Entries from February 2008 ↓

Fascist! is a word that gets thrown around a lot by abstractly angry people who don’t like what their governments are doing. But sometimes those people don’t really know what “fascist” means. People like me, for example. The word has a viscerally ugly ring to it, and suggests all sorts of nonspecific nastiness, and it’s kind of fun to say. But it’s occurred to me recently that someone might ask me what exactly I mean when I say fascist, and I’d have to stammer something like: “You know … fascist! It’s sort of like an asshole, but meaner.” And that would be super embarrassing. So I decided to look it up:

Fascism is an authoritarian political ideology (generally tied to a mass movement) that considers the individual subordinate to the interests of the state, party or society as a whole. Fascists seek to forge a type of national unity, usually based on (but not limited to) ethnic, cultural, racial, religious attributes. Various scholars attribute different characteristics to fascism, but the following elements are usually seen as its integral parts: patriotism, nationalism, statism, militarism, totalitarianism, anti-communism, corporatism, populism, collectivism, autocracy and opposition to political and economic liberalism.

What the fuck. No wonder I’m confused. Fascism seems like an umbrella term for every species of government-fomented evil, ridiculously broad-ranging in its scope. There are lots of governments around that satisfy some of these criteria, but there can’t be one that satisfies all of them, can there? Because, seriously, where would you look to find a group of people who use a particularly pernicious form of faux-populism to whip up nationalist feelings in order to justify their impulses toward militaristic totalitarianism and anti-individualistic corporatism? Who will use all statist/autocratic means at their disposal to quash any efforts toward liberalism and sanity?

Hmmm. Let’s see. Think think think.

Oh, that’s right:

These guys have done more to wreck our democracy than anyone in recent memory. But whenever you tick down the list of outrages, they invoke the judgment of “history”. Bush in particular. Truman left office with a 24% approval rating, he says, and now he’s one of the most respected statesmen in the 20th century. That’s me, he says. I’m basically a brush-clearing version of Truman.

Unless history develops a pretty severe case of amnesia, this is doubtful. Here’s what it’s going to look back on:

1. A fruitless and unnecessary war that plunged a country into chaos, killed a hundred thousand Iraqis and over 3000 Americans (so far), cost us a trillion dollars — all in pursuit of an objective that turned out to be completely illusory.
2. An economy in shambles, the result of ill-advised tax cuts (that chiefly benefited very rich people) and out-of-control spending.
3. The elimination of many of the civil liberties that made us the beacon of freedom that Bush still talks about. It is now possible for the federal government to incarcerate American citizens for any reason, hold them indefinitely without charge, and torture them.
4. The establishment of an entrenched surveillance society. It’s a matter of record, now, that the government has used its ties with the telecom community to monitor our phone calls, our email, our browsing habits. They’ve used National Security Letters to peruse the books we’ve checked out of the library. They’re stealthily building a national database that aggregates all of the details of our lives in one place.
5. The merging of government and corporate interests. Installing corporate lobbyists in government agencies that are supposed to monitor their former clients, bringing in a rogues gallery of serial polluters to vet energy bills, enshrining legal immunities into law to protect their corporate allies from being sued for spying on their customers.

I don’t mean to say that we live under the thumb of fascism right now. But most of the new elements that these guys have introduced into our government and our lives are the ingredients for the formation of a fascist state. If history looks at all this and still comes to the conclusion that Bushco did a bang-up job, then history’s an idiot.

My guess is that, in thirty years or so, the textbooks will say something like this:

The Bush Era (2000-2008) marked a low point in American history. President Bush and his neo-conservative allies ushered in a series of changes that were designed to enshrine the executive branch as kind of oligarchical dictatorship, answerable to no one but their corporate partners and the bankrupt ideology that drove them.

Mr Bush used the time-honored method of fear and endless war to cow the American populace into allowing many of their rights to be taken away, in the interests of defending the nation against “evil-doers” in an ongoing, and never-ending, “war on terror”. It is a matter of considerable debate among historians whether the trajectory that the neo-conservative agenda placed the country on would have eventually resulted in the establishment of a de-facto Fascist state, in which the Executive “branch” became the sole wielder of power, with the legislative and judicial reduced to nothing more than puppets.

Thankfully, this is all speculation. President Obama’s first acts in office were to turn back most of the Bush Administration’s more egregious policies. Civil liberties regained their place of primacy, signing statement were banned, corporate influence waned, and the balance of powers that had sustained the country since the Revolution was restored.

If that last bit seems a little strained, it’s because it’s me being optimistic. I’m not very good at optimistic. But without that paragraph, things become pretty much unthinkable — the same passage, for example, would look something like this:

The Bush Era (2000-2008) marked [ REDACTED FOR REASONS OF NATIONAL SECURITY ]

Maybe that’s why Bush keeps insisting that history will judge him favorably — because he knows that his ideological descendants are going to make sure it does.

For the love of god can someone please invent a gender-neutral singular pronoun? I’m trying to write a technical spec, and find myself fleeing again and again to the plural, because I’d otherwise have to fall back on “he” — or, worse, “he or she” — whenever I mention a user. The latter construction is a nasty blight on the English language, and the former excludes half our user base. So that’s not cool.

Yes, I know that “he” is generally supposed to apply to both sexes, and when I’m in my more combative moods I’ll use it with a feigned lack of compunction. But really I always feel bad about it. I read a book once where this race of beings did have such a pronoun, aer, but I think they had elements of both male and female in them, or something, so it doesn’t work for us. Also I object on principal to words that start with two vowels.

Sometimes I wish you could upgrade languages like you upgrade software. And that I was in charge of the process: the cranky Torvalds of the English language. I’d add the new pronoun, but I’d also immediately deprecate such horrors as “incentivize” and “retort”. All of the ugly constructs creeping inexorably into the language — like “step foot” or “could care less” or “irregardless” — would throw runtime exceptions as soon as they’re used, and take down the entire surrounding sentence. Exclamation points would be limited to one per ten thousand words.

I’d probably also introduce a debugger to diagnose writing failures — I have a whole hard drive full of stories that are badly in need of debugging.

English 2.0 — now with gender-neutral pronouns. Upgrade today!

My understanding of symbolism was dealt a near mortal blow in high school, when we were given an edition of The Old Man and the Sea with a symbol index in the back.

A symbol index is pretty much what it sounds like: a list of story artifacts, with accompanying capsule descriptions of what each of them really means. So if, in the course of your reading you come across something that seems a little symboly, you can flip quickly to the back of the book to confirm your suspicions. Oho! you can say to yourself. I knew that scudding bank of clouds was kind of arbitrarily scuddy. And no wonder! It turns out that it symbolizes our hero’s thwarted sexual longing!

There’s only one way to look at a symbol index: as a dictionary of arbitrary obfuscation. Ie: here’s what the writer really meant, but was too much of a pretentious elliptical prick to just come out and say. I remember finding the whole thing pointless and depressing. Why not just come out and tell us? What’s the point of dragging your readers through this kind of arbitrary indirection? Symbolism, framed this way, becomes little more than an exercise in mildly clever transposition.

It’s taken me two decades to get beyond that experience, and in that time I’ve come to some partial understanding of what symbolism really is. But, first, what it isn’t:

1. It’s not a way to get around saying something you don’t want to come out and say because it’s too obvious or silly or embarrassing. You should either say those things, or not say them. Period.
2. It’s not about demonstrating your talents for clever allusion. Nobody cares about your mastery of the minutiae of the book of Revelations, dude. Just get to the goddam point (I’m looking at you, Joyce).
3. It’s not a way to make your stuff seem more profound. Profundity is a feeling, never a technique.

So what is symbolism, then? It’s a last resort. It’s what you do when you’ve got no other choice.

I’ve talked a lot about the limitations of language in this blog. Clearly, language is a beautiful thing, so crucial to our development as a species that it’s pretty much wired into the hardware. But its powers are largely utilitarian. It does a bang-up job of communicating your desire to buy a grapefruit or run a country or marry your true love, but it kind of fails miserably when it comes time to tell someone how much you love them, or describe your zeal for your country, or expound on your abiding and irrational passion for grapefruits. It’s just not built for that.

Granted, all of this is possible, but it takes a special talent. Ian McKellan does it with Atonement, Craig Thompson with Blankets, Kazuo Ishiguro with Never Let Me Go. I came out of those books — not transformed, exactly, but deeply affected in ways that linger on, years and years later. All these guys managed to slip past the literal wall of my mind into that muddy territory where more elemental, unstructured things live: love and hope and faith and all that stuff. And once they’d done that, I was pretty much theirs.

So how do they manage it? By being great wordsmiths, yes, but also by finding images and characters that transcend the page to reach into our collective consciousness, to stimulate us in ways that go beyond verbal. This is the ultimate power of language, as an artform: it can’t reach these things directly, but it can wend its way into the firmament of shared experience, and draw on that to get what it wants.

And that’s what a symbol is, to me. It’s a way to say what can’t be said, and it draws its power from its ability to illuminate, not create. We have a fund of universal feeling that predates our ability to write, and the only real way to hit people where it hurts is to find your way into it and use what’s there. Music and art have more or less direct access to that place, but words have to work harder: they operate in the corner of our eyes, drawing shapes in the penumbral gloom between consciousness and id — and then waiting for our minds to do the rest.

… and possibly the best video for a love song, to boot. Bright Eyes.