Pulp Fiction

     I wrote yesterday in a rush, and at first sight, it implies something I had no intention of saying, something I don't believe in: I said recent events were like a scrambled Atlas Shrugged, lacking John Galt.

     Ayn Rand was a huge fan of pulp fiction when she was younger, translated stuff in Russia and the pure quill once she came to the U.S.  Those stories were generally cast in the Gothic mode: there's a clear conflict between good and evil, a villain -- and a hero.  Robin Hood, Zorro, general Western Sheriffs, the Continental Op, Philip Marlowe, Batman, G-8, Doc Savage: they appear at key moments, solve the crime, vanquish the bad guy(s), save the day!   When Rand turned to novels, she used archetypes for her characters; of course she had a hero.  It's larger-than-life pulp.  A lot of famous literature is, if you take a step back.

     In real life, the guy who rides in big and bold to save the day is as likely to be a villain as a hero, if not more likely -- Napoleon springs most readily to mind, but you can fill in the blanks.  Good guys getting through tumultuous events and carrying the gen. pop along are likely to be committees: the Founders and Framers of the American Revolution and U.S. Constitution; the leaders, generals and admirals of the Allies in WW I and II.

     A recent news commentator opined that the Democrats are unlikely to sweep the midterm elections despite widespread disapproval of Republican performance in office, because voters see Dems as "weak" and the GOP as "strong."  Since when did we stop rooting for the underdog?  We got into two world wars a bit late, on the side that looked weak -- because it was the proper side; because the other guys were authoritarians with no respect for individual freedom, for freedom of the press, freedom of religion.  Unlike the pessimistic commentator, I don't think we we've lost that.

     We're Americans.  We dance right up to the brink.  So far, we've always known when to step back.

     (PS: Tam said, "So you're rehabilitating Ayn Rand?"  I don't think so.  She fell for her own fiction; you shouldn't.  There are a lot of interesting ideas floating around in fiction, SF especially, everything from The Moon Is A Harsh Matters to The Dispossessed and beyond.  None of them are guidelines around which to remold society, a project that always involves oppression.  One of the overlooked things about the governments that arose from the American Revolution is that in large measure and at every level, the people involved were trying to hold on to what they had and keep it going, not knock it flat and build a New Citizenry from the rubble and ash.  For better and worse, there weren't any huge departures from the trajectories they were already on.  Eventually, the most contradictory elements came into conflict....)

Hurtling Though History

     Photographs of the destruction at the East Wing of the White House from yesterday and today suggest that this Administration is speedrunning the notion of "ruin value."

     Or perhaps it's the boast of Caesar Augustus, who claimed to have found Rome a city of brick and left it a city of marble -- only, you know, the average Roman was still living in a flimsy apartment house, hoping the lightweight upper stories wouldn't catch fire while the Emperor was fiddling around with his building plans.

     Hey, did you hear about the anthrax outbreak in Argentina -- the country our Federal government just bailed out and is talking about importing cheap beef from?  Dig in!

     It's like someone threw Atlas Shrugged in a blender, only with no John Galt.

No More Kings

      The "No Kings" rallies across the country appear to have gone without a hitch: no tea thrown in the harbor, no throwing things at the police until the police shot back, plenty of U.S. flags, silly inflatable costumes, and hand-made signs.  Between five and seven million people took part, very probably the largest mass protest in our history.

     And we do have a history with kings.

     Rule by decree is bad; Congress and not the President is supposed to have the power of the purse (it's right there in the Constitution).  There's still a broad consensus about this, but it's weakening.  It shouldn't, no matter who is President.  Love him, loathe him or feel indifferent, all Presidents are obliged to play by the rules, and when one won't, it's not a thing to chuckle over, it's a reason to chuck him out.

     The first chucking-out is going to be Congress.  Even when they're not shut down by an unwillingness to negotiate across party lines, the present Congress has been largely supine, bullyragged and led around like dull oxen by the Executive.  That's not how it's supposed to work.  They're due for a housecleaning, starting with next year's elections

     Our government is a circus.  We need the clowns, the ringmaster, the lion-tamer -- the whole thing.  One guy leading a herd of elephants to trample it all down isn't much of a show.
  

Which Way Does Your News Lean?

     Look, all reporting bears some imprint left by the people that report it.  Selection of stories, choice of people to interview, questions asked, and so on.  Good reporters work to minimize this; they research and check facts; good editors call 'em on it when they fail to, and send them back to mill to grind more finely. And honest media outlets label opinion as opinion when they present it.

     Not all outlets are honest.  Sometimes they're lying to themselves.  Sometimes they're trying to pick winners and losers instead of just reporting who won or lost.  And sometimes, they're lying to you.

     These guys do their best to sort 'em out.  It's a big job and they don't always keep up, but they don't stop trying.

     Which direction do your news sources lean?  Do you know?  Are you sure?  Find out.

Conan The Historical Preservation

     Robert E. Howard's house, now a museum, is falling apart.  The Foundation running it needs our help.  While the author of Conan the Barbarian -- and a great many other cracking good stories featuring wonderful characters in fantastic situations -- hasn't lived there in quite some time, having ended his own life in 1936 -- the house still stands, restored much as it was.

     Few fantasy and SF writers get much physical recognition; Robert A. Heinlein's houses in Bonny Doon and Colorado Springs (much changed) bear little memory of him; you can look at Octavia Butler's typewriter, but not her workspace; Ray Bradbury's basement office has been recreated here in Indianapolis with original artifacts and there's a museum dedicated to Kurt Vonnegut not far away.  But the actual places where it happened, where the magic met paper?  Those are few and far between.

     You can help save Conan's birthplace.

Spooky Season

     No, not goblins and ghosts and things that go bump in the night -- spy stuff.  Intel stuff, open-source and covert, military and political.  Come to think of it, some of that stuff might go bump in the night, or possibly ka-blam.

     There's a new podcast out, from a source that seems unlikely at first sight, and they're doing good work, serious work, talking to newsmakers a little but mostly to people who avoid headlines, about things that sometimes make headlines.  Sources & Methods is not the usual fare, and in its best moments, is as fascinating as a good spy novel.

Diversity Fire?

     One of the big TV networks is splitting up, spinning off its opinion-focused cable channels and websites from the main news and entertainment operation, and who could blame them?  Their audience goals are very different, and opinion TV rises and falls on the tides of politics; today's soaring eagle is tomorrow's albatross.  Meanwhile, the more mainstream outlet strives to serve (and gather) the widest possible audience.

     That said, mainstream TV in the U.S. still skews white, male and upper-middle class in a manner very disproportionate to the population as a whole, and news staffing leans more that way than entertainment.  One fix, long required by the FCC, has been not diversity hiring but diversity outreach: licensed stations are required to cast a very wide net when seeking employees, and to document their efforts.  The theory is that talent (and the enthusiasm required to employ that talent for the relatively low pay earned by most positions) is rare enough that qualified applicants will have a fair chance -- if they know the jobs are open.  And it has worked; TV today is more diverse than it was sixty years ago, for all that it remains less diverse than the country as a whole.

     Large broadcast companies have supplemented this with news (and entertainment) sub-groups that look for stories about, from, or of interest to underrepresented demographic groups and while it might be tempting to ascribe that to some notion of liberal uplift, guess again: those groups are markets for advertising, and if you can expand the reach of some generic cop-and-lawyers show by adding a Goth-y computer gamine, a lady boss, a gay cop or ensuring that the cast is a cross-section of America, they're gonna do it, and pick up an extra ten or twenty percent in ad revenue because they've got better ratings among red-headed working mothers of Latvian descent, etc. than the competing networks; likewise, news divisions don't want to miss developing stories just because nobody on the staff speaks Spanish or is likely to notice a wave of murders among an ethnic minority or a pandemic emerging among a disregarded group; those are legitimate news "beats," and you need reporters who know the territory.

     So it's not a great sign when a line like this scrolls across social media:
     "NBC News has laid off 150 employees, eliminating teams dedicated to Black, Asian American, Latino and LGBTQ+ issues."
     The details are not quite so dire, some of them will land jobs on one side or another of the split; but the teams will be gone, out from under the current glare of official disapproval, just a little more compliance in advance.

     It's become fashionable, at least in some circles, to sneer at the notion that diversity is a major source of our country's strength, but the version of that sentiment without layers of gloss and varnish is that we're a chaotic, cross-grained mob who, faced with a problem, will try to solve it in a dozen different ways and fight among ourselves over who has the best solution even before it is solved -- but we will solve it, and then bicker about the solving while tumbling towards the next crisis.  Hammering our lovely, awful mess into some square-cornered whitebread straitjacket isn't going to make us better, and you can take that to the bank. 

Sometimes, Silence

     Occasionally, I'll look at a current issue, dig a little deeper -- and decide not to say anything about it.  I had an idea for this morning, but it's just not worth it; I'd be adding more heat than light about something both contentious and impossible to resolve, a matter of opinion and taste rather than fact.

     People are entitled to their own opinions.  Even when I think they're wrong.  Even when their notions are morally suspect.

Remember WENN

     It's back!  The TV series Remember WENN ran on AMC for four seasons starting in 1996 and then vanished.  A mostly-gentle comedy, it follows the career of a plucky young woman from Elkhart, Indiana who arrives at a radio station in Pittsburgh in the late 1930s to work as a radio scriptwriter.  The sets and costumes are first rate, the dialog is period-snappy, and while the technology isn't one hundred percent consistent, it's generally so close you'll never notice.  (I will, especially using carbon and ribbon mics together in the studios, but here's the thing: they're all real microphones, and it's not that far off.)

     It's on AMC and another streaming channel now.  I watched the first episode again tonight.  It's just as charming as I remember.

Peace In Gaza

     As I write this, a long day of speeches and congratulations is underway.  Smiling politicians in nice suits (or the local equivalent) are applauding one another.  That's fine, and I'm not going to say anything snippy about the political figures involved because, hey, they did it.

     All peace in the Middle East is temporary -- but that's true of all peace, everywhere, and of all wars, too.  What's important right now is the last of the living hostages have been freed, prisoners are being released, and people in Gaza aren't being bombed or shot at as they begin, however tentatively, to return to their homes or to the rubble where their homes once stood.  Reports say food and other aid is moving   Maybe it will last a week, a month, a year or only a day; but every day that passes without war in the region is a better day.

     I hope everyone involved -- even the individuals I don't like -- has many better days to come.

Dinner With What's On Hand

      Sunday night, I was a little tired from yard work (and had made scant progress on a wild area of maple saplings and some tree-like weeds).  I didn't want to reheat leftovers, but what did I have?

     Let's see, the tail end of a batch of Canadian bacon, a couple of slices; part of a bag of fresh Shishito peppers; eggs; part of a jar of chunky salsa; a little can of green chilies and, in a corner of the cupboard, a microwave-in-bag of Puerto Rican Rice & Gandules Sofrito.  Gandules are pigeon peas, a delightful legume with a distinctive flavor.

     I heated up the rice and beans per the package while lightly frying the ham.  Then I added the rice to the skillet and cooked it a bit before pouring in the can of chilies (with a healthy sprinkle of dried onion flakes; chopped green onions would have been better, but I didn't have any) and snipping in three large Shishitos.  I gave that a stir, pushed it to the sides and scrambled a couple of eggs in the center.  When the eggs were cooked, I mixed it all back together and gave it just a little more time.  Served in a bowl with a large dollop of chunky salsa on top, it was warm and filling.

     While it was cooking, I remembered I had fresh mushrooms, too, but it was too late.  I had some of them in an omelet this morning, along with bacon, another Shishito pepper, Swiss cheese, a little feta cheese and an olive.

     Some people look down on beans and rice as "poverty food."  You're missing out.  There are remarkably many distinct combinations and most of them are delicious.  Your fellow humans are a clever bunch and you should probably go try what they're having for dinner, if you have the chance.

Metaphorical Floodwaters

     Friends and neighbors, does it seem lately that your zone has been flooded?  Is disinformation, misinformation, arrant BS and rumor crowding out accurate information?  Has it become far more difficult to distinguish between the true metal and mere dross?

     You may be suffering from The Russian Model of Propaganda!  Sometimes known as the "Firehose of Falsehood," if what you're seeing is:
A. High-volume and multichannel
B. Rapid, continuous, and repetitive
C. Lacking in commitment to objective reality
D. Lacking in commitment to consistency
     Then you may need to adjust your social media and news consumption to slow or dilute it.  RAND Corporation wrote a nice paper about it.

     In other news, I noticed our Vice President made the circuit of the Sunday morning politics shows, pressing hard on blaming the Democrats for the government shutdown* and Gish-galloping through questions that didn't fit his goal.  At one point, when an interviewer kept asking about things she wanted to cover, he scolded her, "You're talking to the Vice President, and you've spent five minutes on [unwanted topic.]"  Yes, dear boy, that's how it works: the person conducting the interview asks the questions, and you can answer them however you like or refuse to address them.  You don't get to set the agenda; that's what press conferences are for. 

     The Vice President, the President, members of Congress, judges, journalists, Cabinet members, police: they're all Just Some Guy.  This is the United States of America and none of them are more special than the others.  And if any of them decide to "flood the zone," know it for what it is, and judge it accordingly.
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* As I have noted before, this is nonsense.  Either party could break the impasse by giving the other one exactly what they want; neither of them have made a secret of what it will take.  Or they could sit down together and work out something they'd all dislike equally.  This last option is extremely not happening.  The GOP only needs a few votes in the Senate but they have so far been unwilling to unbend enough to get even a handful of Democrat Senators to come over.  The Dems have made an opening bid, and it's pretty high -- but the counteroffer is bupkis and an empty promise to talk later.  Meanwhile, if you bought your health insurance through the Feds, it's gonna cost a lot more; if you're counting on food stamps or other aid, those coffers are running dry.