acted upon. They are weak, and, as a result — and here we come to the cardinal sin — uninteresting. Nobody wants to read about people too feckless to take charge of their own destiny.

I’ve known about this problem for some time, but always chalked it up to a lack of imagination, or skill, or talent: something technical. But this has been going on long enough that I’m starting to wonder whether it says something more profound about my view of the world.

These are not happy things to wonder about, or dwell on, which is why I generally don’t. The subconscious is a lockbox for a reason. I think of it as that ghost trap from the movie Ghostbusters, the one that can suck hundreds of malign spirits into a little ectoplasmic vacuum cleaner bag, and woe to the man who lets them out. Maybe we don’t need to know — or at least know consciously — what drives us. Maybe we shouldn’t know. Maybe it’s dangerous.

But, in this case, whatever’s going on down there is fucking up my writing, and I need for it to stop. Haven’t quite figured what to do about it yet, but I know that I’ll have to proceed with great caution: messing around in your subconscious is like poking through a cobra pit in the dark.

Hidden among the catalogs and complementary real-estate magnets and supermarket circulars in yesterday’s mail was a little envelope addressed to me, in my own handwriting. I have, over the past couple of years, come to dread these little envelopes. They’re always bad news.

Whenever you send a short story to a magazine, you’re supposed to include a self-addressed stamped envelope along with it. After the editor or sub-editor or sub-sub-editor or sub²¹-editor finishes reading it, he sticks his response in the envelope and mails it back to you. And by “response,” I mean rejection.

Most of the time, these rejections are simple form letters. We have received your manuscript, we read it, it’s not for us, thanks for trying, good luck. That kind of thing. I’ve amassed a small stack of these things over the past couple of years. You can’t blame the editors for not sending personalized responses, of course: they get hundreds of stories a month, and there just isn’t time. But still, it would be nice to know how much they didn’t like it, how close you got.

Part of the problem is that I actually did get a personal response for the very first story I sent in, to The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction. The editor, Gordon Van Gelder, typed up a very nice note saying that he liked the individual elements of the narrative, he liked the writing, but he didn’t feel it really ever came together as a story. He wished me luck. At the time, I didn’t realize what a boon this was. I was instantly spoiled. I didn’t even send him a thank-you note.

The next twenty rejections were form letters.

So when I opened yesterday’s envelope, I wasn’t expecting much. I was already thinking about where to send the story next, when my brain started spinning around and bouncing up and down and banging against the sides of my skull, like an excited toddler, sending jets of pure neon adrenaline into every part of my body. I looked at the note. “It’s not a form letter!” sputtered my brain. “Not a form letter!“

It was short and sweet and wonderful. The editor said she found the story’s idea interesting, the story itself “gripping”, but, nevertheless, didn’t feel like it was quite good enough for her magazine. She wished my luck.

So, still a rejection, but the best rejection I’ve gotten in a long time. When I first started sending out stories, I never would have thought that I’d get this excited over failing to get published. If nothing else, writing teaches you humility, and that some kinds of failure can be, in their own little way, as good as success.

Well … almost as good.

One of the more annnoying justifications for the “theory” of Intelligent Design (which maintains that evolution is a fallacy, and that a divine, invisible hand is guiding our development) is that the universe appears to be “finely-tuned” just for us.

If the strong nuclear force were to have been as little as 2% stronger (relative to the other forces), all hydrogen would have been converted into helium. If it were 5% weaker, no helium at all would have formed and there would be nothing but hydrogen. If the weak nuclear force were a little stronger, supernovas could not occur, and heavy elements could not have formed. If it were slightly weaker, only helium might have formed. If the electromagnetic forces were stronger, all stars would be red dwarfs, and there would be no planets. If it were a little weaker, all stars would be very hot and short-lived. If the electron charge were ever so slightly different, there would be no chemistry as we know it. Carbon (12C) only just managed to form in the primal nucleosynthesis. And so on.” (McMullin 378) [via kuro5hin]

The odds of this happening by chance, goes the argument, are so ridiculously small that it’s actually more plausible that there’s some sort of benevolent intelligence arranging things just so, as part of an ineffable universe-spanning plan to enable our existence.

First of all, this isn’t actually a proof of anything; it’s an argument against a prevailing theory. But it doesn’t even rise to the level of argument, much less proof; it’s more of an “aw-shucks-dontcha-think” approach to debate that attempts to appeal to lower-brain common sense while subverting reasoned analysis.

Second of all, the notion that we should discard an incomplete and not-one-hundred-percent-proven theory in favor of a faith-based non-theory that is by definition unprovable under any circumstances is not just ludicrous; it’s insulting.

Third of all, Douglas Adams thinks it’s silly. Here’s what he has to say about the notion of a universe constructing itself to our specifications:

This is rather as if you imagine a puddle waking up one morning and thinking, “This is an interesting world I find myself in–an interesting hole I find myself in–fits me rather neatly, doesn’t it? In fact it fits me staggeringly well, must have been made to have me in it!” This is such a powerful idea that as the sun rises in the sky and the air heats up and as, gradually, the puddle gets smaller and smaller, it’s still frantically hanging on to the notion that everything’s going to be alright, because this world was meant to have him in it, was built to have him in it; so the moment he disappears catches him rather by surprise.

Well, yes, exactly. Asserting that this infinite universe, of which we compose a tiny, vanishing fraction, was designed and created just for us is the ultimate act of hubris. It’s been 400 hundred years since Gallileo proved that the earth is not the center of the universe; apparently, some people still aren’t convinced.

God: CHARLES DARWIN. BEHOLD YOUR LORD.

Darwin: [looking up from his work; crying out; falling to his knees]: Lord!

God: YOU’VE BEEN A VERY NAUGHTY SCIENTIST, CHARLES DARWIN.

Darwin: Lord?

God: DON’T “LORD” ME. YOU KNOW WHY I’M HERE.

Darwin: [straightening; fiddling with his glasses] Is it my time, Lord?

God: QUITE POSSIBLY. TELL ME ABOUT THIS “NATURAL SELECTION” BUSINESS.

Darwin: [smiling meekly] Oh … it’s just … nothing … really. Just a little idea I’m playing around with.

God: YES?

Darwin: Well, I was just thinking that … given all the fossil evidence … and the similarities between certain species … and various other factors …

God: YES?

Darwin: … that it might be possible that all species are … somewhat …

God: GO ON.

Darwin: … related. Descended from one another.

God:

Darwin: Just a thought, really.

God: [holding up The Origin of Species] A PUBLISHED THOUGHT.

Darwin: Ah. [blanching] You knew about that, then.

God: I KNOW ABOUT EVERYTHING. I HAVE A BOOK OF MY OWN, YOU KNOW. DEALS WITH THE SAME THEMES. PERHAPS YOU’VE READ IT.

Darwin: Of course, Lord.

God: REALLY? BECAUSE THE FIRST CHAPTER — THE VERY FIRST CHAPTER — LAYS IT ALL OUT IN FAIRLY EXACTING DETAIL. ADAM. EVE. RIBS. BEASTS. ALL THERE FROM THE BEGINNING. CREATED BY ME. ANY OF THIS RINGING A BELL?

Darwin; Yes, Lord. I …

God: BECAUSE I’VE READ YOUR BOOK VERY CAREFULLY, AND IT SEEMS TO TAKE A VERY DIFFERENT VIEW OF THINGS.

Darwin: Well …

God: A CONTRADICTORY VIEW OF THINGS, YOU COULD SAY. IF YOU WERE FEELING UP TO IT, YOU MIGHT EVEN SAY A HERETICAL VIEW OF THINGS.

Darwin: But …

God: AND, IF YOU WERE PARTICULARLY WROTH, YOU MIGHT MENTION SOMETHING ABOUT SMITING, AND ETERNAL DAMNATION.

Darwin: [groveling] Forgive me, Lord. I just assumed that the Garden of Eden was … er … metaphorical.

God: I DON’T LIKE METAPHORS, DARWIN. THEY MUDDY THE WATER.

Darwin: That was a sort of metaphor right there, Lord.

God: SILENCE!

Darwin: [cowering] Yes Lord.

God: [holding up the book] NOW WHAT ARE WE GOING TO DO ABOUT THIS?

Darwin: Do, Lord?

God: IDEAS ARE LIKE DISEASES, DARWIN. VIRULENT. HARD TO CONTAIN. I’D ORDER YOU TO UNSAY THESE THINGS IF I THOUGH IT WOULD DO ANY GOOD.

Darwin: Perhaps I’ll be dismissed as a crackpot, Lord. Perhaps no one will listen.

God: THEY’LL LISTEN. ALL THIS ENLIGHTENMENT NONSENSE. THEY ALMOST HAVE TO LISTEN, DON’T THEY?

Darwin: I suppose so, Lord.

God: NO. I’LL HAVE TO WAIT, BIDE MY TIME. IT’LL TAKE A VERY HEAVY DOSE OF IGNORANCE TO KILL THIS ONE, I’M AFRAID.

Darwin: Yes Lord. Although the trend does seem to be moving away from ignorance, lately.

God: IT’LL MAKE A TRIUMPHANT RETURN, DARWIN. IT ALWAYS DOES.

Darwin: Yes Lord.

God: [gazing into the future] YES, I SEE IT NOW. MANY YEARS AWAY, BUT I SEE IT. [turns to Darwin] YOU’RE A VERY LUCKY MAN.

Darwin: Yes Lord.

God: BE SURE TO THANK KANSAS IN YOUR PRAYERS TONIGHT.

Darwin: Kansas, Lord? Who is …

God: JUST THANK IT.

Darwin: Yes Lord.

God: ANYTHING ELSE I SHOULD KNOW ABOUT, DARWIN? ANY PLANS TO THEORIZE ME OUT OF EXISTENCE?

Darwin: Of course not, Lord.

God: GOOD. NOW DROP AND GIVE ME TWENTY GROVELS.

Darwin: [groveling] Yes Lord.

Walking the dog, listening to Beck, weathering neural infarction after neural infarction, feeling the slime of rejected thoughts leaking out of my ears and down my neck.

And I’m thinking:

If you’re the only person standing in line, then you’re not standing in line, you’re standing in point.

Nobody worships entropy as a god, and they ought to; because entropy’s going to win, so you may want to get on its good side.

War is the new peace.

Songwriters have it easy. If they can’t figure out how to end a song, they just keep repeating the same chorus, over and over again, dropping slowly toward silence. That’s not an ending, it’s a petering out, and it’s cheating. Clay recently had some choice words for great authors who commit bad endings, but the fact is that endings are hard. If storywriters could cheat like songwriters, then they’d just repeat themselves out of the need for a real ending, the need for a real ending, the need for a real ending.