Smaller

I get a little petty when my buttons are pushed. (It’s the stage preceding the desire to annihilate.)

Today at That Other Place someone made an argument that Reagan was the last real leader we’ve had in the White House, that he was the “penultimate leader”. A couple of others politely pointed out that this was the wrong word, that penultimate means next-to-last. To which the person replied that he had in fact checked with Word’s thesaurus, which said it meant “last but one” and that he was therefore correct. I pointed out that “last but one” means there had to be one more after Reagan, which is the opposite of the point he was trying to make.

He restated his argument that “last but one” was what he meant: there have been no leaders after Reagan, so he was the last but one. Both his usage and mine were correct.

Except not so much, I thought.

In Which I Vent After the Manner of Krakatoa

Krakatoa erupting in 1883, from Wikipedia

So another of my Big Red Buttons (my, I do have a lot of them) is my writing.

I have an unfortunate tendency to assume that whatever I’ve written is as very near to perfection as any human can make it. While I think it’s good for me to have confidence in my work and my abilities, assuming that I am Shakespeare 2.0 is just ridiculous. Not only is it just over-the-top crazy arrogant, it makes it very hard to achieve any actual improvement in my work. No one can tell me any way to do better because no one can tell me anything.

I took a couple of poetry composition classes in college. I don’t remember being resistant to the feedback of my classmates, but then I don’t remember a lot of things from those days. (And many of the memories I have are clearly false.) Plus my poetry isn’t as close to my heart as my stories. I’m very occasionally an okay poet. I like to think I’m a good prose writer. So I imagine myself sharing a story with someone else, and it going a lot like this:

ME: So here is a story I wrote about were-dingoes. I am super-proud of it. Is it not awesome and epic in every way?

SOMEONE ELSE: Well, I like the were-dingo part. The big fight scene in the abandoned sword factory with the hovercraft and the cyborg girls was way cool. But the sex scene is kinda laughable.

ME: What? Crazy talk. You just don’t get it. Silence, Philistine! I will hear no more of your insolent nattering. (slinks off to sulk and be sad, poor misunderstood artist that he is)

On the plus side, I get to be defensive and rude. On the minus side, everyone who reads my were-dingo story has to endure a were-dingo sex scene that eclipses the previous record set by Tom Clancy for “Worst Sex Scene Writing EVER“. I think we all know how that balances out. It’s a significant disadvantage for me as a writer, because it keeps me from getting valuable feedback. Also it makes me seem like a jerk, which is never good.

On the other hand, there are times when I just go with that and am mostly okay with it. Today at that Other Place, I was addressing a friend’s point about income disparity. She’d pointed out that a group of 200 top executives averaged over $10 million in compensation last year, whereas the average American worker made something like $750 a week. I was pointing out some concerns I had with the argument: how was this group of executives selected? It would be pretty easy to cherry-pick the 200 highest-paid ones and skew the numbers – for every Wall Street banker who raked in fat cash for her work, there are any number of people running smaller businesses making a lot less than that. I’m all for discussing income disparity, but I want to compare apples to apples.

In comes someone I will call the Inflamer. She is easily one of the most infuriating people I’ve ever encountered. She very frequently starts these ridiculous arguments and keeps them going for days, and usually it’s because she’ll make these ridiculous sweeping generalizations (“Republicans all love war because it makes them richer” or “The people who are against Obama just hate him because he’s black”) and refuse to back down from them when challenged. She supports Obama’s calls for more civilized political discourse, and in the same breath uses terms like “Rethuglicans”. She seems to lack even basic critical thinking skills – she recently posted a link to an article that cited “magic sparkle ponies with their cell phones” in attendance at a press conference, and only later realized it was satire. She’s inconsistent, abrasive, and just generally obnoxious.

Rather than address my point – that a comparison of 200 selected individuals to the whole working population of the U.S. might be misleading – she decided to address my use of the female pronoun. Most Wall Street bankers aren’t women, which to her invalidated my point. Except it didn’t. Yes, Wall Street executives and bankers are disproportionately male. And that is an injustice in itself. It’s not the issue I was addressing.

I pointed out that I chose to make my Wall Street banker a woman because I like to make my examples female sometimes instead of defaulting to males all the time. As Mneme pointed out to me, it’s kind of obnoxious when you’re a woman to constantly hear everyone assuming that every role is somehow gendered, and that they’re almost always gendered male. Harder for girls to grow up thinking they can be bankers or lawyers or scientists or Presidents when the default pronoun to describe people in all those roles is “him”. So I try to mix that up by using female examples and male examples interchangeably – the gender of the Wall Street executive in my argument wasn’t relevant to the point I was trying to make.

She said that it made my point inaccurate, that I should have used “person” or “banker” or even “bankster” instead because that would be more accurate. At which point I lost it.

Here I have a person whose consistently poor communication skills cause frequent arguments, someone who has as little grasp on logic and rational discourse as the average second-grader – and she is going to tell me how to write and make a point? And be entirely wrong about it to boot? I don’t think so. I pointed out that “bankster” is a generally derogatory informal term, and therefore not accurate. And I told her that

If you think that I am going to take advice on how to communicate and construct an argument from you, you are even more profoundly mistaken than usual. That’s like a half-deaf blind dog that barks at every sound giving notes to Neruda.

On the one hand, I’m kind of proud of my snarkiness there. Not that I think I’m Neruda (I wish I were half as gifted), but still. As verbal backhands go, it’s not bad.

On the other hand, I realize that I’m responding to one of my Big Red Buttons. And that’s not a proud moment for me. I walked away from the conversation at that point, which was what I should have done initially. I have a strict “do not engage the Inflamer” policy. I made an exception, and I got a great reminder why I shouldn’t do that. Chalk one up for learning.

In the plus column: demonstrated verbal facility, delivered zinging putdown to an obnoxious person, walked away from a pointless battle (eventually).

In the minus column: looked kind of like a bully who can’t take even mild criticism.

Not a good balance. Not going on my list of bright shining moments to be proud of. (Not going in the shameful secrets file, either.) I let my Big Red Button get the best of me, which is of course what Big Red Buttons do.

And what we as humans trying to be good people do is try to identify those Big Red Buttons and manage them better. I’m not going to win Lauren Graham’s heart by being a jerk. (Don’t say it. Do NOT burst my bubble here, people.) Maybe I don’t have it in me to politely thank the Inflamer for her advice while going on with my conversation in my way, but I could certainly have just let it slide. I chose not to.

I’m a little more hair-triggery lately. Stress, depression, isolation – these things get to you. (The lighthouse dream dies a lingering death.)  Something I need to watch out for, and work on.

Steam Goes Out, Peace Fills the Void

I should be working on a writing job right now. But I’m feeling a bit irritable, and a bit of venting seems in order because the irritation is keeping me from focusing.

Two of my aunts often use their Facebook status updates to make political points. Generally this amounts to those “cut and paste this if you agree” reposts. Since my aunts (like most of my relatives) are much more conservative than I am, their posts tend to infuriate me.

Sometimes it’s because they’re bent out of shape over stuff that’s not even true: gangs using handicapped people and children as bait to kidnap women in mall parking lots, President Obama cancelling the National Day of Prayer, and how you can get AIDS from a handshake if you don’t say three Hail Marys and drink a guava-strawberry smoothie with your left hand while hopping on your right foot.

Okay, I made that last one up. But you get the point. It’s chain e-mails all over again. And no matter how many times I point it out to them, they never think to check Snopes to see if their friend’s  friend’s cousin’s attorney’s neighbor might have it wrong. Heaven forbid they even do a little Googling to see if maybe this stuff is just crazy talk, or perhaps exaggerated by the telephone effect. The way data moves these days, you can go from “Polly Noonan lost ten dollars at the casino last night with her dog Millie” to “Paul Newman left ten million dollars to start a dog casino” in no time flat.

Last night’s repost was about the new Florida law requiring individuals who apply for assistance under Florida’s administration of the federal TANF grant to pass drug tests. If they have kids and fail the test, someone else can be designated to receive the funds for their kids. But not a penny for them until they can pee clean, God-fearing American pee like stand-up citizens. My aunts think this is great: “Let’s get Welfare back to the one’s who NEED it, not those that just WANT it.”  I’ve no idea who got them reposting this, but the aunts who didn’t re-post that liked it.

Let’s take a look at that. Johnny Spoon and Bonnie Fork were high school sweethearts. They have a little too much peach schnapps after the prom and Bonnie winds up pregnant. They graduate and get married that summer. Bonnie stays home with little baby Gaga, while Johnny gets a job to pay the bills. It’s a lot of stress, being a 19-year-old high school graduate trying to support a family. He wanted to go to college and become a Web millionaire. Bonnie was going to be an optometrist. Johnny makes a bad choice and starts doing drugs. Now he’s addicted, and it’s hard for him to hold down a job. It’s even harder in a bad economy.

Bonnie loves him, but she can’t take care of  him and the baby. She’s just a kid herself. And she won’t have drugs around her little girl. She has to leave with baby Gaga and move back in with her parents.

Johnny’s not a bad guy. He wants to work and do right. But now his brain is wired to demand a certain kind of chemical stimulation. And as badly as he wants to get off drugs and be the man he needs to be, he can’t: his brain can no more stop screaming for a fix than his stomach could for food. It’s not a lack of will or a weakness of character. It’s one bad decision compounded by a cruel trick of biochemistry.

And now he can’t get help from the state to make ends meet. He can’t keep a job, he can’t keep a roof over his head, and before long he’s on the streets with millions of others. The farther he gets from the rest of us, the farther he gets from the possibility of help. The longer he stays out there on the streets, the better the chances are he’ll turn to crime and wind up in prison or worse.

Are we really willing to shut the door on all the Johnnys out there? Are we really willing to write them off for one mistake? Yes, Johnny made the wrong choice when he started doing drugs. But he can’t make that right on his own anymore. He physically can’t break the hold those nasty little molecules have on his neurons. (Ask yourself why the first of the Twelve Steps is admitting your powerlessness before your addiction.)  It’s easy to let our non-addicted brains think, “Well, he just needs to grow a spine, haul himself up by his bootstraps, and apply a little elbow grease.” But until  you’ve lived inside a brain that doesn’t work right you can’t possibly know what it’s like. I’ve had a taste of it with my own serotonin-starved brain, and there’s a sense of powerlessness there that taints everything you think or do: you can’t trust your own consciousness. I can’t imagine what it would be like to need something that I know is destroying my life and slowly killing me.

It’s also worth noting that the goals for the TANF block grants don’t say anything about “drug eradication”.  It’s not a priority for the federal government to make sure only “clean” people get help. And it’s their money.

Part of me wants to argue all this with my aunts. It’s not just that their short-sighted lack of compassion offends me in ways that would have surprised me a few years ago. I feel like I need to Fight the Good Fight. The more we let our White Whales and Big Red Buttons dictate policy, the worse we’ll make our policies. And the more we stand back in silence while the ignorant and ill-tempered spew vitriol at the voiceless and defenseless, the worse things get for “the least of these“. And after all these years of appeasement, of hiding who I am and letting them think I’m still one of them, I feel an almost desperate desire to carve out a space for my true self. I get to breathe, too.

Part of me thinks it makes more sense to “drop the rope”, as Mneme says.  I’m not going to change their minds. They were raised in pretty much the same conservative, fundamentalist Christian background I was. And they’ve had a lot more practice and indoctrination than I have. They are pretty firmly set in their ways, and they are pretty firmly convinced that this is the way God would want things. Kind of hard to argue with that.

Someone at that Other Place suggested I should let it go. Their beliefs are rooted in story, not truth, so there’s no point arguing with them. (She’s a big believer in Eckhard Tolle, of whom I know very little. Also she’s an inveterate and frequently illogical arguer, which is both annoying and funny, but that’s neither here nor there.) In this case she’s right. We all have narratives we’ve written to make sense of our lives. “Punish the wicked” is a bigger theme in theirs than mine, and nothing I do will persuade them to edit their narratives to make room for a little more mercy. They will filter every argument through their narrative, even though I’m trying to show them that it’s the narrative itself that needs changing.

And if I’m being honest with myself, part of my desire to argue with them is rooted in that same “punish the wicked” theme. I’m just more inclined to swing the axe than cheer the headsman, and I have my own ideas about whose necks need cutting. But as Nietzsche wrote, “distrust all in whom the impulse to punish is powerful”. (I really should finish Zarathustra sometime.) That reflexive “no” isn’t the best approach.

That’s really the heart of it: not the reflexive “no” or the automatic “yes”. Making conscious moral choices instead of relying on knee-jerk responses. Sailing over your emotional waves, learning to ride them out. It’s easy to say “no welfare for scummy druggies”, and it’s easy to say “you’re wrong, you narrow-minded, short-sighted, heartless jerks”. But the right thing to do is take a step back, think it through, and proceed with well-earned calm and confidence.

New UltraMegaHyperMax – TO THE EXTREME!!!! (Now Available for Sperm Whales)

So I’ve written tangentially a little elsewhere about our extreme times. But I wanted to say a little more here, and in a little more personal way.

People are angry. I don’t fully grasp why, because it’s a wide-ranging anger with a rootbed like a saguaro. There’s fear of change, which gets worse as change accelerates. There’s betrayal – this isn’t the American dream we were all promised, with nice cars and nice homes and solid jobs and weekends for barbecue. There’s confusion because the complexity that’s always been there gets more insistent and that whole “don’t sweat it, just be cool” ethos is giving ever-smaller payoffs; the difference between Gulliver laughing off a nuisance and Gulliver helpless on the beach is exactly one Lilliputian rope. And there’s fear of the other – fear of the woman who isn’t just going to stay in her appointed place, fear of the people who love a little differently and make you think a little harder about your own sexuality, fear of those who look/talk/worship differently and expect you to have as much respect for them as you demand for yourself.

Plus there’s a whole other element there – something to do with drawing a line, back against the wall, no more compromises – that I don’t fully get. I’ve been there myself, and I still go there if I’m not careful, but I don’t fully understand it. It reminds me of one of my favorite scenes from Star Trek: First Contact. (BIG kudos to Patrick Stewart and Alfre Woodard.)

This clip doesn’t really finish the scene properly – Picard soon realizes that Lily is right, and misquotes a line from Moby-Dick: “And he piled upon the whale’s white hump the sum of all the rage and hate felt by his whole race. If his chest had been a cannon, he would have shot his heart upon it.” (Star Trek writers love their Melville – who could forget Khan’s last words?) His anger wasn’t just for all the lives and worlds destroyed by the Borg, or even for the trauma he suffered at their hands – for all their monstrous crimes, the Borg were a convenient bogeyman and punching bag. He was willing to throw away the lives of those he loved and the whole world he lived in for a futile effort to make them pay for every injustice ever done him.

Yesterday I found myself arguing against indentured servitude at That Other Place. Not that I mind the argument per se, since I have no problem opposing the idea that one human being could own another for even a (theoretically) limited time. I’m just surprised I had to. And I’m doubly surprised at who I had to argue with – a friend whose intelligence, integrity and commitment to human rights I respect. I wish I could help him see that his libertarian ideals are utterly incompatible with his arguments in this case.

But there it is. His White Whale is those who don’t do the right thing. For someone else, it could be illegal immigrants. Mine is idiots – by which I mean those who don’t think the way I do. I think a lot of us have these White Whales, and it’s as important to recognize them as it is to be aware of our Big Red Buttons. A White Whale is more than a scapegoat – it’s not just something to blame one thing on, it’s something to blame everything on. And it’s something that drives you out of yourself, beyond your normal boundaries and into that too-familiar country at the edges of the map. “Here be dragons” indeed.

It’s easy to say this is all driven by fear, and there’s truth to that. But these White Whales aren’t just objects of fear. They’re not the monsters in your closet. They’re not just your dark reflections, and they’re not just threatening mysteries. A White Whale takes on mythic importance out of all proportion to objective reality. You shape the narrative of your life so that the White Whale is your perennial antagonist: it’s as if Hamlet blamed Claudius not only for killing his father and stealing his crown but for letting Fortinbras menace the kingdom and for Elsinore’s lousy ventilation and all those damn snooty Frenchmen at university who get all the girls and wreck the curves on all the tests. The White Whale isn’t just an enemy, it’s The Enemy. It’s symptom and disease.

Large segments of society are letting their White Whales drive them to support what would once have been untenable, even unthinkable positions. Here in Arizona a controversial new law allows the police to require proof of US citizenship if they have a “reasonable suspicion”. The birthers are demanding President Obama jump through increasingly arcane hoops to prove his right to be President. Senator Rand Paul apparently feels that just listening to the wrong words is grounds for deportation. It’s starting to seem like if you don’t say “are you INSANE?!” when you read the news then you must be reading the funny pages.

I’m not one to talk about “the Good Old Days” because I’m not one to believe they ever were. But it seems to me that both words and deeds are heading fast in the direction of the moons of Nibia and the Antares maelstrom. And if we don’t want to get dragged down in the wreck of the Pequod as we try to round perdition’s flames, we need to take a few deep breaths and a few steps back to remember that the White Whale is only a white whale.

P.S. – As I posted this, my eerily pyschic iPod shuffled its way into West Indian Girl’s “What Are You Afraid Of”. I love that song, so I’ll share.

A Quick Break

13,094 down, 36,906 to go. Okay, I’m pretty far behind. I need to average something like 5000 words a day to finish on time. And while I can wax rhapsodic and loquacious with the best of them – in high school I wrote a single sentence that covered three double-spaced pages and only included one verb – there are still certain limits on my time. I have to work, I have to sleep, I have to let my feverish brain cool down for a few minutes between wild flights of fancy. Also I know a lot more verbs now, and I would like to use some of them.

I’m not saying I can’t do it. I really think I can. And I’m having a blast doing it. You should see the mad grin on my face. But I let myself skip a few days in there, which put me WAY behind. Also I felt the need to involve myself in  some nonsense at That Other Place last night and this morning. Common mistake here at the Winter Palace.

I’m thinking of trying to sell the thing when I’m done. (By “done” I mean “edited and revised into some semblance of coherence”. I’m basically throwing kitchen sinks full of kitchen sinks full of spiders, porcupines, robots, vampires, and sexy ninjas at this thing right now.) Maybe even just as a PDF available online for a few bucks a pop. We’ll see. Cart follows horse, right?

Right now, I have to get my protagonist out of a slave mine on a faraway planet in time to be elected Galactic President, figure out why a time-traveling AI is so interested in his criminal career, resurrect his guardian angel without upsetting the cosmic balance between good and evil,  and give the Devil a nice vacation.

This stuff writes itself.