A Few Links, Talking about Books

Inspired by Niall Harrison's discussion of Gwyneth Jones's Kairos a couple of weeks back, Ian Sales has written about Gwyneth's 1986 novel Escape Plans, a novel I've always felt has received very little attention-- though my perception of that may be due to the lack of a US edition of the novel. Sales' writes:

...a story which is not all together easy to parse in the first place. The setting, the use of an acronymic language, the mentions of the myriad systems, the deliberate confusion between the systems' real and virtual locations, and the metaphors used by the Earth's populace in explanation of this... all serve to richen and partly obscure the story. Happily, the prose is so well written, it pulls you along with the plot.

This description confirms my memory of the reading experience. And if I correctly recall, there were many little things in the novel that absolutely tickled me. So many delicious ironies (for 1986 especially).

I was amused to read a response to Sales' review from someone who doesn't get "the regard in which Ms. Jones is held. I've met her and like her, but I find her fiction almost unendurable. It is, for me, not quite unreadable, but I wish it was; I waded through the Aleutian trilogy and enjoyed it as much as if it were thick sewage." After going on a bit in that vein, the commenter then declares his love for Neal Stephenson's work and provides a link to his praise of said work. Sales's reply made me chuckle: "Ah well, you see I don't get the Stephenson thing. I thought Snowcrash was mildly entertaining, Cryptonomicon twice the size it needed to be, and I gave up on the Baroque Cycle halfway through. I feel no burning desire to buy Anathem. But I will be buying GJ's new novel, Spirit when it's published in December..."

On Wednesdy I read first a notice and then a review of Nisi Shawl's Filter House. The review is Matt Cheney's, and can be found here. The notice is in the Fall issue of Ms. Magazine, which lists Filter House among its dozen "Great Reads for Fall 2008." (There's no weblink yet, since the site's still showing the Summer issue.)

Politicians and their Wardrobes

On learning that Sarah Palin spent $150,000 in campaign funds on hairstyling, clothing, and accessories, the watchdog group Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics filed a complaint with the Federal Election Commission against Sarah Palin and the Republican National Committee, charging them with violating the FEC rule prohibiting candidates from federal office for using campaign funds to purchase clothing. Questioned by reporters about this, John McCain tersely replied: "She needed clothes at the time. They'll be donated at end of this campaign. They'll be donated to charity."

The Anchorage Salvation Army announced that it would be delighted to be the beneficiary. So now I envision a charity fashion show, auctioning off clothing worn by Sarah Palin during the campaign. Will the Valentino-Garavani jacket she wore to the debate go for more than the outfit she wore on SNL, I wonder? I can even imagine Tina Fey agreeing to model the clothing for them. Wouldn't that be fun!

Another Republican, Minnesota Senator Norm Coleman (who is running against Al Franken), has been under fire because Nasser Kazeminy, a wealthy donor, bought expensive suits for him. And it turns out that Palin's personal shopper is a close Coleman connection, one Jeff Larson, whose firm is involved in engineering the McCain campaign's robocalls---and whom Coleman tipped for the juicy plum of running the Republican National Convention last summer. Are these instances of politicians helping themselves to sartorial perks a signal that candidates should be grilled by the media about whether or not they buy their own clothes? I don't know. The media never bother to explore the issues and the candidates positions more than superficially as it is. Asking candidates about their clothes might simply further distance them from discussing the issues. And yet...

While in one sense, such gossip is irrelevant, in another, such details offer the public a clear index of the values and attitudes rife among politicians and lobbyists-- values alien to everyone but the most elite. I'm sure Palin feels entitled to a new wardrobe: this, after all, being a "natural" perk of power, just as the investment bankers who exuberantly participated in the subprime mortgage pyramid scheme feel entitled to multimillion bonuses as their companies and clients are all going bankrupt and failed CEO's always seem to be given golden parachutes when they're fired for incompetence. The McCain-Palin position is that Bush didn't go far enough in redistributing income from the middle to the very most upper classes-- they're demanding even more redistribution (and must be laughing their asses off at "Joe the Plumber's" naivete in thinking that Obama's plan to raise taxes on millionaires will hurt him personally). Since robbing the middle class to give to the rich has become an absolute ethic of the Republican Party, Republican politicians must find it galling when they get called on the perks they believe they're entitled to.

The Battle against Voter Suppression

Katrina Vanden Heuvel and Nicholas Jahr's Voter Registration Flashpoints reports on the battle against voter suppression, which seems to be going well in at least some places (like Ohio).

As we head into the final stretch of the election season, alarming reports of dysfunctional voter registration, purges of the rolls, and possible voter suppression are surfacing weekly, if not daily. The National Campaign for Fair Elections' hotline (866.OUR.VOTE / 866.687.8683) is already receiving roughly a thousand calls a day; while the majority of these are requests for information, some concern problems with registration. The New York Times reports that tens of thousands of voters may have been illegally purged from the rolls in swing states. Other news sources speculate there are 600,000 voters at risk of disenfranchisement in Ohio alone. What goes unreported upon amid all this turmoil is how effective the response has been, and what can still be done.

Their report looks at battles in Montana, Ohio, Virginia, and Florida.

Is the strategy of disenfranchising voters "pro-American" and patriotic?

Here in the US with only a few weeks remaining to Election Day, Republicans, in danger of losing not only the Presidential election but also a substantial number of seats in both the US Senate and House of Representatives, are really, really desperate. It's becoming obvious that they believe that the only way for the GOP to avoid devastation at the polls is by preventing as many people from voting as possible. In GOP Terrified of American Voters (The Atlanta Journal Constitution October 19,2008), Jay Bookman notes that

On Friday, the US Supreme Court ruled unanimously against Ohio Republicans in their effort to try to challenge 200,000 voters. Two hundred thousand!! Republican officials fear the verdict of the American people. They fear the wrath of those Americans drawn into political participation by anger at the direction that the GOP has tried to take their country. And they are trying desperately, frantically, to try to prevent that verdict from being delivered.

This is probably the most egregious instance of the numerous challenges Republicans are making to the rolls of registered voters, but in many, many states, the Republican Party is doing its damnedest to disenfranchise voters. Presumably they hope that by making their challenges at the last minute, the voters knocked off the rolls won't have a chance to contest their elimination. This was a tactic that worked well for the Republicans in 2004 and even better in 2006. (And we know that similar tactics were successfully deployed in Florida in 2000.) But this year the effort is much wider and more systematic and seems to constitutes one of the party's major strategies. It stinks of desperation and implies a dangerous mindset: that if the only way to stay in office is to prevent the electorate from voting, the strategy's justified. Republicans and Democrats alike proclaim that the US is a democracy; and they make this assertion solely on the basis of the fact that two branches of the government are headed by officials elected by the nation's citizens. (As we know, leaders of both parties were furious when the citizenry opposed the Big Finance "bailout," and they rejected public opinion as ignorant and irrelevant.) But the Republicans' open embrace of cheating is as good as an admission that they don't give a damn about even this most limited, timid form of the democratic process.

Okay, so the fact that the Republicans cheat (or are trying to cheat) is old, old news. But when I start matching it up with some of their recent rhetoric, I find myself wondering whether there's any line they won't cross in serving their desperate addiction to power. This morning on Meet the Press, Republican Colin Powell, when endorsing Obama, said that he has heard "senior members of my own party" insist against that Obama is a Muslim and is (therefore?) connected to terrorists. (The Nation has a video clip of this.) Powell duly criticized robocalls trying to taint Obama, which he says go "too far." He said he's "troubled by these approaches"-- troubled by what "senior members of the party" say-- and asked: is there something wrong with being a Muslim in America? As for Sarah Palin-- Powell cited her choice as McCain's running mate as an indication that the GOP is taking a turn even further right than it already is.

And then there's Minnesota Rep. Michelle Bachman's assertion on Chris Matthews' Hardball that Barack Obama and liberals in general are "anti-American." (The Nation has a clip of that, also, here.) This assertion resonates in a very sinister way with Sarah Palin's statement at a North Carolina fundraiser that

We believe that the best of America is in these small towns that we get to visit. And in these wonderful little pockets of what I call the real America, being here with all of you hard-working very patriotic, very pro-America areas of this great nation.

Excuse me? What does it mean, talking about certain parts of the country being more "pro-America" than others? Logically speaking, it seems to be a meaningless oxymoron, though various commentators have extrapolated it to mean she considers some areas of the country more "American" than others. But then she reprised this comment last night in her (reality, not parody) "first press conference," held last night on Saturday Night Live--

You recently said you prefer visiting the pro-American parts of the country; are there parts of the country that you find un-American?

“Sure, New York, New Jersey, and Massachusetts, California, *raspberry*

“But then also too you have states like Ohio, Pennsylvania, Florida... who can choose whether they are un-American or not. *wink*

The wink, of course, is supposed to indicate that she doesn't seriously mean this. Nudge, nudge, wink, wink... What can we conclude, given Michelle Bachman's tarring of both Obama and "liberals" as "anti-American"? Ask yourself who might find Palin's "joke" funny... and there's your answer.

ETA: As Eileen Gunn points out in her comment (and as I also realized when I viewed the SNL clip myself), the "press conference" was actually given by Tina Fey playing Sarah Palin. (My source apparently didn't realize that.) So there are two jokes here: Sarah Palin's joke, and SNL's joke about Sarah Palin's joke. See the comments for more on this.

Sic transit gloria mundi

In Eleanor Arnason's To the Resurrection Station (1986), Belinda Hernshaw and two others from a planet many light years away visit Earth, which they find is now ruled by giant intelligent rats bred by a scientist to survive ecological catastrophe and nuclear holocaust. The rats worship the gods Darwin and Mendel (bizarre human-shaped constructions of wicker on wheels, wearing feather crowns , necklaces made of plastic, glass beads, and animal teeth, and each with an enormous phallus stuck out in front of it). And to their gods they chant this prayer (as they prepare to kill a one of their own for the crime of having paws that are neither long nor nimble:

Darwin, bless us,
Mendel too.
Make our breeding Always true.

Make our children
Long of hand,
Nimble fingered,
Strong to stand.

Wise of wit,
With tongues to praise
Darwin, Mendel
All their days.

After a close encounter with the city government officials (all rats, of course) at Columbia Circle, Belinda & company escape in a canoe & paddle out into New York Harbor. There,

Belinda saw the huge ruins at Manhattan's tip. That was Wall Street, she realized--those bare building frames, those broken facades. Huge flocks of birds circled above them.

Wall Street! Somewhere in that jumble was Trinity Church, the Treasury Building, and the New York Stock Exchange. America, her professors had told her, was the only true and authentic puritan country. It had been built on two supports-- religion and greed. In those shadowy ruins, the leaders of America had worshipped God, Truth, the General Good, and Money. Now, like the temples of the Maya-- like Uxmal, Tikal, and Chichen Itza-- the holy places of American Capitalism had all fallen down. Trees grew from the seats of the stockbrokers. The birds flying overhead cried, "kree-kree-kree." Belinda felt a terrible sadness.

You must bear in mind, of course, that Belinda's professors never lived on Earth and were the descendants of space colonists, and Belinda seems to be cursed with the gift of imposing a null-probability field, everywhere she goes...

Yum. It's wild, funny stuff.

Stuff of Interest

--The San Francisco Chronicle reports:

An advocacy group is suing over an Oklahoma law that prohibits a woman from getting an abortion unless she first has an ultrasound and the doctor describes to her what the fetus looks like.

In the lawsuit filed Thursday in Oklahoma County District Court, the Center for Reproductive Rights says that the requirement intrudes on privacy, endangers health and assaults dignity.

The law, set to go into effect Nov. 1, would make Oklahoma the fourth state in the nation to require that an ultrasound be performed before a woman can have an abortion and that the ultrasound be made available to the patient for viewing, according to the Guttmacher Institute, a health research organization in Washington, D.C. The other states are Alabama, Louisiana and Mississippi.

--Alan De Niro has been posting "transcriptions" of the sinister Palinomicon at his Goblin Mercantile Exchange.

--Nation columnist John Nichols reports that Republican Senator Gordon Smith of Oregon has taken the desperate measure of trying to cling to Barack Obama's coattails in his television ads, even though Obama has been providing unambiguous support for Smith's opponent, Democrat Jeff Merkley.

--The New York Times reports that a senior World Bank official requesting anonymity commented that "There's no question the Washington consensus is dead," adding that at the World Bank, the push toward deregulation and unfettered free markets "died at the time of the $700 billion bailout."

--"Food insecurity" is on the rise in the US, reports the Food Research and Action Center in Washington DC, and "the study's findings show there is strong public opinion in favor of the need for a comprehensive debate among candidates for the White House and other public offices on the issue of hunger and food insecurity."

--Strange Horizons has posted my review of the anthology Paper Cities.

--Chris Gerrib has posted a review of Alanya to Alanya.

--The Fix has posted a review of Plugged In.

--Annalee Newitz's The Greatest Depressions (and Economic Recoveries) of Science Fiction offers a brief survey of sfnal depictions of economic crises at io9.

--Steven Shaviro muses on the role of financial crises in capitalism and concludes "Now more than ever is the time... to be unrealistic, demand the possible.”

Style! Cyril Connolly's Enemies of Promise

A couple of weeks back I posted a quotation from Cyril Connolly's Enemies of Promise. This is an interesting book, originally published in 1938, that's recently been reissued by the University of Chicago Press. Chip Delany urged me to read it, and so I did. The book addresses the situation of "writers of promise"-- that is to say, it's a book about writing for writers who are neither beginners nor satisfied merely to make a living from their work (even when it's a very good living). What does it take, Connolly wonders in the first chapter, to write a book "that will hold good for ten years afterwards"?

Part 1, "Predicament," discusses the hazards that entangle every aspect of writing, placing a special emphasis on style and the continual shifts in literary fashion that sweep respected and even popular works into the dustbin of obscurity. His elucidation of style is fascinating and makes great sense to me (perhaps at least partly because it resonates powerfully with my recent reading in ms of the revised edition of Delany's Jewel-Hinged Jaw, which Wesleyan will be publishing next spring.) Some of it is a bit dated, and obviously its scope is restricted to early twentieth-century English literature, but there's much here to interest writers and critics today.

Part 2, "The Charlock's Shade," analyzes "the conditions which govern the high rate of mortality among contemporary writers"-- specifically politics, daydreams, conversation, drink and other narcotics, the "clarion call of journalism" (which includes writing reviews), worldly success, sex with its obsessions, and the ties of duty and domesticity. And he begins by citing Samuel Butler: "What ruins young writers is over-production. The need for money is what causes overproduction." His analysis, of course, is (unconsciously) gendered. Though women writers face the same obstacles men writers face, their resources and internal obstacles tend to be different from those of men writers, and these create differences it doesn't occur to Connolly to attend to.

Part 3, which is fully half of the book, "A Georgian Boyhood," is autobiography that culminates with an intense, almost novelistic description and analysis of his years at Eton. (His schoolmate George Orwell appears as a figure that haunts its margins.) It is only after finishing Part 3 and returning to the first two parts of the book that one realizes that an unstated reason for Connolly's writing the book must have been his need to explain to himself the dissipation of his own "promise" as a writer (ironically, of course, since the book was reprinted in 1948 and then again another 60 years later).

Of course Delany forcefully demonstrated in the Jewel-Hinged Jaw that "Style," as Connolly says, "is manifest in language." Connolly continues:

The vocabulary of a writer is his currency but it is a paper currency and its value depends on the reserves of mind and heart which back it. The perfect use of language is that in which every word carries the meaning that it is intended to, no less and no more." (10-11)

And so,

One might say that the style of a writer is conditioned by his conception of the reader, and that it varies according to whether he is writing for himself, or for his friends, his teachers or his God, for an educated upper class, a waiting-to-be-educated lower class or a hostile jury. This trait is less noticeable in writers who live in a settled age as they soon establish a relationship with a reader whom they can depend on and he, usually a man of the same age, tastes, education, and income, remains beside them all their life. Style then is the relation between what a writer wants to say; his subject--and himself-- or the powers which he has: between the form of his subject and the content of his parts. (10)

My oh my. So many he's and his'es, typing them out wearies my spirit. And yet, I do appreciate its clarity.

Connolly classifies all styles as being either "Mandarin" or "Vernacular," and then makes subdivisions within these two classifications as he examines the advantages, limitations, and pitfalls of various styles. I particularly liked this passage:

The quality of mind of a writer may be improved the more he feels or thinks or, without effort, the more he reads; and as he grows surer of this quality, so he is the better able to make experiments in technique or towards a simplification of it even to its apparent abandonment and the expression of strong emotion or deep thought in ordinary language. The great speeches in Lear and Samson Agonistes do not seem revolutionary to us because we do not recognize them as superb and daring manipulations of the obvious. Any poet of talent could write: "The multitudinous seas incarnadine" or "Bid Amaranthus all his beauty shed," but only a master could get away with "I pray you undo this button," or "Lear's quintuple "Never."

Style is a relation between form and content. Where the content is less than the form, where the author pretends to emotion which he does not feel, the language will seem flamboyant. The more ignorant a writer feels, the more artificial becomes his style. A writer who thinks himself cleverer than his readers writes simply (often too simply), while one who fears they may be cleverer than he will make use of mystification: an author arrives at a good style when his language performs what is required of it without shyness.

I recommend this book to writers with ambition, and anyone interested in the writing life.

Follow-up

In case you haven't been dropping by Ecstatic Days to read Vandana Singh's guest posts there, I urge you to check out a post Vandana made yesterday-- Women Writing in India: A Conversation with Urvashi Butalia and Anita Roy.

Today's San Francisco Chronicle has this: Veiled Racism Seen in New Attacks on Obama.

"It is the Willie Hortonization of Obama," said University of San Francisco associate professor of political science James Taylor. Horton, an African American man, was a Massachusetts felon who committed a rape and armed robbery while on a weekend furlough. Republican strategist Lee Atwater used a TV attack ad featuring Horton to create a negative impression of the 1988 Democratic nominee, former Massachusetts Gov. Michael Dukakis, in the campaign's final months.

Instead of using a grainy photo of a grizzled convict as Atwater did, the current attacks, analysts say, are embedded in "coded" language. They cite as examples Republican vice presidential nominee Sarah Palin portraying Obama as a cultural outsider and friend to terrorists and the dismissive way his Republican opponent, Sen. John McCain, referred to Obama at their Tuesday night debate as "that one."

Other recent attacks include the unsubstantiated allegation on Fox News' "Hannity's America" Sunday that Obama's community organizing work in Chicago was "training for a radical overthrow of the government." The incendiary allegations - as well as the anti-Semitic background of the source of the allegation, commentator Andy Martin - went unchallenged and undisclosed by the host, conservative commentator Sean Hannity. Fox said that the program is the host's opinion, even though the allegation was presented as a documentary. Obama did not respond to Hannity's request for comment.

The article concludes that according to Stefan Forbes, whose documentary on Lee Atwater is being released this week in San Francisco,

The key to Atwater's success was that the candidates themselves remained above the fray.

"They were friendly, like (Ronald) Reagan," Forbes said. "Just like now, Palin is the friendly face, or George W. Bush was the guy you wanted to have a beer with. They'll dance around it and say (these tactics) aren't racist, but they are.

"The next couple of weeks are going to be really fascinating," Forbes said. "If the Atwater playbook can destroy Obama when the economy is collapsing the way it is, then it can accomplish almost anything."

But Stanford University political science Professor Paul Sniderman, who recently completed a survey on racial attitudes of voters, doesn't think the attacks will work. He also said widely circulated media reports that said "Obama's support would be as much as 6 percentage points higher if there were no white racial prejudice" were wrong.

A piece at the Nation by Leslie Savan, McCain Takes His Party Prisoner, includes a video-clip of McCain addressing his audience at a campaign rally as "my fellow prisoners," obviously without realizing what he is saying. Reading Savan's piece, I wondered if McCain suffers from Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (which would go some way toward explaining his wild, irrational rages).

Racism and Election 2008

Given that racism is one of the driving forces shaping US society today, and given that this is the first US presidential election in which a candidate from one of the two major parties is black, it was a foregone conclusion that both overt and covert racism would play a role in media coverage, punditry, and the campaign tactics and strategy of the opposition. The desperation of the McCain campaign is certainly bringing out the ugliness always lying there at or just below the surface. Have you seen Jonah Goldberg's contribution to io9's feature on what works of political sf people should be reading or watching before the US presidential election? Goldberg, a pundit for the National Review Online, urges that everyone should watch Angel, Season 4, for this reason:

An extra-dimensional being (played by Gina Torres) appears on Earth, and everyone who sees her becomes totally devoted to her and starts to worship her. She brings peace and prosperity, and only Angel's friend Fred can see that she's really a hideous monster.

In the story, the world is mesmerized by a god from another dimension played by a charismatic black woman who truly does bring universal peace and love to the planet. Her only price: we all must worship her (and provide her with a statistically irrelevant number of humans to eat) and unify around our love for her.

I don't think Obama is evil or a villain of any kind. But the lesson is pretty valid. Obama is the high priest of a cult of unity. Unity can be useful, but it is also very, very dangerous. That's why the founders conceived of a system of divided government, after all.

I didn't get the full punch of Goldberg's point until this morning, when I read a discussion of last night's debate, discussing how McCain, so brimming with hatred for his opponent that he couldn't bringing himself to use the usual Senatorial courtesy of acknowledging that they are colleagues, referred to Obama as "that one"--- a reference, it seems, to the topos of the Dangerous Black Charismatic leader that the McCain campaign and its supporters are exploiting in television commercials and mass media punditry. Writing for a venue like io9, Goldberg wisely plays down the extremity of this position by saying he doesn't think Obama is "evil or a villain of any kind" (which he is no doubt happy to let Sarah Palin say). But "unity" is "very, very dangerous"? Didn't Dubya call himself "the Unifier"? Wasn't that his major campaign point in 2000? And what does divided government have to do with warning about "the high priest of a cult of unity"? For the last eight years the US Congress has been letting the President do whatever he wants, shredding the US Constitution in the process. Does electing Obama pose any greater threat than what has already been done?

Perhaps more troubling is the likelihood that on election day Obama will face "the Bradley Effect" (as it's been called), which several commentators have been warning could make Obama's apparent lead evaporate when people actually vote. Chalmers Johnson's Voting the Fate of the Nation: Will Economic Meltdown, Race, or Regional Loyalty Be the Trimp Card in Election 2008 takes sober note of the effect unacknowledged racism has had on past elections.

Although large numbers of white Democrats and independents have told pollsters that the race of a candidate is not a factor in how they will decide their vote, there is ample evidence that they are not telling the truth -- either to pollsters or, in many cases perhaps no less importantly, to themselves. Andrew Hacker, a political scientist at Queen's College, New York, has written strikingly on this subject, starting with the phenomenon known as the "Bradley Effect."

The term refers to Tom Bradley, a former black mayor of Los Angeles, who lost his 1982 bid to become governor of California, even though every poll in the state showed him leading his white opponent by substantial margins. Similar results appeared in 1989, when David Dinkins ran for mayor of New York City and Douglas Wilder sought election as governor of Virginia. Dinkins was ahead by 18 percentage points, but won by only two, and Wilder was leading by nine points, but squeaked through by only half a percent. Numerous other examples lead Hacker to offer this advice to Obama campaign offices: always subtract 7% from favorable poll results. That's the potential Bradley effect.

Meanwhile, the Karl Rove-trained Republican Party has been hard at work disenfranchising black voters. Although we are finally beyond property qualifications, written tests, and the poll tax, there are many new gimmicks. These include laws requiring voters to present official identity cards that include a photo, which, for all practical purposes, means either a driver's license or a passport. Many states drop men and women from the voting rolls who have been convicted of a felony but have fully completed their sentences, or require elaborate procedures for those who have been in prison -- where, Hacker points out, black men and women outnumber whites by nearly six to one -- to be reinstated. There are many other ways of disqualifying black voters, not the least of which is imprisonment itself. After all, the United States imprisons a greater proportion of its population than any other country on Earth, a burden that falls disproportionately on African Americans. Such obstacles can be overcome but they require heroic organizational efforts.

This is all pretty strange stuff-- people lying to pollsters-- and even to themselves-- about who they''ll be voting for, and then doing something different when they're actually filling out their ballot. I can believe it, though, since racism does strange, weird things to people's thoughts and emotions.

Just to end on an upbeat, though, in case you haven't already heard about this: Small Beer Press is having a fabulous sale of everything they've ever published, and they will be giving 20% of the proceeds to the Obama campaign. Check it out here.

Anna Politkovskaya Award of 2008

The Nation has the address Afghan social activist and ("suspended") member of parliament Malalai Joya gave on receiving RAW in WAR(Reach all Women in War)'s second annual Anna Politkovskaya Award.

My own life and hardships speak for themselves about the obstacles Afghan women face today. I've been threatened with death; I've survived a number of assassination attempts; and every effort is made by the fundamentalists to silence me. But I am happy to enjoy support of the peace-loving people of the world. I am especially grateful to Reach All Women in War (RAW in WAR) for considering me for the Anna Politkovskaya Award of 2008.

. . . .

Seven years after the US invasion of Afghanistan, our devastated country is still chained to the fundamentalist warlords and the Taliban; the country is like an unconscious body breathing its last.

The US government and its allies exploited the plight of Afghan women to legitimate its so-called "war on terror" and attack on Afghanistan. The medieval and brutal regime of the Taliban was toppled, but instead of relying on Afghan people, the United States and its allies pushed us from the frying pan to the fire and brought the infamous criminals of the "Northern Alliance" into power--sworn enemies of democracy and human rights, who are as dark-minded, evil, anti-women and cruel as the Taliban.

Only few months ago, US National Intelligence Director Michael McConnell told the Senate Armed Services Committee that 70 percent of Afghanistan is lawless. The Afghan government has control of only 30 percent of the country, and where the Taliban and local warlords hold power, there is no rule of law.

Our nation is still living under the shadow of war, crimes and brutalities of the fundamentalists, and women are the primary and silent sacrifice of this situation. Justice doesn't exist in Afghanistan. Every sector of life in Afghanistan today is a tragedy, from women's rights to security, law and order and domination of a drug mafia.

Women suffer especially. The rates of self-immolation and suicide due to domestic violence and poverty, of forced marriages and violence against women are higher than ever. In the first six months of 2008, forty-seven cases of self-immolation among women were reported in a single hospital in the western city of Herat. Reports come every day of gang rapes of young girls, especially in the northern portion of Afghanistan, where pro-US warlords have full power and a free hand. But the rapists are not prosecuted. Last month President Hamid Karzai ordered the release of two men who were sentenced to eighteen years in prison for raping and killing a girl.
Read the rest of her address here.

Take note!

Aqueduct author Vandana Singh is now guest-blogging on Ecstatic Days. She tells me she'll be bringing to her posts "thoughts relevant to various things close to my heart, including feminism." Be sure to drop by and visit her there this week.

Aqueductista Events This Weekend

Two Aqueductistas will be talking, reading, and signing at bookstores on Saturday. Nisi Shawl will be appearing at Book People in Moscow, Idaho. According to the Daily Evergreen, this will be a "brown bag lunch" event and that besides reading from Filter House, Nisi will also sing with accompaniment from Brian Clark on guitar. Here a snippet from the article in the Daily Evergreen:

Her work is helping pioneer the capacities of the sci-fi genre beyond the cliches from questioning the most rigid social norms. She will be reading from her latest collection of short stories, “Filter House,” from 11 a.m. to 1 p.m. Saturday at the BookPeople of Moscow bookstore on 521 S. Main St.

“I use science fiction to question the authority of the way things are. It’s good for challenging the status quo and that’s what I use it for," she said.

Defying any branch of mainstream storytelling, Shawl said her ratio of female to male protagonists is nearly nine to one and the women are rarely preoccupied with locking down a love interest. Yet, Shawl said she doesn’t feel particularly aware of trying to write feminist literature.

“It’s not a conscious or preachy thing, gravity is a part of my work too,” she said.

On the other side of the country, in Phialdelphia, Josh Lukin will launching Invisible Suburbs: Recovering Protest Fiction in the 1950s United States by giving a lecture-- "How Dreams of Freedom Survive in a Conservative Time"-- at Big Blue Marble Bookstore in Mt. Airy at 3 p.m. Here is the bookstore's description:

Invisible Suburbs: Recovering Protest Fiction in the 1950s United States. Reading with Josh Lukin. An examination of fiction from repressed voices in a misunderstood decade, with essays by Stephanie Brown, Ladislava Khailova, Kathlene McDonald, Ian Peddie, Harry Thomas, and Jennifer Worley. Were the 1950s an oppressive or a liberating time? Some scholars argue that the Red Scare, newly institutionalized discrimination against gays, and a public discourse saturated with sexism left wounds in American society. Others trace the origins of sixties liberation movements to the fifties and celebrate America's postwar prosperity, or argue that such new phenomena as rock 'n' roll, teenage consumerism, and Beat poetry gave Americans a new sense of freedom and identity. Invisible Suburbs advances a new synthesis of both views from the perspective of literary scholarship. Josh Lukin is lecturer of English at Temple University. His work has appeared in many periodicals, among them Modern Language Notes, Minnesota review, Comics Journal, and Exquisite Corpse, as well as in the anthology Daughters of Earth: Feminist Science Fiction in the Twentieth Century.

Have to say, I'd love to be able to attend both of these events and am sorry I can't.

The Dark Side

The institution of higher learning at which I spent almost ten years of my young, adult life has apparently gone over to the Dark Side. (Not for the first time, of course. Like most universities, it behaved shamefully during the McCarthy Era.) An article at Inside Higher Ed, Beware the Button Police, takes note of the University of Illinois' new policy on political expression: viz., banning political expression on campus, be it pins or buttons, bumper stickers on cars, attending rallies on campus, much less expressing an opinion on the election in class. (Link thanks to Bitch Ph.D.) I checked out the University of Illinois' "ethics" page myself and saw that it also requires every employee of the university to report all "communications" with elected officials. Does that mean that staff and faculty are now required to keep & submit a log of all their phone calls and letters and visits to their federal, state, county, and municipal representatives? The article quotes from a draft statement by Cary Nelson (who happens to be the president of the American Association of University Professors) and other faculty, now circulating:

“Although these rules are not at present being enforced, the AAUP deplores their chilling effect on speech, their interference with the educational process, and their implicit castigation of normal practice during political campaigns,” the draft says.

It adds: “The Ethics Office has failed to recognize and accurately define both the special context of a university and the role of its faculty members. Campus education requires that faculty and students have comparable freedom of expression on political subjects. This applies not only to obvious contexts like courses on politics and public policy in a variety of departments but also to the less formal settings in which faculty and students interact.... As the rules stand, students can exercise their constitutional rights and attend rallies and wear buttons advocating candidates, but faculty cannot.... [S]tudents might attend campus rallies and later analyze them in a classroom. Are faculty members to have no experience of the rallies themselves? Finally, it is inappropriate to suggest that faculty members function as employees whenever they are on campus. Faculty often move back and forth between employee responsibilities and personal acts within the same time frame.”

I wish he had also included staff in that last sentence. University staff often belong to activist groups, often attend rallies, often help organize rallies (after hours, during their lunch breaks-- but apparently all political activity during breaks from work is now forbidden to staff when they are inhabiting University property).

My reference to "the Dark Side," of course, was a joke. A peculiar kind of joke I seem to need to make because this controlling and surveilling of political expression at a place so important in my personal history pains me. But after writing those words, I suddenly recalled Steven Shaviro's recent posts on The Pinocchio Theory on applying the characterization "Evil" to John McCain.

[W]e should make it clear that even the most minimal sense of human dignity requires us to throw the Republicans out of power. It is not stupid to vote for McCain/Palin; rather, it is evil. Republicans are intrinsically, and necessarily, morally depraved. Anyone who votes for McCain/Palin, or supports them, by that very fact demonstrates that he or she is a person utterly devoid of basic morality, and lacking in any respect for others. To vote for McCain is to shit on human civilization, and show utter contempt for human values and human hopes. And not in spite of the Democrats’ hypocrisy, but rather precisely because of this — because their hypocrisy is, as it were, the compliment that vice pays to virtue — the moral thing to do in this election is to vote for Obama.

In a follow-up post, he defends his use of the word "evil" against the uneasiness of anti-essentialists like me who are deeply suspicious of the use of the word wherever they encounter it. His argument about McCain is very interesting and likely to startle a lot of people (and has in fact provoked 50 comments so far):

In other words, no matter how hypocritical the Democrats are (and they are, if you think — for instance — about how Biden pours forth all this rhetoric about helping the less well-to-do citizens of this country, while at the same time he has spent his entire political career working hand-in-glove with the credit card industry to screw over working- and middle-class Americans just so Visa and MasterCard can increase their already obscene profit margins even further) — nonetheless, the fact that they pay lip service to human rights, human dignity, and freedom from unnecessary suffering makes them morally superior to the Republicans, who are so crassly cynical that they overtly and positively revel in the prospects of torture, bigotry, destroying the environment for quick corporate profits, and enriching the already-rich at the expense of everyone else.

Thus, the Democrats’ hypocrisy is to be preferred to the Republicans’ cynicism, for good Kantian reasons (though Zizek would probably give Hegelian ones instead). As Kant famously said about the French Revolution, no matter how much this uprising might have “miscarried” or been “filled with misery and atrocities,” nonetheless any decent human being, observing the events of the Revolution from afar, would have to be caught up in “a wishful participation that borders closely on enthusiasm”; the sheer fact of this “sympathy,” despite everything that goes wrong in actuality, itself testifies to “a moral predisposition in the human race.” In other words, the sheer fact that something like the French Revolution could occur, no matter how badly it went wrong subsequently, gives us a legitimate ground for hoping that human beings are not forever subject to the Hobbesian alternative of either continual war of all against all, or severe and violent repression.

In the present circumstances, this means that Obama’s rhetoric of hope, no matter how vapid and empty it may actually be, still matters. Anyone who thinks that Obama will actually change things is in for severe disappointment if he wins. It’s pretty clear that Obama will do no more than restore Clintonian neoliberalism, in place of the revanchist militarism and rampant looting and pillaging that characterizes the current Bush-Cheney regime (and that McCain, for all his promises of “change”, will do nothing to alter). In other words, Obama may well rescue us somewhat from the nightmare of the last eight years, but only to the extent of restoring the status quo ante, with its foreign bombings and domestic “rationalizations” of the economy, that we rightly objected to in the 1990s. Nonetheless, the fact that Obama, Biden, and company pay lip service to humane values that they will not actually uphold is in itself a cause for hope, for maintaining a “hope we can believe in,” or (to quote a past Presidential candidate whom it is now taboo to mention) for “keep[ing] hope alive.”

Do check out the posts and ensuing discussion here and here.

The Bailout (again): Battling Narratives and Alternative Plans

John Nichols reports that some of the progressive House Democrats who voted against the bailout plan, including Peter DeFazio of Oregon and Marcy Kaptur of Ohio, are proposing an alternative plan, one modeled on

a proposal made last week by former FDIC chair William Isaac, who recalled that in the 1980s Congress enacted a "net worth certificate" program - which allowed the federal agency to shore up the capital of weak banks to give them more time to resolve their problems - and the FDIC resolved a $100 billion insolvency in savings banks for a total cost of less than $2 billion.

"It was a big success and could work in the current climate," argued Isaac.

The chair of the FDIC during Ronald Reagan's first term explained that that:

If we were to (1) implement a program to ease the fears of depositors and other general creditors of banks; (2) keep tight restrictions on short sellers of financial stocks; (3) suspend fair-value accounting (which has contributed mightily to our problems by marking assets to unrealistic fire-sale prices); and (4) authorize a net worth certificate program, we could settle the financial markets without significant expense to taxpayers.

Say Congress spends $700 billion of taxpayer money on the loan purchase proposal. What do we do next? If, however, we implement the program suggested above, we will have $700 billion of dry powder we can put to work in targeted tax incentives if needed to get the economy moving again.

The banks do not need taxpayers to carry their loans. They need proper accounting and regulatory policies that will give them time to work through their problems.

DeFazio, Kaptur and their allies essentially agree.

So, too, does the powerful Service Employees International Union, which has endorsed DeFazio's proposal.

"We finally have a plan that will restore confidence in the financial markets without writing a blank check to the same Wall Street banks and CEOs who got us into this mess," said SEIU President Andy Stern. "This is an important, short-term solution that protects taxpayers and their savings accounts. To revive the economy over the long-term, we must address rising unemployment, stagnant wages, the healthcare crisis, and a tax system that is tilted in favor of the wealthy."

Christopher Hayes has more on the proposal here.

NPR this morning aired a segment discussing some of the concerns of the 200 economists who signed an open letter to Congress opposing the bailout plan.

Paul Krugman, in his column in today's New York Times, looks at two of the various narratives of the bailout people are subscribing to. (Link thanks to Eileen Gunn.)

There seem to be two prevailing narratives about the bailout plan(s). Both have elements of truth, but are fundamentally wrong.

And at The Black Agenda, Glen Ford has a scathing political analysis of the bailout crisis in his piece Bailout Lesson: Capital Crisis Will Wreck Both Parties.

Whose Reality Is It?

A few weeks ago, noting the two sharply different reactions to Sarah Palin's VP nomination, I posted about the particular gap in values in the US that has been widened and exploited by the Culture Wars. But today I'm reminded of another gap, the one that every now and then pops out and frustrates actors in the public sphere. Today the US House of Representatives voted down the proposed bail-out bill being pushed by leaders of both parties as well as by the mainstream media. In an Associated Press article, Julie Hirschfeld Davis writes

"We're all worried about losing our jobs," Rep. Paul Ryan, R-Wis., declared in an impassioned speech in support of the bill before the vote. "Most of us say, 'I want this thing to pass, but I want you to vote for it — not me.'"

Said Boehner, after the vote: "Americans are angry, and so are my colleagues. They don't want to have to vote for a bill like this. But I have concerns about what this means for the American people, what it means for our economy, and what it means for people's jobs. I think that we need to renew our efforts to find a solution that Congress can support."

In the wake of the vote, the Dow Jones index fell nearly 800 points. The AP headline declares that the vote "shocked the capital and worldwide markets." Apparently it does not occur to these folks in Washington, on Wall Street, or in the media that there might be an alternative to the non-solution of this "bailout." (Economists of every stripe seem to think that such a bailout will not solve the difficulties that both the economy and the economy's sector are in.) It's their way or no way, they're telling themselves. The thing is, though, that people who have no power to act in the public sphere, people who are generally ignored, don't share their mindset. Maybe we don't get all the complexities of a system gamed with the help of mathematicians and physicists (unable to get academic or research jobs), but we do have a certain distance that enlarges our perspective (and considerably greater emotional cool). I can't help but recall how shocked and stunned and frustrated the pundits were when a large majority of the US public refused to buy into the supposed necessity to impeach President Clinton. The pundits kept wringing their hands and moaning. They just don't get it! The ordinary person just doesn't understand what we've been telling them. What can we do to educate them? (Meaning: people are so stupid. If they weren't stupid, they'd listen to us and share our insanity.) According to Davis's article, Bush lobbied as hard for this as he's ever lobbied Congress for anything. And you can bet the paid lobbyists have been busy night and day. But for some reason, the anger of the public (which isn't allowed into the public sphere) carried the day with most members of Congress...

Yesterday I read a piece in the Observer that resonated with a conversation I'd had with Tom on Saturday afternoon. Tom said, "Osama bin Laden must be laughing his ass off. The US with all its imperial ambitions is sliding into bankruptcy, just as the Soviet Union bankrupted itself fighting the Cold War." Well, John Gray's A Sattering Moment in America's Fall from Power suggests that

The fate of empires is very often sealed by the interaction of war and debt. That was true of the British Empire, whose finances deteriorated from the First World War onwards, and of the Soviet Union. Defeat in Afghanistan and the economic burden of trying to respond to Reagan's technically flawed but politically extremely effective Star Wars programme were vital factors in triggering the Soviet collapse. Despite its insistent exceptionalism, America is no different. The Iraq War and the credit bubble have fatally undermined America's economic primacy. The US will continue to be the world's largest economy for a while longer, but it will be the new rising powers that, once the crisis is over, buy up what remains intact in the wreckage of America's financial system.

. . . .

The irony of the post-Cold War period is that the fall of communism was followed by the rise of another utopian ideology. In American and Britain, and to a lesser extent other Western countries, a type of market fundamentalism became the guiding philosophy. The collapse of American power that is underway is the predictable upshot. Like the Soviet collapse, it will have large geopolitical repercussions. An enfeebled economy cannot support America's over-extended military commitments for much longer. Retrenchment is inevitable and it is unlikely to be gradual or well planned.

Meltdowns on the scale we are seeing are not slow-motion events. They are swift and chaotic, with rapidly spreading side-effects. Consider Iraq. The success of the surge, which has been achieved by bribing the Sunnis, while acquiescing in ongoing ethnic cleansing, has produced a condition of relative peace in parts of the country. How long will this last, given that America's current level of expenditure on the war can no longer be sustained?

An American retreat from Iraq will leave Iran the regional victor. How will Saudi Arabia respond? Will military action to forestall Iran acquiring nuclear weapons be less or more likely? China's rulers have so far been silent during the unfolding crisis. Will America's weakness embolden them to assert China's power or will China continue its cautious policy of 'peaceful rise'? At present, none of these questions can be answered with any confidence. What is evident is that power is leaking from the US at an accelerating rate. Georgia showed Russia redrawing the geopolitical map, with America an impotent spectator.

Outside the US, most people have long accepted that the development of new economies that goes with globalisation will undermine America's central position in the world. They imagined that this would be a change in America's comparative standing, taking place incrementally over several decades or generations. Today, that looks an increasingly unrealistic assumption.

Having created the conditions that produced history's biggest bubble, America's political leaders appear unable to grasp the magnitude of the dangers the country now faces. Mired in their rancorous culture wars and squabbling among themselves, they seem oblivious to the fact that American global leadership is fast ebbing away. A new world is coming into being almost unnoticed, where America is only one of several great powers, facing an uncertain future it can no longer shape.

The Bush Administration, of course, has always claimed that it makes-- rather than submits to-- reality. At the same time, they (and just about every other person and institution in the public sphere) do their best to convince the public (i.e., everyone not in the public sphere) that late capitalism is the only reality possible for the 21st century. What I think? We live in "interesting times." "Interesting times," of course, are never exactly fun.

Sun on Dragonfly

Nicola Griffith has posted a fan vid based on her story "Touching Fire" (which can be found in With Her Body, Volume 2 in Aqueduct's Conversation Pieces Series) on her blog, in the entry titled Murder music, heat and sex music. The vid, "Sun on Dragonfly," is by Karina, who has also made a vid in response to Kelley Eskridge's " Strings."

Quote of the Day

If we look at writers through the ages we see that they have always been political. Greek poets were political, they championed democracy or defended oligarchs and tyrants according to their sentiment. Pindar was political as were Aeschylus and Euripides, Plato and Aristotle, Catullus and Cicero, Virgil and Horace. Dante was engrossed in politics as were most of the artists of the Renaissance. Nobody told Byron he would be a better writer if he did not attempt the Vision of Judgment or Wordsworth not to bother with Toussaint l'Ouverture; Swift was not considered to have cheapened himself by The Drapier Letters or The Conduct of the Allies, nor Dryden to have let down poetry by Absalom and Achitophel. To deny politics to a writer is to deny him part of his humanity. But even from a list of political writers we can deduce that there are periods in the history of a country when writers are more political, or more writers are political than at others. They are not the periods of greatest political tension, they are those in which authors can do most, can be listened to, can be important, can influence people, and get their own way. Thus Roman poets ceased to be political after the Empire because they were powerless. A writer during the age of Augustus could not play the part of Catullus or Cicero. Writers flourish in a state of political flux, on the eve of the crisis, rather than in the crisis itself; it is before a war or a revolution that they are listened to and come into their own and it was because they were disillusioned at their impotence during the war that so many became indifferent to political issues after the peace.

It is clear that we are living now in a transition period as suited to political writing as were the days of Ship Money or the reign of Queen Anne. Writers can still change history by their pleading, and one who is not political neglects the vital intellectual issues of his time and disdains his material. He is not powerless, like the Symbolists of 1870, the aesthetes of the eighties and nineties, the beer-and-chivalry addicts of the nineteen hundreds or the demobilized Georgian poet on his chicken farm. He is not a victim of his time but a person who can alter it, though if he does not,he may soon find himself victimized. By ignoring the present he condones the future. He has to be political to integrate himself and he must go on being political to protect himself. To-day the forces of life and progress are ranging on one side, those of reaction and death on the other. We are having to choose between democracy and fascism, and fascism is the enemy of art. It is not a question of relative freedom; there are no artists in Fascist countries....Stagnation, fear, violence, and opportunism the characteristics of capitalism preparing for the fray, are no background for a writer and there is a seediness, an ebb of life, a philosophy of taking rather than giving, a bitterness and brutality about right-wing writers now which was absent in those of other days, in seventeenth-century Churchmen or eighteenth-century Tories...

--Cyril Connolly, The Enemies of Promise (1938)

Addendum: The top news stories in the US today? On the domestic front: the US Congress, in its ongoing savaging of the US Constitution, is preparing to hand over absolute power to the plutocrats running the Bush Administration, under the guise of fixing the mess those same plutocrats created (and note, please, that the mainstream media is studiously avoiding asking economists their opinions on the proposed "fix"). On the international front: the US is expanding the "Bush Doctrine" to include Pakistan as the next front for its endless, destructive war fronting its endless, destructive corruption. All this via a "secret" presidential order, made without reference to Congress. In short: a really, really Bad Situation just got really, really dangerous. Is no one really concerned about this? For it certainly looks to the casual eye that as far as the US public goes, it's all just Business As Usual.

More on Connolly's book on the writing life: soon.

ETA: Tom tells me that finally the News Hour (formerly Mc-Neill-Lehrer) has had three economists on. One of them, he said, was even more scathing in his denunciation of the "bail-out" than Paul Krugman.

Take Note!

Cat Rambo is guest-blogging this week at Ecstatic Days.

Nisi Shawl to read in Moscow, Idaho

Nisi Shawl will be read and sign at The Book People, in Moscow, Idaho, on Saturday, October 4, from 11 a.m. to 1 p.m. Book People is located at 521 South Main in downtown Moscow, Idaho. Call (208) 882-7957 for directions, or email bookpeople@moscow.com.

Although I won't be able to make the reading, if you live in Eastern Washington or Western Idaho, you won't want to miss it. Not only is it a treat to hear Nisi read, but I've browsed in that bookstore myself a few times, when visiting friends in Moscow (and spent freely) and can assure you it's got all the charm you expect of a small independent bookstore.

* * *

This exquisitely rendered debut collection of 11 reprints and three originals ranges into the past and future to explore identity and belief in a dazzling variety of settings. “At the Huts of Ajala,” a folktale concerning a girl wrestling with a trickster god before her birth, is full of urgent and delightful imagery, while “Wallamelon” is an elegiac, sophisticated exploration of the Blue Lady myth. Of the several science fiction stories included, the strongest are “Good Boy,” an engrossing experiment in computer psychology, African gods and postcolonial anxiety, and “Shiomah’s Land,” a cross-genre bildungsroman involving a girl who becomes the wife of a goddess. The concluding tale, “The Beads of Ku,” is an utterly arresting, authoritatively delivered tale concerning the diplomacy of marriage and the economy of the land of the dead. The threads of folklore, religious magic, family and the search for a cohesive self are woven with power and lucidity throughout this panorama of race, magic and the body. ---Publishers Weekly, starred review

What's Behind Us

Bitch Magazine is offering a retrospective of six works of feminist literature from the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s--Paging Through Feminism's Lost & Found Classics-- that includes classic tests like Joanna Russ's We Who Are About To and Kathy Acker's Blood and Guts in High School as well as the not-so-classic Up Your Ass by Valerie Solanas, the best-selling The Women's Room by Marilyn French, the primer on the Women's Liberation movement by Cellestine Ware, Woman Power: The Movement for Women's Liberation, and the anthology The Black Woman, edited by Toni Cade [Bambara] and featuring wriers like Nikki Giovanni, Paule Marshall, Audre Lorde, and Alice Walker, "about what it means to be a woman in the civil rights/ black power movement and black in the women's liberation movement."

In the 1976 cross-country race film The Gumball Rally, the late, great Raul Julia rips off his rearview mirror and tosses it over his shoulder, saying “What’s behind me is not important.” 


He didn’t win the race. 


Maybe that’s because what’s behind us actually is important. Feminist literature and history did not spring fully formed from Betty Friedan’s and Naomi Wolf’s pens and word processors; they have had long, complex, and often buried lives. The six works profiled here, ranging from once-famous titles to all-but-unknown works, were dead-on portraits of the state of women when they were written in the 1960s, ’70s, and ’80s, but they still resonate with readers today. Themes like race and the women’s movement, gender and identity, and body politics are evergreen; discussions of these topics still roil in books, on blogs, and in person. And while mainstream feminism may not be grappling with issues like separatism these days, the passion, politics, anger, and truth contained in these books can inspire us to burn as brightly as these authors did. 


For each book, the article provides a paragraph on "What it's about," another on "When it was published" (i.e., how it was received when first published), and "These days," which includes a paragraph on "why you should track it down."

The Mystery of the Disappearing Comments

I've heard from several people lately that some comments posted to the blog are not appearing. Comments do come to us first for moderation (handled chiefly by Cat Rambo and occasionally by me), but unless they're spam or Beyond Obnoxious, we invariably approve them for posting. The comments that are getting lost in the ether never make it to the moderation stage. (Which is why I don't know how exactly often this has happened.) So I thought I'd better offer two pieces of advice to people wanting to post comments. First, make a copy of your post. (A hassle, I know, but it's even more of a hassle if you decide to go to the trouble of writing it a second time.) Second, if your comment doesn't appear within 8 hours of your having posted it, assume it's lost and either re-post, or drop me (or Cat) a line to confirm and then re-post.

Sorry for the inconvenience. Software, as you may have gathered by now, is something I swear at when it impinges on my consciousness. I've no idea what is up with the comments software.

Stuff of Interest

I'm back in Seattle, wishing my two nights away had been three. Yesterday we had Jeanne Gomoll's interview; today we have a couple of interesting posts by Aqueduct authors Sue Lange and Kelley Eskridge. Sue has a guest post-- The Singularity Trap-- today at the Mumpsimus; while Kelley has posted Just Say No To Gender Stability on her blog. Also, I've just seen a lengthy review of the Marq'ssan Cycle by Frann Michel (who gave an interesting paper on Octavia Butler's work at WisCon 32) on her KBOO Radio blog. Check them out!

Jeanne Gomoll

I'm away from home, briefly, visiting the Columbia Gorge, staying in Hood River, OR. It's a beautiful area, but (for me) a bit hot for September.

I see that Strange Horizons has posted an interview with Jeanne Gomoll on Feminist SF, the Tiptree Award, and WisCon, complete with the image of Space Babe (which Jeanne designed). Check it out!

Sentence of the Day

More damaging to the common weal than internecine brawling is the sheer amount of pontificating ("America loves a winner," "America loves the underdog") and prognosticating and chest puffing that is engaged in by the cast of dubious characters who are given a forum on cable-news programs and run around from network to network like free-range chickens.--Nancy Franklin "Convention Wisdom: Cable news at the gathering of the clans" (in the Sept 15. issue of The New Yorker)

Civil Disobedience and Juries

I'm always interested in seeing how juries react in cases where criminal charges are the result of civil disobedience. The primary aim of activists on trial is usually to bring obscure but shocking facts and circumstances into public space (which is, of course, what acts of civil disobedience are most often intended to do) and public discourse. (In case you hadn't realized it, a courtroom, unless it has been closed to the public, is a public space par excellence.) One generally hopes to have an impact on the jury---not necessarily to win an acquittal, but more importantly to bring a part of reality into their thinking that they've previously been unaware of. Acquittal (or dismissal of the charges by the judge) is simply icing on the cake.

In some cases, though, an acquittal can be more than that. Today's Independent/UK reports that six Greenpeace activists put on trial for painting the name of Prime Minister Gordon Brown on the chimney of a power station in order to protest a plan to build a new generation of coal-fired plants were acquitted by a jury on the grounds of "lawful excuse." NASA scientist James Hansen testified on behalf of the defendants, asserting

that emissions of CO2 from Kings-north would damage property through the effects of the climate change they would help to cause.

He was one of several leading public figures who gave evidence for the defence, including Zac Goldsmith, the Conservative parliamentary candidate for Richmond Park and director of the Ecologist magazine, who similarly told the jury that in his opinion, direct action could be justified in the minds of many people if it was intended to prevent larger crimes being committed.

The acquittal was the second time in a decade that the "lawful excuse" defence has been successfully used by Greenpeace activists. In 1999, 28 Greenpeace campaigners led Lord Melchett, who was director at the time, were cleared of criminal damage after trashing an experimental field of GM crops in Norfolk. In each case the damage was not disputed - the point at issue was the motive.

Here's a bit more from the article:

The court heard how, dressed in orange boiler suits and white hard hats bearing the Greenpeace logo, the six-strong group arrived at the site at 6.30am on 8 October. Armed with bags containing abseiling gear, five of them scaled the chimney while Mr Hewke waited below to liaise between the climbers and police.

The climbers had planned to paint "Gordon, bin it" in huge letters on the side of the chimney, but although they succeeded in temporarily shutting the station, they only got as far as painting the word "Gordon" on the chimney before they descended, having been threatened with a High Court injunction. Removing the graffiti cost E.ON £35,000, the court heard.

During the trial the defendants said they had acted lawfully, owing to an honestly held belief that their attempt to stop emissions from Kingsnorth would prevent further damage to properties worldwide caused by global warming. Their aim, they said, was to rein back CO2 emissions and bring urgent pressure to bear on the Government and E.ON to changes policies. They insisted their action had caused the minimum amount of damage necessary to close the plant down and constituted a "proportionate response" to the increasing environmental threat.

Speaking outside court after being cleared yesterday, Mr Stewart said: "This is a huge blow for ministers and their plans for new coal-fired power stations. It wasn't only us in the dock, it was the coal-fired generation as well. After this verdict, the only people left in Britain who think new coal is a good idea are John Hutton and Malcolm Wicks. It's time the Prime Minister stepped in, showed some leadership and embraced the clean energy future for Britain."

He added: "This verdict marks a tipping point for the climate change movement. When a jury of normal people say it is legitimate for a direct action group to shut down a coal-fired power station because of the harm it does to our planet, then where does that leave Government energy policy? We have the clean technologies at hand to power our economy. It's time we turned to them instead of coal."

Ms Hall said: "The jury heard from the most distinguished climate scientist in the world. How could they ignore his warnings and reject his leading scientific arguments?"

An acquittal in a high-profile case like this one may well have reverberations. Interesting, isn't it, that half a dozen letters on a chimney can be perceived as so threatening...