Essays by Sean

Thematic Citizens

2012-02-09T17:15:00.000-08:00

essaysbysean.blogspot.com

“Thematic.” It means relating to a common theme; it’s a word I now associate with observing and seeking out.

Yes, that’s my word of the day, thanks to science fiction (sf) writer Gordon R. Dickson, best known for his novels in the Childe Cycle. At the end of a short story collection, Steel Brother, there is “The Childe Cycle Status Report” and an Algol Magazine interview by Sandra Miesal, “A Conversation With Gordon R. Dickson.” In both parts Dickson explains how his Childe stories, taken together, are thematic. I find the idea of “seeking out” intriguing. As he tells Miesal:

…I am writing something that I hope the average, wanting-to-be-entertained reader will pick up and absorb. That’s the whole point of the consciously-thematic novel. It’s a way of making a philosophical statement that the reader sort of swallows without having realized that they’ve swallowed it and only later realizes it’s in there. The propagandistic novel gives you no chance but to accept or reject the statement. The consciously-thematic novel makes the statement available to you but does not require you to choose either one. You can simply ignore it.

Elsewhere in the conversation he says of his Childe novels, “… that their message is not an accidental blurred thing but a clear statement for those who will look for it.” The trick, of course, is they have to be willing to look.

Written science fiction, of course, in contrast to Hollywood’s moving pictures, has always rewarded those willing to look and think. The novel Nineteen Eighty-four, by George Orwell, starts out with the clock striking thirteen as bits of grit are blowing into the doorway. With that opening line the reader thinks, “How silly, to take metric to the extreme of having thirteen to twenty-four bells.” Combined with the grit, he realizes, “A powerful government has forced its metric ideals on the people, without the democratic check and balance of common sense. Obviously that government is oppressive, since they don’t have the economical, and psychological, resources needed for having clean streets.” As an essayist, I see I’ve just done my own subtle-thematic-thingy, by leaving it to my essay readers, those who are willing, to ask: What “psychological resources,” what character traits, are discouraged amongst the public by oppressors?”

This realization in reading 1984, from the very opening line, comes before the reader has even encountered the first huge poster of Big Brother. Later in the novel, of course, it will be made explicit that “ideals” are but an excuse to exercise power, with power as an end in itself. A leader will reveal to a prisoner a fact of life: You don’t seize power in order to make a revolution; you make a revolution in order to seize power.

In my favorite sf novels, come to think of it, the theme is subtle, and not put in words by anyone, neither by the author nor by any of the characters. Sometimes the story is not, at first, even written with a conscious-theme. Lois McMaster Bujold wrote a novel (Cordelia’s Honor) of the adventures of Cordelia against a plot to overthrow the government, with Cordelia being a starship captain who has left the service for a planetside marriage. Bujold was most of the way through writing her novel before she (and Cordelia too) realized it was about leaving one’s lone career and fully accepting the ties of children and family.

I used to be subtle with my essays, too subtle. And so one day I had to go back to my older ones and edit in some explicit thesis. This was after my buddy Blair pointed out I was mistakenly writing for science fiction fans. Hence I was writing essays with a nice chain of logic but at the very end not nailing in a thesis. Blair explained it was better to be less artistic, even patronizing of the readers, than to expect people to create a conclusion. He was right, of course.

As for essays on the Internet, I am told there are artistic ones. Such a relief to hear. Unhappily, so far, I have almost only found writing for computer nerds who will read at their workplace, perhaps while their code is booting. These nerds will rush along the words wanting really short pieces, with their minds in neutral, wishing to be spoon fed. Call them “really bright guys who are common sense challenged.” One lady even wrote, “If you can’t make your point in 200 words, you shouldn’t even bother.” How queer, since I can think of classic essays where the beginning alone takes 200 words. Obviously in her world there are no classic essays, no classics to return to and find new connections, insights and thoughts missed the first time. A pity.

As with essays, so with novels where, as G. R. Dickson notes, people have a choice about subtle things. It’s fine to read only for the adventure, of course, while there is also more to find if you are willing.

While I enjoy essays, more of my reading is fiction. Lately I’ve been intrigued by two subtle lines in the fiction of sf writer Robert Heinlein. I’ve lifted my eyes up from the page to ponder how so much can be unpacked from a simple sentence…

I can’t recall which of Heinlein’s novel, or novels, contains a spoken line to the effect that “any police service that goes in for wire tapping and bugging, ends up with the police chief himself being bugged.” Well. At my first fly-past I assumed that with so much bugging technology lying around some police officer, either a “keener,” or a “bad apple,” would end up spying “on” his chief. On the second time past I had second thoughts: could it be spying “against” his chief? Could it be that when bugging becomes easy and commonplace within the police service there is a change to the ethics and values of the “city’s finest?”

A “change?” Better call it a “corruption.” Wait- is not the police force embedded in society? More change, then, as we are each of us, as the Reverend Martin Luther King noted, bound up in a web of mutuality.

According to rumor, the FBI started by spying on the activities and love lives of communists and union organizers, and then moved to keeping files on the sex lives of congressmen, as well as the activities of my favorite reverend for civil rights. It is said the White House, as early as the time of President Truman, daren’t fire Hoover, for fear of secret files. Mutuality: It is a short crooked line from Hoover to the Watergate tapes. After sober thought: Better to keep to using specific wiretaps subject to specific warrants by a careful judge.

Perhaps, then, the Patriot Act is too trusting of human nature.

In Heinlein’s novel Glory Road the hero, a fencing expert, magically ends up on a quest wearing a sword, with a sidekick to set up his nylon tent, and a princess by his side. The hero starts out, though, in the US army in a jungle war in Asia, near a port where people will pirate-copy western things like Irish Sweepstakes tickets. While Glory Road is technically a fantasy, it also has the thoughtfulness so appealing to readers of science fiction. The scene I am recalling is where they make camp in a beautiful park-like glade. The hero peers around and the princess assures him, “It is safe.” Still nervous. She adds, “It is defended.” Then the hero relaxes.

When I first unpack and expand her six words… I envision a young handsome blond in a denim jacket in a pool hall. The lad probably won’t have the character to have become skilled at a musical instrument, a performing art or a sport such as fencing (not unless he is desperately grasping at straws as a way to escape the slum) Finding everyday life challenging enough, he totally rejects taking up cliff climbing or hiking. This means, secondly, that outdoor pursuits can be used for character training for juvenile delinquents, and firstly, that remote parks are safe enough, defended well enough, simply by having park rangers with radios. Meanwhile, gambling in the pool hall, his winnings are safe from violence only if the other patrons and the police will defend him. If no one will help, or at least be willing to serve as a stool pigeon, then the boy is left helpless.

Speaking of character training, or lack thereof: If the lad goes to prison, safety will mean a gang. His fellow convicts will form no committees, certainly not a justice committee, nor even an escape committee, not like normal people dropped into a WWII P.O.W. camp. This makes sense: Persons unfit for civil society are unable to form a civil society “in the joint.”

When I unpack the dialogue still further, I see the Asians in Glory Road could not prevent war or piracy, not without having the character, the civilian will, for “effectiveness” in their police and armed forces. Today, of course, the communist police lack the will to stop economic piracy; the South Vietnamese army, so infamously unbrave, is now history. It was in one of his essays, not in his fiction, that George Orwell remarked that civilized men are safe at night only because other men, inevitably less civilized, are guarding the frontiers while they sleep. (A remark used by Jack Nicholson’s character in the film A Few Good Men)

Expanding still further- how far I’ve come from six words! …Safety is not the default: Rather, from ports to remote parks, safety follows conscious defense. This could mean responsible citizens like in Athens, or less responsible folks like the hero’s Asian friends, or, as one of Heinlein’s characters once muttered, really pathetic folks “paying Danegeld.”

Perhaps, then, pacifists who are anti-army are too trusting of human nature.

OK Blair, here’s my thesis: Good reading takes work; a healthy society takes work. For me, it’s fun to slow down to think about subtle essays and fiction, especially when such prose reminds me that, on this planet, fully responsible citizens are not the default.

Sean Crawford

Where “the pursuit of happiness” includes thinking

Calgary, February 2012

Inflation, Conspiracies and Climategate

2012-02-06T17:07:00.000-08:00

www.essaysbysean.blogspot.com

As you know, the climategate scandal, exposed in November of 2009, is about scientists censoring and falsifying data, and suppressing other scientists, in order to uphold a "party line."

A local bookstore has a fresh new copy of Mein Kampf, -with a smooth black cover, naturally. Strangely enough, when I saw the film American History X, a film where a teacher is incensed that Edward (Terminator 2) Furlong's character does a book report on Hitler's work, I got the distinct impression that some U.S. high schools censor that book. How silly. My own secondary school shelved not only that book but also William Shirer's Rise and Fall of the Third Reich. At my school Hitler's book gathered dust, while Shirer's book hinted at what would have happened if our teachers had tried to use censorship: The German government caused parts of certain pages of school books to be censored by pasting paper rectangles over them, then the German students, typical of youth in my own day, proceeded to sneak some steam kettles over to see what being hidden. So it's better, I think, to allow Mein Kampf to gather dust in plain sight.

The book is too big for kids to read, anyways. They'd be bored. In fact, kids are so bored by history that a 1980's Hollywood miniseries, to retell the story of the Nazis, according to a 1980's newspaper interview, had to resort to a stratagem: the Nazi shoulder logo was modified, blocky luger pistols became blocky blasters, and the Nazis were changed to so-called "Visitors." The "party line," on billboards everywhere, was "The Visitors are your Friends." They had space ships: the series was called V.

As for Mein Kampf, even the Germans mostly did not read it. According to Shirer, the tome was merely set on their coffee tables as a comfort piece. The amazing thing, to Shirer and me, is how even though Hitler so clearly laid out his plans for living space, plenty of U-boats, etc.,etc., the world didn't think he would so much as re-arm, let alone annex Austria and so forth. But I'm not bitter.

Like they say, "Judge not, lest ye be judged." Last summer I heard a recording of Prime Minister Chamberlain's "Peace in Our Time" speech. The crowd cheered wildly. And why not? The Great War had taught them how war is not glorious, a lesson the kids in the 1960's claimed to have discovered all on their own. I'm sure Churchill himself read the book- but he was such a brave man. As for the rest of the public, I think the "conspiracy" of no one considering out loud the "price of peace" was not a conscious one, but rather, reminiscent of Star Trek's PrimeDirective: Some things society is not yet ready to know, and it does no good for a Churchill or anyone else to try to "break the directive" and speak out. And if something comes by like inflation, and they instantly forget, then isn't that, besides being a prime directive thing, a form of mass self-censorship?

An actual conspiracy, which at first we could scarcely believe, was the White House doing Watergate, and President Nixon having secret tape recordings. Now we all believe the White House could do such a thing, and perhaps even house war criminals (torture) but at the time people "staggered" when they heard the news. Many folks initially believed Nixon's compelling speech (which I have heard) announcing that certain people had resigned, yes, but Nixon firmly believed they were "good men" who would eventually be found innocent. In fact, they never went back to their positions, going instead to jail. We still remember Watergate; It's hard to believe that we could forget a concurrent conspiracy, once it was exposed.

I lived through a conspiracy more damaging than Watergate. Of this I am sure.
The results can be seen around us:
An historically new lack of job loyalty and job security. Careerism. No loyalty between top and middle executives, or to the rank and file. Leveraging. Hostile takeovers, with sell offs to make money -but not "wealth-" on paper. Conglomerates. Greenmail to prevent takeovers. Downsizing. Almost none of this was happening back in the days of the TV series Mad Men, back when I was young, certainly nothing on the scale of today. Inflation, with it's new time-lines and new Return On Investment equations has changed business incentives. The change in behaviours have then changed the moral fabric of the nation.

The ripples of disaster are still spreading. The investigative magazine Mother Jones, in the April 2007 edition, presents a convincing case for the decline of print newspapers, and the decline of ethical journalism, being not from the internet, but rather, from takeovers of print media by conglomerates. Hence, due to financial incentives, the culling of newspapers and their assets to make paper money, downsizing of beat reporters, and then blatantly favoring the conglomerate's less ethical electronic media, of course. (The difference between print and infotainment journalism is beyond the scope of this essay)

This all began in the 1960's with presidents Johnson and Nixon. At the time I recall my school principal, Wes Jansen, telling us how the experts were baffled, mystified, how no one had predicted there could ever, possibly, be such a thing as "stagflation." (Inflation plus a stagnant economy.) A U.S. leader, Gerald Ford, had faith in distributing buttons saying WIN, for "Whip Inflation Now." Meanwhile, there was Nixon's contemporary, a Canadian prime minister, a man with just as much credibility -and more scholarship- than a Kennedy or an Obama. Yet even he, Pierre Trudeau, was either taken in by the conspiracy or was a part of it. He called loud and long for Canadians to voluntarily heed his "six and five" plan. Meaning: percentages of increases for wages and prices. (Canadians, mindful of history, never legislated or froze wages and prices.) This was the best solution Trudeau could offer, since inflation was such a mystery. Say it in a spooky voice: "No one knows what causes inflation or what any real solution might be." In the U.S., as in Canada, a "consensus of scientists" with Ph.D.'s in climat - er, economics, gave the people no hope.

In community college, in the 1970's, I took an economics class with a hybrid text book made for both high school and college. We took "M-1" and "elasticity," but, what we did not take was whatever was causing our inflation. I looked through the text. Nothing. I did not find a "smoking gun" (proof) for the inflation conspiracy until I found business guru Peter Drucker quoting an angry Secretary of State Henry Kissinger justifying inflation. But this I didn't find until later.

Back in the mid 1970's there was a maverick, Robert Ringer. An author. His brand, long before people talked of branding, was to be a tortoise. An appropriate brand, actually, since reality can be too grim without a salting of humor. I chuckled when the tortoise published two best selling self-help books, one of which featured praise from Ann Landers on the back cover. Then came his third book with this quote - can you sense his desperation?

... Almost without exception, the politician who gains public support for his "inflation fighting" measures usually proposes actions that will make inflation worse.
If this chapter is the highlight chapter of the book for me, then the upcoming paragraph must be considered the highlight paragraph of the book. If I were asked to name one thing, above all else, that I would want readers to understand and remember from this book it would be the following:
Increased wages and prices do not cause inflation; in fact, they do not even contribute to it. Inflation is caused by only one thing: an increase in the supply of money. ... wage and price increases, in other words, are the result of inflation.
Restoring the American Dream, 1979, by Robert J. Ringer.

I suppose the righteous ink of Ringer's book slowly began to stain black the tide of ignorance, at least amongst the reading classes.

By the mid 1980s I can remember an upper middle class straight A student, John C., at a Canadian university, contemptuously telling me that it was a "generally accepted" truth that inflation was "partly" caused by government printing too much money, but I remember, as we talked, thinking that if you walked down main street, entering into the working class bars and beauty parlors, you'd find the people there most certainly did not know. They still don't: my bank has to remind people to save extra pension to account for future inflation. However, I have read a few times in the newspaper how the government thinks a certain amount of annual inflation, and unemployment, is good for the public, for the economy, so I guess the word has been getting out. But nonetheless, I think the good people lining up in the bank with me still think, in the backs of their minds, that inflation is unnatural, not fair, and that government would stop inflation if it ever learned what causes it.

And here is the irony: For all the years inflation was causing all this wailing and gnashing of teeth... for all this time, in libraries all across the land, Mein Kampf and Shirer's book were sitting quietly. Yes, Hitler was an evil genius, but he was a genius, albeit a flawed one. Under his watch people went from bringing their inflated pay home in a wheelbarrow... to seeing inflation whipped, beaten, and run out of town. He did this by tying money to a standard- not a gold standard, though: I guess the Germans had lost all their gold after losing the war. If in my youth a "consensus of scientists" failed to point this out then I can only say their failure was at best a prime directive thing, and, at worst a conspiracy. Wait- Did I mention Kissinger? It was the worst.

If today some "good scientists" share a secret consensus of permission to do climategate, then - how? Perhaps it's made possible because there is no competition, no separate nations of calm scientists objectively putting out the facts for respectable citizens to consider. Instead, there is a monopoly, full of sound and fury, a so-called "intergovernmental panel." In contrast, when some quantum physics guys claimed the planets orbited the sun due to space-time curvature, not gravity, they formed no panels, conducted no coercion. No scientist was labeled a "relativity denier." A skeptic, sure, but not a denier. (Someone once told me the French, at ten years, had been the longest holdout.)

Recently the local newspaper carried a column by a professor who thought he was putting forth a good case for climate change being man made... if only he hadn't liberally peppered his column with the unscientific term "denier."

It seems to me that climate alarmists (such as the journalist in my essay Angry With Crichton of Nov 2011) lose their faith in democracy, thinking that information has to be censored for our own good.

I disagree with them: Yes, the public includes rather few physicists, and yes, many of us prefer TV to books or newspapers. But we all believe in progress. The people may need to take a step backward, and rest, for every two steps forward, but still, most of us, most of the time, want to do the right thing. Democracy is good enough.

Sure, sometimes it seems information only gets out by tortoise, not carrier pigeon. Yet the news gets out... and data, like power, is safer with the people, not confined to cold Harvard nerds like Kissinger. Having faith, I try not to censor others. ... and I try not to self-censor my choice of reading material.

... Meanwhile, in libraries all across the land, books are standing mutely, books that stand ready to put forth "the theory and philosophy of Science."

Sean Crawford,

Believing in climate,

Believing in a falsifiable hypothesis,

January 2010

Footnotes:

~I guess Trudeau was a part of the conspiracy, for on Feb 6, 1966, "Canada decides to sell $100 million of it's gold reserves to the U.S. signaling financial co-operation,"according the newspaper's 'this day in history' section for Feb 6 in 2010.

~Curiously enough, in late elementary school, when we had a rebellious class discussion about "why study history?" while being unfocused as such childhood discussions often are, and when someone(s) asked, "Why not just print more money?" I was able to excitedly raise my hand, (and Mr. McIntyre obviously could tell what I was about to contribute) and then say that just after the French revolution they tried printing lots of money and it didn't work, it caused horrible inflation... Being still innocent about adults, I never clued in that history was repeating!

I have since learned that even journalists and editors sometimes don't know Basic. Obvious. Facts. When this happens I am sometimes too tired and disgusted to write a letter to my editor... but then sometimes, after a while, I struggle over to my keyboard and write an essay, perhaps after the events are not so fresh.

Group Support

2012-02-01T06:12:00.000-08:00

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I made a joke as three of us walked across an office building plaza: there was the chief executive officer, the big vice president, and me. I told them that Shannon, the executive I report to, had announced she was going to be away for a day in order to take some leadership training. I said my response to Shannon, after first making sure I was out of arm's reach, was to quip, "More training? Great! I love leaders, without leaders I'd have no one to blame!" The CEO laughed, but the VP responded with less levity, more gravity: "Blame- ain't that the truth."

I think a lot of us "don't get it" that we need to honor those willing to be leaders. And no, this needn't mean jealousy or resentment. Such emotions are a big concern of a colleague, call him Sean, who is excruciatingly democratic. Sean is idealistically against hierarchy or "better than." Me too.

Last week I was standing with Sean by his open car trunk; I noticed that lying loose in the trunk he had a "certificate of accomplishment." I teased him, "Hey, you're supposed to put that parchment somewhere real safe where it can't get wrinkled." It turned out that he wasn't sure how being honored with a certificate fitted into his ideals. After admitting I didn't have a clue where my own certificate was, I asked if he'd like to hear my own alternate theory of groups. Sean idealistically said "yes" meaning he was not afraid to change, and not afraid to be bored.

"Give me an example," I challenged, "of a group where people share a common purpose." Sean gazed around for inspiration and said, "A group going down to help the people of Hondura." So I spun a theory and gave him an alternate scenario to add to his view of life. Then what? Did he grin ear to ear, pump my hand, and thank me for "showing me the light?" Of course not. A new theory of leadership or groups is like a new word for your vocabulary: life gets a little more interesting, and whenever the time comes around the "more precise" word will be there, waiting, but in the meantime life goes on.

It was Professor Herbert Thelen of Chicago who put me on to his "half" theory. According to my memory, Thelen noted how in a formal group every individual is motivated half by the group goal, and half by an individual goal. Half, "I want to help the poor Hondurans," and half- ? One fellow wants to get good at building things "on the square and on the level." One lady wants to practice her accounting skills. One chap values the camaraderie; one guy wants to be near a certain brunet. I note this not with sadness at the lack of idealistic mono-motivation, but with affection: I like how my fellows are so human- just like me.

Really, who cares about the people having multiple motivations, as long as everyone is contributing to the group goals? Good leaders have a good perspective on unseen motivations: At leadership school, when it comes to problematic behavior, students are told to focus solely on seeing and changing an employee's behavior, not the person's inner psychology.

As our hypothetical group is down helping the Hondurans, one lady is willing to take on the stress of leadership, one man tirelessly stuffs envelopes to write asking for more help, and one woman always offers neck rubs. Better still, Hondura being so dusty, this lady humbly washes everyone's feet- just as Jesus would do. While this is going on, while these three make extra efforts at helping the group -with leadership, envelopes and feet- I think there needs to be some extra compensation. My response therefore is to honor these three. Jesus did, remember? He had his own "half theory:"Appealing to people's practical side, Jesus said people who serve get a higher place in heaven.

Those who heard Jesus, and adopted a service ethic, would presumably, in the fullness of time, give of themselves only half because of "practical reasons" and half for a new service ethic, a new way of life. Sean might say, "Yes but... people should all, right now, be at a higher level of wanting to help- and so maybe we shouldn't honor the "extra" helpers." My reply would be, "Sure but... people are only human. That's why Jesus taught with parables -not essays- because not all people were ready for a higher level: "Hearing, they understood not.""

Sean might be troubled by this paradox: Everyone in the group is honored for helping the Hondurans, and some are more honored than others. This confounded paradox fades when you step back to see the big picture.

I remember being confounded at a student party in early December once. A friend said, "People should be nice, every day should be like Christmas." I was nodding when two philosophy majors gleefully chimed in to say, "Then what would we do for Christmas?"...Yes. Uncommon effort will never be common.

And so I honor and support anyone's efforts, both the common and especially the uncommon. On a functional team, we all support each other, right? It follows that an honored leader is one who (besides other things) supports the group to move further along towards achieving the goal. And of course a person who washes feet is also supporting the group, and therefore is also a leader.

Of course if I honor this person, encouraging her to carry on; if, say, I lead the applause for her, then I too am supporting the group. Hence I too am a leader, a leader by example.

I think it follows logically that it is fine to make an extra effort to support the group, without feeling "less than," by giving "constructive" feedback to my boss, an effort made as part of problem solving... but while doing so I don't blame my leaders. Not to their faces and not behind their backs. I have no time for "non constructive" useless negativity.

And now I have to laugh. I am so looking forward to telling my ultra-democratic colleague that right where he is, right in his current position, he can be a leader.

Sean Crawford
between snow falls
Calgary, March 2009

Footnote:
~British Honduras is now known as Belize (Be-leez)

The Borg Have Jobs

2012-01-27T13:07:00.000-08:00

www.essaysbysean.blogspot.com

/Cog/ noun: a toothed bar or wheel

Encyclopedia Galactica.

I wish I could tell new graduates: All those How-to-pass-a-Job-Interview booklets, with their advice to "research the company" have a secret agenda.

I've recently been astounded by a new appreciation for old common advice on how to find a job.

My thoughts here begin with machines, then go to a computer expert's essay about jobs, and at last I consider democracy.

Machines. Said the Cylon to the human, "Are you alive?" Could you, dear reader, pass the "Turing test?" Not everyone can. I was talking to David Gerrold, a father and science fiction writer. He remarked that children could not always pass, that a kid will suddenly impulsively reach for an object and not know why. How can you tell if a machine has become "alive," has become an "artificial intelligence," has become, by definition, "self aware?" In the film 2010 the computer Hal shows it's self awareness when he asks, "Will I dream?"

The father of the computer age, Alan Turing, came up with a simple test. In Turing's day, a time of slide rules and vacuum tubes, no one knew how to build an artificial intelligence, but everybody knew that someday many people would be making the attempt.

One could fake intelligence, of course. The first Terminator movie has a scene where the robot is in a hotel room. From the hall some one yells a question. The machine drags down a menu list of responses, clicks on one and shouts a reply, a reply obscene, but quite human sounding. In theory you could build a big computer, complete with blinking lights, that gives a false impression of being able to converse. You just need lots of menus and decision trees and oodles of computing power. It would still be a fake. How would you tell?

_____

Turing came up with an elegant test: A machine will pass the Turing test when you can talk to it for a long time on the telephone and never realize that at the other end of the line is a machine.

We might agree with Gerrold that children may not always be self aware, but adults?

When we look at rows of computer guys working in their cubicles doing their IT (information technology) or developing software (by typing computer code) we are certain we are seeing live humans, although of course we may joke about them being part of the Borg collective. However, I have recently lost my certainty. I have been astounded... I'm still getting over it, thanks to "Stevey."

A computer guy, Stevey is one of my bookmarked blog-essayists. Down the years Stevey has hosted many job interviews to hire software developers. Today I am pondering a certain post of Stevey's entitled Godel, Escher, Blog. His piece begins with admiring a mathematician and ends with listing some computer geek questions to self-track your own "self awareness." (See Stevey's Home Rants)

I learned, if I've got this right, that most software stuff is "base operation," like a machine slavishly adding "one plus one plus one" et cetera. Stevey points out that "meta (thinking about) operations" can also be encoded, but this happens far less often. An old machine, if base programmed, can travel one meter plus one meter plus one meter... But a young human, (if in meta mode) as Stevey notes, whines "Are we there yet?"

As I see it, a human with weekly staff meetings, if not a slave to his base nature, may nobly ask, "Do we need this particular meeting?" Or, "Does our practice of meeting weekly still serve a purpose?" I do this at work, not to be a "mud disturber," but because I try to be aware of my purpose. Call it being "self aware," or "job aware." Because I operate with awareness, and because I mud disturb so diplomatically, I've been given the unsought title of Service Excellence Ambassador, with the perk of regularly having lunch with my CEO.

I wish I could tell new graduates: All those How-to-pass-a-Job-Interview booklets, with their advice to "research the company" have a secret agenda. On the surface a job seeker is always being advised to research to become aware of the company, showing initiative and interest and enthusiasm. On a deeper level, though, the secret hope is that after you pass your interview and get hired, you will keep up your awareness, your meta-mode, as a way of life. I say again: as a way of life.

_____

Are you a leader at work? You could be, right now, right where you are. Last week I noticed a newspaper display advertisement for new employees. A generic ad, really. Without, of course, using the phrase "meta-operation," the ad was for ordinary entry-level desk workers with computers who could wear many hats and thereby "be leaders in an exciting company." In other words, in this company "leadership" is not only a position of managerial rank, but also a quality "between the ears" that everybody working there, including those at entry-level, could have.

But not everyone does. How unfortunate. To an alive college student, with a lively interest in "the meaning of life" it may be hard to fathom recent graduates, white-collar workers, being unalive. The vital issue isn't smartness. After all, the computer nerds in those cubicles are smart. The issue is attitude. Stevey often interviews experienced developers looking for coding jobs at his company. I was energized by this part of his essay:

... That's why my project related questions always included meta-questions like, "How many lines of code was your project or program?" "How many people were working on the project and for how long?" "Who was the customer for this project?" "How did you know if you were on track?" and so on. I find that smart people always have good answers... Unsmart people (who, alas, comprise the majority of our interview candidates) not only haven't ever thought about these things, they're usually quite surprised, if not openly hostile, about being asked. They evidently think of themselves as cogs in a machine, one that's being piloted by someone else.

Hostile? Openly hostile? How can anybody want to be a cog? That's like wanting to be a Borg. Not me. As I see it, if a company's top executives want the non-managers to be "leaders," as my CEO does, it's not just to make the company more competitive, and a more positive place; it's because executives are human, and so they want you, just like them, to know your human potential. I sure prefer to be around positive, growing, alive people.

If such cogs are so prevalent in the working world - and it's not something I like to think about - are they also prevalent in a democracy? Maybe so. It surprises me to say this, but maybe democracy only works because sprinkled among us are the salt of the earth, the yeast in the dough, the citizen-soldiers in the body politic, and without them all this democracy can't go on. Maybe the inventors of democracy, through their well rounded schools, were trying to give their children a chance to avoid "cog-ism."

_____

In contrast to classical Greece, the non-democracies in this tired old world, in every space and time, from a communist collective to a Muslim theocracy, all share one common attribute: human growth is not encouraged.

I once shared a house with two men from two of the eastern bloc countries. The fourth man in our house was a self-employed contractor: He was cool. The other two? Whipped dogs. I thought: My God, what has communism done to them? One man was taking appliance repair at the provincial technical school but believe me, he had none of the usual student optimism or can-do spirit. It was awful to see.

The awful thing about non-democracies is they reduce humans to peasants. If, like a peasant, you lack any power to effect any change, then you lose any sense of purposeful curiosity. And then you might as well be a cog: Your library card gathers dust. The mantra of the peasant is, "What's the use?"

Living here, under a democratic sky, I'm so grateful to be alive and realizing my potential, as worker and citizen...

Epilogue:

In Battlestar Galactica, two scenes were symbolic. Do you know the first human question spoken in the series? There is no weather on a battlestar. Commander Adama is walking when Starbuck comes jogging along. She stops to jog in place. He asks the young woman, "What do you hear, Starbuck?"

She replies, "Nothing but the rain, Sir."

"Then grab your gun and bring in the cat."

She points and jabs, "Boom boom boom, Sir." And jogs away. An illogical exchange, of course, one that machines wouldn't get, but one that humans would be OK with. (Although I can't imagine any women in Saudi Arabia talking this way) There is a bittersweet scene, at the end of the show, when this exchange is reprised, again with no rain in sight... Not being cogs, they both have a touching awareness of how affection makes illogic possible.

The first machine question is posed during the opening scene. We see an old worker: Colorless, bland, and performing as a cog. Although the scenes of him aging alone on the space station were cut, we still know he has become a dull cog because he summons up almost no spontaneity, no creativity, in answer to her question. It's been too many years since he pondered the "meaning of life." The pretty Cylon, Number Six, asks him, "Are you alive?;" he barely speaks, uttering only a machine's binary answer: "Yes" ... He fails her test; he is destroyed.

Destroyed? Don't let it happen to you!

Sean Crawford

Alive and affectionate towards people at work,

and any dear readers,

on this 2010 space odyssey.http://www.google.ca/search?q=borg&hl=en&client=safari&rls=en&prmd=iv&source=univ&tbs=vid:1&tbo=u&ei=CYmdTITxCY6qsAPopK3VAQ&sa=X&oi=video_result_group&ct=title&resnum=11&ved=0CEwQqwQwCg

Among Mortals

2012-01-22T19:10:00.000-08:00

www.essaysbysean.blogspot.com

I tried not to feel inferior as I sat beside a young, pretty, exotic, confident and presumably rich businesswoman.

Society tells us that the richer you are the finer and smarter you are. Bill Gates, they say, is the smartest man in America. Such is the common wisdom about Bill, to be sure, but "they"... don't always say things I agree with. Businesspeople are surely rich and well esteemed, so much so that in my Toastmasters (public speaking) manual we no longer have summaries: now we have "executive summaries." Yes, everyone knows that business class people are richer than non business class and I don't just mean they get more legroom on the aircraft.

Passenger jets may be used by ballerinas on tour... but no sooner does the excitement of a window seat wear off than they have to retire. Oh, how strenuous, how short, is a dancer's career! Once there was a fine prima ballerina, beloved by thousands, who retired. The fine lady took some schooling, then took an anonymous entry-level business job... and found that her income was now better than at the peak of her dancing! OK, maybe her example "does not compute," but society still says the finer people are the richer people.

(Toastmasters)

I was sitting by this businesswoman, wondering whether I felt inferior or merely sad, while in a corporate boardroom. It was evening and we presidents of various toastmaster clubs were having an area level meeting. People join such clubs, and volunteer to be the president, partly for the social aspects. And socialize we did.

"Do you guys know of any business self-development books?" asked the young lady. As an avid reader I said to get Games Mother Never Taught You by Betty Harragan. I gave an example of a lesson from the book. The woman grimaced: "That one I've just learned, the hard way."

"Do you know how to write reports," she asked us "without feeling foolish or futile as you write?" As an avid writer I said to write out the goal of your report on a separate paper using a complete sentence. I do that for speeches. Then you may gain confidence by relating everything you write to your goal. My humble advice was the best we had to offer about reports. The chairman of our meeting, our area governor, wore a nice business suit and tie. He advised the young lady, as we chatted, to give little thought to her shortcomings and instead to build on her strengths. This advice was new to her. I chimed to support the governor's idea by noting that business guru Peter Drucker held strong views that a company should hire based on a person's strengths, on what she could use to contribute to the company.

In terms of cost-benefit, weaknesses are not worth spending time on.

Now, whence came our dread concern for fixing our shortcomings? We in that boardroom all had concerns. Maybe because we all figuratively had puritan ancestors. (The woman's literal ancestors were Asian.) In our culture the Chief Executive Officer started out in the mailroom, Benjamin Franklin kept a self-improvement chart and a tenderfoot became an eagle scout. Those are golden strands. But there's a darker strand woven into our culture. When and where did any little shortcoming become in our eyes a big monster to be slain? Maybe in the same place our nightmares start: in childhood.

(Genesis)

As a boy I read in Reader's Digest about a rich family. The family is having a not-so-functional supper: as the kids are loudly talking a young teenage girl says quietly,"I broke a school record in swimming today." Father storms, "Swimming! How about...!" (how can you be so below average at A and B, and why aren't you average at C yet, and how dare you be so very above average at D if you can't even do A properly?) So the father storms, topics swirl around, and the word "swim" is never whispered again. Not until bedtime. Then, by God's grace, the mother suddenly remembers and goes to the girl's room to ask about her success. Such family stories are as old as the book of Genesis.

A son, east of Eden, was excellent at socializing and telling jokes and being generous and herding swine... but he thought he had to totally avoid his father and family. This was because he was below average at one itzy bitzy little thing: he was prodigal. When did fathers start saying that if you failed to meet just one condition, such as by being too prodigal, then you had failed to meet the condition for being "good enough" to be loved? Fathers never did. OK, maybe they briefly did, in the same way a little boy says, "...and I hate you!" Yes, the boy means it, but it passes. We adults know this. Children don't. If a girl becomes a woman while her father still occasionally storms then she will still wonder about him. This wondering won't pass; she won't ever feel secure.

Somehow, surely, these darker strands of society are connected, these dark beliefs about shortcomings and conditional love and richer being finer... I wish I understood but I guess I don't need to. It's enough to remember we are more alike than we are different. I am challenged because I dwell on stuff so much, my area governor is challenged by his use of a wheelchair and the businesswoman, well, surely she too has her story. I think all we can do is keep helping each other and striving for the good.

Sean Crawford,
East of Eden

Allah Bless Cartoons in Danish Ecology

2012-01-18T23:18:00.000-08:00

essaysbysean.blogspot.com

This month (August 2009) the Danish cartoons are in the news again. Yale university has "appeased in advance" (my words) any Muslims by not publishing the cartoons within a scholarly Yale Press book, a book that explicitly concerns the cartoons: They claimed they didn't want to "instigate violence." (their words) I think Yale is wrong, if not racist, to think U.S. Muslims believe in violence.

I'm not too surprised. Back in 1947, only two years after finishing a global war started by appeasement, Robert Heinlein published a young adult novel that takes place during an age of rockets. The teenage hero (who would have been a child in 1947) bursts out with something like, "But everybody knows appeasement is wrong!" Heinlein knew that human nature, alas, does not change.

A decade later, in 1957, Ayn Rand wrote in Atlas Shrugged that wrong can be done "with the sanction (permission) of the victim." I see Yale as willing to be victim by giving permission to the censors, perhaps claiming the principle of avoiding violence to the school, while certainly forsaking the higher principle of Truth.

Principles matter. I long ago bookmarked a web essay by Clay Shirky called, "A Group is its Own Worst Enemy." His classic example is a computer internet group of mostly adults where some high school kids used excessive profanity. With their principle of "Individual Freedom" the adults "couldn't" stop the kids, so they disbanded the group instead. They forgot about other principles, such as civilized group survival.

As I write this the war on terror is continuing. As the rest of us stand up for democracy, where is Yale?

At a military funeral service, for a young man I knew, there was a program handed out, as in a church service. Mothers cried. The parents of Corporal Nathan Hornburg, consulted in writing the program, had a German quotation included: All that is necessary for evil to triumph is for good men to do nothing...

Allah bless cartoons in Danish ecology

Sean Crawford

Calgary, Alberta

Heroes are Soldiers

2012-01-13T20:50:00.000-08:00

www.essaysbysean.blogspot.com

Some misguided person, call him Smith, wrote into the newspaper forum to complain, saying that a man who serves in Afghanistan is not a hero. Smith says the man merely has a job, like being a welder or a carpenter. Not so. You, Mr. Smith, are expressing a belief that may be common and logical among peasants in the Third World... but we are in the First World.

As my old coach would say, let's review fundamentals of democracy, let's return to ancient Greece. An average guy like you, Mr. Smith, might pass the city gates into Corinth on a Saturn's Day morning. Then you will walk briskly to the Forum. It's a special place with a wide expanse of marble floor and columns holding up the roof. You hurry there to mingle and discus the issues of the day. Such spirited talks are meaningful to you because, in contrast to a dispirited Third Worlder, you believe that Corinth belongs to you and your peers, not to whatever government you have just elected. You own Corinth.

Looking around the Forum, and gazing past the columns to the surrounding streets, you will see only civilians: no generals, no paid full-time soldiers. That is because you and other healthy men will periodically go out to a grassy field and practice standing in three ranks to fight. In the event of war a person known for having sound judgment, a good farmer or merchant, would be appointed as the general.

(Republic)

Two thousand years later, in 19th and 20th century America, Abraham Lincoln and Harry Truman would be elected by their peers to be officers for the Blackhawk war and world war one. Of course Lincoln and his unpaid buddies couldn't afford uniforms. The Greeks were also too poor for uniforms, let alone full-time generals. While they were far poorer than a modern Third World country make no mistake: between their ears they were truly First World.

It's dangerous to view soldiering as a "job;" the Romans showed us this. For the first few hundred years their city on the seven hills was a shining example of virtue, both military and civic, an example that will gladden people's hearts as long as there are books. There was no conscription, no draft.

On a fresh dewy morning, outside the city walls on the field of Mars, the volunteers, unpaid, would stand in three ranks, heavy shields up, jabbing their short iron swords against an imaginary foe. Their arms and legs would ache, sweat would blind them, and still they'd practice. In the third rank would be middle-aged guys like me: we too were expected to go to war. "Every citizen owes his country twenty campaigns" went the popular saying. "But wait!" cries Smith, "I can't do twen-" Relax Mr. Smith, a campaign in those days often meant a weekend slave raid against another city state... just as they would be raiding us. Hence our city wall.

Have you ideals, Mr. Smith? As in Greece, the Roman citizen-soldiers had ideals; they weren't in it for the money. The army would supply the catapults, rations and so forth but no coins. Imagine: no faceless minions of an evil dictator, no working stiffs going through the motions. Instead a fundamental difference: an army of free men. The butcher, the baker, your merchant neighbor: men of volunteer spirit, like you. "Let's get this war over with so we can go home."

The volunteers were famous for their discipline. At the end of every single day's march, however tired, whatever the weather, they would build a fort to camp in. This meant ditches, ramparts, and a palisade. Backbreaking work. No other army would do that. But then they would sleep in blessed peace.

(Empire)

Generations passed. Eventually the army was regular: full-time and regularly paid. Still disciplined, still able to defeat any equal sized army of energetic fierce barbarians. By then the republic had garrisons across the sea. Unfortunately the past gave the Romans no warning of what was to come. From their overseas possessions flowed much wealth. Too much. The city became both rich and morally bankrupt. The new economics nearly extinguished the middle class.

Mass unemployment became normal and permanent. Happily, or so they thought, any Roman could receive what we of today would call the dole, welfare, or nanny-state allowance. Not only did they get free bread without having to sweat, but also the state would provide free events, called "circuses," such as chariot races and gladiator contests. These served to keep the idle masses, known as the mob, occupied. (Like how people on welfare are allowed a television) The old Star Trek episode, Bread and Circuses, takes place at the tipping point where virtue is being exchanged for decadance.

Not having history to guide them, the Romans must have been surprised by what happened next. Being idle with "bread and circuses" did something to their spirit... something terrible. They wouldn't volunteer to enlist in their army -although you got a free farm at the end of your life of military service- and they lost all interest in going to the Forum. No one said, "I'll write to my senator!"

The senators? In the movie Gladiator, just a little after the tipping point has passed, you can see how the senators had become mere paper tigers. Naturally, because their constituents had become wimps. I think in the film they are hoping the emperor hasn't realized this yet. Historically, after the first emperor got away with taking over the republic, the empire continued to expand for several generations but it was running on momentum. The Roman people continued to decline and rot.

(Empire and army)

And the army? Since rotten people don't volunteer, the Romans had to start enlisting paid barbarians. Unfortunately, the hired help will never be as self disciplined as owners. Over the years, as the legions became nearly all barbarian, the army gradually tossed away nearly all their heavy armor, piece by piece, until at last the only armor they wore were helmets. By the time Rome fell it was very hard to tell the "Roman" army from their foes.

The moral is clear: just as "people get the government they deserve" (are fitted for) so, too, do they get the army they deserve. Remember those United Nations troops from the Third World in Rwanda? They were useless for reducing the amount of genocide because they were non effective as soldiers. The ancient Greeks, on their rocky infertile islands, stand as a reminder: poverty is not the issue.

(Democracy)

In a democracy citizens have rights. As Abe Lincoln said during his first inaugural speech, the people have right to replace the government, and the revolutionary right to overthrow it. What "Honest Abe" was also talking about was responsibility. Not everyone is ready to face up to owning, and deserving, their government...

In the US the sherif in elected. Police powers are delegated to the sherif, but the people are still ultimately responsible. Are you willing, Mr. Smith, to own your responsibility? If funding for the police service runs out, are you willing to be deputized for a posse, or serve on a jury? If our armed representatives are sailing off on a troopship overseas, do you accept that they sail in your name? Some of those boys, recruited from small towns, are too young to vote, and know little of the world. The innocent boys are trusting that you and the other voting citizens gathered in the forum know what you are doing. Are you worthy of their trust? Or, instead, do you think the jury and police and army arise separate from the people, like some sort of magical virgin birth? In parts of the third world, sad to say, peasants view "their betters" as having "education" and "blue blood:" Quite separate, which gives the peasants quite an excuse to disown responsibility...

Sad to say, Mr. Smith, not everyone can face up to their role: Anyone who can breath is a civilian; someone who accepts responsibility is a citizen.

I see reservists as literally citizen-soldiers; I see all of us as citizen/soldiers. Just like in Greece or Rome, we are living our democracy.

To me, servicemen are a part of our nation's treasure. I find them to be both bold and shy. They never brandish their rifles in the air. When they march it is merely a formalized military walk, not a goose step. They never sing songs of glory, preferring to sing bawdy rugby songs. They will quietly say "duty" and "mission." Then they will boldly say "job" as a joke, as a figure of speech.

I would ask you, Mr. Smith, to please forget about peasants, please get your head out of the Third World. If you misinterpet a soldier as being your mere "hired sword," if you treat him as such, then you, not he, are the barbarian. Our soldiers are embedded in citizenship; they are not "the hired help." The soldiers are us... the best of us. In our affluent land of air conditioning, couches and welfare nobody goes off and does a battlefield crouch by Death's doorway, exposed to the smells and sounds of war, as a "job"... ...if ever they do, then democracy is over.

Sean "Yes, I've read starship troopers" Crawford
Calgary, Alberta

Footnotes

~Yes I own a dictionary, but "genocide," like the Roman "decimate," has lost its old 1940s precision to now mean "destroy a large part of." (A pity, since to decimate requires self discipline)

~I wonder if "bought the farm" was a reference to Rome, meaning getting your promised plot of earth, if only six feet long, without a lifetime of military service first? The origin of this U.S. term is "unknown."

~In David Gerrold's first book about an ecological infestation from off planet, A Matter For Men, a high school global ethics teacher, without using the term "bread and circuses," tells the kids that cattle are comfortable, while free men are willing to be uncomfortable.

~The Dutch are repeating Rome's "idle mob" decline. Member of Parliament and Muslim refugee Ayaan Hirsi Ali documents this in her book Infidel.

The Dutch assume:

that Muslim refugees will be comfortable and happy staying on welfare...

and then becoming happy to aquire the burden of feeling ownership of their civic responsibility...

including being happy with the discomfort of accepting their responsibility for the community's Freedom of Speech.

These assumptions are wrong, of course. Men aren't meant to be cows. Alas for the Dutch, history repeats...

The Death of Buffy

2012-01-11T23:17:00.000-08:00

essaysbysean.blogspot.com

Recently I re-read a web essay by film critic Roger Ebert, an essay about sad movies hard to re-watch. Among the comments, only three were about any TV shows, and of those, all three were about the same episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer. I have the BtVS series on my shelf, gathering dust like an old favorite book. In my heart the beauty survives.

I remember: In the end, just before the landing party beams away, Mr. Sulu is awed by the before-death recording of a lady, a very competent leader. He says he’s sorry she didn’t survive. Captain Kirk, equally struck, replies, “No, Mr. Sulu… Beauty- survives.”

I am forever awed by the beautiful competency of TV executive Joss Whedon’s handling of the death of Buffy Summers. I’m impressed, for example, that I’m not spoiling the plot, for any new viewers, by writing this, since Joss foreshadows her demise right from the first episode. In that one Buffy suffers the little death of quitting the cheerleading squad, and any chance of arm-in-arm friendship with the frivolous empty-headed Cordelia. Buffy takes this path not because cheerleading seems empty –Buffy herself was a cheerleader before becoming the slayer- but because Buffy has no time for it, not if she is to be patrolling for vampires to slay.

For Buffy, being the (definite article) slayer is not just something she “tries on” with, say, an adolescent joking half-focus. No, she’s deadly serious. This is her calling.

The first person to share Buffy’s secret is the school librarian, Giles. Old enough to be her absent father, Giles is her coach, her official “watcher.” Giles accepts responsibility for Buffy’s defense training. He likes her, while knowing slayers always die young. Always. His torment is unavoidable: Should Buffy not be allowed to spend her hours doing happy high school stuff, like going to evening sock hops? Should Buffy not enjoy her brief life? After all, eventually the law of averages will catch up to her. Or, on the other hand, should she try to extend her time on earth by putting her hours into defense training? Giles likes her, and so he mainly opts for training, mainly.

I suppose I would too… In prose, I can only think of two writers who would sometimes kill off the main character before the end of the book. One was Louis L’Amour, who received the Medal of Freedom at the White House: He certainly had the writing chops to pull it off. The other was a post-war writer of young adult novels, Robb White: He was writing for teens who had just lived through the Second World War. Today’s TV audiences, of course, live in a more sheltered time. For us, death is still somewhat controversial: I am reminded of a young man, some years ago, who received a police ticket for an obscene T-shirt: It read F--- Off and Die. In court, the judge let the man go free… after ruling that death was no longer an obscenity in our society!

In other cultures, such as Japan, people live closer to the bone. When anime came to America young fans were both amazed and gratified. As anime exporter Peter Payne of J-List (Dec 14 2011) puts it, “(anime is)… the freedom to create a story using the endearing medium of cell animation in which people actually died in dramatic ways instead of bailing out of the plane at the last minute, as they always did in those lame 80’s cartoons.” He added sarcastically, “I remember the days when TV studios would mix up the episodes of the anime you were watching because why wouldn’t you? There was no reason to show them in order.” Yes, broadcasters assumed anime was like children’s cartoons, with no story arc.

In the US, even live action shows had no story arc. The original Star Trek, for example, was a franchise. Any member of the Writers Guild could request the show’s ‘bible’ and then submit a script. No, the studio wouldn’t mail the tome to any “fan boy.” (Did we have that word then? I don’t think so) In Canada the CBC was showing live action shows from Britain, shows that were made to air in order, but the BBC shows were slower paced, and US broadcasters thought that US audiences would lack the patience for BBC.

This all changed when along came “a fan boy who made good,” a TV executive: JMS. Today J. Michael Straczynski is scripting comic books; long ago he paid his dues with long years in Hollywood, most notably as a writer of mysteries on Murder She Wrote. This writing stood him in good stead for his masterpiece, Babylon-5. For this he did constant clue dropping, foreshadowing, and then a quick payoff. JMS wrote his episodes himself, in order, and he kept faith with the viewers: If someone were shot they would be absent next episode, and reappear with their arm in a sling. Babylon-5 was the very first TV series ever conceived as a five-year novel… The first season, fans hasten to warn me, is normal average sci-fi. But then things really start to pay off: A new (lively eye candy) commander takes over, characters begin to grow or decline, and because viewers know the characters so well their deaths feel so harsh. With the fourth season the novel moves into high climax.

I am sure JMS broke trail for Joss Wedon’s BtVS. I chuckled when some young nerd characters on Buffy had some Babylon-5 collectors plates. (Obviously as a homage, because B-5 never sold plates) Thanks to B-5, BtVS too was written to be aired in order, with, for example, characters processing trauma through several episodes. Another debt to B-5: JMS did something Louis L’Amour and Robb White never did: foreshadowed the death of the main character. Referring to a dead planet, a Buddha figure says, “If you go to Z’ah’adoon, you will die.” But the character goes off because, like Buffy, he is trying to save someone dear. For the death of the B-5 Commander, JMS warned that although normally viewers were always trying to get new people to watch, for this episode they should keep it in the family… He was so right, it was so sad.

As for the episode noted above, “The Body,” people cried. Part of the sheer competence of the episode is how for that one episode Whedon had no music, no score to tell you what to feel. Something else: while music can give emotions, screen credits can screen off emotions. Whedon got the opening credits out the way by opening with a happy flashback; it might have even been scored. Then silence. Then the body. It’s Buffy’s mum… discovered by Buffy… Buffy doesn’t call one of her dear young (by now adult) friends: she calls her father figure, Giles, and they sit in silence.

It was a hard episode but I know it was necessary. I know, having lived through the storm of Vietnam and AIDS, that it is just wrong for a parent to bury her child. Part of the craftsmanship of the show was making sure that Buffy’s mum passed on first. Later, partly because Buffy is so determined, the show makes plain as regards the departed mother what must have been in the show ‘bible’: Death is natural, and so mortals cannot be brought back. Of course this will apply to Buffy, too.

Slayers don’t make it past their twenties. Our determined heroine eventually copes by seeking out survival knowledge from wherever she can; she even consults a vampire who has killed two slayers. The truth is, as was said on the frontier: ‘No one is ever the fastest gun.’ And so, near the end, Buffy goes through a short phase of shell shock: being too scared. But Buffy has a calling, she returns to facing life’s challenge. In her final episodes, she is going about with her mouth in a straight line: A pretty blond with no smile. Clearly, to viewers, it’s almost time Buffy set down her burden. Then, just as she has with her life, and with her calling, Buffy Summers meets her last responsibility… head on, eyes open.

How many of us can say the same?

Sean Crawford

January 2012

“Tell Giles- Tell Giles I finally figured it out, and I’m OK.”

Calgary

Footnotes:

~Regarding film credits, in a movie “too good for Hollywood,” 12 Monkeys with Brad Pitt and Bruce Willis, before the story starts, some things that will pay later off have to be shown. Hence the really extended credits (I was irritated until I “got it”) as Willis is walking around in a post-apocalyptic world. Finally the credits stop and the story, for Willis, begins. (Note: My buddy Blair misheard the key line in the last scene- the word is “I'm an” not “I'm in.”)

On Youtube I found what must have been a series of summer promos for the next season of Buffy, sans Buffy.

~As for collector’s plates and other such, B-5 once did an episode to make fun of Star Wars-style merchandizing. Londo comes in angrily brandishing a figurine of his likeness. He is upset it has no, er, anatomically special features. He sputters, “Er- Do I have to spell it out for you?”

Susan Ivanova says, “Ohhh.” Grins. “You mean you’ve been symbolically cast- in a bad light!”

~As for the nerds who bought the plates, I’m still chuckling over the scene where they meet Spike. With his punk hairstyle, and super-obvious English accent, Spike is not one to suffer nerds gladly.

“You’re English, aren’t you?”

“Yes” (with wary disgust)

The nerd, brightly, “I’ve seen every episode of Doctor Who!”… Then, quietly, “I don’t care much for Red Dwarf, though.”

~Roger Ebert link.

Don't Blog Too Fast

2012-01-07T15:01:00.000-08:00

essaysbysean.blogspot.com

The recent focus on activism through occupying Wall Street, while important, has obscured the previous focus on activism through blogging.

In fact, I had forgotten the promise of brave new blogging until I found my old post of 2009.

Darn. Drat. Fooey. Only after I wrote this blog, as a draft, (without pressing "publish") did I start to slog through lots of search engine stuff. Result? I was probably wrong to write this. But I am too self indulgent to waste my writing time, so I am turning this into a lesson: Don't blog too fast. Here was the original:

A good goal of bloggers, according to the newspapers, is to be an alternative news source. Bloggers are good for getting the word out and then, I guess, the mainstream media gets involved.

So today, for once, instead of an essay, I could blog two aspects of something that seems to be missed by others. I'm thinking of the bailout negotiated for the North American auto makers.

First Aspect:

With people wondering whether the car makers are capable of properly using the bailout, capable of internal reform, it never fails to amaze me that no one refers to the work by the Pulitzer Prize winner David Halberstam.

Called The Reckoning, in 1986, it explored the U.S. corporate automotive culture, comparing and contrasting it to the auto corporations of Japan. The U.S. companies were shown as arrogantly slow to change: for example, the Europeans had commonplace front wheel drive ten years before the U.S. did. Halberstam's book could have been titled The Wake up Call.

Second Aspect:

I found a passage in a book by business guru Peter Drucker, currently for sale. In Management Challenges for the 21st Century, from 1999, on page 76 it reads, "But, as almost everyone outside GM immediately realized, the Saturn did not compete with the Japanese makers. All its sales came at the expense of declining- if not dying- GM brands such as Oldsmobile and Buick.

It was denied money for expansion- that money went instead into futile attempts to "modernize" Oldsmobile and Buick plants. It was denied money to develop new models- again that money went in to Oldsmobile and Buick redesigns. And the UAW began to whittle away at the Saturn's new and successful labor relations for fear that Saturn's example in building management-labour partnerships might spread to GM's other plants."

Neither Oldsmobile nor Buick has benefited. Both are still going downhill. But the Saturn has been all but destroyed. And both GM and the UAW have continued their decline."

Drucker writes, "... one possible solution might have been to do simultaneously two things: (1) kill the dying Oldmobile and (2) run with Saturn's success as hard as possible, give it all the money and people it needed but set it up as a separate company free to compete aggressively with all of GM's old products and for all GM' s old customers."

Adding it up:

I "don't get it" that the bailout plan has included the Saturn being canceled. I don't know enough to make judgments, but I thought I'd do my first ever blogger thing, and put this out there for wiser heads out east to follow up on as they may deem fit.

-original ends-

Search engine results:

Oldsmobile was revamped and then, after all that money, canceled a few years ago. Saturn was also revamped but was selling poorly. I have read comments posted where some people said they foresaw the canceling of Saturn. All the commenters, knowledgeable about cancellations and line-up revamping and things, perceived GM management as being "a bunch of morons." It looks like Buick is still being manufactured as "one of four (surviving) GM nameplates."

So maybe I need not be so suspicious that Saturn is being canceled.

A Grim, sordid lesson:

As I recall, during the confusion of the start of the war on terror, a blog went all around the globe when a college student blogger said his teacher had previously seen and had a copy of the "fresh footage" being shown of Arabs on the day of 9/11 dancing with joy in the streets. -Ooh, conspiracy against Muslims!- Later the teacher denied this to the blogger... and so then the blogger recanted. But by then his story was whirring around the world... (see snopes.com)

I think every blogger should try to have the same integrity as a newspaper reporter. Don't guess. Either correctly attribute (in this case, quote the teacher, with permission, by first and last name) OR check the facts yourself first hand. As an old army captain told the narrator in David Gerrold's The War Against the Chtorr, (quoted from memory) "Be sure! The test is, 'Can I rip of your right arm if you're wrong?'"

I may not be serving with that captain but nevertheless for me, as a citizen in a democracy, it is simple common sense to treat information as any gentleman would.

Sean Crawford
Originally published with cumulatively zero hits,
in July of 2009

Yet Again, Done and Learned

2012-01-03T16:46:00.000-08:00

essaysbysean.blogspot.com

No single theme today; I’ll try to make it interesting for you, dear reader.

There have been some surprises since my last “taking stock” essay, (Again, Done and Learned) of 35 posts ago.

Regarding the Occupy Wall Street movement, I posted three lengthy pieces on change, both for individuals and our culture. Lengthy. Obviously I must have been pondering social change ever since living through the 1960’s. Still, it was such a surprise to have so much to say. In fact, I wrote that I was too tired to write a Part Four, which would have been about a higher level of mass organizing. Luckily for me, no commenters said they wanted a Part Four, so I can guiltlessly turn my hand to easier pieces.

Again I’ve had a few people (according to my statistics application) surf deep into my archives (120 essays) but this time– at last! – the surfers included some Yankees, too. Before this, only Europeans were keen enough to surf. Maybe this says something about we Americans, eh?

I’ve been translated again, into Portuguese this time; and again it’s not by people overseas in Brazil or Iberia, but by folks in the US of A. At least, I think it’s the USA, as these guys, about ten of them, couldn’t be bothered to say hello in the comment section. Not that I’m offended, exactly, as I suppose this is average behavior: Historically, only one in ten lepers thanked Jesus for curing them.

Average maybe, but not the expected behavior of a "gentleman," whom Confucius called a “true man.” A sage once split the atom for me of “average/normal.” He told me an average man could run one mile; while it’s normal for a man to be able to run four miles. Since then I’ve sided with Confucius in trying to be true to myself.

The translated essay was the one explaining Japanese animation, my second most popular post.

As it happens, the only essay with more hits is Olympics and Boards. (Feb 2010) I don’t know why folks like it. For that piece, my “compare and contrast” thinking was aided by my earning a diploma, (in recreation therapy) having an Olympian for a roommate, (track and field) and my having served as the chairman of the board, of a for-profit company. (Full Circle Adventures)

While some essays are well trod, others are seldom explored. In fact, some of my oldest pieces have a visitor count of zero. This I know, because as the “blog administrator” I am privileged to see the “cumulative hits” for each post. With my settings at “show 25 titles per screen page” I can scan my body of work with only a few clicks. As it happens, the zeros are only low down on my earliest page. It still feels odd though. Here I am, a real writer, one who scrubs and polishes his pretty little prose, only to look back, seasons later, and notice hit counts of zero. Strange. And so I have been doing… reruns. But should I? Is this right?

Um, yes, there’s precedent for trying to sneak in some reruns. The song “mercy, mercy me” got re-released: But this was only after cutting out my favorite part, the sonar pings. And Cher gave her bank account a boost by re-releasing “I’ve got you babe:” But this was only after tacking on an introduction with Beavis and Butthead. Those two idiots! I would rather Cher had tacked on some sonar! The trick, of course, is once you tack or delete, then you can pander to your audience by giving them the excuse that your piece is “new” and “improved.” And why not say it’s “exciting,” too?

My, such a fine line between pandering and patronizing. Could you even say, “insulting?” Nope! The same public that “consumes” TV and electronics seems to be far beyond noticing any insults. I’ve certainly read a lot of copy about Beavis and Butthead, and almost none of it has been unfavorable.

Many Internet users, of course, although they are “reading” the screen, are the same zombies who would not be reading at all, but passively watching TV, if only they weren’t at a computer. Still, dear reader, if you’re alive enough to read essays, and “only a live fish swims upstream,” then you don’t need me to be pandering. For you, my reruns can be un-new and un-improved.

Regardless of hit counts- hit counts be damned! - Every writer, in the dark hour of the wolf, must wonder whether his output has any meaning. Recently I noticed –and “recently” is the truth, I’m not pandering- that of the 25 titles on my last page, the second most number of hits were to a rerun of Angry With Michael Crichton. No surprise there, since Michael is world famous. My surprise is: The most hits were for a (Blair, being Smart) a testimonial to my friend, the late Blair Petterson. I’m touched, I hadn’t thought anyone would notice.

Truly Blair had friends around the world.

Sean Crawford

January 2012

Footnote: Hour of the wolf: “It’s the time between 3:00 and 4:00 in the morning. You can’t sleep, and all you can see is the troubles and the problems and the way your life should’ve gone but didn’t. All you can hear is the sound of your own heart.”

Susan Ivanova, in Babylon-5,

by J. Michael Straczynski, 1996

Update, to groan or laugh: So, on Wednesday, Jan 12, I came home after finishing a long shift at 11:30 p.m. and decided to post from my "word." I should have waited until I was fresh in the morning. Not only did I misspell the man (JMS) I had spelled rightly, in the above footnote, but I forgot to type in my URL, something I have never forgotten before. Groan, laugh.

Too bad, because I had over 500 hits by morning, and over 1000 when I came home from my day shift.
So far, the hit counts for my most popular posts are only in the 3 digits, and only after a long time. Now here is 4 digits, in 24-hours.
Why? 'Cause it's a "fanboy" post, and so I guess it's OK that I forgot the URL: Such people won't return to an essay site, anyways. Sour grapes.

~The really good news: JMS twittered, "Yeah, it's a nice little piece, thanks for the heads up." This, from a colleague, means more to me than being clicked on by curious web fans. A nice little piece.

~Oh, and remember that one leper out of ten? That one guy must have been special, because from fanboys I am at zero comments per thousand. Fanboys.

Affirmations

2011-12-31T06:50:00.000-08:00

www.essaysbysean.blogspot.com

I remember me...I recall with fondness and goodwill the "me" that was alone at my kitchen table one Friday night. A single mother friend phoned. "What are you doing?" she asked.

"Writing in my journal" I replied.

"What about?"

"Positive affirmations."

Then she asked, "What exactly are you writing?" And I told her.

My throat wasn't dry. My chest wasn't tight and puffy with fear. I didn't feel dumb or unworthy or a charlatan. My affirmations fit me like bark fits a tree; the words felt true, they were me. Somehow, in writing out those words for so many days, I had wrought a miracle, a miracle I had hoped for, but hadn't really expected.

"Life," my friend said "is full of surprises."

Sean Crawford,

at my kitchen computer, winter 2008

At Otafest

2011-12-26T08:58:00.000-08:00

essaysbysean.blogspot.com

Originally Published Victoria Day 2009
as a Chitchat/introduction, pre-essay,
to Hollywood Morality

This weekend I am at the University of Calgary at a festival called Otafest. You know the word trekkie? The vague equivalent in Japan is otaku, meaning "fan" of Japanese comics, or "manga," and of Japanese animation, or "anime." So I'm around hundreds and hundreds of people in costume. Meanwhile there is also a western Canada high school aged volleyball tournament going on and the coaches and parents are clueless. And a male coach my age, who sees the costumes every year but still doesn't know what's going on, expressed contempt: I think he's a mundane fool. At least a couple of ladies asked.

As a middle aged man I can recall watching the first aired shows of Star Trek. And something else: I can recall that in the 60's female fans were writing fiction of Kirk and Spock having a loving relationship. There was quite a lot of such female "fanfic" and no one quite knew why. Now I "know:" It was to fill the void of no such comics from Japan. Now there are lots of "yaoi" (boy meets boy) manga.

I know because Doctor Antonia Levi has driven across a dozen mountain ranges from Vancouver to give lectures. Yesterday her first otafest lecture was a "nerd magnet" where suddenly I was not the only "old guy:" There were over two dozen people, almost none of us in costume (like I said, nerds) and the room included at least a half dozen men and women my age. Doctor Levi told us about universal myths being encoded into Japanese popular culture.

Her next lecture, after a short break, was a "girl magnet:" lots of costumes, lots of energetic people under 18. It seems that in Japan nearly all of the yaoi readers are under 18- just like their approving mothers before them. But here in America any yaoifest will have an age limit of 18+. The girls yelled it wasn't fair; they screamed with approval when a boy in a wig and dress said his mother helped him with his costume.

As for me, middle aged: normally at slightest hint of impropriety I go "harumph!" and rustle my newspaper. As for these kids, they aren't bad: They aren't the sort to wear black leather jackets and sneak smokes behind the arena. They are wholesome. In fact, two of them work part-time in a public library! (Where there is some yaoi they aren't telling the librarians about!) When they grow up, some of them will attend lectures on cultural encoding.

I can't fault the girls for their belief in tasteful boy with boy romance. Meanwhile I will continue to do the middle-age thing of vigilantly monitoring our popular culture for stuff that is sexist or too violent or- you know what I mean.

Hollywood Morality

Sean Crawford
Calgary
Summer 20009

1 COMMENTS:

pyll said...: Sean, What a coincidence! I stumbled upon the anime Saint Seiya on youtube and while looking at the wikipedia entry, found the term yaoi. Interesting indeed! I'm glad that you had an opportunity to go to otafest... I would have loved to attend the lectures, but I'm sure that it will be just as good hearing it from you! Did you happen to connect with anyone at the festival? I've been to a couple of events like this, and they are a lot of fun, but the feeling fades as you go home. It would be nice to have some intelligent discussions with people. Did the speakers leave time for questions? Keep up the good work! p

Occupy Wall Street, Student Activists

2011-12-20T18:06:00.000-08:00

Student Activists

Occupy Wall Street, Part Three

(essaysbysean.blogspot.com)

In Part Two I concluded the Occupy Wall Street folks in the Calgary city plaza were not students- they were NEETs: not in employment, education or training. As well, they were NEETs with hubris.

Hubris, to the Greeks, meant excessive pride, as in not heeding the Gods, and it led to a fall. Today, to me, hubris means not heeding the public or history or common sense. In the recent past, as noted in Part Two, hubris has led to operating with the toolbox half empty, by rejecting “the older generation,” or folks in suits, or the working class. Now I place no trust in NEETs. But what of students? Near the end of Part Two I wrote: It remains to be seen whether hubris will render some, most or all of our educated youth ineffectual…

…As teens a lot of our energy went into protecting our egos. As an adult in my 20’s, I found that if I wanted to get active results in the real world, I would need to leave my ego at the door. Forget hubris.

I’ve been a student. At my college, I’m pleased to say, we heeded the old activist principle –violated by the occupiers- of having our public activities with a “closed” time frame, often of less than a lunch hour, rather than have an “open ended” gathering where gradually people trickle away, reducing the number of bodies and reducing the power of the spectacle. To quote from the man in my footnote to Part Two, “Anything that drags on becomes a drag.” So at college we ended things with a bang.

At my university, as at college, students were varied in their spirit. I knew many students who were newly adult and keen to know their brave new world. They found it meaningful to follow the news, both in the greater world and right on campus. So bright eyed, so bushy tailed. I dimly knew of other students too, but them I never got to know. They wouldn't care for campus news or student media. I think they were trapped by family or peer expectations that they were “s’posed to” go to university. For them, any youthful excitement had to come from weekends and student cabarets, because every week they were in a passive mode, feeling unresponsible, uninvolved, like in some glorified high school. I’m thinking of a man I mentioned in a previous essay. He felt no sense of campus affiliation; he said he attended “for my professional information.” It sounds to me like he was too fearful to reach out.

A spirited student activist won’t be someone who gives in to fear. No claiming to be bored or superior to other students. No leaning back, heh-heh, and chewing gum. But perhaps fear is a two sided coin, with the other side embossed: Hubris.

Back in high school I had hubris, we all did. My school was full of snobs, and shy people mistaken for snobs, and no doubt some kids were both at once. I would have been glad when reading the young adult novels by Robert Heinlein, about teens like me, with their middle aged mentors. I was glad the books were devoid of characters in their 20’s, because the contrast with us teens would have just been too much for me. (Say, maybe that’s why graduate students are expected to absent themselves from normal student (undergraduate) affairs)

So I ask, “Is hubris rendering some university students ineffectual?”

Well, yes. Sometimes. Before me is Fast Forward, a typical weekly entertainment-newspaper, of the sort found in every big city. The first few pages, activist friendly, are always a critical look at the Establishment/Government/The System. Then come write-ups on independent bands, entertainment reviews and regular syndicated columns, the latter illustrated with irreverent 1960’s style cartoons. No sports. The young audience, despite preferring Star Wars to sports, see themselves as cool; the keen young writers, who surely all have day jobs, romantically see themselves as responsible "writers."

Up in Edmonton last week I had gone to see the feature film Margin Call. The (VUEWEEKLY) weekly paper there, the equivalent of Fast Forward, gave the show a balanced, fair review. The writer is Josef Braun. (Headlines, of course, are generated by the editor when laying out the page, and not by the writer) The headline reads ECONOMIC HUBRIS Though strangely paced, Margin Call finds some truth in its exploration of big business back dealing. 3/5 stars. (Roger Ebert gave 4/5) The call out reads “What ultimately makes Margin Call worthwhile above all is the way it cumulatively builds up to something like a revelation, one that isn’t novel but feels very true.” Fine. I had assumed Fast Forward down here in Calgary would have a good review too. But I forgot about hubris. Boy, was I in for a surprise…

While it goes without saying that students who want to understand, and then reform Wall Street, would seek out the medium of print, that is to say, use their flipping library cards! ... I took it for granted that students would also access popular culture, the stuff of water cooler talk. It’s hard to “activate social change” if you don’t know where your non-university fellow citizens are coming from, and let’s face it: most of them are coming not from books but movies. Unfortunately, there’s been precious few such films. It must be hard to make business movies. They may be socially necessary, but cinematically difficult: It’s hard to have a violence or sex, special effects or explosions, and the characters are apt to be old enough to be a young movie-goer’s parents- in boring suits no less! But sometimes it can be done. (Also there are fine feature-length documentaries such as Inside Job) Now here is one specifically about Wall Street.

The characters are not at a bank but at a Wall Street financial company: The difference is critical. Banks, by federal regulation, must protect their customers by having deposit insurance so the bank won’t go broke. The cost of this insurance is passed on to customers by providing much lower interest rates. Many customers prefer to settle for such security. Other companies, outside of federal law, are theoretically allowed to fail, while taking bigger risks for bigger profits. The people working there are not productive capitalists but wheeler-dealer brokers of money: Certainly not your stereotypical timid bankers.

Margin Call begins as no one, not even top management, has any clue of the coming melt down. In the first scene some workers are downsized. Naturally the survivors, and especially the workers just terminated, now have a chance to question their fundamental values and priorities. (Questioning doesn’t have to stop when you leave college) And then a company numbers wizard becomes a harbinger: He predicts a melt down. What would you do? Crawl into a bottle? Cooperate as in a lifeboat? Or claw madly as in a jungle? Margin Call is about choices that were made, and characters that were formed, long before the demon of melt down was ever summoned.

I liked Margin Call. I am neither a businessman nor a math person. In fact, I once joked, “If only I could do math, I would have been an engineer, and today my bridges would be world famous!” Furthermore, at the risk of sounding like I “fail to take a grown up interest in the news,” I must confess I seldom read the business section of the newspaper. But maybe that’s OK, as I’ve come to suspect even real businessmen don’t, I think they only read the articles that directly pertain to them. My point is this: Although I don’t know much business or financial math, I was able to easily follow the conversations in the movie. So how to explain the Fast Forward review?

The Calgary reviewer hated the movie. Hated the characters, and hated the actors too. Writing like a whiny brat, and saying he had only a couple of dollars in his pocket, he said he couldn’t understand the business dialogue, even after the boss had said, “Explain it to me like I’m a golden retriever.” I sense alienation and isolation from the world of grown ups wearing suits. Apparently the writer had graduated, and was now going about his daily life, without ever picking enough knowledge of the world to converse at the level of a dog. How? And why make a virtue of his ignorance? The how and why is: Hubris.

When I saw the movie I was visiting Edmonton, and visiting a smart employee at the Princess Theatre, a guy so smart he had sounded crazy to a psychologist by predicting the melt down just months before it happened. After the 7:00 o’clock showing I stood by the man as he asked the people leaving if they liked it. Everyone was favorable. The house had been pretty full. I told him, “I sat at in the first row and before the house light went down I noticed something: Practically no one was under age thirty… All the guys who occupied Wall Street didn’t bother to show up!”

My conclusion, regretfully, is yes, some students are being rendered ineffectual by their hubris.

It doesn’t have to be this way. The “activists” who organized the American Revolution had great self-confidence but not hubris. Benjamin Franklin, according to his autobiography, would say, “Perhaps… maybe… it appears to me…” My favorite US president (and Captain Kirk’s favorite too!) had the confidence to impressively stand up to all his generals, and to all his cabinet ministers, yet he was well known for being humble.

At work, a couple years ago, I was asked to “trouble shoot” by taking over a rowdy team. I had heard horror stories. No, I didn’t stride in with my “stern command presence.” Instead I was very polite and very humble. It all worked out. When I reported back, my boss responded, “Humble is good.” Perhaps being humble is an antidote to fear of others, or fear of self-judgment, because it disengages the ego. Maybe humble is healthier. It appears to me, in the face of this ever-changing world, “humble is realistic.” Being humble I can safely listen to others, and take a chance of being changed. And, willing to learn, I can even use my flipping library card!

And, finally… Humble means: Just because I can’t grandly change Wall Street overnight, that’s no reason to give up. There are many people out there working on small ways to change. And that’s OK. As for how to help them all to be focused and committed on Wall Street action, that would take a separate essay(s). (...And by now I’m just too tired to write a part four! Sorry. At least, not unless someone asks me)

Here’s hoping for the humble path.

Sean Crawford

December 2011

Calgary

Footnotes

~ I tacked on the prefix Wall Street to the title to, ahem!, patronize web-search laziness. That's 'cause I saw my first two essays were getting double the hits. A pity, as my third one is the most constructive. (And then later added "Occupy")

~ For a longer look at the differences between students, between those with and without spirit, see my essay "Of Students, Alumni and Couches" from June 2010.

~I see that for the last month a lot of my essays have been at the intersection of citizenship and action. I won’t list them all here, (I presume you are bright eyed enough to view my home page archives) but I will note that Citizens, Jobs and the Liberal Arts is in October 2011 and I touched on Focus and Commitment way back in June of 2011.

Afghanistan Pie

2011-12-17T17:03:00.001-08:00

essaysbysean.blogspot.com

Chairman Mao once said, in effect, that to know a slice of the apple pie was to know the whole pie. He said this in his essay On Contradiction as he was trying to build the Chinese villager's self confidence for making decisions after the mandarins (officials) were all gone. In our democracy, where we have never felt dependent on mandarins, our national decisions are something to be pondered at the individual level, and of these our defense decisions, a small slice of the decision pie, are perhaps the hardest, most fearful decisions of all. But if we citizens don't take this responsibility, then who will? The government? The generals? "War," said the poet "is too important to leave to the generals."

The generals, it is said, always train to fight the last war, not the next one. At least the armed forces are aware of this, and take steps to mitigate their retro tendency. Many civilians are not so aware.

I believe that if the only war you know is Vietnam, then you don't know war. You don't know that Nam was a blip, and not the usual course of waging war. And you may not understand the usual course of ongoing democracy, either.

Unfortunately, since for many people Vietnam was their "last war," they try to repeat it. It is as if they see a big boulder marked Decision, with ropes for a tug of war wrapped around it, and it is being tugged over the war/no war line by a slim minority. They think that to combat this minority a series of protests and strong opinions are constantly needed. For them, if the temper of the times does not allow them to protest by riots, marches, or occupying buildings, then they will ratchet down their protest to writing columns in the media, being quoted, and constant questioning, even unto obstruction. But what if the thing they were trying to ratchet down was a civilian model for their last war, Vietnam?

It helps to have a bird's eye view of democracy. It even helps to have a perspective on capitalism, for in a business, as in a village, people try to steer by consequences, feedback and reality. The people who try to steer us by daily protest do not share my view of how the wheels go around. The situation in the media is better now: I don't feel so angry. When I wrote this Afghanistan Decision essay, back when there was a media storm, after every casualty, to combat the decision to go into combat, I felt a reply was sorely needed.

Afghanistan Decision

Occupy Wall Street, Part Two

2011-12-13T18:21:00.000-08:00

seanessay.blogspot.com

In Part One I had noted two Occupy Wall Street encampments in my city. Also, a) I examined the homeless camp, and b) I was annoyed at how no one in power was examining the folks with their message in the white middle class camp. No “summing up.”

As Juliet would ask: Wherefore the occupation? I’m no expert, and I wasn’t raised middle class, but still, I feel qualified to examine the middle class occupiers. I think I’m old enough, and humble enough, to be willing to see things. I know hubris when I see it. Hubris, to the Greeks, meant having too much pride to heed the Gods, leading to a downfall. To me hubris today includes being too prideful to heed history, common sense and the public.

To me the issue is our unwillingness to critically look at the need for, and the process of achieving, social change. As a society we won’t bother looking if we feel no hope, and the youthful protestors, who might have sparked our hope, won’t bother looking if they have too much hubris.

As for social change, for Wall Street and beyond, the obvious question is: Should we bother? Is change even possible? Can we ever learn from history? My answer is NO and YES.

In the 1960’s many longhaired youth thought we could change ourselves, could come to believe in Love, replacing cold capitalism with altruistic communism. My own experience is: NO, we can’t “learn” to change the human heart. There were Hells Angels working at Woodstock. There will always be as many or as few robber barons as we allow, given our limited time and energy, barons at the fords of streams, and barons where streams of money pass by. There will always be individuals in the street agitating for crowds to riot or go to war. I was in Vancouver the week after the 2010 hockey riot made headlines around the world. The young people who participated were the same people who would have told you, a week earlier, with a straight face, (Give peace a chance) “Rioting is wrong.”

We may never learn the horror of riots, or the horror of war, no, not permanently, but YES, we can learn tactics for managing everyday life. We can learn, say, that if we are willing to regulate then there will not be another Great Depression. Hopefully. But if we forget, and if both major US political parties proceed to de-regulate, then there will be a Wall Street melt down and a World Wide Recession. The overall silence, about this disaster, is partly because both US parties are guilty of de-regulation. Neither party is adult enough, humble enough, to take responsibility and show remorse. Instead they have Hubris.

My grandfather lived in Vancouver. He knew the hubris of the Great War. “They say” –and lots of falsehoods start with they say- they say that people of Grandpa’s time didn’t know enough to de-glamorize war. Grandpa was a sergeant major in the artillery reserves. He told me he liked going to summer training camp (which would have been barely two weeks in those less affluent, less unionized times) because at camp the sergeants would ride horses, his only chance to ever ride.

In my day many of the longhaired hippies were no strangers to horses. They were middle class: rich. Not working class. Not poor like my dad who as a boy had felt bad that he couldn’t always feed his dog, or like my mother who still feels bad that she had to feed us on- never mind. The hippies could oppose “the system,” and idealistically live on handouts, only because, in reality, they were merely slumming. I despised them as soon as I saw allegedly “poor” hippies eating potato chips. No, these people had never known hunger; they felt no need for real food.

Hubris meant that Grandpa’s peers in the horse cavalry wouldn’t even go look at tanks, and one officer even said what do we need aeroplanes for? "From the air everything is a blur." And when an original thinker like Winston Churchill got the allies to try the first ever combined army-navy operation, the invasion of the Dardanelles, the forces didn’t even know how to cooperate. Today perhaps the hubris is still there, but today’s tactic, according to rumor, is to impede the promotion of any officer who doesn’t cooperate.

Society learned, at great cost, that society’s toolbox needs a mix of tools, without the pride of favoring, say, the tank tool over the airplane tool. Or government over business. Or business over government. Not everyone learned. Not the Japanese, blinded by the hubris of their glorious fascism. My uncle Jack was in the pacific for world war two. After the war, during the first weeks of the occupation of Japan, there was an innkeeper who, in fear and trembling, deeply apologized for having a few allied officers, from both army and navy, staying under one roof!

Unfortunately, Uncle Jack’s children of the 1960’s were not much better. Hubris again. We youth claimed to want a revolution yet we said, “Don’t trust anyone over thirty!” And so we cut off the “older generation.” We threw away that tool. Such madness: How can you fix a punctured, bent tire, and fix it so it makes revolutions, with a half empty toolbox? The cold fact is people willing to do the tedious self-disciplined work of, say, following the Wall Street money, to see which company controls what other companies, are more likely to be over age 31 than under 21. If only the youthful Occupy Wall Street people could have reached out to such old allies, started a movement, and then a groundswell… but it was easier, for their pride, to ignore the public.

So who are the occupiers? They are youth: Impatient, undisciplined and unlearning of history. But wait- what about the college protestors who occupy Wall Street? Doesn’t university teach you to discipline your mind? Well, I’ll attend to students later in this essay.

I’m no College professor; I’m no learned expert. But I’m a witness. I can remember, back the 1960’s, having some trouble enjoying the popular TV show Laugh-In, partly because I didn't like the cast trying so hard to be "hip." My biggest problem, though, was that while knowing how expensive every second of TV was, I was trying to watch a show with a longgg time between punch lines. I felt like someone was holding open the refrigerator door. Meanwhile, in those days an intellectual Hollywood screenwriter, Harlan Ellison, was doing TV columns in the medium of print. My favorite line of his is surely a heartfelt one: “Television is chewing gum for the eyes.” Ellison, of course, was an original rebel, not a blind conformist. How he happy he was to hear some precious airtime was to be donated to the younger generation. At last! Now the youth could explain their side of things, cross over the generation gap, reach into homes across America. Hurray! But then, well, what he witnessed was…

Of course average American workers can’t go to college, they won’t read Das Kapita, or any political theory, not even in comic book form, but at least they can see. They will, perhaps while chewing gum, watch the tube. And so it was exciting when somehow precious airtime, no doubt with commercials included, was given to the “now generation.” Here was their one and only chance for the longhaired idealists to educate people, to explain how the Establishment, the System, could be improved… and they blew it.

I never saw that broadcast, myself, but I read Harlan’s column afterwards. It was sad. Apparently the show started with someone in a mini skirt saying something silly and gleefully swinging a big hammer at a gong as a joke. And that set the tone. It was all the same: glee, more glee, and never any substance. Ellison was crushed.

History repeats, God knows. When the G-8 was meeting just outside town, near Banff, and when protestors, those rich enough, and free enough, to travel, came idealistically from all over the continent, I kept watching the newspapers day after to day. Would any of them write a letter or maybe even a column to explain to the public exactly why the G-8 was a Bad Thing?... Nothing. I remember the protestors once did a stunt where they stood in a line, and mooned the crowd, with letters written across their butts, but that was all they ever wrote. Easier to have glee, and anger too, than to think and reach out and communicate. So don’t expect the people of my city to know any more about the G-8, today, than do the people in any other North American city. I understand there was indeed an educational thing put one night in the university gymnasium, but that was by locals and for locals… older locals.

I remember being angered, at the time of the G-8, at the sheer fascism of the young travelers that came here. I say “fascism” as being the opposite of democratic spirit. Not only were the youth uninterested in talking to me and my neighbors, but they spent an inordinate amount of their time and energy concentrating on trying to communicate with, and to educate, just eight –eight! - measly old white men. This in a city of a million souls. Had they no time to wander into beauty parlors, barber shops and beer halls? No time for greasy spoon cafes? ... Incidentally, a Member of the Legislative Assembly, Gary Mar, years before being sent to work as our man in Washington, had the humility to come into a café where I was drinking and sit down to ask for feedback… Had they too much hubris to believe in joint action? After all, here were a million bodies, right handy, ready to march. Or were these middle class kids prejudiced against admitting the less affluent classes like mine could ever learn? (“The proles will never revolt!”) Or had their schooling not made clear to them the joy of democracy over fascism?

As for schooling, before I touch the subject of college students, lets return to the folks with the nice store-bought pretty nylon tents: the local occupiers of Wall Street. I can say with confidence these folks failed to draw certain lessons from the earlier G-8 folks. This weekend, finally, the occupiers were kicked out. The summing up, I regret to say, came not from a political leader but from a local reporter. The Calgary Herald gave an entire page, A3, (Sunday Dec 11, 2011) to Jen Gerson. Even on the last day, notes Gerson, with the protestors giving a press conference with “every media outlet in the city…cameras, recorders and notepads…” There was nothing of substance to report. At no time did a lengthy written statement ever come out of the occupation. Such youthful hubris. Such a waste.

So, again, who are the occupiers? If they lack the ability of a typical college student to draft a statement, if they can’t compose an essay, or even enjoy reading one, (let alone read a manifesto or Das Kapita) if they can’t think coherently and critically, then maybe it is because the campers weren’t attending classes, and furthermore, had no plans to ever feel engaged in learning. Maybe there were no students reading Calvin or Hobbs, no Leviathan, no students of economics or commerce with original insights into Wall Street or capitalism. And if so, if the Olympic Plaza occupation was barren of students, then maybe there’s no need for us to give up on all youth just yet. Maybe there is still a place for sparks and tinder from university intellectual romantic rebels and protestors. If there’s still hope for change, then there’s no need for us all to give up and be silent about Wall Street. It remains to be seen whether hubris will render some, most, or all of our educated youth ineffectual.

Who are the occupiers? Obviously not students. I believe they are, or were, what the Japanese call NEETs. It’s not a term I ever see over here: I only came across the concept this summer in an English translation of an anime. (Eden of the East) NEETs are a felt problem in Japan. A NEET is anyone not engaged in employment, education or training. At last I know the occupiers: NEETs with hubris.

It would be a mistake to hope such people would advance social change. The organizers of the American Revolution had self-confidence, but never hubris. They all had employment- and many were over age thirty... although they would not have called themselves "members of the older generation."

NEETs, huh? Surely college students deserve a separate essay, an essay building on what I’ve written here and in earlier essays. That is for another day. (A Part Three? Better call it Occupy Wall Street, Student Activists, For Dec 2011)

Because I have lived through social change I know more change could still happen. Change won’t be easy, it never has been. It surely won’t be done with a half empty toolbox. People of all generations and incomes, all the facets of our body politic, would need to feel involved. But I just don’t know if the NEETs are ready yet to add themselves to the toolbox.

Sean Crawford

December 2011

Calgary

Footnotes:

I wish I could ask my late buddy Blair. I miss him at times like this.

In the sci-fi series Harsh Realm, a series short-lived because the realm was too harsh for viewers, an early episode was named in homage to Leviathan.

Keep the fairy dust from your eyes: My previous essay noted that, sometimes, to have the ability to see, and then to act, may require de-glamorizing youth mystique.

Books: No, I haven’t struggled through Das Kapita myself, and I don’t expect others to, either. But there are easier classics to read. Anyone could get through Thomas Paine.
Equally clear is the work of Barak Obama’s long dead mentor (At least, “they say” he is the mentor) Saul Alinsky, a famous community organizer of his day. Before he died in 1972 Alinsky described his hopes and fears for student activists.

Alinsky, I think, would say the occupation is merely a “terminal tactic,” like a wave that crests, breaks and is gone forever. Wasted. Leading to nothing. Better to have a series of actions leading to an end game. I’m sure Alinsky would have tackled Wall Street if, and only if, the public had asked him. As it was, his invitations to help always came from discrete communities.

Here is a link, from a member of a minority group in New York city, seeing the occupiers in NY as being greedy and hypocrites, because they hurt her neighbors.

Boomers Are Not Special

2011-12-10T14:41:00.001-08:00

essaysbysean.blogspot.com

Headnote: "We" means my generation- although I disagreed, I know how "we" thought... "We nerds" means me, specifically- I did not conform with the rest of the herd into rebelling: I kept my independence.

Normally we like to have praise for the youthfull baby boomers in their glory days of campus protest. Today I would like to stomp on the 60's mystique- trample it down and bury it. Beyond a regard for the truth I have reasons: 1) to put "occupy wall street" into clearer perspective, and 2) to be willing to face modern behaviour. For now, let me say it is indeed Politically Correct for me to bash the boomers: I was born in the 50's. I remember where I was when the Beatles played on the Ed Sullivan (variety) Show.

After walking a trail down the long decades I felt at last financially secure enough to risk some university courses. This meant studying alongside young people: first generation X and later gen Y. Whether from youthfull competitiveness or whatever, some of them expressed being fed up with the boomer's 60's hype... Me too.

I remember how every Sunday night I'd watch a Beatles derivative, The Monkeys, on TV. Their theme song went "...we're the young generation, and we've got something to say..." What we said was, "Don't trust anyone over 30!" and we cautioned against being judgmental. A popular ironic button went "Here Comes the Judge." This while being judgemental of the "establishment" and the "older generation." As we saw it: Our parents, incredibly, didn't know that war is wrong. Imagine! In their day, we told ourselves, no one had realized the importance of giving peace a chance. They were too old to learn that love is the answer, peace is the way. Lord knows we tried to tell them, over and over again, my friend. We tried with our words and with our song lyrics. "I'd like to build the world a home, and furnish it with love..." So went the cola song that our school band played.

(In the groove)

And if you were a nerd like me, back then? Whether from Stockholm syndrome, (boomers were savage with anyone who disagreed) emperor's new clothes syndrome, or whatever- You wouldn't be a spoilsport. You were probably literate enough to know that after the horror of the Great War people tried to avoid a second world war by demonizing arms and peace time soldiers, by trying to make war almost unspeakable and thereby almost unthinkable. During the little fascist wars of the 30's, in mainland Asia, Africa and Europe, it was not just economics but also ideology that kept the armies of the English speaking world so small.

And then later, in the 60's, as we youth reinvented the peace wheel, we nerds either kept silent or, like my friend Keith, shouted slogans along with everyone else. Talking about my generation: We thought we were so special. Every previous generation, we thought, had forgotten what it was like to be young while we were new improved and, like I said, special. And we had our new rock music to prove it.

We would put down the rich kid who tried to feel good from racism while we felt OK with feeling good from temporalism. (time-ism) Special indeed. A "generation gap" meant the older folks were not "with-it," not hip. We had "our" music which "they" despised and would never understand. Now I am finding it harder to keep a straight face around aging boomers as generation X is followed by generation Y while the beat goes on. Surely it's time to put this snootiness behind us.

(Groovy)

I hate to be a nerd spoilsport but hey, I am a nerd and I hate prejudice. Temporalism, which sounds so innocent coming from a fresh teen who still has baby fat, sounds sadly inappropriate coming from gaunt people old enough to have teenagers of their own.

Suddenly I envision old pony tailed men sitting in a row on a campus quadrangle. They are protesting, chanting, "Hey hey, ho ho, temporalism has to go." Behind them students of religious studies are passing by. Philosophy students are passing too. And further away, in time and space, a sage is passing through Chinese villages in his quest for a king who will support peace not war. The kings of the Chinese city states valued that man's war knowledge. He, Confucius, always told them the same thing: if they carried out his ideas of economic development, and gave the peasants a more democratic deal, then the king would be unconquerable. The very peasants of the fields would rise up from the land to defend him against another king's horses and men. Alas, Confucius never did find a king worth working for. But at least he tried. Such a good man. At the risk of offending my mainland Chinese readers I must say I think confucianism, as a religion or a philosophy, will be with us long after communism has left the building.

One of his acute observations was this: As he approached a village he would hear music. From this he could discern the people's character before he even met them. To me today it's obvious: if youth in Asia and America are characterized by an enthusiasm for rock music it is because they are so youthfull. Not smarter. Not better. Just different.

(Oh wa oh)

In the mid-sixties, suddenly, the electric guitar spread as fast as today's i-pod or cell phone. Folk music suddenly plummeted out of favor. Electrics killed the acoustic guitar.

I remember how every fall the radio disc jockey would intone, "Rocktober" and play, "The history of- rock 'n- roll!" In his booth the DJ would press "play" and a forgotten star would proclaim, "Rock 'n roll is here to stay!" meaning: To heck with our old parents complaining about our newfangled awfull music. Of course R'nR actually came from an earlier time than the 60's, being from the acoustic 50's. How I love that era of cruising and sock hops, of Archie and Betty. Remember Archie's affordable old ford model T?

Henry Ford had famously said that a customer could have a car in whatever color he wanted- as long as it was black. As "affluence" came to the land there appeared a new thing called "marketing" and "market segmentation." Cars began coming in various colors while being designed for various socioeconomic groups. Back in the roaring 1920's Betty's father could barely afford a record player for his family. And a soda pop was a rare treat. By the 1950's he could give young Betty her own record player. He gave her a big allowance too, big enough for her to afford lots of soda pop, as well as several single-song 45 rpm records. And a market was born. In my day, with vacuum tubes abruptly replaced by transistors, teens could suddenly afford a personal radio. And a market grew.

To consume from this new market did not require being smarter or better than previous generations; there's no mystique, no mystery: you just had to be born at the right time.

(Dig it)

My mother once darned my socks. Not any more. Hand-me-downs are no longer common. As affluence has increased history has repeated. Lately I have been seeing articles about a surprising new market: "tweens." Parents are lamenting how their pre-teen girls want to dress like their sexual pop idols- and can afford to do so.

The arrogant boomers, with their temporalism, believed that not all decades are equal. It follows, by their own logic, that maybe this current decade is less equal.

Maybe the latest "now generation" is devoted to a sort of mental inbreeding... ignoring library texts for text messaging to each other, forsaking hard reading, hard thinking and high culture in order to invest their time in using twitter, face book and screen games. Maybe the willingness to invest their man hours in anything requiring self discipline and tedious effort is now being postponed by a decade or more... Or maybe not.

I was only slightly disturbed to read a new up-to-the-minute book review of The Dumbest Generation, a book which posed such questions. What truly disturbed me was the reviewer noting that baby boomers- those old campus protesters, those high I.Q. university graduates- are constitutionally unable to face such questions about modern behaviour. Blinded by their creaky old belief in youth mystique.

But the question of whether youth of today have less willingness should be faced.

"Hey hey, ho ho, youth mystique has got to go."

Sean Crawford

originally posted at
the end of the summer of lovely 2008

Sidebar:

I remember Ed Sullivan.

I understand that today kids have personal TV's in their personal one-kid bedrooms, in their one-child families. How bizarre. In my day TV's still had vacuum tubes and the whole family would watch together: Dad in the easy chair, older people in other chairs, children squished on the couch and the youngest ones on cardboard boxes or on the floor. Younger kids, in those days, commonly fell asleep trying to watch big kid shows. We all conversed together about the performers on Ed's variety show, such as tight rope walkers, puppets, tap dancers and, of course, singers.

Looking back, I guess Ed got into televison before the standards had tightened up; then the people liked him so much the studios couldn't get rid of him. He had real stiff shoulders, a stiff manner and he looked more like Richard Nixon than Regis Philbin or any handsome Hollywood entertainer. He was real and we liked him.

Occupy Wall Street, Part One

2011-12-05T16:13:00.000-08:00

essaysbysean.blogspot.com

Is your town occupied too? In towns across the land, protestors are “occupying Wall Street.” In my city, although ordinary people are making some common sense observations about the protestors, I have yet to see any comprehensive “summing up” of the occupiers by anyone in power. How annoying.

Even if a “first minister” (premier) or a “first citizen” (president) has little actual power, it is an expected part of their position for them to have moral power. As in Ronald Reagan being the first politician to alert us to the existence of the deficit, or like John Kennedy explaining how the cold war insurgency was something new. I expect my leading figures, even if they are just figureheads, to set our agenda, to prioritize. I expect them to inspire us, as a body politic, to focus on a few things… And to put into perspective national front page stories such as the occupation of Wall Street. I’m sure you’ve read the stories.

In my town the occupiers are in two main encampments. The most conventional, with store-bought pretty nylon tents, are in the town square, Olympic Plaza. This plaza was created in the 1980’s as homage to the town square in Sarajevo, a plaza for joy-full gatherings during the Sarajevo Olympic games. Now our public space is occupied, endlessly, by a gathering without joy. Perhaps the Olympic Plaza includes a few homeless, while the most homogenous gathering is on the river island, being entirely of homeless persons. By all reports, neither encampment is like a pioneer town. No, they are both more like The Lord of the Flies. Their professed belief in “freedom!” sounds like a “cop out.” Individual citizens are remarking on this, saying how the occupiers have no rules or organizers or central message, that is to say, it’s as if they were still kids with authority issues, but still… nobody official is saying so.

…For this essay, this Part One, my focus is the homeless camp. Respecting how perhaps most Internet readers prefer posts to be overly short, and overly focused, I will overly stick to what I know…

If the homeless on the island were capable of organizing, if they were capable of policing the grounds for litter, of electing an occupation-village mayor, of agreeing to be bound by the deliberations of their town hall meetings; in short, if they were capable of being as self-reliant as our pioneer ancestors, then I what I know is they would be just like me- and I have never lived homeless. I’ve been poor, yes, and I’ve starved; I’ve had to dress in layers for insulation, like a bag lady, because my starved body wouldn’t produce heat; I’ve had my legs on fire after climbing a single flight of stairs- but I’ve never been a homeless person. Nor gone on welfare.

My choice, years ago, was clear: If I wanted a bungalow with a white picket fence, and if I didn’t have good steady job, (I did contract work) then I would need to pay a price. I would need to replace freedom from responsibility with acceptance of responsibility; in short, I needed to share a bungalow with other people. Happily, in a multi-bedroom shared house, my part of the rent would be much less than, say, for sharing a bachelor apartment. How easy. At least, it was easy for a boy whose ancestors had lived in longhouses and gathered for barn raisings and quilting bees. No need to elect a house mayor, not when we gathered around a kitchen table and agreed to police the area, and agreed to simple guidelines such as whether we should label our food in the fridge. Maybe we couldn’t afford a dishwasher, but Ann could wash and I could dry while I asked her about her day. Home sweet home. I could ask her, “Read any good books lately?”

I recently read Charisma, by Steven Barnes, where Barnes quotes a successful war hero, civil rights leader and self-made millionaire, Alexander Marcus, as saying, “A choice, once made, creates its own path.”

If a potentially homeless person, like Ann, can’t afford the first month’s rent on a boarding house or apartment then she has choices. The easy way out is a shelter, which, like a youth hostel, must empty out every morning. There the residents, according to a social worker acquaintance of mine, break down into three groups: one third there from mental health issues, one third substance issues and one third there from circumstances. From that choice, I don’t know if there’s any path leading onwards. The better choice and path, it seems to me, is to get a windfall of cash by accepting the responsibility of Social Assistance: Welfare. What would you do?

I suppose welfare varies from state to state, but hey, work with me here, I am trying to do a thought experiment with you: If, hypothetically, your state’s welfare won’t pay for a nice apartment then you’d need to pay a price for giving up the freedom of being homeless. Your “path” would be lined with Housemates. However, they might be a living example of a more functional life. What if your housemate buys a monthly bus pass first thing, before he spends all his welfare cheque? Wouldn’t he then be a living rebuke to you and your “freedom from responsibility” lifestyle? Ouch.

What else might this new path entail? Obviously there would be free psychotherapy and support from a social worker. I feel silly writing this, but it seems to me that taking this path would mean developing minimum skills for adult responsibility, clear communication and basic politeness, such skills as needed not just for holding a job but for simply hanging out at home… not to mention those kitchen table meetings. While your social worker could teach you communication skills, most likely you would grow into your various skills as a child does, by trial and error from your housemates, like some sort of 24-hour alcoholics anonymous meeting. Growth is good.

The best thing of all, and the worst thing of all, if you’re an anarchist wanting “freedom from everything,” would be your support from your social worker, and from your housemates too, supporting you to become responsible enough for volunteer work, then part-time work, then a full-time job, perhaps at minimum wage at first… A choice, once made, creates its own path.

But wait a minute- would you want to even begin to learn basic politeness? A pretty lady of my acquaintance says homeless beggars “should be shot” because they are so mean to her on the street. No, not every light bulb wants to change.

How queer. Make a choice, commit to your choice, and one day, at the end of your path, there’s a job and your very own white picket fence… Yes, I know, I make it sound so attractive. But it’s not for every dim bulb. Easier to claim your “freedom,” beg, and remain homeless.

Sean Crawford

November 2011

Calgary, Alberta

(Part Two will be posted in due course)

Footnotes:

~The “no money left for a bus pass” example came from an acquaintance. She worked in a shelter for prostitutes, and one day she said through gritted teeth if her teenage son had so little maturity she’d feel ashamed.

~Part of the genius of alcoholics anonymous is that nothing is merely handed to a recovering alcoholic. In their open-to-the-public office I have noticed that even a mere ten-cent leaflet is not free. The drunk must somehow find a dime. (Find a pop bottle?) Call it finding self-respect. Before you get all weepy white liberal on me, remember that AA has a better track record than university degreed professionals.

~More on "nothing is merely handed": In my city, one day, I heard talk of building a new shiny residential tower for the homeless. They already had a smaller building. That same day I watched as two homeless chaps approached an office-retail tower. I correctly predicted something: They bypassed the polite sign saying to save energy by entering the revolving door. Instead, quite unlike anyone else, they reefed open the handicapped door. Obviously, handing them a bigger tower is no good if between their ears they see themselves as still homeless, still separate from accepting membership in the responsibilities of society.

~Perhaps, through gritted teeth, I should be ashamed of my fellow rich white liberals who, by tossing money to beggars, are, as they would say in alcoholics anonymous, “enabling.” The tossers enable those poor blokes to merely subsist, to avoid welfare, and thereby to have daydreams, perhaps, but no real hope of a future. Grrr.

Citizen Activists

2011-11-30T05:09:00.000-08:00

www.essaysbysean.blogspot.com

One overcast day I went to a rally at City Hall. While people were arriving and waiting for the speeches to start I chatted with a friend, David, who was there as a summer Calgary Herald reporter, and with a TV cameraman David knew. They were commenting on people they recognized. My friend asked me unkindly, "Why do you see the same faces at demonstrations for different issues?" I was almost speechless with despair. How do you answer such a question? "To see old friends from the last demonstration," I lied "and catch up on what's been happening since."

Later the crowd ambled down the sidewalk with the TV man preceding us. I chatted with David. Every time the TV guy turned around to film us David had to step down onto the road. Reporters are supposed to report the news, not make it. We arrived at the Native Friendship Center where there was ethnic food and live entertainers from around the world.

David went off to file his story. What I never got around to telling him is this: if only for practical reasons, for solidarity, minorities must help each other, and that things are interconnected. A region high on racism is also going to be high on sexism. A politician who mouths "family values" is also going to deny funding to "family strengtheners" such assistance for men who batter or women's shelters.

David was used to individuals who are conservative, in single-issue groups, such as the established unions.

While big unions might have a reputation for being conservative, this has not traditionally been the case. They used to be, or still are, the main support for the (socialist) New Democratic Party. "Those 'labor organizers'...were primarily middle-class revolutionary activists to whom the CIO labor organizing drive was just one of many activities." So writes Saul Alinsky regarding the formation of these unions during the great depression of the 1930s.

In his book Rules For Radicals he continues, "The agendas of those labor union mass meetings were 10 % on the specific problems of that union and 90 % speakers on the conditions and needs of the southern Okies, the Spanish Civil War and the International Brigade, raising funds for blacks who were on trial in some southern state, demanding relief for the unemployed, denouncing police brutality, raising funds for anti-Nazi organizations, demanding an end to American sales of scrap iron to the Japanese military complex, and on and on. They ...organized vast sectors of middle-class America in support of their programs. But they are gone now, and any resemblance between them and the present professional labor organizer in only in title."

I can't get involved in everything- I pace myself- but neither can I deny the issues are there. I enjoy being with others who participate; they are loving and jolly and they remind me of the bumper sticker: "If I can't dance I don't want to be part of your revolution."

I would tell David that once you start accepting responsibility there's no turning back.

Sean Crawford
summer 2008
published originally in the University of Calgary Student Newspaper,
The Gauntlet for Dec 8, 1994

Footnotes:
~The friend was David Gazzard, my student editor for 1988-89. Unlike his siblings he had kept his Aussie accent- I suppose chicks dug it. While I make him sound unkind he was a decent moral person, like Australian Mel Gibson's character in Signs... -Did you know that for copyright reasons many excellent books, predessors to Harry Potter, were not for sale in the U.S.? One day his family dog came by the newspaper office. David said, "Hello Biggles" and I said dramatically, "By Captain W. E. Jones." "Hey, that is who he's named after!" (an aviator in a series)

~David went on to be a reporter in Australia. He said the Oz ecology did not require all the formal training to be a journalist, not like over here. Probably by the time my piece was written he was working directly with the Australian Prime Minister as the PM's (I forget- communications person? Something cool, anyway)

~Later David ran for Australian parliament and narrowly lost.

~In an election year when neither major U.S. party had concrete changes to offer, the republicans seized the high ground with their platform plank of "family values." It was powerfull fear mongering. How could democrats defend against something undefined yet sounding right? Harpers magazine later exposed the scam, with no effect, when they published a secret republican memorandum reminding followers not be taken in or try to seriously implement this "platform." The codeword "family values" mainly meant right wing status quo: no support for women or children or minorities and especially no equal rights for homosexuals.

Angry With Michael Crichton

2011-11-25T14:40:00.000-08:00

essaysbysean.blogspot.com

Headnote: This essay came about because two or more obituaries claimed he was "rebuked by congress." I tried doing a tiresome google search using rebuke and testimony. I found only that one or two congresscritters had disagreed that day with Crichton before he even started to speak, with one saying she wanted "facts not fiction" but I found no record of a rebuke.
MAYBE those obit writers were better researchers than I...BUT I suspect they did not like Michael's philosophy.

This week the author of the novel State of Fear, Michael Crichton, has passed away. (Better known for Jurassic Park.) If a politician dies, or even retires, all is forgiven. A gentleman doesn't speak ill of the dead. But Crichton continues, right now, to inspire fresh hatred from the global warming crowd. And he hasn't even been buried yet! I hope his family will eschew the internet.

On the 'net I see people being willfully blind, irrational- and hateful. One fellow, this week, going down a thread, kept raising new straw man arguments, against Crichton, as fast as they were knocked down. This on a thread that started as a sober memorial by fans. The problem, of course, is that, unlike being able to forget an out-of-sight politician, the hate-mongers can't forget how Crichton's essays and speeches are still in print. As is State of Fear.

As it happens the hate-mongers, some of them, will openly say on the web they haven't read his book, nor his testimony before congress. Instead they will attack him as a person, adding that being a mere novelist, and not a scientist, he "should not be allowed to testify" in the first place. His speech in the senate, which as you know is one half of the bicameral congress, is on his web site. I found his speech, but not his testimony. I, for one, sense the hate-mongers are claiming that Crichton testified against global warming and carbon dioxide. By fixating on their claim, like a pit bull stuck to an arm, they don't have to lift their eyes to face the implications of what Crichton actually said.

(Sex)

It is ironic. By expressing hatred, by refusing to read, by refusing to objectively refute, they are living proof of what Crichton testified about: that science, at least in the climate change domain, is moving away from science towards politics and propaganda. It is amazing to me that in our day and age people can graduate college but not soak up basic "Philosophy of Science 101."

Understanding the basis of Science -not just climate science- is the Key.

If I might reference an earlier controversy: I wasn't born yet when Alfred Kinsey did his research. He astounded people by showing that homosexuals were not a mere fraction of a fraction of one percent. And not, it logically followed, just a scattering of "bad" people who had "chosen" to be gay. By using the "Key" an entomologist can have a valid opinion regarding the methodology of a sex researcher. And vice versa. A scientist with a Christian religion who disagrees with Kinsey's 1940's sex research findings should be able to calmly, without hatred, refute Kinsey by doing "new, improved" research. But hatred is a good excuse for claiming, "I don't have the time to research, I don't need to read Kinsey..." Sounds familiar, I know. "I don't need to read the footnotes in State of Fear..." The novel is purely fiction, the copious footnotes are true and pure.

(Key)

Crichton was a man who knew the Key. He found himself, in this brave new millennium, having to raise the awareness of congress by referring to the methods used in drug research trials, methods which are naturaly more stringent that the ones for, say, sociology. A hate-monger claimed on the web that Crichton was saying that climate research should be just as rigorous and verifiable as medical research. Wrong. Crichton was saying that we should not shrink from trying to have reasonable science standards where possible.

These standards would include doing separate experiments to verify research, and separate computer simulations to verify computer modeling, both in space (today) and in time. (After some years, does it still hold up?) The fact that it took literally years before the United Nations hockey stick graph was verified by two Canadians... and thereby exposed as false... is a disgrace to science. Not just to the global warmers but to Science. The fact that the hockey scientists would not readily share their raw data... is not what I was taught to do as an idealistic student in science class. Unlike magic, a science experiment must be repeatable by others.

I remember when that graph, of global temperatures shooting up like the blade on a stick, made the front pages all over the world. Being an idealist, as I have documented in my Citizen Activists essay, I appreciated that graph. I thought: Sweet! Cool! Wow! ...Years later I did not appreciate abruptly learning how unscientific the graph was. I felt betrayed. I fully expect scientists, in their everyday lives, to be less than saints. I also expect them, in their professional lives, to be reliable. To have, as my grandmother would say, integrity.

(Witch)

Oh dear. Did everyone notice how in the above paragraph I just "had" to wave my activist credentials? A sure sign that society has hysteria is when I have to look away from an issue and, instead, call a time-out to "defend" myself. To me this is so degrading: as in arguing against the horrors of Senator Joseph McCarthy's witch-hunt and suddenly coming to a full stop -and switching gears- to say whether I am now, or have ever been, a witch. Oh well, at least my credentials were on topic; at least I didn't try to gratuitously say whether or not I believed in the environment.

Most folks who have read this far, enjoying people in general, would be bored to hear any more about the hate-mongers.... Many readers, interested in individuals, would rather I moved on to tell my personal story. OK, that suits me, even though I am modest- because my life story is relevant to my being angry with Crichton.

Angry With Crichton, Part II

My life was nice. At a young age, in my twenties, many of my happiest productive hours were spent as a young volunteer reporter for my university student newspaper. Our campus had no career program in journalism, but as keen volunteers we soaked up "Journalism 101." I learned that an ethical reporter will always strive for "balance" by using multiple sources, and then letting the reader decide. If I quote a rehabilitation expert, as head of a parole board, saying that a memorable killer with a life sentence is to be allowed to go free, and if the parole board experts all agree, then I should nevertheless also seek out someone who disagrees, perhaps a tearful survivor. My readers will of course agree with a consensus of experts, but they still deserve a chance to consider the other side.

My journalism peers told a folk story, to promote the rule of balance, of the sole exception to having ethics: a man followed some G.I.s into a Nazi death camp and proceeded to file his grim story without first getting a Nazi quote for balance. "Sometimes," he said "there is no other side."

(Con)

Years ago l noticed that a certain nation-wide chain of newspapers was publishing every single one of its global warming stories without ever trying for balance. Unfortunately, in the media, ownership tends to mean control. And I think, from some (off topic) scant evidence, that these particular owners are too arrogant to go back and learn ethics 101. For a long time I had noticed this bias. Finally, at last, a syndicated journalist with a weekly environment page addressed the issue by saying that it was fine to not have balance because of the importance of the issue, because readers might be "confused." At the time I hoped it was just "her and the owners" and not "her and the other reporters too." Now my hope has dwindled. That no other journalists rang any alarm bells is a sign of- ...of something disgusting.

My young life was nice. At the age of 17, when I moved out alone from the innocent farm to the big city, I didn't know the slang "grifter." I did know "con artist." I knew I wasn't magically immune to being fleeced. I figured I had only two things going for me. First, cons usually depend on the mark being greedy. I wasn't. Second, the con man usually generates a sense of urgency. So as I gawked at the skyscrapers I resolved to be on the lookout for any such urgings. When the above journalist implied, "the end justifies the means" she was trying to exuse her actions, to herself and others, by trying to generate a contagious urgency.

(Panic)

It was nice how the other student reporters let me volunteer to "do the Ernest Hemingway newsman thing" without first being a student myself. Years earlier, just like young Louis L' Amour, I was an avid reader yet not afraid of hard work. And so I was once a soldier- for six of the happiest years of my life. I was picked for junior (NCO) leadership school. Yes, it was hard.

Of course we took parade drill and book learning such as the Geneva convention. More important was learning problem solving, "task procedure," for on base and in the field, and, most important of all, learning "NATO battle procedure." This meant disciplining our minds to always do certain things in a certain order. Leading an attack was stressfull but straight forward. Equally hard, in a different way, were mock problems such as using our troops to suddenly improvise an effective checkpoint, rescue a wounded paratrooper high up a tree, lead a bomb search without any previous search training, and so forth. As confident soldiers, our tendency during such role playing was to revert to what we thought we would do in real life. Wrong. Or to hurry too fast. Wrong again. Our true goal was this: to learn to use army procedure with due deliberate speed.

Of course in an immediate emergency such as first aide we would "think" super-fast, rather than use deliberate thinking...but we would still follow super-quick procedure (ABC means airway breathing circulation- in that order). There is never, ever, a need to close our eyes and hurry in a blind panic. I won't close my eyes to the scientific method, depite the urgings of persons with a global warming religion.

I wish certain civilians would learn to slow down. Poor U.S. soldiers might have avoided Iraq; we might have avoided eight years of President Bush, if only the Florida designer of the "butterfly ballot" had slowed down enough to take the time to do a user test. At least, to her credit, as a check and balance, she did have the humility to show the butterfly ballot to some other government workers. Unfortunately, they carefully looked it up and down and pronounced it, "Good."

Had the Florida folks slowed down to spend a little money on research they would have learned something: actual users do not look a ballot up and down. They just look for their candidate's name so they can mark it. They won't always notice if the butterfly "wings" are not symmetrical but offset by a line. God only knows how many votes, which should have gone to Bush's rival, went instead to some guy named Buchanan. Call it the butterfly effect: Someone waves a ballot and years later a storm of steel rages over Baghdad.

(Ethics)

Urgency does not excuse panic. I believe there is always time for media ethics, for science ethics, and always time to verify science. We could do double blind experiments; we could take the time to give the same research problem to three laboratories. We could give an experiment, of ice core rings, say, to three labs. Let all three do algorithms and generate equations and do regression analysis and so forth. If all three get a hockey stick then, "Sweet!" No team will dare fudge results. By doing proper science we will never have to sadly say, as Florida did, "If only-."

The late Michael Crichton explained so much so well during his senate speech. His family has restored his web site; once again I can read his speeches and essays. Meanwhile, his hateful detractors not only won't read his testimony, they will not even care to know he has those articles, articles not merely about climate but about things under the general roof of science- and media too.

His site includes several PBS videos from being a guest on The Charlie Rose Show. I am grateful to have seen several long video-taped speeches where Michael is charming and understated. Of course, being human, at some level he must have been angry. Perhaps he expressed his anger at home. Figuratively, I am beside him in solidarity. As a guest in Michael's kitchen, I am angry too, right along with him.

Sean Crawford

November, 2008

footnotes:

I found several YouTube clips of congress that seems to be made by a Nineteen Eighty-Four type of leftist: everything edited to put Crichton in shadow and highlight his detracters. His actual testimony was NOT shown... I can't fathom having so much hatred as to cause such unfairness.

I referenced Crichton last month in Editing and Climategate, also in my very short essay Global Hot Air, (May 2011) and in my one where I call him my hero, Smokers and World Peace. (September 2011)

By the way, another writer hero of mine is Sir Winston Churchill. I have many of his books. During the war if any of his staff wrote that today in Italy our forces were "fighting with the Germans" he would have them change it to "fighting against the Germans."

Global Warming and Consensus

2011-11-21T17:09:00.001-08:00

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CBS news has exposed a global warming scandal according to yesterday's Calgary Sun, July 2, 2009. It seems that two Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) experts have been suppressed from saying that the EPA is rushing, unwisely, into declaring that carbon dioxide is a pollutant. (CO2) Columnist Lorrie Goldstein is comparing Obama to Bush and saying that had Bush tried to pull this stunt the media would have noticed, big time.

Writes Goldstien, "Carlin said EPA officials wanted to rush through their decision on carbon dioxide, adding while regulatory decisions normally take a year or two, this one took mere weeks and EPA staff had only four and a half days to respond to a draft report on the decision."

I realize some people will excuse the EPA for being unethical because of the nation's current emotional claim that "CO2 is causing global warming," a claim "they say" a "consensus of scientists" believe in. I am not "some people." You can't be a "tiny bit pregnant" or a "tiny bit unethical." Ethics matter. Consensus is no excuse; the angels are not self-evidently on the side of consensus. It was less than a year ago that a "consensus of experts" would have said there would never be a global recession, surely not one led by the good old U.S. of A. (And if the U.S.was so irresponsible then surely Americans would never compound their leadership dishonor by adding insult to their world injury with a "buy America" policy, a policy that, here at home, stabs the Free Trade Agreement.)

It was in the 1990's that the media and "everybody" knew that silicon breast implants caused ill health. Such was the consensus, a consensus tested in court. It was only after Dow Corning lost a settlement case, and therefore went bankrupt, (with lost jobs) that the first ever science study was conducted. Results disagreed with the "consensus." Each subsequent study also cleared Dow. Too late. The villain here was not the EPA but the FDA. They got jittery from the consensus and therefore banned breast implants not because they were unsafe but because, with only 90 days to respond, the corporations could not prove they were safe. Today? The consensus is gone, the ban overturned. Too late. (see Risk by Canadian Dan Gardner, 2008, with a 2009 afterword on the global economic crisis.)

It was in medicine that a young Michael Crichton, with whom I am angry, got his start. I wonder what he thought of the implant hysteria? Lots of people are angry at him.

About a Friend

2011-11-17T17:45:00.000-08:00

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I think I was always able to love... in my uptight real man way. Perhaps you know what it's like to try to dance without being too graceful, or to try to be affectionate without showing too much natural feeling. (It's easier to banter and put someone down.) It takes a lot of energy to be uptight; it took a lot of love to get me free.

I met a woman who was genuine. By her love I blossomed and grew staight towards the sun as God intended. In a zillion ways she showed me how to love. (Guys take note: when your lover touches you or suddenly snuggles with you, it does not always mean you have to rush to "do it." Ask her yourself.)

Can you believe in a woman who will say the L-word to more than one person under heaven? One who will say "I love you" without premarital sex? How I rejoiced in her fun and laughter. I like to imagine her skipping down the ramp at church, or leading the Sunday school kids in a lively game.

But it will never be.

One day, scared and trembling, my friend who loved me said she was gay... gay! She waited for my response, pale, breathless, all her color and sparkle gone, and I felt in my heart a mighty anger. I wanted to bellow, "Who did this to you?" My friend looked like she had seen a specter. That specter was society. "Who hurt you so badly?"

How could anyone ever tell you that you were anything less than beautiful?

We held each other tightly and the sun came out again. But now there was a small cloud, and there always would be. Somewhere out there are people who hate my friend.

How dare they?

Sean Crawford

in a bible belt city,

north of enemy territory,

February 2009

Better to Sow

2011-11-09T22:41:00.000-08:00

www.essaysbysean.blogspot.com

Gray sky. Chill. The fall wind rolled leaves across the campus and blew my thinning hair. I walked past a group of energetic colorful students, busy around a recycling bin. A part of me ached to belong among them. I paused and a young lady enthusiastically told me how they were being "ecological." I smiled and walked away.

I did not tell those shiny happy people that I too had once been involved, years ago, when there was nothing environmental on campus. For a time, I had taken my turn at single handedly keeping the dream to recycle alive by rolling six pop can carts down to the loading dock. There I got up to my biceps in the grease and food that people forced inside the carts. The carts were so novel: for some folks those two little can sized holes were beyond their ken.

The Campus Recycling Committee patiently met each obstacle, worked things out, and evolved a system. So many details! It took us two years of serious meetings, I think, before, at last, the first six recycling carts were set out in Mac Hall.

All along I felt that some students disapproved, that we worked amid scorn and disbelief that we'd ever succeed. The campus was a little more conservative then. Once, in the shadow of a nuclear peace banner, a man told me it was "too hard on my psyche" to work on a hopeless cause. Since then the Berlin Wall has tumbled and scores of recycling bins have sprung up on campus.

As I walked away from those warm students on that cold fall day, I reflected that a few people will always find the hope, the belief, and the spirit to work for change.

And, under that grey sky, I knew one thing for sure.The old prophets were right... It is better to sow than to reap.

Sean crawford

gazing at a future unseen,
Calgary Alberta

originally published as a Viewpoint in The Gauntlet, our University of Calgary student newspaper, October 28, 1993

Fallen Dreamer

2011-11-05T18:34:00.000-07:00

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I remember: In the mid 1980's, on a darkened stage at the university, an old Trojan woman lay grieving alone, holding her shoulders off the floor, whispering "Who shall I blame, then?... The Greeks? Helen?... ... All of us... All of us..."

And then she was gone and only a little sacred fire burned there, alone, as all of us left.

Much later in this essay I will "connect the dots."

Last night I was moved by hearing the music while reading the search engine lyrics for Army Dreamer by Kate Bush, with comments by less than a dozen "reviewers." Perhaps if I was a woman I would have cried; one of the reviewers did cry; another reviewer was a father, with a son in Afghanistan, who said he found the background army sounds almost too much to bear. I have Kate's Album but since I only play it on road trips I had never before seen the lyrics writ plain. I hadn't realized, for example, that "tears on a tin box" was Mum huddling over an army issue casket.

I suppose I was affected by the context of my previous half hour on the computer before I reached Kate's song. I had begun, you see, by going straight to the youtube video of the old spiritual Samson and Delilah as interpreted by the British lead singer of Garbage, Shirley Manson. For a season two episode of Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles the song ran for its entirety, four and half minutes, without any dialogue being audible. I admired such craftsmanship. I admired the symmetry, too, for the same technique had been used for season one: For a no-dialogue scene the song had been one about judgment day, sung by Johnny Cash, When the Man Comes Around. This while a robot is sending people to meet their maker.

Perhaps, last night, I was made vulnerable by a fan video, one where a music track of This Woman's Work is Never Done, really beautiful and transcendent, plays over clips of Sarah Conner, a single mother. I watched once more as Sarah is helpless, too far away to intervene, as a robot raises a pistol in one swift sure motion and shoots down a boy as he flees for his life and the boy falls hard.

During the season two Shirly Manson song Sarah gets her chance. This time, as the pistol hammer falls, she leaps in front of her son and she pulls her son down like a secret serviceman taking a bullet for the president. The apostle John noted, "Greater love hath no man..." (And Kate sings, But he never even made it to his twenties)

A reviewer noted that Kate packs her words with meaning, never choosing any phrase merely to made a rhyme. Yes.

___

The last time I attended a military funeral there were probably too many people in attendance to fit into the cathedral; we used the rodeo grounds. I knew the parents. They had a nice Russian wolfhound. They had a girl. And once they had a boy- their only begotten son.

Although I sat where the attendees, except for the couple with me, didn't know the young man personally, I could hear from all around me, at all times in the service, people needing their handkerchiefs. The service included projected slides, reminiscing, and a family friend, a folksinger, with a guitar. He sang of a father's shock and outrage, "My boy came home in a box!"

At this many of the mourners, many of them in uniform, hesitated, were puzzled at first, wondering how to react. To a young person of generation Y, I guess, there would be nothing amiss. After all, war is diverse: the soldiers write letters and they use futuristic satellite telephones; they come home walking and in a "box." That's life.

The reason my peers hesitated is our legacy of Vietnam. Even teenage recruits share a cultural memory of being called "baby killers" and of returning Nam veterans at the airport being spat upon. How sweet then that Kate Bush can be so kind. And so informed- she starts her song by trilling BFPO. I wonder how many civilians realize this means British Forces Posted Overseas?

Kate and I were both born in the 1950's, we both remember the home front during the Vietnam war. It was boomer Steve Jobst of Apple who said in a commencement address, after surviving cancer, that you can only connect the dots by looking backward. Now I understand Vietnam better than I did back then.

___

First dot: With our U.S. casualties in the tens of hundreds over there in Iraq we have as yet no protests or riots over here. No campus activity. Call me cynical, but surely this is because today there is no conscription, no lottery style draft. I remember how during the '60's some older person wrote a book about the draft, saying sympathetically that it is normal U.S. behavior to worry about saving your own skin. Maybe so. Hence today's quiet campus.

Second dot: People re-arrange their world-view to integrate their most pressing needs. For example, a drug user of my aquaintance who "needs his drugs" has no clue about the politico-civic issues around the 1930's prohibition of alcohol. To seek any such clues would destroy his excuse that "prohibition never works." And just as a drug user may feel disengaged from the life of democracy, so too may a drug dealer, just like a convict, need to claim that city hall and big business and the police are criminals too. And many prostitutes will claim that marriage is prostitution. (I used to have breakfast with a prostitute.)

There was a loving young housewife married to a soldier. This was in the '60's, during Vietnam. And one day some other young woman directed some shocking, very venomous, hatred at the poor wife. As it happens, the blame for war was nailed by Euripides over 2,000 years ago in ancient Greece: surely by modern times it must be clear that targeting a young housewife for blame is just plain wrong. The wife, after she recovered, had a theory. Her understanding of the verbal assault was this: The girl felt an overwhelming pressure to take action and then, in her hysteria, from her pressing need, arranged her world-view so she could feel justified in targeting the wife.

That's crazy, but it makes sense. Now I can understand other crazy things as being from hysteria, things like believing servicemen were baby killers. And perhaps -I could be wrong- I may finally grasp why "responsible" citizens still can't say, "innocent soldiers." Perhaps if they said so then they couldn't bear their own guilt.

Third dot: College students were exempt from conscription. The baby boomer students shared with each other tricks to use after graduation to further avoid the draft. To sustain their world-view of separation from the non-college boys... and to abandon those idealistic working class boys to a harsh fate- ...this must have surely affected the middle class. I can't even begin to imagine what twisted guilt they must have suppressed.

I may never fully understand such boomers because although I've become middle-class in my later adult life, I was raised working class and "on the wrong side of the tracks." My sort never wore teeth retainers or went to Disneyland.

___

Dots connected: If you are of generation Y, with an even handed view towards the armed forces, then please understand: your easy sanity is from being raised in these saner times. People my age, conditioned and re-arranged by the stress of Vietnam, may require a lot of effort to become as liberated as you.

The most liberated people in society have traditionally been the entertainers. Billy Shakespeare and his pals knew that being anti-Jew was wrong. (Oh, how they slyly "bashed" the bigots in The Merchant of Venice) Today stage artists know that bashing homosexuals is wrong...Yet, back in the '60's, actors and singers, like snarling distressed lemmings, would all rush to fiercely bash teenage soldiers, and their wives, and even sillier targets. ( Kate sings But he couldn't afford... ...But he never had a proper education...)

At last I understand why I could offer no answers, no alternate world-views, to such "long haired freaky people" at the time. Back then I was exempt from the hysteria. Not that I was cynical, but I could think for myself. Today I am still "gun shy:" I still expect every long haired pop star to be nuts.

Kate Bush, though, is exceptional. Having a mind of her own, she has a kind, healing, gentle sympathy for poor working class boys. I knew those boys, I know their dreams.

Kate knows, too.

Sean Crawford

April 2009,

Calgary

The fallen soldier, killed in action, was Corporal Nathan Hornburg.

Obama Killing Americans

2011-10-31T18:47:00.000-07:00

essaysbysean.blogspot.com

There’s a war on. And Yanks are killing Yanks. I would remind my European friends the Americans are not taking action against Britain’s IRA or Canada’s FLQ, not unless such terrorists cross the border south, going into Ireland or the US of A. No, the US has not declared war on conventional civil war terror but on cross-border, what President Bush calls “global reach,” terror. If the US did not overtly intervene when Pakistani Muslim terrorists crossed over and shot up the Indian financial district of Mumbai (Bombay) it is only because the US was already overstretched in that part of the world. That can happen when you fight a war on multiple fronts. And now Yanks are killing Yanks.

My European friends, along with US citizens, must be wondering how US President Barak Obama could apparently sign a death warrant, as in a “kill or capture list,” against a US citizen in Yemen. The government of the people and by the people sent a drone to strike one of the people. (September 30 2011) Granted, Anwar Awlaki was a terrorist, but he was also a civilian and a US citizen. Certainly the US constitution does not cover such things. On this topic, concerned experts are surely addressing the various issues involved and making clear the various perspectives, so that, in the end, an answer may emerge.

I realize readers on the Internet will prefer that an essay be very short, illuminating only a single perspective. So here, then, is one perspective. I am not a US American, but I am a North American. Perhaps I can interpret things for a concerned overseas audience.

Here, instead of a totalitarian government demanding total devotion to only one thing, we have a plurality of loyalties. My dad is a lodge member, and a legionnaire, and formerly British. If you saw the Oscar winning movie Fargo, then you may recall how people in Dakota talked like Scandinavians, “yah?” while also loyal to America. Other loyalties would include people being half Muslim or Jew, while also being half atheist. A Roman Catholic president, John Kennedy, said publicly that he would put the US constitution above the pope. (Because he swore to God to uphold it)

The American ever expanding economy has ever depended on new immigrants who, forsaking all others, make an expensive one-way trip to a new land. This new-fangled 20^th century practice of dual citizenship is something that has really only ramped up after cheaper travel, in the decades since my father’s youth.

I would ask you to imagine a man from, say, “Yalta,” a man named Joe. In America as a teenager, Joe might say he will get dual citizenship when he turns 18, if Yalta allows it. (In Japan, for example, on your birthday you have to choose which nation) Joe might say he will be of Yalta and America. Joe might say he has dual citizenship, with loyalty to the United States, but only if the USA does not declare economic sanctions against Yalta. As for all the other US Americans, part of their culture is their tradition of immigration. Call them idealistic, or call them coldly practical, regardless: They expect every dual citizen to be American, with no if’s, and’s or but’s.

I saw this culture reflected in an army legend during the brief years of the Republic of South Vietnam. The G.I.’s told stories of a white man seen fighting against the US, a man seen fighting alongside the black pajama boys. According to legend, this guy wore a US style cowboy hat, but he was not American, he was French. It's possible. There may well have been French plantation owners who hated Yankee imperialists, who had grown up playing with Vietnamese boys, and who had been to Paris and soaked up communism. To me the significance of this legend, which I believe to be false, is this: The American boys told it to each other. Consider: When Vietnam had been French Indochina, would the French soldats and Foreign Legionnaires have told that story? Would the British Tommys, fighting the communists among the jungles and rubber plantations of Malaya, have that legend? No, this story reflects something in the American mind. That cowboy hat is a powerful symbol.

The Americans, as Wiki-leaks has shown, are a naïve people who believe in fairness. And yet a mainstream US publication like Reader’s Digest saw nothing wrong with running an article back in the 1960’s called Get Yamamoto! You may recall that Yamamoto was a key Japanese leader in WWII. The allies having broken the Japanese cipher, a US squadron of uniformed pilots raced through the sky and met the uniformed Yamamoto and shot him down. Things that are both cruel and unusual during peacetime are normal in wartime. American readers saw this air strike as quite fair.

What if the squadron leader had been a farm boy from Dakota? What if he was on a combat patrol one day, planning to intercept a nameless routine Japanese flight? And what if he had already heard a story that one of the English speaking islands of US citizens, not Guam but a smaller one, had a bunch of Quislings in cowboy hats? Imagine if during his flight his radio crackles to tell him of hard intelligence of such a clear target. “What’s your position and fuel, alpha leader? You must be getting close to the Japanese. Could you divert to the island? It’s your call.”

“Hello H.Q. I hate the enemy, but I will turn away from them to kill renegades!” And he banks his plane and leads his squadron off course.

European friends take note: Although you may accidentally snarl as you say "Hitler," the word “renegade,” for you, has all the heat of a Scandinavian winter sun on the horizon: a weak pale thing. But to Americans, the word has heat and passion. It goes right back to their terrible Indian wars. I can assure you that while they may have dimly hated those enemy terrorists in Mumbai, they hated this Yemeni bastard as much as all those Pakistanis put together.

Before you get judgemental about Obama and my US cousins, I would ask that your vocabulary include that awful word.

Sean Crawford
on the great plains,
October 2011

Two Sad Women

2011-10-28T19:34:00.000-07:00

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A nice spring evening. Two sad women joined me at my table in my favorite old greasy spoon cafe. They said they liked the new environmental bumper sticker on my car outside, and I said what a nice surprise to see them. And because they were caring idealists we talked about the sad state of the world, about stuff that could make us quite glum or infuriated if we let it. But the dire state of the planet was not why they were sad.

No, it was just that one friend, especially, was having a blue day. No use pretending otherwise, we agreed. Let's not deny the reality of mood swings or whatever it was that might have unconsciously triggered such a day of shadows. So instead- we laughed. We savored greasy food and sucked old-fashioned milkshakes and we laughed. Blame the laughter on me.

Towards the end of the evening, as we headed out the door, I joked, "Oh my God! Here you are trying to be blue and I've medicated your feelings! Oh, how awful!" As we stood by our cars we agreed it was sure nice to have switched to a cheerful evening. And off I drove.

As I cruised along the river I could have reflected on how my inner nerd had been satisfied by our serious talk of science and the environment, or how my inner child got to show off my travel photographs, or how my grownup self got to have an adult conversation. Instead I thought about humor. Children laugh so easily while we adults are so serious. What gives? We all know how to be heavily burdened, and competitive, and worried about "enough-ness." But humor? We claim to prize it but we sure don't do it much. In fact my default self- let's face it- is to be a serious nerd! (can there ever be a non-serious nerd?)

Or, at least, that used to be my usual self, back in another life. But on this night I was able to help two friends escape from gloom. Isn't that nice? But how?

It helped that my travel pictures allowed me to "pull their legs." First, I showed a set of pics from the "San Juan Islands"...actually from a town a couple hundred miles inland that had been used as a movie set! (for Snow Falling on Cedars) We chatted. Then, back to the photos, I showed the very crowded "beaches of Rio de Janeiro" where crowds increase towards dusk as the heat of the day eases off... actually pics of a day of international fireworks in Vancouver!

So to my "how?" question I find two answers: sudden permission to be silly, and repetition: It would not have been the same to omit the chatting for repetition allows for a rhythm to build...or something like that. Speaking from my nerd side: To merely have a series of jokes, without any chatting, would have been irritating. Say, did you know that songs use repetition? There is something comforting in the moment of returning to a familiar chorus. Like a conversation that turns again to warm safe laughter.

When I spoke of "sudden permission" I might have more accurately said, "Sudden surprise permission"... Surprise is an integral part of humor, and of traveling too, for surprise seems to catapult us into the child world. Indeed, a common romantic moment is when our sweetheart makes us a surprise meal. Presto!, a "surprise moment" of loosening up for the magical child to be taken care of. In that state, wondrous things can happen.

Humor, I suppose, is a way of taking care of those we care about. For a nerd to learn humor it might be best to start with taking care of people via small talk. The principle is the same, I think: putting the human heart ahead of seriousness. In conclusion, let's take care of each other.

As my new bumper sticker reads: ...We all live downstream.

Sean Crawford

On a nice evening

footnote: one of my favorite comic book collections is Strangers in Paradise. The comic's title comes from the Tony Bennett song that comments that without love we are just- (title)

Citizens, Jobs and the Liberal Arts

2011-10-24T14:48:00.000-07:00

essaysbysean.blogspot.com

I don’t have a Liberal Arts degree myself, but at least I have a degree, a degree in my chosen profession… There is a lot of regret in the phrase “at least.”

Looking across the USA, I wonder if historians will one day refer to these years as The Troubles, this polarized distressful time when civilized discourse has been replaced by personal attacks. Is even academia embedded in The Troubles? I wonder, as across the land I see the respectful search for truth being discarded by those who are full of passionate certainty, devoid of humble spirit, and devoid, as well, of any respect for other searchers.

I have great respect for the Liberal Arts.

I have mentioned Scott Berkun’s essay-blog before. Recently, in the comments to an October 17 2011 blog-post exploring the value of philosophy degrees, I found this one by a guy I will call Joe. The bitterness of Joe’s last line perfectly represents The Troubles.

Peter Drucker indicates management is a Liberal Arts profession. (Others) suggests college is not the place to really learn. I have found as much useful professional information in (some) books as I did in my entire graduate program. Costs less and I don’t have to schedule my life around class times.

Challenge yourself to grow and invest in that growth. Let the folks who really need to waste money do so. Encourage the reductions in grants for college since you are paying for someone else to waste their time.

Such a bitter line. It baffles me that Joe has gone in for extra learning, as in first a post-secondary degree and then a post-graduate degree, and still, somehow, Joe values neither learning nor his fellow students. Did he go through his youthful campus years as a hard atom, bereft of community? Joe reminds me of that fellow in the 19^th century comic novel Three Men in a Boat who “never looked at the stars and wept, he knew not why.” My hypothesis? Joe went through his degree years hoping for a job, not an education; he missed out on the stars because he wanted data for his “professional information.” He was, in short, a mercenary.

History note: The Roman legions were volunteers who fought for free, with the army supplying the rations, catapults and so forth. As free men from a poor city they outfought the mercenary (for pay) soldiers of wealthy Carthage… Perhaps it’s a symptom of The Troubles that today’s kids don’t know that in the republic of Rome men fought as citizens, not as conscripts. (Draftees)

In my day campus vandalism, such as writing on toilet stalls, was only by undergraduates. Such vandalism was because some of them, while having gone in with barely above average IQs, felt burdened, felt like conscripts, felt they “hafta be there” in order to “get a good job.” The graduate students lived vandal-free because they had freely volunteered for their extra learning. I wonder, after reading Joe’s comment, if this has changed. I wonder, too, if those who have missed the stars, missed out on the awesome spectacle of humankind’s slow hard climb out of the muck, are the same ones who are part of The Troubles.

History note II: In Drucker’s day there were faculties of economics and sociology, but not of business. Drucker, to the surprise of academia, insisted on writing educational (not training) works in the field of business. Then Drucker invented “management” as something that could be taught. His first work was The End of Economic Man, where he explained that money isn’t everything.

In replying to Joe’s comment, I referred to Drucker, but I don’t know if Joe “got it.” I wrote that Drucker was expected by his parents to go straight from high school to college. Instead, at the age of 17, an age when a year is forever, Drucker went off to apprentice for one year with a merchant trading company in Hamburg. Surely he did this to learn about the world, not to get a job as a merchant. After his year he went to college and earned a law degree. Again, his purpose was to learn, for he never made the slightest attempt to practice law. To me college is not where “you hafta lose years” out of your life, rather, college is a bittersweet part of your life, valuable for its own sake.

Joe is probably correct in thinking the tricks and techniques and vocabulary of business can be learned outside of school, such as on the job or weekends at the library. This was what people did in my father's day, before Drucker came along. Not so for the liberal arts, not on your own.

For example, successful novelist and college teacher John Gardener wrote that reading Shakespeare on your own was no substitute for being led through the work by a professor. Yes indeed.

A library teaching machine can give the facts, but it is being on campus, having contact with others, that gives you feelings about the facts. There is no substitute for blithely saying something that is commonly believed in your clan, only to see, in response, a look of revulsion on the face of your professor. (I’m remembering a blond South African who said something anti-Negro. By graduation the student had changed) It is from the liberal arts, as the war on terror rumbles on in the background, that a clan member, and Member of Parliament, Ayaan Hirsi Ali, extracts her concepts, concepts for putting the war into perspective for herself and her constituents. As I documented in an earlier essay, (Backfire, Sept 2010) no terrorist of the “global reach” or “cross-border” jihad sort has a degree in the liberal arts. (In contrast, conventional terrorism, of the within-the-state civil war sort, attracts all types: Philosopher Jean Paul Sartre claimed to have been part of the resistance in Vichy France)

I suppose the ideal, for someone of college (above average) IQ, would be to get a three or four year degree and then get a one or two year “after degree” for job/professional training. (My own campus has added a fourth year to the degree, adding it at the bottom as a "high school make up year," according to the vice president) I know you can do this already for journalism in Ontario, and for social work in Victoria. The latter stipulates, in the university course catalogue, that it has to be a real degree, and not in, say, engineering.

I greatly respect engineers. In the faculty of engineering, of course, the sheer course load means there is a limit as to what non-engineering courses can be taken. Still, the faculty offers an honest university degree: It is not a conservatory of engineering. With a quasi-rounded education the students will think and ask questions. Upon graduation the engineers will be given a plain steel ring to symbolize some needed thinking. By the way, if “nerdy” engineering students are “wild,” it’s not solely from sheer stress. (Accidental pun) After graduation, they will require the strict respectability of a banker or undertaker or married person. It’s no surprise if the student years are something of a stag party.

In contrast, the future builders enrolled at technical school, -and let me say that three of my siblings have tech diplomas- are not there to learn the questions but the answers. They work quickly right up until bedtime, deriving the answers to things like fluid flow rates, or interstate highway gradients. Meanwhile, back (time) at university (space) I was supposed to have more free time than they did: My research papers had a far off due date, on purpose, in order to give me the emotional space-and-time to sit under the old apple tree and create new questions and original insights. Apples fall, and maybe… maybe planets orbit not from gravity but from following space-time curvature.

Tech students have a different role than I did: Working on the answers during every available minute, they are not given time to study history and ask questions. For example, during the post-war years, if they are learning to build the “military and interstate highway system, “the interstate” for short, (Historical Note: “military” is to get around the US constitution forbidding autobahns) then they won’t ask whether neighborhoods should be torn asunder to reduce interstate driving time by almost ten minutes. Nor ask, "Why is it always the Black neighborhoods?" Nevertheless, if someone with a degree in the liberal arts asks a question, just once in his lifetime, and then helps save an ethnic neighborhood from being blasted into history, then, surely, his college grant has just paid for itself.

It’s tech school that gives you a job, not college. I never hear, as a term of praise, of a “successful plumber.” Because the risk is low, so is the praise. I think university should be for volunteers who accept the risk of not being guaranteed a job, just as Roman citizens, subsidized by the city-state, risked volunteering for the legions. How glorious. I think my siblings, as taxpayers, subsidized me at university, as I in turn have subsidized the upcoming generations, in order for these students in our fine democracy to ask vital questions. We all have our parts to play. After high school some will go to tech, others straight to work; some will marry and have children, others will adopt. I’m not too sure about Joe. Like many during The Troubles, he sounds too bitter. Unlike him, I don’t begrudge “college grants” and subsidies. To paraphrase a post-war proverb, “It takes money from all the village to raise a child.”

God save the Queen.

Sean Crawford

Calgary, Alberta

October 2011

Footnotes:

~Peter Drucker is one of an honored handful of Americans who supported Japan in their post-war economic miracle. They didn’t believe him, at first, when he told them how fast they could rebuild. Another such American is Deeming. Much of the so-called “Japanese management,” such as in the Michael Keaton movie Gung Ho, is actually Deeming’s invention.

Even before The Troubles, US citizens had a listening problem: In the US auto industry, only the junior leaders, until well after the oil crises, would go to hear Deeming, just as how in the US army only junior officers, during the Vietnam years, would be sent to the British Jungle Warfare School. In Japan, in stark contrast, the most senior executives would go to hear Deeming and Drucker. (My essay of June 2011 contrasts the British commitment against jungle communist guerrillas with that of the US army; my essay quoting Vietnam correspodant David Halberstam, of April 2010, shows how Detroit would have faced The Reckoning even if the oil crises had not hurried things along)

~Speaking of engineers needing a stag party, in Japan secondary school is hard, and later being a “salaryman” is hard, and that probably explains why college is so easy. Like having time for racecars in the manga Oh My Goddess! They deserve that break.

~I have written essays on this site about “anime.” Today there is a popular Japanese animated weekly TV show, based on a best selling novel, Moshidora, known as Management from Drucker (Not sure of the future English title, I don’t think it’s been translated yet) A high school girl has to replace her sick friend as manager for a baseball team. She goes to the bookstore to learn to be a better sports managER and by mistake picks up Drucker’s book on manageMENT. Then she applies the knowledge to the team during the baseball season. Like I said, Drucker is honored in Japan.

~I am teaching another leadership course at work, starting in November. I will have seven students who will “get off the floor” for my weekly class. Yes, I will tell them about Drucker!

Man and Girl

2011-10-20T06:11:00.000-07:00

www.essaysbysean.blogspot.com

I am a middle-aged man. If I sinned with a teenage girl and if I felt I needed to tell two nice old ladies at church about it, then how could I confess? I can't just blurt it out, no, better to start by saying "Teenage girls like me..." No, I'm scared, I'd rather start with, "I like the dead end roads in Calgary.

"They are so exotic compared to where we parked as teens back home. For one thing, the signs are in French, cul de sac, and the street opens to a keyhole shape with neat little shallow curbs..."

No, best to start with "In high school I role modeled off of a buddy a grade older than I"... I used to go to Jack Lee's place every week. I remember once seeing the fireworks as he broke up with his girl: as a ladies man he was as unpolished as I back then.

Where he excelled, I thought, was in being friendly. Along our school's hallowed halls he'd go waving and smiling and giving a cheery word to so many students. It wasn't until next year that I read Peyton Place and began to grasp how so many of us were troubled teens, each with our own story.

My senior high school wasn't nearly as bad as Buffy's Sunnydale High, or the one in Mean Girls. Perhaps because both of our junior high feeder schools had a drop out rate of about 50%: now, those schools were bad. Still, we had a vague hierarchy and I was, at best, an average Joe. In my junior year I started being nice like Jack.

And one quiet afternoon, after the school had emptied out, I was going down the corridor and I noticed, standing at his locker on the other side of the hall, a nice modest senior who, in a U.S. school, would be called "popular." He was rich; teammates called him "the native" because of his Hawaiian suntan. He was handsome. He was captain of our school's biggest sports team. I am tempted to lie and say he was also president of our student council, but that would be gilding the lily. We had probably never conversed.

I remember that as I walked along that day he slowly turned at his locker. I walked, he turned...he was shyly waiting for his "hello!" And at that moment, as I said "Hi!," I understood: we all have our needs. And if I am too shy to reach out to an upperclassman then I am in the wrong. My mantra: "Because I am afraid to love, you are alone."

It's been a long time since I attended a high school pep rally. Today "rallying" for my city spirit is a private silent responsibility. Nowadays, as a middle-aged man, I park at a cul de sac to walk a grassy path over to the Tim Hortons for a coffee. At the end of the cul de sac lives a nameless teenage girl. I sometimes see her entering her door, or playing badminton on the road with her dad. I wish her well; I love my city. And one quiet evening on the path the girl said "Hello"...and I was mute. Why? Was I surprised and shy? Or surly and senile? I would like our teens to expect that in this world they will like people and be liked in return. That evening, when I failed to say "hello," I both failed the girl and I sinned. I forgot my mantra: "Because I am afraid to love, you are alone..."

To the two old ladies at church I will say, "I sinned and I'm sorry." All I can do is try to do better next time. If I establish good habits now, if I habitually look for the good and show warmth then someday I won't be old and grumpy. Instead, like my pals at church, I will be old and kind.

Sean Crawford

People, Poppies and Perception Checks

2011-10-17T17:25:00.000-07:00

www.essaysbysean.blogspot.com

In Flanders fields, the poppies blow...

Note to offshore readers: In the British Commonwealth countries it is common for people to wear a red plastic poppy near (Armistice Day) November 11, "Lest we forget" with the proceeds, via the legion, going to the needy veterans. The poem, In Flanders Fields, was written by Canadian Lt-Colonel John McCrae after the death of a young Lieutenant who had been his student in civilian life. McCrae did not survive the war.

"The torch

(... from failing hands we throw the torch/

Be yours to hold it high/ If ye break faith with us who die/

We shall not sleep...)

is not a gun: It's peace."

-My grade five teacher, Mr. Thompson, back in the days when our fathers, veterans, were middle aged schoolteachers, coaches and Scout Masters.

Have you heard? Away out east some old war veterans are dismayed and disturbed. Very little news has reached us back here, but anyway, it seems some folks are proffering their white poppies as a replacement for the traditional red ones that they profess to see as making war “romantic.”

Romantic? Really? When my father gave up years of his young life? When my mother’s high school friends, their names now hanging on the old school wall, are forever young? My dad never misses a November 11 service; my mum can never attend because she cries so much. Can anyone gaze at so many rows of silent white crosses amidst the gently blowing red poppies and still say war is romantic?

While I can understand how for very young soldiers a bit of denial is very healthy, I have no doubt that young veterans, and civilians like you and I, and old veterans, are all fully aware of the facts of death. Never mind how Hollywood romanticizes death and war and crime. Hollywood shows many deaths in movies about, say, criminals, and in a TV series about a mafia family. I admit that while I am watching I might pretend that crime families are "romantic," but at the end of the day, in reality, I still wouldn’t want my sister to marry into one-Never!

If you and I know that war is Bad, and poppies are Good, then why don’t those guys back east? In theory, a man -and somehow I imagine a man, not a woman- who cares enough to make white poppies would also care enough to do a perception check. He would easily walk down the street and ask the butcher, baker and hot dog maker, “Do red poppies portray war as romantic?” I know dam well what my parents, along with almost everyone else, would say.

So why don’t the eastern dudes, those modern day “long haired hippies,” bother to ask? I think I found an answer in my favorite 1960’s campus cartoon: Doonesbury. The creator, Gary Trudeau, gave the lead activist the name “Megaphone Mark.” I think Mark’s first name means he has an egotistical vested interest in neither hearing, nor respecting, other views.

It’s such a pity... for your campus years could be a time for broadening your mind by meeting diverse people, just as the "school of life," although with more difficulty, can also be broadening. But not if you start to stay more and more in your comfort zone… until one day you reach a tipping point… and then from that day onwards pick all your friends for being clones of yourself.... and cut off from your life the non-clones.

For me, as an observer of the human condition, in this, our Romantic Glorious democracy, my choice is clear: For me to seek a narrow life, a false comfort, would be unworthy of me. I love the people too much to cut most of them off.

Sean Crawford,

On the Great Plains,

October 2011

Footnote: Part of the above poem, In Flanders Fields, is on the Canadian 10 dollar bill.

Battlestar Galactica and Reading

2011-10-14T13:12:00.000-07:00

essaysbysean.blogspot.com

"If only Barrack Obama's enemies had known what a scandal generator the Nobel Peace Prize would be, they'd have been hankering for him to win it last year."

Lisa Van Dusen, Calgary Sun Washington Bureau, October 14, 2009

Lately I've been reading about the recent terribly uncivil state of public discourse. Maybe the pendulum has really swung... or maybe this is permanent. Now crazy things are being believed, people prefer to indulge in hatred not research, and all this while the electronic media -or at least the taking heads- seem willing to sunder journalism from ethics. Why?

Why now? Many people are discussing this state of affairs on the essay-review website of Chicago Tribune movie critic Roger Ebert. One fellow proposed that this recent decline in common sense comes from broadcasters going digital (more channels) and going to 24 hours. (more time to fill)

I think part of the problem is fewer people are reading newspapers. Hence they don't realize that journalistic ethics have always been compromised in the electronic media. I think the public, like any boardroom of business managers, needs to first know what is Right before they are constrained to compromise.

During a discussion on "journalism" a friend made reference to the Fox TV news. I didn't have the heart to tell him "Fox isn't real," that I didn't know of any city daily that was a Fox-style newspaper. It's too bad. If you don't read, then you don't have the same expectations for "real journalism." You won't even have the term "infotainment" in your vocabulary. This I know because the word was new when I said it to my night school class of older university students in their final semester. It's too bad: in their university education they had missed out on grasping everyday media.

... Fox News executive Michael Clemente said, "The average news consumer can certainly distinguish between the A-section of the newspaper and the editorial page, which is what our programing represents."

Only it's not called Fox Opinion, it's all called Fox News.

Lisa Van Dusen, October 15, 2009

While the public assumes that university people are smart, well, I've heard of graduates who don't read books or newspapers.

Reading has enhanced my understanding of everyday democracy partly because reading has enhanced my vocabulary. My favorite essayist, George Orwell, once wrote how the the word "tumbril" has taken on a sinister tone since Dickens wrote, "It was the best of times, it was the worst of times." (Incidentally in one of the Star Trek movies Admiral Kirk receives as a gift A Tale of Two Cities.) I don't know whether a nonreader would know that word, but it makes a great line in the final season of Battlestar Galactica. A distinguished lady is politically imprisoned, awaiting her imminent death. They send only one drab person to lead her away. The lady says with contempt, "You should have sent a tumbril." Perfect!

Another word of the final season, which I looked up, is "harbinger." The word comes from old English and German. It means someone who goes ahead to find, and then announce, a safe harbor or fortified base, hence the related term herald. The colonists face a dilemma: Is a certain undead character a harbinger of Earth, or, as an oracle proclaims, "a harbinger of death?" The choice to use that word on the show was just so right.

Sean Crawford

Footnotes:
~I originally wrote this as an introduction/link to Readers Enjoy Battlestar Galactica, which was then on my old website.
~Regarding cyberspace, my constructive criticism is in Polite Blogs, April 2010
~I first explored uncivil discourse back in April 2010 in Decent Democracy.
~in case you go there, and read the footnote, be advised I analyzed uncivil professors in a subsequent essay.

Editing and Climategate

2011-10-11T20:58:00.000-07:00

essaysbysean.blogspot.com

By "editing" I don't mean things like that guy at wikipedia barring contributions of global warming skeptics. (See Murphy's link below)

I mean editing my own manuscript.

Note: For a good introduction to the scandal of climategate, for a transcript and vidio, see this link to the CBC's Rex Murphy. The video alone is terrific, but on the CBC National page are just a few links of Murphy's that will get you to things like evil "editing." ( Say, you may recall that in an earlier essay of mine I found a guy doing a 1984 style editing of Michael Crichton on YouTube: the rot is pervasive.)

I thought I would show you a "version 2.5" of my letter that was published in the local newspaper, the Calgary Herald. (I'm copying Paul Graham; he did a an essay called Version 1.0 regarding the purpose of modern essays) I want to encourage people to edit their own stuff. My point in this: Please don't feel your every word and comma is golden. Just let it go: After a flicker of sadness, I didn't mind my piece going to half length.

Context: A couple weeks after climategate broke, when the mainstream media were still not covering the story, a couple guest columnists (not reporters) addressed the issue of AGW: Anthropogenic (man made) Global Warming. As you would have predicted from my Global Hot Air piece, someone wrote in to angrily to attack them. His letter was headlined Evidence still Valid and it ran, I guess, right up to (if not over) the maximum word count of 250 words. So I wrote one comfortably under that count. It ran a couple days later along with a geologist's letter. The geologist wrote that global warming has happened before, and will again, down the ages, but there is no proof of any link to people.

They gave my letter the headline Heroism

My first draft, 1.0, was over the allowed word count for Herald letters. As Stephen King notes in his book On Writing (recommended by web blog-essayist "Stevey") the formula is [second draft = first draft - 10%] So my shorter version 2.0, shown here, is what I sent in. I call the Herald's version 2.5. I have put the 2.5 parts in red inside my own 2.0 piece; then I've put 2.5 below.

I liked how two informed guest columnists, Mr. Gunter and Professor Cooper, (Nov. 24, Dec. 2) put :"climategate" (the leaked e-mail scandal) in perspective. I disliked how they were attacked by David Reich in his letter (Dec.3) headlined "Evidence Still Valid." Civic conversation, and scientific conversation too, can't happen if people can't be civil. At least Gunter and Cooper are semi-public figures, semi-used to confrontation. Not me. Such attacks are why "man-made climate change" lacks credibility: like the "scientists" exposed in the e-mails, some people want to limit conversation, not increase it. It takes a hero to go against the "consensus of scientists" who believe in attack. For me, Science is NOT consensus; one hero, like Galileo, is all I need. But, like Italians ignoring Galileo, Reid ignored how Gunter's piece, before Gunter even got to the issue of e-mail, had 12 column inches citing evidence from this year, such as Indian scientist's measuring Himalayan glaciers. Reid avoids such science. Reid even avoids common sense when he refers to "groups of climate-change skeptics surreptitiously accepting money from oil companies." My favorite skeptic was a writer too proud and too rich to take any money: the late Michail Crichton. His web site has terrific skeptical writing; he read every word of thick climate reports. While Reid is as bad example, Crichton is my hero.

Well. Looking at the colors, I see my letter was not so much "edited" as "cut for space." I was once asked over the telephone to cut to fit a space, and I e-mailed back a cut version right away. As before, my words were not golden: After a flicker of annoyance, I let them go and moved on.

Heroism

For me, science is not consensus; one hero, like Galileo, is all I need. But, like Italians ignoring Galileo, David Mayne Reid ignored how Lorne Gunter's piece, before Gunter even got to the issue of e-mail, cited evidence from this year, such as Indian scientists measuring the Himalayan glaciers. Reid avoids common sense when he refers to "groups of climate-change skeptics surreptitiously accepting money from oil companies." My favourite skeptic was a writer too proud and too rich to take any money, the late Michael Crichton. His website has terrific skeptical writing; he read every word of thick climate reports. Crichton is my hero.

Footnotes:

~What of Al Gore's Oscar winning movie, An Inconvenient Truth?

Since climategate, two members of the academy of motion pictures want to force Gore to give back the Oscar they awarded him, according to the internet.

~I see that even while the British prime minister referred to skeptics as being close to flat-earthers, (AP, in the Herald Dec. 6) the British schools, after a court case, are legally required to make nine scientific inaccuracies clear to children when showing it. (Herald, Dec. 18, headlined Why Aren't Al Gore's Pants on Fire?)

Sean Crawford,
a scientist and a gentleman,
Calgary Alberta

Too Excited for Tech

2011-10-06T16:14:00.000-07:00

essaysbysean.blogspot.com

October 2011

You might think I would get all excited at all this new technology. After all, I’m a science fiction fan, as well as being a thin boned person with an excitable metabolism. So yes, I enjoy accelerating up to the “excitement” gear… but that doesn’t mean I enjoy disengaging the “common sense” gear.

I winced when an overly excited journalist, in my staid solid local newspaper, ignored standard journalistic practice: In an article, he wrote only the word “app.” Come on, app? Do you think my dear old dad would “get it?” For journalists, the standard practice is to write out any abbreviation in full, the first time it is used in an article, even if “everybody knows” what it means, because “there are new babies being born every minute who do not know.” (App means software application)

But some people get too excited. I am old enough to remember when technology was very expensive. Back when French was compulsory for admittance to university, when every second high school student was taking French, in my own high school there was only one French lab, with tapes and headphones, for my whole school. And in my community college, the computer majors had to come in at midnight to get computer time: There was only the one glassed-in computer lab. So today, just as I instinctively turn out the lights when I leave a room, I also instinctively think computers are expensive...

No wonder I am skeptical when I hear excited parents saying they want computers for every single student in every single classroom. “Computers are the wave of the future!” they say. “We have to start in grade one,” they say… as if our kids will need to put in a lifetime of man-hours on their computers, just as our aristocratic ancestors needed a lifetime on horses in order to show a “good seat.” I say, calm down.

No, I don’t want my nephew to grow up to be laughed at for being less skilled with computers; no, not in the way that less affluent little officer from Corsica was laughed at by the rich aristocrats because he couldn’t ride as well as they could. The poor little guy ended up getting a “Napoleon complex” and attacking Russia.

But what if, when our kids grow up, learning a computer will be as easy as learning a car? Or, if it’s harder than that, what if takes no longer than a year? Let that year be in the final school year. Then if employers and the community and the recent graduates themselves all report back that a year is not enough, start them in the last two years. And then, if needed, the last three. That would be a lot cheaper than a computer on every single desk in every room in the school. (Say, can the kids see their teacher over their monitor?)

Sure, I think it’s practical to have some computers for all the school grades, and, I also think it’s practical to keep from panicking about the future. From what I have seen of human nature, computers in the future will probably turn out to be like public libraries, or ten–speed bicycles: More features and gears than you’ll ever use. (Libraries in this century feature much, much more than just paper books and magazines)

Taking some time to consider human nature is common sense, and using common sense is what keeps me calm and grounded.

I learned skepticism at an early age. I was a boy, drawing rockets, when adults were saying that in the future –a far off future, mind you- people wouldn’t have rotary telephones anymore: Instead they’d have visiphones. You know, with a TV screen. So I drew visiphones, too. Later I would see them on Star Trek, and give them no thought. But as a child I thought: What about privacy? And wouldn’t people prefer to concentrate only on sound? I figured that when I grew up, and had a telephone of my own, I would often talk with my eyes closed. One day, as a teenager, I read the best seller by Helen Gurley Brown, Sex and the Single Girl. Brown said how nice it was for a girl to only attend to sound. And around that time I read an old nonfiction work by science fiction writer Arthur C. Clarke. It turned out you could buy a visiphone today! They were stocked in a warehouse, in –where else? - Southern California. The phones, it turned out, were gathering dust. One might, at the very least, expect a bunch of millionaires to “buy out the store” so they could talk to each other, but no… It seems millionaires like privacy and only attending to sound, too.

I realize, of course, that engineers and computer guys will always enjoy bending over their workbench tinkering with new gadgets and apps, but at the end of the day? They still need to lift up their eyes and reflect on human nature... I’ve written here before about fools who surf all day without ever reflecting.

My guess is that recently an entire software development team at Google got too excited. Harmfully so. The nerds must have said, “Oh boy, here’s another app feature!” They forgot to consider human nature. I will explain.

The Google host for my blog, Blogspot, allows me, for my eyes only, to see a page list of 25 of my essay titles at a time. Of course, this means scrolling down because I there’s just no room for 25 blog titles on my screen. At the bottom I can click on “see older titles.” Or, I used to. It has just changed. Now, this “new, improved” Blogspot means I have to scroll all-l-l the way back up again before I can click. It’s an irritation, a needless design error, but I’m merely irritated, not dismayed. It’s not like anyone’s feelings will be hurt. Meanwhile, until recently, I could deliberately click on “statistics.” Then I could see my “top ten posts,” by hit count, for the last “day” or “week” or “month.” It was my choice- but not anymore! Now, for the new exciting blog, always displayed right along with my list of titles, whether I want it or not, is the “cumulative hit count” for all time. Now I’m dismayed.

Going wayyyy back to my first 25 posts I am amused to see a lot of cumulative hit counts of zero. Good thing I didn’t know that at the time, eh? All that work, scrubbing and polishing my pretty little prose… all for nothing. Of course, as an “artist” and “professional” and “middle aged man” maybe I wouldn’t have minded, maybe… I can imagine a young American in Iraq, intent on the war on terror, working hard, striving to inform citizens on the home front, telling her fellow Americans some stories about the Iraqis trying to learn democracy... only to find her successive posts, about something so important to America, getting hits of zero, zero and zero. That would hurt.

Logically, I know, a brand new blog “should” get no hits, but when cold logic smacks up against the number Zero, the collateral damage is to folks of flesh and blood. So, then, why did Google remove any choice for seeing cumulative hits? What were they thinking? I usually think of nerds as being apart from the crowd, but I guess at Google a whole crowd of nerds got excited. I’m reminded of a science fiction fan’s badge from the 1970’s that read “Go Lemmings Go!”

I say, "Let's stay calm." And so I remain skeptical about tech. I am always happy to race along in the excitement gear, but only so long as my car runs on Good Sense tires.

Sean Crawford

Having two space pills for breakfast,

Then holding my cape aside,

To get into my flying car.

in the 21st century,

Calgary, Alberta

Self Esteem and Acceptance

2011-09-30T17:23:00.000-07:00

essaysbysean.blogspot.com

Introduction

The original introduction was bookended with these two paragraphs:

I was once a volunteer news reporter for the University of Calgary student newspaper, the Gauntlet. We did not allow columns. In fact, for sensible reasons, columns were explicitly banned in the Gauntlet constitution. Years later the ban was lifted without, as far as I can tell, anyone asking what those reasons might have been.

Back in my day I got around the ban by occasionally writing "essays to my editor" for the letters section. This meant effort and risk: Any column worth doing meant not merely sharing my perspective but the risk of sharing myself- and my mistakes. When I did my Self Esteem piece my editor shook my hand: obviously I was speaking to a concern of many students.

Self Esteem and Acceptance

Weight-loss through self acceptance? An aerobics leader told her diet class to put their hands on their fat parts and think loving thoughts. Everybody was amazed: Didn't they need a fierce hatred of their body, a hatred of themselves, in order to be motivated to lose those tenacious pounds? No. Self acceptance is a far, far better motivator.

Too many of us depend instead on a sort of self esteem to get us through life. But it can kill us. In the last days of 1929 well dressed businessmen were throwing themselves out of office windows. Their "self esteem" involved a sort of mental ledger where they could feel good about themselves only if their credits outweighed their bad points (debits). When they no longer had "enough" money... How sad, especially when many of their peers, equally devastated, went on to recoup their fortunes.

A friend, Jackie, once explained "self acceptance" through an example. It seems that when a baby is born it is covered with an ugly white coating that serves as a protection against infection. Jackie told me, "You accept the baby not despite the white stuff but along with it." I just looked blank. She said, "You don't get it, do you?"

"No."

"Just go home and ponder the words literally." So I did, and finally it sunk in.

Today I can be accepting of my world and the people in it. My body, my life, my essence... all are imperfectly beautiful... along with, not despite, my imperfections.

And I know now, with a peaceful finality, that I will never commit the spiritual equivalent of diving out the office window.

Sean Crawford

coping with the US-led world recession,
but staying off any ledges,
January 2009

The Art of War, New Translation

2011-09-26T16:49:00.000-07:00

essaysbysean.blogspot.com

September 2011

"... This is the world in which Steve Jobs came of age. It was, not coincidentally, a world in which it became easy to believe that the United States was in decline. Our churches looked like recreation centers, and our rec centers looked like re-education camps. Our campuses and civic spaces were defaced by ziggurats of cement. Our cities had crime-ridden towers and white elephant shopping centers where the neighborhoods used to be. Our suburbs were filled with what James Howard Kunstler described as the “junk architecture” of strip malls and ranch houses.
Then, gradually and haltingly, beauty began to make a comeback...."
From Up From Ugliness, a New York Times op-ed by Ross Douthat October 8 2011, on-line.

I’m feeling contemplative.

Here before me is a thing of beauty. Here is traditional Chinese bookbinding, a method developed during the Ming dynasty. (1338-1644) Scarlet ribbons are stitched across the spine, the thick pages folded in half with the printing on the outside only, pages with both pretty calligraphy and print. The cover is black with gold lettering; yet not as stark as that sounds, for there is also a red plaque, with gold calligraphy, pasted into an indentation.

The piece, from Amber Books, is The Art of War by Sun Zu. I’ve long owned a paperback copy, in English. This new translation, 2011, is by James Trapp. Does the world need yet another translation of this 2,500 year old text? Actually, yes. I’ll explain below. For now, I’m just contemplating this piece, dipping into it, and thanking another James, one James Clavell.

Clavell is best known to the TV watching public for the mini series Shogun, of old Japan, featuring the actor from the weekly TV series Doctor Kildare, Richard Chamberlain. A huge tome, Shogun is about as thick as a paperback can ever be, a best seller, a book that would especially appeal to fans of science fiction or history, with its intricate fantastical depictions of a lone Englishman cast ashore, a stranger in a strange land. Castles, ninjas, even bathhouses- it’s all good.

I remember, in the 1970’s, lending the book to two brothers still living on our old homestead. When I returned I found my book battered and wilted, like it had been through a whirlwind. “What the heck happened?” I asked. “We both read it, twice.”

A western army officer must be confounded, at first, when he learns that fierce samurai also believe in the beauty of graceful caligraphy, tea ceremonies, haiku and other arts. But then the officer may reflect that not everyone believes warriors need the "strength" of being single-minded or crude. After all, the citizen-soldiers of ancient Greece thought a well rounded life was important to the strength of a republic. Their Olympic Games always included an arts festival. Beauty matters.

I never did return to Shogun, but I read Clavel’s Tai Pan (colonizing Hong Kong) and King Rat (prisoners of the Japanese) twice each. And I also read twice, once as a little book and once as a Reader’s Digest article, James Clavel’s grim and controversial The Children’s Story, set in the USA. They called Clavel a communist for that one. I dimly recall the Digest people having to defend themselves in the next issue, saying how the story of poor Johnny, who’s father had been taken away for re-education, was only to dramatize how easily children can be led, and not for any other purpose. This would have been during the Kennedy or Johnson years. (Wikipedia mistakenly says 1981)

For me, it’s nice to contemplate the beauty of Clavell not being a “sellout” to mammon. Besides his best sellers, he also took time to write independently, to do what he thought was right.

As I see it, Clavel wanted to help inform his fellow citizens, realizing that many citizens know about only their own town and family, and some don’t care to know much more. Even now, during the war on terror, some are unknowing. I remember when some of us, not all, cared about South Africa’s apartheid, and we helped to stop it, with college students arguing about sanctions, but today I wonder how many Americans, even Muslim Americans, care that schools, “madrasses,” funded by the Saudis, are teaching children that having hatred is normal and commonplace, that hatred is a Good Thing.

I suppose that individuals, or nations, who believe in hatred have trouble believing in beauty: They don't know what strength they are missing out on. Such is the price of hatred. I wonder: If the children of the Saudis go on to university, will the ambiance of hatred cripple their ability to have typical student seek-the-truth conversations? Will Arab science be crippled too? American students today may not grasp how, in my day, we didn’t even hate the communists the way these innocent children are being taught to hate. Too bad citizens at college are silent about the Saudi-funded schools.

It occurs to me that some people, and here I’m thinking of readers of history and science fiction, may find it easier than others, to lift up their eyes beyond their immediate family. I suppose world travelers like Clavel find it easier to have a bird’s eye view of citizenship. Clavel realized something: The average educated Chinese housewife knew The Art of War as well as her American counterpart knew a work of English literature, but the American housewife, at the same time, had never heard of The Art of War, and she didn’t have any of its classic concepts as part of her vocabulary. Over here, no one did.

In the west, as best I can judge by the before-and-after World War II writings of Captain Sir Basil Liddell-Hart, even army officers did not read the book. Not even during French Indochina and Vietnam- Ouch! What Europeans did read, unfortunately, was a famous book, On War, by Karl Von Clausewitz, a Prussian staff officer who encouraged “blood.” Westerners, when I was young, would have thought you were crazy if you tried to say that the highest form of generalship is to get the opposing army to surrender without any bloodshed. It’s queer to contemplate how certain armies, I’m thinking of the US civil war and the Great War, might have avoided so many sorry casualties if only the wives and husbands on the home front had chosen an “anaconda plan” of naval blockade and sanctions.

But about the only translation, in the west, was by a Jesuit priest long ago. And so matters remained, back when I was a boy.

Then something happened. Today there is a mainstream movie, starring Wesley Snipes, called The Art of War, and the business section of a bookstore stocks Sun Zu’s classic as surely as it stocks books about samurai businessmen (‘swords’ and ‘rings’)… such books as would never have sold during my childhood, by the way. Over in the social studies area of the local big box store, last April, while I don’t remember if I specifically counted the actual number of translators, I know I counted eleven different editions of the work. Well! The western world has sure heard of it now!

What happened was classic: One man made a difference. Someday I will read again James Clavell’s forward to the first modern Art of War. I would have read it during college around 1981ish. (Wikipedia has the date wrong) What was Clavell to do? Well, he began having various characters, in his various best selling “Asian novels,” mention Sun Zu's book. Meanwhile he worked on a translation. And he wrote a forward. Then he had to persuade an otherwise sane editor that a book ostensibly about warfare, about long dead guys with bows and armor, would sell enough copies to break even. The rest is history. The irony, to me, is that not one of those eleven editions I found that April night was the first one with the introduction by James Clavell. Poor Prometheus!

I said “ostensibly.” What makes Sun Tzu’s (Sunzi’s) work suitable for the business section, and other parts of the bookstore too, is, as James Trapp puts it: “…the elegance of the prose and the underlying Daoist principles.”

And James Trapp has made an elegant translation, a much more humane one than the old standard translation on my shelf. Yes, plainly there is room in the world for a translation as clear and lyrical as this one.

I think I would like Trapp, with his interesting academic past, a past that must have fed his soul, not just his bank account. Like Sun Zu, he had an appreciation for beauty. His specialties included Bronze Age art and early Buddhist sculpture. Today he works part-time at the British Museum, and also as a consultant to the UK school system for integrating China studies.

Dipping into the piece before me, I like Trapp’s choice of footnotes, useful yet concise. In a footnote to page one of the final chapter, Using Spies, Trapp writes, “Sunzi’s understanding of the necessity of an effective intelligence network, its efficient organization and the various levels of expendability of its agents is chillingly calculating…and modern.”

James Trapp’s introduction ends, “In the eyes of Sunzi a general is no mere jobbing soldier: he is a scholar, gentleman and philosopher. The depth of meaning which this element of mysticism imparts is undoubtedly responsible for the work’s continuing and universal appeal.”

Now I contemplate citizenship; I cherish the responsible competence of James and James, and of course Sun Tzu… And I truly appreciate the beauty of the volume before me.

Sean Crawford

September 2011

Calgary

Footnotes:

~Changing Sun Zu to Sunzi, or Mao Tse Tung to Mao Zedong, is because the Chinese have switched to Pinyin (closer phonetically) spelling. I still write the old way, myself.

~Tonight I was watching the Japanese anime series Ghost in the Shell, (2^nd Gig) with English subtitles. In one episode the major shows up at a den of three wealthy old bad guys amongst luxurious furniture. Three angry young hoodlums are there too. An old man asks the major, “Are you the same race as Roh?”

“Can’t you tell?” Meaning: Yes, the major has a "full prosthetic" body. How formidable. The major backs away with her prize and the hoodlums want to chase after her. The old man forbids it, and quotes Sun Zu: When you know yourself and you know your enemy (voice over as the major flees into a taxi) you can fight a hundred battles without defeat. The implication being: The hoods can’t know how good the major’s prosthetics are.

~I can’t resist saying: Did you ever see the artistic German movie, with Peter Falk, about invisible angels on the roofs of Berlin? In the very next episode of Ghost, Batou is in Berlin, on stakeout on the roofs, (and so is the major) using his "optical camouflage," meaning his invisibility thing. Batou is shocked when a girl in a wheelchair can see him. In homage, the episode was given the movie’s title, Wings of Desire. I thought the whole episode, with recurring angels, was well done. The Americans once made a mainstream remake of the German movie, starring Nicolas Cage.

Smokers and World Peace

2011-09-22T18:26:00.000-07:00

essaysbysean.blogspot.com

A lion-hearted colleague asked me if I was going to write about the latest harsh and ludicrous anti-smoking laws. “I suppose I could,” I said “I’ve been thinking about aggression and lies.” ...Sometimes people write into the newspaper to say, “I don’t care if people smoke; I just don’t want them smoking around me.” Are they truly carefree and good-natured about smokers? Or is there something nonpeacefull down in their spinal brain stem, something primal that wants to rise up and get out?

(Thought experiment)

Let’s do a thought experiment. Let’s suppose that, close to the university, there is a Foothills Medical Centre (there is) that includes a hospital and a university medical school. (It does) You would expect to see patients just outside the doors smoking. (I have) But here on the prairies…Brrr it’s cold! You might expect some starving student to show some enterprise. He could drive his old VW van in a loop around the huge parking lot picking up and dropping off patients.

But if the person who claims he doesn’t care about free adults smoking were in fact just “blowing smoke,” then you would expect him to somehow thwart the student. Here are the facts: I no longer see patients with their loved ones smoking. The entire huge parking lot has been ruled nonsmoking by the hospital. Coincidence? Maybe so. My point is that “good” people do indeed care about aggressively thwarting innocent smokers. “Good” people once burnt witches. “Good” Muslims today give silent support to youthful terrorists, rather than organize the community to roundly condemn terror.

(Aggression)

Aggression extends through space and time. There’s something I’ve never understood about colonial (pre-1947) India. Something about the British wives of officers and administrators. In the summer they would escape to their little hill stations, in the winter they would be down in their little neighborhoods, and always their fellow housewives would be precious few in number. So how to explain the intense feuds, the obsessive hatreds that went on for years? Boredom? I wonder: maybe their aggressions had no other outlet?

In the U.S., after the cold war, many were taken by surprise. Nuclear peace- at last! -did not mean peace but lots of little wars such as in Yugoslavia. Why the surprise? Partly because people are mostly innocent of social studies. To paraphrase George Santayana, “Those who don’t know history are condemned to be surprised when it repeats.” Partly because during the cold war very little money was spent on research for peace. At the time I was miffed at the lack of funding but I guess it’s understandable. If indeed we all have an aggression gene, well, who wants to know?

Speaking of research, I recently read that the earliest studies into the danger of second hand smoke were rubbish. I don’t expect this fact to be widely publicized, nor do I expect the public to demand to know how such flawed research ever got so widely publicized in the first place. I offer no answers as to whether or not the later research was equally flawed. Some questions are not for the faint of heart…nor for hospital administrators.

I remember a roommate of years ago. She was both a communist and wanted world peace... under world-wide communism, naturally. One day she came home all jazzed up from seeing a James Caan movie, Rollerball. She eagerly told me the whole plot with special relish for the part where the worker/athletes used violence to rebel against the capitalists. I can still hear the line from the TV commercials. “In the future there will be no war… but there will be… Rollerball!” Some one back then noted that I was sensitive but not fragile. True. I would want to know if I have an aggression gene. And not because I could bring in world peace through Rollerball!

(Peace)

There are so many theories, some crackpot, about the cause of war. Here’s another: maybe there would be fewer theories if we weren't each afraid to look inside our own heart. Maybe – here’s a glum thought – maybe we can’t cure war but can only cope? If so then I’d welcome all the research we can get, however unpleasant.

I remember Captain Kirk talking to some faint hearted leaders. Their planet, in Balance of Terror, was facing Armageddon. Kirk said something like, “Yes, I'm a killer ape, but I choose…not…to kill…today.” Then he told those leaders to start talking.

You see, war is caused- Never mind, I’m not a crackpot and I won’t sound risk sounding like one either. But I will say I believe in Dialogue. And Science. Only with science can we navigate a starship or steer our society along past Armageddon to a better world.

(Hero)

James T. Kirk will always be my hero, while lately I have found inspiration through the example of a living person, Michael Crichton. Maybe he’s crazy, because even though he (presumably) is a millionaire, he doesn’t spend his time idly on the beach. Instead he slogs through thick wordy UN reports and reads oodles of UN footnotes while finding time to write his big novels. I never knew how some capitalist scientists were betraying Science, and blindfolding the workers, regarding things like tobacco smoke and climate. I learned from Crichton doing a speech, complete with charts and graphs, to the National Press Club. (His tobacco bombshell was from a science speech at the California Institute of Technology)

Many reporters pride themselves on being hard boiled. I wonder if any felt faint as Crichton rocked their world-view? The speech is on his web site, entitled The Case for Skepticism on Global Warming. I would recommend it to anyone who wished to be crew, not passenger, on spaceship earth.

In summary: We need to know our hearts, and dishonest science is very uncool.

And now I can either ponder nuclear terror or I can focus on the absurd. No one could have imagined, at the start of this essay, that I’d be led to one inescapable conclusion: that a step for smoker’s rights is a step for world peace.

Sean “I’m merely a social smoker, honest!” Crawford,
Calgary, 2008

Epilogue:

Iraq, anyone?

There was a consensus of scientists and experts for the existence of weapons of mass destruction. Perhaps anyone who disagreed with the consensus (can you name even one?) was labeled a "stooge of big oil" for "trying to keep the oil fields stable."

As for Climate Change, if only M. Crichton is reading the "actual U.N. reports," if even journalists aren't reading them, then what are the world's national policy makers reading? Easy: U.N. Summary for policy makers ...This disturbs me because the invasion and occupation of Iraq was made possible in part because all those self-important people in the white house only read the summaries, not the actual reports... The actual reports had expressed doubts about the data, about the reliability of sources, and so forth.

This I learned from reading Chain of Command by pulitzer prize winner Seymour Hersh.

Peace, anyone?

...Update: Shades of Franz Kafka! This summer I bought a book, still unread, that says that UN climate reports are written so that the body agrees with the summary: the summary is written first! I will try to find the book and report here.

Three TV Nerd Heroes

2011-09-18T12:14:00.000-07:00

www.essaysbysean.blogspot.com

America loves its TV stars. Here's three: There's that handsome cop my girl watched every week, that starship captain, and how about that crazy redhead? "Luuucy!, I'm home!" Here's my three favorite nerd stars- but wait! Nerds can't be a show's main hero. Or Can they?

I recall a high school TV movie, from over a decade ago, where the handsome hero is clearly one of the smarter kids. The show opened with chemistry class. Within the first few minutes some other nameless kid in glasses was briefly on scene and then was never seen again. This "four eyes" was shown to be the smartest in the class and then was laughed at by everyone when a cupboard slammed on him. The kid's brief role had a purpose: He was to be a foil to prove the star, although smart, was not a nerd. The star always has to be a "regular guy." Except for this past decade.

In the old beach movies the foil was a suave ladies man. I suppose Archie has his Reggie. I see a continuum: At one end is the suave guy, always glib and easy, while in the middle is the regular guy, mostly relaxed and friendly, and at the far end is the nerd: unconfident, stiff, both physically and socially awkward. This "stiffness" is what I focus on to define "nerd" although, of course, that is not all there is to it... For further information, there is a long list of nerd characterists recited near the end of a modern beach movie, Revenge of the Nerds II.

(Growing)

Happily, once we leave school, or so it seems to me, nerds start vanishing like soap bubbles. I suppose getting out and rubbing shoulders in the real world quickly smoothes out the rough spots noted in the aforementioned list. Besides, as the nerds are growing their peers are growing up too- and swiftly becoming too confident to worry that someone is "too smart" with computers. Growth is good.

I remember an episode of Angel. The folks at Angel Investigations are only a few years out of Sunnydale High when a spell makes them regress: We see them once again as they were during their nerdy Buffy days. Oh, how far they've come! ...My three favorite nerd stars, unfortunately, are challenged by more than mere items on a nerd list, items to be easily noted, fixed and checked off... For those three heroes rubbing shoulders is no remedy, not when their stiffness comes from a much darker place, a place still too dark for today's TV viewers.

My three favorite nerds are a girl, a boy and a man.

The DVDs for the girl are unique: Although they are, appropriately, marked for "age 16 and up," the heroine, Lain Iwakura, is only 13. Call her a "quiet loner," or, "a nerd with no friends." As a fan on the web wrote, "She is a nice kid, too bad she's so messed up." Lain's complete story is told in Serial Experiments Lain over one season in Japanese animation. (anime) I watched it dubbed on VHS. At first I wondered if there was a translation error for the voice of Lain's mother. She is so bizarrely unmaternal: dry, detached and unaffectionate. No error- Surely this is a clue to explain poor Lain's demeanor. I like Lain because even after she receives criminal child abuse she is still like a selfless car accident victim, still thinking compassionately of others.

(Hiding)

The boy, Maxwell Evans, is 16 with spliced half alien DNA. Once an orphan, today his adoptive parents don't know he is one of the alien teens passing for human. The town of Roswell is small enough to still have angle parking and it's surrounded by desert. This means it's very hard, if the kids are ever discovered, to hide or run. The series Roswell lasted for almost three full seasons. On the DVD pilot commentary you can hear Ronald Moore, years before he made the dark Battlestar Galactica, laughing to say something like, "Look, he's almost smiling- hey, there's a flicker..."

Imagine: A teen hero who doesn't smile! Not like a popular student. It's understandable: Max is carrying a lot of weight because the children's real parents, after their saucer crashed, were hidden away by the government, experimented on and killed. The other alien kids say Max is the leader. As with Lain, the result is a certain stiffness. I see Max as the flip side of an angry blond anarchist, Grace Polk, on Joan of Arcadia. Grace actively pushes other students away to keep the secret that her mother is an alcoholic. Maxwell is so quiet because his secret means life or death.

One of my favorite episodes is Toy House where a girl says she wants to tell her adoptive mother. It goes something like, "You can't. What if she turns us in?" (to the government)

"But she's my mother!"

"How do you know know she'll still be your mother?"...silence, a tear... I am reminded of how so many defenseless children with allegedly "nice religious mothers" have to wait until after they are adults before they dare tell a single soul they are homosexual.

(Playing)

In one episode an alien boy goes with Max to Vegas to have fun. Soon they get into a big fight because Max just won't lighten up... I like Max because he never escapes into clowning or drugs or denial of how they are in danger. He just never quits.

An actor from Alberta plays the adult nerd. On the DVD commentary for Firefly he explains trying to tell creator Joss Whedon that he couldn't see himself playing the part, saying (I forget) something like,"This character is a hollow man, with no plans or dreams, nothing springing up inside, no joy. He is just going to just...keep on going." The character of Malcolm Reynolds, captain of a tramp freighter, is unique: Although he used to be a regular guy, now he is a nerd.

In the opening credits, in a flashback, he kisses his religious medal; now he is a hard atheist. Once he learned the social skills for dancing and mingling; now he wouldn't care to go to a dance, not even if one were held right beside the port.

Something happened: he was a sergeant at the lengthy famous battle of Serenity valley. Every single officer was killed while Malcolm led the remnants to fight on... Only to have their idealism betrayed. When Malcom finaly left that valley of shadows he left his light behind.... I am reminded of a Vietnam veteran who cried out in the night.

(Burned)

The series lasted less than half a season, which makes it sound like a real bad show. But since then? The DVDs have been "flying off the shelves" at amazon due to word of mouth ...leading eventually to funding for a feature, Serenity. (The name of his freighter) However, the movie failed to re-launch the series. Why? Perhaps because the film was a compromise, being written, I think, partly to appeal to fans who had seen the TV series. Never do that.

I like Malcolm because, unlike a timid middle-aged man, all of his inner conflicts have been burned away: He is very clear. When he strides to do something even a big muscular criminal steps aside.

...This past decade of TV has probably been a fluke. I don't expect to see any more nerds as TV stars. Still, I am awed at my good fortune to have known the glory of Malcolm, Max and Lain.

Sean Crawford

summer 2008

footnotes

~ It is no coincidence that the old Enterprise transporter room was made for only six. I remember seeing the opening credits for Young Riders, where they ride abreast, and groaning, "Oh no" after counting six (or seven) people. The problem? I think six is the absolute maximum number of main characters for a story- unless you are doing an ensemble piece. Better to use five or three.

For Firefly to get away with nine characters they needed A) a gifted writer like Joss Wedan and B) a two hour pilot. Which was done.

Then the Fox "suits," unfortunately, A) made Joss improvise a one hour pilot giving him a deadline of a single sleepless weekend to write it and B) aired the episodes out of order. The real pilot was shown dead last- too late!

Critic Roger Eibert said, "What a crock" saying Fox should have given Joss, because of his success with the TV series Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Angel, the benefit of the doubt and gone with his intended order.

~ David Gerrold, in his book about Star Trek, portrays a clear understanding of how a movie is a different animal from a TV show. I thought that Serenity had a very blurred understanding which I interpet as being due to a compromise.

~ Sometimes I joke that I am a nerd, but no one ever believes me.

Blair, being Smart

2011-09-11T11:10:00.000-07:00

essaysbysean.blogspot.com

I’ve been thinking about my buddy Blair lately. Before he passed on, he symbolized to me how there are certain pitfalls to being real smart, pitfalls that he overcame.

He was brilliant.

Here in Calgary Blair Petterson is known as the guy who comes down from Edmonton for the annual science fiction and fantasy convention, CON-Version, wearing a business suit. Stout, blond and bearded, he’s well known at the con. He adds so much value by proposing ideas for panels, sitting on panels and chairing panels. He told me he was pleased at getting the audience to participate. It helped that he was so quick with humorous quips. As for me, I would seldom be up on the panel myself, since I didn’t know enough, but I would be in the audience putting up my hand to say things like, (All this talk of funding a moon base by mining H-3 is fascinating, but) "Inquiring minds want to know: What the heck is H-3?" (Helium-3)

Since CON-Version is a science and literary con, there are always several panels to choose from. Blair told me he was touched that I showed up so often at his panels, because I knew they would be well run: I said, "I'd get good bang for my buck." He valued how my comments were always so interesting and concise. Naturally: One of my hobbies is “meetings,” and long ago as a volunteer journalist I learned to be concise.

For Blair, one of the joys of going to cons was how he met so many brilliant sf writers. He treasured how they would engage him in long conversations, as he was brilliant too. Naturally, most sf readers, just like the computer guys in Silicon Valley, tend to dress in jeans and T-shirt. The reason for Blair’s business suit, I learned at last, was he would come straight down from Edmonton, where he was a trial lawyer for Alberta Family Services.

I was not surprised to hear how, when arguing before the judge, the man I knew from panels would speak at great length with unusual power and conviction… because, unlike the other family lawyers, he didn’t need to use notes.

Working in family law, he believed, as I do, that women deserve equal rights. I’m sure he made the connection, which always goes unspoken, that those who would abuse children start by devaluing women. Blair didn't devalue any minorities, in fact, he had troubled himself to get a good grasp of two Asian Languages and two European ones. Once I asked him about Canada’s most populous province flirting with bringing in Muslim sharia law: He had nothing but outrage and contempt.

Perhaps Blair was being modest when he explained how he was able to propose to a judge a useful change to family law, a change that is commonly used now. He explained that the Edmonton law school is “like a strobe light” showing law today, while his school in the Maritimes had given him a background in how law developed. Maybe so, but my smart friend had to apply himself in order to envision any change to the law.

In person he was a decent, good-hearted, earnest man. Never mind the pathetic US slogan, “If you’re so smart, why ain’t you rich?” I think Blair preferred to make less money than he would as a corporate lawyer because he could have such immediate effect on vulnerable people who needed help.

A common pitfall, I think, for smart young people, for whom success in anything is so easy, is to go chasing money without considering what they truly want to do.

For the really smart people, I think the real danger is not falling into a pit of snobbery -which Blair avoided as surely as he avoided devaluing women- but the almost unavoidable bitterness of being in a smart minority.

I’m thinking of poor guys like Mark Twain. Remember The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn? Huck slowly journeyed down the Mississippi river while having the mental “adventure” of slowly coming to reason that all of his friends and all of his neighbours –in other words, an entire society- were wrong. Huck came to realize that Nigger Jim deserved to have a life, even if this meant Huck had to break the law about helping runaway slaves and, therefore, go to hell. Poor Twain: surrounded by people who believed in various prejudices only because, willfully, they would not take the time to think things through. Twain's life must have been a daily hell.

Like Mark Twain, Blair Petterson was smart and curious: They both thought things through.

Unlike Twain, Blair avoided falling into bitterness at human folly. Me too. Here in Calgary, a decade or two ago, only a few miles from the university, I curiously wandered into a hotel lobby and then into a meeting room. Quelle Surprise. I found a large meeting of people, most of them up from High River, nearly all of them members of the “short haired older generation,” having a meeting for a dark purpose: being anti-gay. On some six-foot tables –that’s “tables” plural- at the back were a number of books, presumably published before the war, about how horrible the Jews are. I only wish I had my camera, for I might have put the Jewish defense league onto those homo-haters. Meanwhile, at the University of Calgary, many not-so-bright students with library cards continued to believe that being gay was a "choice." Were these university students simply not smart enough? Or were they being willfully ignorant?

Not long afterwards, an acquaintance managed to get a human service worker job in High River. At a community center one night here in Calgary, at a dialogue group meeting, as soon as we had a break, she sped across the room to ask me what I thought of her getting a job in that town. I said, “Well, when I go there I feel like I am in enemy territory.” It would be so easy to feel as Mark Twain did. But I won’t do bitterness.

My buddy Blair, in his legal work, had seen a lot of the seamy side of humankind. Accordingly, his meetings with his clients would never be held at the courthouse tower. This was to lessen the chance of him being spotted or identified. He half expected, nevertheless, to be murdered one day. For this he had fear and acceptance, but not bitterness.

I never asked him about the worst pitfall really smart young people face, an existential choice: "Should I lower my consciousness, dial down my smartness, stop learning so much?" Not everyone makes the same choice... a choice I find is talked about more in science fiction than in real life. For example, in the sf novel Atlas Shrugged, in a flashback where Dagny Taggart is a child, she wonders aloud if she should try to be more popular by not being so smart and capable. Her friend slaps her.

In boyhood Blair and I enjoyed sf writer Robert Heinlein’s young adult novels where heroines have to hide their light under a bushel basket. In Heinlein’s Citizen of the Galaxy a crippled old beggar, Baslim, adopts a boy. They beg together, living in a caste-ridden society where all their peers are illiterate. Nevertheless, Balsim teaches his son reading and mathematics. Sometimes, late at night, Baslim has doubts about his decision to educate the boy… Today I think parents working over in the Arab world must have similar self-doubts, because they say if you send your son to the international school he will be at a disadvantage for trying to chat up/hit on Arab girls, since he won’t be overly macho.

I remember once, I was reading over the phone to Blair an essay about Sarah Conner, in which woman don’t punch hard, when he immediately interjected, “Learned helplessness.” Yes. A fictional example of learned “not-so-smartness” would be in Bio of a Space Tyrant, by Piers Anthony, where the narrator’s sister is really beautiful. She is not method acting: She has genuinely made a long-forgotten decision, before the story opens, to live her life at far, far less than her potential. C’est domage.

George Orwell, the author of Nineteen Eighty-Four, came of age during the rebellious years in the aftermath of the Great War. In an essay he once reasoned, in accounting for the horrors of two world wars, how an entire ruling class could have dialed down their smartness. I’m no time traveler, so I can’t directly judge Orwell’s findings, but it makes sense. Here in the present day, from certain regions, I have often encountered rich young people. I find a much larger proportion of them to be frivolous, and status-oriented, than can be accounted for by mere chance.

I first began meeting rich people in college. There I happily found non-frivolous students who were into the college-personal-growth thing. This was when I was first decompressing from things I had seen, first able to process meaning-of-life questions. Should I dial down? Hide my light? I dimly recall using an example of Ming vases, and asking a pretty Chinese girl “What should I do if the person I’m talking to knows nothing about such vases? What’s the point?” She said brightly that I could bring them up to my level, telling them about vases. Yes.

Forget trying to walk a fine line: I believe it’s best to be expecting too much knowledge, rather than too little, from others. In my last three-person shared house I lived with two much-less-educated sex trade workers. One said grandly how she saw me as “knowledge.” They didn’t feel the least bit intimidated by me: I believe it’s best to be without arrogance.

My buddy Blair, good-hearted, never arrogant, must have believed the same things. When I was with him around restaurant staff, store clerks or his cleaning lady I was amused, charmed, even a little embarrassed, at how he would cheerfully expect people to know things, or cheerfully expect people to welcome his enthusiastic explanations. I treasured that aspect of him. I think that, avoiding all pitfalls, he made a splendid accommodation to his being so smart.

The only glimpse he ever gave me of the flip side of his life was one day when we were watching the dubbed version of my anime series Elfen Lied. I said I had checked and found the dubbing was wrong: What the students were living in was not a vacant restaurant, it was an inn. Out of the blue Blair said he really appreciated me because, like his fiance (wife), I never bored him. That was a nice thing to hear, but- a world of boring people? I pushed the thought away.

We were watching the anime dubbed, although true fans insist on watching anime with subtitles, because a) I seldom do subtitles, and b) Blair’s failing health. His vision had weakened. No books, no subtitles. So, being Blair, he became an enthusiast for audiobooks... A few years ago he had to stop attending conventions.

In September, in the year of our Lord 2011, Blair passed away.

I never asked him what it was like to live in a world of boring people, and now I never will.

Sean Crawford

Calgary

September 2011

Footnote: My computer statistics feature shows that today someone was on my site, someone using the search term “Blair Petterson,” (Blair is in a democracy essay footnote) so I am posting this essay right now, instead of holding it back for editing and second thoughts. The searcher was from either the UK or the US, not Canada. Blair had friends everywhere.

Recycling To Me

2011-09-09T23:26:00.000-07:00

www.essaysbysean.blogspot.com

Is recycling true and good and beautiful? Maybe. I have read many articles that are pro recycling, none that are con. None? As for cost-benefit, the costs I read about are less, usually, than benefits and the costs are measured, always, in terms of economics. Yet people don't live by cash alone.

One person who understood issues of emotion, not just cash, wrote in to the newspaper letters section sounding shrill and bitter. How hard can it be, he demanded, to soak your cans in the sink to peel off the labels? Or to leave glass jars in a full sink overnight to soak, as he does ...he went on like this "self-righteously" ...and therein lies his motivation. He mentioned no partner and I wondered if he is a bachelor and if, back in high school, he would have ever socialized with Cordelia Chase.

You may remember "Cordy" from Sunnydale High: a rich pretty cheerleader and social queen... not someone who would associate with library nerds, or a vampire slayer or... dare I say it, future bitter recycle-ers. When Cordy got a job in the real world, in L A, she was in a world at one remove from high school hell, but a world where many non nerds still feel traces of conformity-fear, still want to keep up with the Joneses and still look to opinion queens. I can imagine a woman sitting in a beauty salon, looking at her nails, and wondering, "Does Cordelia fill her sink overnight? And if she won't, then I won't either."

(Nerd)

As I write this my spectacles are free of tape and I am wearing clothes with matching colors. Yes, I have a computer, and yes, I have the independent thinking of a nerd, but I also have enough consideration for others to dress well and to gently expect others to act as their peers do, not as my own peers might wish them to do.

Many of my peers, as noted in my (May 2011) Atrocities and Our Troops essay, are organic new age types. One fellow is a small businessman. This means long days. Maybe too long: the poor guy can't attend any of my community building or dialogue groups. And when I found out that on top of all his labor he was crushing and folding all the myriad cardboard boxes that came through his store, and after stomping on them he was carting them off to the (not a) recycling bin... I said, "Enough!"

I said that even people who own a computer (he owns four) and who have collected every episode of Buffy (he can freely borrow mine) are still allowed to "get a life." Sure, you're "s'posed to" recycle but think of all the good you can do for others with the time you could save. I told him, "What's good for your store is good for the new age community." I have no comment on whether he acted on my concern.

I think Buffy would sympathise. Like me, she feels pain at thoughtless litter bugs. And she would feel pain at seeing beautiful thoughtless Cordelia. Yet Buffy is too noble, too sensible, to escape from her pain by feeling alienated from Cordelia and condemning Cordelia's lifestyle. Buffy doesn't do "self righteous." Instead she came to sympathise with Cordy and to protect her with her life.

A couple I know -one is my friend of many years- expressed "irritation," you might say, the last time I failed to recycle my clothes. So, for my next time, I arranged with the friend to meet in a small town tea house called Tea & Time Emporium ... Then we would car pool and she would show me where the town recycling for clothing was. More importantly, and this was her idea, we were to meet at Tea & Time so I could edit down a couple of her professional articles. (I happen to be a paid published writer.) Well, I will tell you what happened: it was my turn to feel a little bit miffed, a wee bit cranky... and downright "irritated."

(Joy)

My friend forgot about recycling, forgot about me... I was stood up. And so my point is this: Following my organic friend's example, we don't need to take recycling too seriously. Not unless we enjoy feeling self-righteous and feeling cut off from our fellow humans... Better to recycle less from "s'posed to" and more from joy, as many of my dear readers do, joy in the spirit that we are each a wonderful part of the planet... including the folks who don't recycle.

Sean Crawford,
North of a small town
Summer 2011

footnotes~

~ Tea & Time Emporium has clocks all over all the walls, even along the staircase, upstairs and downstairs: They sell more than just tea and crumpets.... Responsible to make amends? As of this writing my friend who missed the Emporium hasn't found any Time to buy me a Tea.

~Update: The Emporium has become a dentist office, the cows have come home, and my honor-challenged friend never did make amends. In fairness, I don't have much to offer. Now, while keeping nice old memories of us, our future meetings will be by random accident.

~ Responsible to others? Buffy is a blond who is too responsible to continue cheerleading with Cordelia, not once she answered her calling as Buffy the Vampire Slayer.

~It strikes me that for teens the defining characteristic of "popular" non nerds is no responsibility... The one who has to take care of Aunt May, or rush home to tend the animals, never makes it as teen royalty. There is an essay here... (Hence I've made a piece about Three Favorite TV Nerds)

~ I suppose if I was raising children then, for that purpose, I might recycle gently, just as Mum, in the days before housewives knew the word "ecology," would pick up litter with us, and just as Dad, as Scoutmaster, played the "game" of Scouting for a larger purpose.

~ Come to think of it, my aged parents "recycle." They are known around the block for recycling cans and bottles; the money goes to Shriners in the Philipine Islands.

Excellence, Students and the Olympics

2011-09-03T19:40:00.000-07:00

essaysbysean.blogspot.com

And I should know, at my age, that any statement that starts with, "I really ought to..." is suspect, very suspect.

Introduction- The original introduction ended with these three paragraphs:

Nancy Green attended university in Nelson; I took a U of Calgary night school class in law: I learned how the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms applies not only to citizens, but, by federal Supreme Court ruling, to anyone under Canadian sky. Now I find how oppressors can get around that ruling if the orders to oppress are issued from offshore.

The B.C. Supreme Court (provincial) has finished hearing the case of the Canadian women ski jumpers. "There will little solace to the plaintiffs in my finding that they have been discriminated against; there is no remedy available to them in this court." This was in the Calgary Sun, Saturday July 11, 2009. The Sun, reminiscent of my other essay, has buried the story 15 pages into the sports section.

Those who expect excellent student protest will be disappointed. I can predict this because excellence, for students, is hard, even in an Olympic city during the Games.

Excellence, Students and the Olympics

With the 20th anniversary of our city's winter Olympics, it's time to ponder how hard everyday excellence was for me back then... and still is today... At the time of the games I was part of a happy band of volunteer university journalists. That year, at our weekly University of Calgary student newspaper, the Gauntlet, we eagerly sought to share the Olympic flame... only to discover that the spirit of excellence is hard to catch.

I say "we" but actually two of us, one of the co-editors and I, told our peers months ahead of time, to their complete bafflement, that no, we would not join them in their Olympic project. I tried to help pierce the "hype." Unfortunately, to any of my keen probing questions, I received the reply, "But it's the Olympics!" "Yes, but why do we want to-" "It's the Olympics!"

I was a little older than the other students. At their age I had arrived, down-at-the-heels, in the big city clutching my new manual typewriter. It was so tiny, not like the clunky ones on desk tops. Such a wonder of teeny precision machinery, with Eatons on the enameled steel cover. I'm sure typewriters never got any smaller. I also had a glossy new book called something like, Teach Yourself to Type. But... the typewriter gathered dust. A few seasons later, not so down at the heels, I decided to fork out for a night school course in Beginner's Typing. The "for fun" course was all filled, so I had to take the "for credit" one. With secretaries. I remember we learned to count characters and divide by two so we could center our headings on the page.

(Practice)

So everyday at home I'd excellently practice my typing assignments. I quickly- bang!- got so I could guide the silver return lever- ching!- with my eyes closed. Then I got so I could touch type. Hurray! I passed the course- I even raised my college grade point average!- and then... my typewriter gathered dust. I knew I really ought to practice for half an hour every day, and do a full hour every Sunday. Just as I had read in all those inspirational self-improvement magazine articles. Yes, I knew what I should do but... only dust.

Then I joined the volunteers over at the university. I was doing at least an article a week, requiring two or three drafts, with vigor and purpose... then home to the dusty machine. Except for my actual writing, I still didn't practice my typing. I still don't. I confess: to this day I can't type in numerals without looking at the keyboard. My typing speed has probably even declined since that long ago course- I know I really ought to excellently practice my typing. And I should know, at my age, that any statement that starts "I really ought to..." is suspect, very suspect.

I am steadily learning that excellence is not easy. I first found this out in junior high when I found myself the only boy in a beginner's typing course. This was just not natural and my classmates let me know it. At least it was not as bad for me as trying to be a girl in the chess club. She lasted only one day. And me? Read on...

(Kids)

At this time in my youth all of the male students and even some of the male teachers had long hair. The hair symbolized something. There was a sense of freedom to take new risks, try new innovations and boldly seek empowerment for all. Class timetable registration, that year, followed a "new improved" format: the students would choose their own courses, meaning: choose their own teachers. Logically things would sort themselves out: Smart students would take the more competent harder teachers while the more challenged students would take the easier ones. The academically gifted students, in other words, would pursue excellence.

Due to my personal issues, not my I.Q., I was a glum and struggling student. Nevertheless I eagerly grabbed all the hardest teachers. Turns out I was a minority of one. All those academic golden students? They all chose the easiest ones. They told me so. After only one day of classes the registration fiasco had to be fixed overnight by the teachers.

And so I lasted only one day in typing class. I was never able to fit in another one. Years later, long after my night typing class, I was able to briefly touch excellence: As a working "man" and "college graduate," I excellently scribbled my way through not one but two books of writing composition exercises. I am pleased with that, although I feel "I really ought to be doing more writing exercises these days."

But what of my Gauntlet university peers? Were they closer to excellent college graduates or closer to "take-the-easy-way-out" kids in junior high?... The Olympics were a big deal. When the torch relay passed through our town my roommate was so excited he ran alongside for a long ways in his street clothes. Then he ran home to tell me.

(Vision)

Months before the games were to arrive my fellow Gauntleteers had an exciting vision: They too would aspire to Olympic excellence. At our energetic crowded staff meetings this vision seemed noble and do-able. Putting out a weekly newspaper was hard enough. Now they aspired to twice or even thrice weekly. Even if the paper was thinner, and it surely would be, they would thus be required to rise to a much higher level. Like athletes, they'd reach for excellence...and be more like an efficient paper in the real world. Obviously we are talking about better organization, as in meeting with editors, and productivity.

...Note: When editors guide and edit the first draft submitted (before handing it back) or advise on stories they don't yell- only Spiderman's editor, J. Jonah Jameson, does that....

Crank out issues? How? I thought of what I had seen, or read, about things in the working world and spoke up with equal excitement. "Sure guys, our editors could have a board where they posted what time they'd return (and excellently keep to their commitment)." Some students (two or more) instantly scorned that idea, saying, "What if he wants to stop off at the A&W?" I suppose at that very moment the writing was on the wall but nobody had realized it yet.

As noted, I was not to be part of the Olympic issues, but others were. About a score of them had made a written commitment on a sign up sheet. Maybe Tony Sabo suspected something. A night or two before the games Tony called every person on the list and they each gave their word again. ...All classes were canceled: students were evicted and their residences were turned over to the Olympians. This meant students needed a little more effort to drop by the Gauntlet office. This meant too that most of the Gauntlet readers, by default, became the athletes.

(Campus)

I recall that in the student union food court, near the olympic oval and residences, there were massage tables staffed by volunteers from all over the continent. Since I too had a massage background I enjoyed chatting. I remember answering a lady from Chicago that no, our city wasn't cleaned up for the games; it was always like this. She was amazed and I wondered what the heck Chicago must look like.

Then I wrote up an article on athlete massage and filed it for use when school came back in session: I cared a lot about my student audience, but athletes? Not so much.

Tony and a couple others got a paid job doing stories for a periodical for the athlete's village; they had to wear fluorescent red berets. Gauntlet folks said, "Great, you can get past security and drop off copies of our Special Gauntlets for the athletes."

But... by the time they were preparing the second Special issue... things had gotten desperate. My embarrassed editor asked me if he could use my article. I said "Yes." As for those who gave their word on the list, I'm pretty sure not a single one showed up. A student later said sadly,"It was too easy to go off skiing." This was after the Gauntlet Olympic dreams had bit the dust.

(Honor)

Yes, excellence is not easy. And now I know: The average university man is not quite as bad as a junior high kid, but he's no better than a frat boy, either. As the Klingons would say, "They have no honor." But of course Tony did, and I treasure that.

I still see some old classmates once a year at writer K.M. Tratt's all-day Saint Patrick's party. Bruce, a university art professor, attends, and some years Bruce and I get to talking about how hard it is for art majors to keep making art after graduation. I think that whether it's painting or typing or jogging or anything else you're "s'posed to" do you probably shouldn't be too hard on yourself. It's OK to use tricks to encourage your effort such as registering for a marathon, or for next year's gallery showing, or joining a local club or whatever it takes. I once read about a nerd who could have made a nice living as a computer guy. Instead he became a millionaire because he kept finding a succession of increasingly harder little problems to solve. Whatever trick works, eh?

In my own case my art is my essays, an art that appeals to my absurd Right brain. Hence my dearth of Left brain up front topic sentences. I am driven to make art, and I wouldn't do so without using the trick of a "real" web site for essays. A mere blog (web log) would not be enough to trick me into being productive. A blog, to me, is something done carelessly with no second draft, something that unsettled Left brain people are going to frantically skim/rush/click right through.

I care a lot about readers who settle in with a nice cup of tea, but unsettled readers? Not so much. A mere blog is not enough to keep me polishing my pretty little prose.

I suppose, in conclusion, I really ought to quit reading self-improvement articles... but I do like them so.

Sean Crawford, SNAG,
sensitive new age guy,
with lots of growth potential,
Spring 2008

Footnotes:

Update: This is now on a blog because a blogger, Little Rivkah, has advised me: A blog has a better chance of being read than a web site. My old site was read, or at least commented on, only be those who knew me in real life. It remains to be seen whether my blog will be read enough to attract comments by strangers...

Update: Now, instead of judging readership from comments, I can go by my blogger statistics feature.

For those who came in late: My old web site has been discontinued, and so the links on this blog, with essay-introductions, are now broken. Hence I am doing "re-runs" using no more than three paragraphs of the original introductions.

New pieces, such as the previous post, Citizenship After 9/11, are still being written amongst the re-runs. I am still committed to my art.

Citizenship After 9/11

2011-08-28T12:08:00.000-07:00

essaysbysean.blogspot.com

If you don't care about me, I don't want to be part of your democracy

I like the feeling of validation when someone else expresses my own beliefs about what citizenship could mean:

After 9/11, “…We weren’t urged to study Arabic, to join the foreign service or international aid groups, to develop alternative sources of energy, to form a national civil reserve for emergencies-or even to pay off the cost of the war in our own time. Its burdens would be borne by the next generation of Americans, and by a few hundred thousand volunteer soldiers in this one.”

The writer is George Packer, a winner of the Overseas Press Club award, from his book The Assassins’ Gate subtitled America in Iraq. …As you know, Memorial Day is observed by Americans back at home, and in a chapter called Memorial Day Packer is writing the above paragraph about a citizen, Chris Frosheiser, who lost his son in Iraq. Two paragraphs later Packer writes:

“So the months after 9/11 were a lost opportunity- to harness the surge of civic energy and to frame the new war against Islamist radicalism as a national struggle. It should have been the job not just of the experts in the intelligence agencies and Special Forces but also of ordinary American citizens to wage it. And it should have been waged on many fronts, with many tools-not just military, but also intellectual, diplomatic, economic, political, cultural. This had been the vision of the architects of the early Cold War, whom Chris Frosheiser read about in a college history course and whom he came to admire even more after September 11…. Bush…His message to the public was essentially, “Trust me,” and the public slipped into a fearful passivity.”

A theme of my essay site is that democracy does not begin and end with voting. That’s too easy. Democracy begins with people and their neighbors feeling not as passive peasants but as citizens, together.

For me it took effort, I had to get off the couch, to be a young citizen-soldier. I remember a dewy morning when I risked my life walking through a grassy field to find unexploded bombs. Suddenly my leg got caught. I looked. There was a very fine yet surprisingly strong copper wire... ...No danger. This wire had been part of a wire guided anti-tank missile. Such rockets, naturally, require mid course corrections. Earlier, science fiction writer Robert Heinlein, in Starship Troopers, had envisioned a missile where you could sight on the target, click to show it to the missile’s computer, then click once more to send the missile on its way. Of course such “fire and forget” is only a fantasy.

I think part of the problem in the US, now, is the recent fantasy of “market fundamentalism.” In this ideology the public can relax and just let “market forces” do all the work. I think this feeling has spread… to people feeling that government “should not” require constant correction. When President Obama was proposing a national health care, like the splendid ones in Japan or my homeland of Canada, many Americans suspected that their own limitations, unfortunately, were just too great. They simply could not have a government service that would work nearly as well as in Canada or Japan, not if the relaxed lazy citizens wanted to just “fire and forget.” How queer for me to reflect that, within my lifetime, Americans used to be more democratic than Canadians.

The US citizens fired their white house experts off to Iraq, and then tried to forget that citizenship requires participation. "Nation building," to rework an old quote "is too important to leave to the generals."

Earlier in the first quoted paragraph was this

“…Joseph Biden wondered, “How urgent can this be if I tell you this is a great crisis and, at the time we’re marching to war, I give the single largest tax cut in the history of the United States of America?” The tax cut didn’t just leave the country fiscally unsound during wartime; their inequity was bad for morale. But the president’s failure to call for shared, equal sacrifice wasn’t accidental. It followed directly from the governing spirit of the modern conservative movement that his presidency brought to full power. After years of a sustained assault on the idea of collective action, there was no ideological foundation left on which Bush could have stood up and asked what Americans could do for their country. We weren’t urge to study…” (As above)

The next paragraph begins:

“Perhaps it was a shrewd political read on Bush’s part- a recognition that Americans, for all their passion after September 11, would inevitably slouch back to their sofas. It seemed fair to ask, though, how a body politic as out of shape as ours was likely to make it over the long, hard slog of wartime; how convincingly we could export democratic values when our own version showed so many sign of atrophy; how much solidarity we could expect to muster for Afghans and Iraqis when we were asked to feel so little for one another.”

I love that validation. In one of my essays I pointed out that it was a mistake to think we could teach the Iraqi’s to have democracy with just a quick sound bite, the implication being that on the home front Americans would need to reflect for more than just a single bite of time. But of course, events proved Americans just could not reflect, certainly not enough to develop some solidarity with Iraq. I think my parents knew more about the enemy during WWII than we do about our protégés, our allies, all those folks we mentored in Iraq.

In the Arab world, democracy is still a feared, loved, hated, strange and revolutionary thing. It was Emma Goldman who said, and you may have seen her bumper sticker, “If I can’t dance, I don’t want to be part of your revolution.” As for what the Iraqi’s wanted, (dancing?) judging by the US occupation authorities, and their bizarre dictates, no Ugly American cared enough to ask them. Not caring? Not working with? I ask you: Is this treating the Iraqi’s as “good enough to be citizens,” or merely as unwashed voters who would regularly change their masters? It cannot be denied: The US authorities were embedded in the US culture, in a republic of people too apathetic to oversee them or correct them, let alone develop any understanding of the innocent Iraqi people. Here’s a bumper sticker for an Iraqi driving past a US headquarters: “If you don’t care about me, I don’t want to be part of your democracy.”

For various sound reasons, which would require a separate essay, I haven’t given up on the US. I still have hope. I realize how, for some people, hope is only felt when concurrent with action. At the end of my April 2011 essay Are Yankees Stupid? I was getting at this sort of thing, at action, citizenship and hope, when I addressed a hypothetical US citizen, one who claimed he was neither stupid nor irresponsible:

"At which I can only reply, as gently as I can, “All of my readers are responsible. And you, dear reader, may well prove me wrong. Go ahead: do the “citizen thing.” Go to your downtown library, or bookstore, and ask them to include a war on terror section. Tell them how your fellow citizens want to seek out new information, new concepts, and boldly put their actions where their commitment is… I am sorry to say I think you will fail… Then you may write a comment here to tell the rest of us what happened.”"

That was in April, and so far I've heard nothing back. I am an idealistic person, so if you have some hope, please feel free to comment.

Sean Crawford

Calgary,

August 2011

Footnotes:

~Jerome Weeks of the Miami Herald, wrote "Packer's account is suspenseful, heartbreaking and infuriating, like watching a slow-moving bus accident... The Assassin's Gate is simply indispensable."

~As I recall, the heirs of President John F. Kennedy did not use their initiative any more than did the pals of Bush. No asking, "What can I do for my country?" As the bus started to slide down the hill the liberals stood watching with folded arms.

~The 2005 quotes are from pages 386 and 387 of the Farrar, Straus and Giroux trade edition, with a new copyright 2006 Reading Group Guide and a new 2006 author's Afterword.

~Maybe it's the time of season, or maybe its the time of apathy, but this essay, with its clear title, is getting less than my usual number of hits.

~Update: It's taken a good while, but, cumulatively, now it is at a normal number of hits.

Quality TV and Battlestar Galactica

2011-08-24T22:52:00.000-07:00

essaysbysean.blogspot.com

It is a cliche that with the exciting new changes to television - more paths, lower costs, more channels - there will be a leap to higher quality TV. Yet I am doubtful that Hollywood is poised to leap....

By the time I was leaving elementary school several changes had been made to the TV world. Each change had resulted in a journalist writing in the newspaper TV section that a new level of quality broadcasting was imminent. I recall cynically telling my teacher for grades six and seven, Mr. Macintyre, that the latest claim would be as bogus as the others had been. Not that we used the slang "bogus" back then. Nor did we have the words to say, "Entertainment reporters are just blowing smoke." Mr. Macintyre once told us, sheepishly, that studies showed that people who watched cultural shows did not buy as many of the products advertised on commercials. This was before PBS.

(Twilight zone)

It was years earlier, during the days of black and white television, that Rod Serling had addressed the quality issue. In our day Serling is best known for creating The Twilight Zone and then writing some of the early scripts. Of course he also did voice overs; he appeared on camera beginning with the second season. As you know, Serling used the cover of "merely science fiction" to tackle controversial issues such as equal rights for Blacks. In his own day Serling was known for his award-winning teleplays, such as Requiem for a Heavyweight. Back then, for a brief spell, it was possible to give prominence to a screenwriter's name, as we do today for playwrights. Serling said that teleplays could not approach the quality of stage plays as long as the shows depended on sponsors because the sponsors would never risk controversy.

It's been years since I heard, "Lassie is brought to you by Campbell's Soup." I suppose the sponsor obstacle has since fallen, as have other obstacles, until one might think today that only the "ratings" obstacle remains. One would be wrong. As Shakespeare would say, "The fault is not with our stars but within ourselves."

When we undertake to go out to the cinema we undertake to be vulnerable to "the agony and the ecstasy." But at home we play it safe. There, as the cathode tube glows, we may stir the soup on the stove, pet the dog, and glance at the newspaper headlines... all the while determined not be vulnerable. Instead we pretend the action is safely in our living room. If, perchance, a Shakespeare-style show played we would maintain our safety by having a relief valve of commercial breaks and by never, come to think of it, having any hushed thoughtful intermission between acts.

There was a brief time when society allowed television to be creative, a time when society felt permission for change: the 1960's. When recently the A&E channel was advertising, "TV too good for TV" many of the A&E shows, such as The Avengers, were from that time. A friend tells me the channel has since dropped all their A programming to stick with only the E.

(Post 9/11)

Society certainly felt a shock wave pass through on 9/11. After that day, networks broadcast comfort reruns; shows that could be thought frivolous, such as awards shows, were postponed for weeks. Remember? Sales of gentle Enya albums rose. A man said that America had lost her innocence.

Previously a wit had said that America was the only nation that could keep losing her innocence and then regaining it. I suppose now if Americans are to fully regain their innocence it will be only after they feel fully safe that conventional "civil war" terrorists, such as the British IRA, no longer share the planet with newfangled "global reach" ones, such as the Pakistani Muslims who cross international borders into India.

A show that reflects post 9/11 is Battlestar Galactica. It's so different... I am reminded of one time years ago, during a docudrama about Albert Speer, when I read aloud a full screen of text, reading it to the kitchen worker on the couch next to me. I had guessed the text would swiftly vanish. It did. She said, "Thank you, Sean." The incident has stayed with me not just because she had no ego problems with being read to (unlike the males I knew then) but because I have never since seen a TV show that so overestimated the reading speed of the average American. Not until now.

(Marketing)

The first thing I noticed about Battlestar Galactica was that the orienting text on the screen, such as "City of Caprica" was small and did not linger. The next thing I noticed was that acronyms, such as "an FTL ship," were used in dialogue without being "spelled out" in full or explained. Would a senior citizen I knew, who happily watched Star Trek, "get" such acronyms? For folks like her, remember, the "teleportation chamber" was simplified into a "transporter room." Obviously the producer of Galactica, Ronald Moore, hasn't marketed to the lowest common denominator. Moore has risked letting the audience stretch intellectually... and emotionally.

The average viewer, while stirring his soup, probably couldn't bear a show where an Israeli prime minister, for the sake of peace, allows a child he has met to die by an imminent Hezbollah rocket attack. Yet on Galactica the schoolteacher/Madam President must consider doing such a thing. It's awfully tense... but great drama. Then the battlestar commander, Adama, must consider whether to blast a "possibly" hi-jacked passenger liner heading for headquarters. And Adama's sensitive son, Lee, is the one with his finger on the trigger.

I don't see a European-style "lack of innocence" in Battlestar Galactica. No, I see an ennobling determination to face reality. I don't think the rest of bogus TV land will ever aspire to such dramatic quality.

Sean Crawford

still hearing a lady pilot's outraged cry, "We are at war!"

2006-2008 Calgary

Hollywood Morality

2011-08-18T17:19:00.000-07:00

essaysbysean.blogspot.com

(Originally title Terminators and Boys)

Before television, or radio shows, or moving pictures, there was Rudyard Kipling's violent short story, The Drums of the Fore and Aft, about two army drummer boys. The boys play this song:

Some talk of Alexander,
and some of Hercules;
of Hector and Lysander,
and such great names as these;
but of all the world's great heroes,
there's none that can compare,
with a tow-row-row-row-row-row-row
to the British Grenadiers.

I keep chuckling proudly over 'something about a boy' in the TV show Terminator: The Sarah Conner Chronicles ...

...For some bewildered or righteous folks our chaotic nation includes Hollywood TV shows and movies that are "scandalous and violent." Not exactly heroic. For them that rumbling sound you hear is a railway car, shaped like a hand basket, carrying us all thundering down to hell. For me though, as a writer and citizen, Hollywood makes clear sense.

Occasionally, of course, a director with a second-rate understanding for all aspects of movie making tries to load up his movie with sex and violence, -ok- and with immorality, -no way- and then wonders why his second-rate B-movie sinks like a stone. It is fine for a new director to make a pessimistic movie that speaks to the dark side of an audience; it is fine if his next movie speaks to the brighter side of that same audience- but what he must never do is make an attack on the morals of that audience.

Obviously the public doesn't need to have the conscious eye of a writer or anthropologist. At some less conscious level the immorality of a movie will register, and then the public will register their disapproval at the box office.The average person, I presume, never thinks much about Hollywood morality. Some people, if asked, might smirk and say that (since the 1960's) "anything goes." Not so.

To train one's eye for adult shows it is fun to consider shows for boys. I grew up during the golden days of black-and-white westerns. My peacefull granny bought me a cowboy hat. That summer I fell dead in so many ways: twisted, flopped, sagged- I did a terrific slow sag off a raised oil tank once. This while our TV heroes, such as the Lone Ranger, never once shot or even wounded anyone. (Batman was the same) To disarm the man in the black hat, at the end of the show, the hero would shoot the gun, not the hand. No blood. My brother Pat remembers a horse chase. The robber kept turning in his saddle to shoot at the hero, while our hero, in his white hat, kept winding up his lasso. (Yes, he "caught" the crook) Again, no blood.

(Stories)

TV changed to color, horse chases changed to car chases. Remember Dukes of Hazard? As in this summer's fashion of Daisy Duke shorts? "Just two good old boys, never meaning no harm." In every episode a police car would flip over. Always- despite how every second of camera time is precious -always the cops would be shown nimbly climbing from their vehicle, and thereby showing their prime time viewers that they were totally unharmed. The duke boys meant no harm.

Remember The Fugitive? It was broadcast after bedtime for children. David Janssen played Dr. Richard Kimble, searching for the one-armed man. In the adult world, where hats are often gray, the fugitive often found himself teaming up with shady characters. I remember watching an episode on the couch with a buddy. The fugitive's buddy-of-the-week had to slug a policeman and then the two ran off. My buddy shouted, "You see that? The fugitive never hits a cop! Then if he finds the one-armed man there will be no charges against him!" True. The other issue was: heroes don't hit policemen. Space age writers of digital scripts, and bronze age tellers of tales at hearth fires, have always held their heroes, such as Hector, up to high moral standards. A storyteller is part of the town, accountable to the town.

As a writer and story teller, I am mindful of Orwell's observation that every healthy society must demand a little more from people than it can reasonably expect. As a person, in the darkness away from the story teller's campfire, I know I am not so good. In fact, I am a timid middle aged man. If some one points a gun at me, or if he makes death threats, then I cannot sooth myself that "he is only trying to scare me." Of course, to discourage me from taking the law into my own hands, such acts are criminal offences...

(Morality)

But as a timid man I might not risk waiting for the law to prevail. Also, if I have to club someone on the head then I might just be tempted to "clear my back trail," to relieve myself of feeling so afraid of someday being a target of revenge. I might be tempted to... er-, "terminate with extreme prejudice." (sorry) Luckily for everyone I live a nice timid life.

The closest I get to action is seeing Hollywood adventures where if my hero has to knock someone out... then he will take the time to tie the bad guy's wrists and ankles and elbows and and thighs and so forth, not forgetting to gag him too, and maybe take his uniform, and then rush off in disguise to save the day.

In The Terminator, the first movie, we see Schwartzennager, the robot, arrive, then later the resistance hero arrives naked. (It's a time travel thing.) The hero steals a cop's gun, but without harming any cops.

In T2 Schwartzenagger arrives again, then later the resistance fighter shows up and comes across a cop. We see him next wearing the cop's clothes and gun but we don't explicitly see the cop hog-tied. Tension: In our culture this sets up a tension. The movie is in no hurry, not until page 95 (paperback) of the book by Randall Frakes, to reveal that the "resistance fighter" is not human. Whew! Instantly the movie (and book) is moral again. (The cop must be dead) And the robot's subsequent killings can be explicitly shown.

(Men)

I found some interesting comments on a blog that I follow of anthropologist Grant McCkracken. He wrote for November 24, 2008:

"...This means TV can't ever ever entertain a tragic view of the world.... TV land is benign.

But on The Sarah Connor Chronicles, life's a nightmare, then you die... The characters know they are doomed in the short term or the long. Even if good wins out over evil, the world will still be reduced to rubble. But the hope of triumph is slender at the best of times, and incredible all the rest of the time."

... Post post script: Anyone interested in what feminism means for popular culture must watch this show."

McCracken also writes, "Please do check it out. It's numbers are down and, as I say, it's really just tremendously good fun."

One might cynically ask: Ha-ha, can a single viewer's teensy act do anything to change the (ratings) numbers? Nevertheless, "everyone doing teensy acts" is the basis of any society. People amidst democracy are accustomed to much greater responsibilities than with any other form of government. So anthropologist McCracken may be "crazy" to ask for action, but in this culture he is perfectly correct in doing so.

(Boys)

In this nation our suburban schoolboys mustn't carry a gun explicitly made for man-killing. Not unless, perhaps, they are in uniform in the army reserves. They can enlist as early as sweet 16 but very few enlist quite that young, for obvious reasons. I was once in high school, at a study table leaning forward to read of Kipling's heroes, while a long-haired classmate dreamed of rock concerts and banged his imaginary drums. I knew my classmate had no business going off to be a drummer in battle- leave it to the adults.

For the opening credits of Terminator: The Sarah Conner Chronicles everyone is walking cool: the camera pans past the determined single mother, Sarah Conner, with her gun, then past her ally, Carmen, with her gun, and then to her son with his cool shoulder bag. As I recall, for season two the camera pans past the first two and then- scene cut. Because for season two John has advanced a grade and turned 16... But to the viewers he is still a schoolboy.

At this I am amused. And I'm pleased at how the TV producers are trying to cope, trying to be moral. And so I am proud to be North American. If any one calls us decadent, calls us "the great Satan" then I look him in the eye and say: "Don't be silly...."

I am so looking forward to seeing the season two DVD of Sarah Conner.

Sean Crawford,
drinking infidel red wine,
January, 2009

Footnotes:

~The link to the anthropologist's site is broken so I deleted it.

~Having bought the DVDs I can see that my memory was off- unless they changed things. After all, Hollywood has been known to do retroactive changes. They say the Gilliagan's Island opening song used to end "and all the rest" before they firmly decided on the number of cast(aways), and today when I see a re-run of even the very earliest episodes of Enterprise I still get the Rod Stewart type singer, and not the original nostalgic-type (for me) singer. So my essay stands.

~On the web, where many of us are young computer (nerd) users, where no one uses sports figure icons, but many use anime figures as our live journal icons... I can forget that many older people use their computers as glorified typewriters and mail boxes. And they don't watch popular culture. Last night I did an abreviated version of this essay as a speech at my toastmaster club. My speech evaluator was puzzled when I went from talking about terminators to some one named Sarah. A club member that I talked to afterwards didn't know any of the shows mentioned except for The Lone Ranger. Well. I've learned something.

~My brother-in-law was a hunting guide for rich crazy foreigners. I first knew that he saw me, his city-slicker brother-in-law, as sensible and competent, on the day he walked about in front of me while I had a loaded 303. This while we were shooting.

When our girls were plinking with 22's they, of course, were never behind us.

Radio Silence

2011-08-14T19:31:00.000-07:00

www.essaysbysean.blogspot.com

I was at a retreat this weekend. I couldn't even begin to summarize any of the seminars, I can only write of Stacey Li's surprise...

...It was time to celebrate "the miracle and magic of our spirit." Time for us at our weekly public speaking club, Miracles, to pool our money and take off for a weekend retreat. Instead of our usual little speeches we would have ample time to put on seminars and workshops for each other. We could unleash our inner teacher... Going up the open Queen Elizabeth II highway past cattle and silos, then along a couple of range roads past forests and fields, we at last arrived at a place formerly called River Island, now called Talking Trees.

We car pooled. No trunk space, this time, for bringing the karaoke machine. People's gear included a Tibetan singing bowl, chimes, yoga mats and meditation CDs. For electricity there was a generator by night and solar panels by day. No running water in the cabins. No showers. Nice outhouses...We had a wonderful time.

Next door, in "big sky" Montana, they only introduced highway speed limits about ten years ago. Here on the great plains we like to race along. I have heard that in big cities you may drive for a hour in slow crowded traffic. Out here we wizz north at 110 kilometers per hour... for an hour and half to get to our retreat on the Red Deer river.

Stacey Li came along Saturday morning, driving alone. Here is the thing: She used to live in Victoria near someone famous, Ekhart Tolle. He had advised her to enjoy the driving without having other things to distract her... (My friend John Duban said that some people remove themselves with a wall of sound.) ...So Stacey tried driving for a little while under radio silence. No ipod. No CDs. Nothing but her gently humming engine and tires. In fact, to her surprise, she ended up driving the entire way there without electronic noise. And she loved it! She told us she "noticed so much more." She felt more connected, more mindful of the farms and fields and undulating land. For her the retreat started at the city limits.

I believed her. Partly because we had car pooled up there without the stereo on. And mostly because I too have felt serenity. Here in the city I usually arrive home with my radio on normal/loud. But as I park I dial the volume way down; if the power switch is separate from volume I gladly kill it. Next morning, when I fire up the ignition, I resist the crutch of automatically reaching for that power switch. With my old rattletrap car I had desperately needed a daily radio silence in order to stay acquainted with my car's many noises.

These days I need daily silence to stay acquainted with... something deep. As John might say, "In the silence is the All." Many times I'd commute almost to work before wondering, "So, what's the weather for today- hey, I've had the radio off all this time." So I'd flick on the radio but then I'd arrive at work before the forecast could come on. To me this sudden "hey-" was queer but if I tried to share my amusement then I'd see furrowed brows. It bothered people.

So I guess most folks are driving with crutches... while people like Stacey have found freedom.

Sean Crawford

Southern Alberta,

Spring 2008

Footnotes:
~I wouldn't do justice, in this short essay, if I tried to explain the seminars. Trying to summarize a good seminar is as silly as trying to condense a classic essay or stage play. ...Hearing how people in cyber space believe in having short attention spans just makes me hiss like Gollum!...

~Princeton Lau, a computer guy, e-mails me that he too drives without the radio on, both in the city and on the highway up to Edmonton; he thanked me for putting it in words.

~If I feel hollow after I turn off the radio (or after any activity) then I know my true motivation had not been music but something else, probably avoidance.

~After talking to a couple of people I think I should say that in my high school a girl and I were each living alone. We each flipped on the radio as soon as we entered our empty abode. Had we been drivers then of course we would have used our car radio a lot.

Internet, Sans Memories

2011-08-10T22:41:00.000-07:00

essaysbysean.blogspot.com

There was an old lady,

Lived under a hill,

And if she’s not dead,

She lives there still!

Junior Classics

Back in the good old days, when I was a child, my life was improved: Someone wrote a first person nonfiction article, about a man with a diver’s helmet, published in the Junior Classics Shelf of Books. The “shelf” held ten volumes; I think they were published just after the war, as one of the stories was about a B-17 limping home. (Oh, those brave men … oh, those dear boys) One day, middle-aged and passing through the rocky mountain town of Golden, I found a few of those volumes. I picked one up and glanced at that old childhood article about exploring the silent world, and I realized: “Hey, I know this name!” It was James Ramsey Ullman (1907-1971).

My grade five teacher, Mr. Thompson, read to us Ullman’s story about a young alpine guide, Banner in the Sky. Years later, it was during my Outward Bound course that I heard Ullman’s Americans on Everest read aloud in the dusk, across a campfire. It’s a small world: in another time zone, in another decade, that reader was to be my college outdoor pursuits teacher, Alan Derbyshire. Across the flames Alan read to us of the summit team being benighted, sitting through subzero temperatures, waiting for the sun. (They lived) Both of those readings have stayed with me, warming my heart, but neither has changed my life as did as Ullman’s account of exploring under the sea.

According to my childish memory… before I was born, before the invention of self contained underwater breathing apparatus, Ullman entrusted his life to the principle of the diving bell: air will compress upward, and finally become too dense to allow the water to go any higher. (I guess every boy has tried putting Kleenex in a glass upside down in the water) But instead of being within a diving bell, Ullman had just a helmet. No watertight canvass diver’s suit, just a helmet. The water came near his chin. I remember he found how fish would swim closer if, instead of standing stiff like a man, he would sway with the currents as the seaweed did. Back in those days, of course, there was no such thing as a store-bought underwater camera. How was he to retain images of that amazing world beneath the sea? Easy: He would turn his head away, and if he could not picture the scene, he would turn back his head and try again. This trick has improved my life.

To this day I have retained “memories,” what the French call “souvenirs,” of treasured moments. Another version of Ullman’s trick, for works of nonfiction, is to look away from a page and try to imagine how I would explain it…

Down the years I watched as vacuum tubes gave way to transistors, which in turn gave way to solid state. Computer programmers gave way to software developers. And now I have high speed Internet, in a new plastic world, far away from solid diving bells and steel propeller bombers, a world where supposedly we have a better chance to avoid war, if only because, with the Internet, we can acquire more wisdom from having more information. A better chance for peace, eh? I remain skeptical.

Peace? Can we hope to be wiser than our grandparents, who tried and failed? I’m tired of people surfing with their mouse, click, click, click, skipping like stones over the surface, as if the world beneath the pages is forever silent to them. Knowledge won’t become wisdom if you won’t look deeper, won’t look up from the page to reflect.

Do clickers have any memory? Any attention span? I just don't know… I think if they turn their heads away then, after a little while, they don’t even know what they just clicked on. What did you learn today? Listen: In the morning it's "click click click;" in the evening it's "I don't know." Regretfully, I fear that someday, in my golden years, the only “classic” pages on the web from back in 2011 will be from pages that have been scanned in from real paper.

One of my favorite blog-essayists is a software developer named Stevey. In one of the last pieces he ever did, in July of 2010, he mentions Reddit, a well-known geek site where pages are voted on to have rankings. Perhaps he was being ironic in Blogger Finger when he wrote:

“Another perspective I’ve gained is that I now actually agree with everyone who complained that my blog posts were too long. Reddit has ruined my attention span for online material. There seems to be no such thing as too frequent, but there’s definitely such thing as too long. So I’ll be better about that.”

… I suppose it’s a good thing, overall, that Stevey is conscious of what’s happened to him.

Less conscious are those people like me, from the post-war generation, unaware why we find it hard to read the classic novels our parents liked. According to best selling novelist Rita Mae Brown, people of the TV generation keep expecting a change every so often, just as they would expect to pause for commercial breaks.

I can relate. When I was in college I took a “creative movement” class. Although our class offered the same credits as any other class, we needed more classroom hours per week. We were serious. However, we still lacked the time to choreograph pieces of any length. And so for several years afterwards, whenever I saw “real dances” on stage I kept expecting them to end… Admittedly, part of my problem with seeing long dances was my old inability to digest sweet beauty, a problem I would also have when reading the classics… Thank God the performing arts developed my attention span, for my problem with beauty would have been unsolvable without sustained attention.

As for my everyday reading tastes, after finishing a best-selling volume of nonfiction, I like to turn my head away for six months. Then look again. Besides being re-entertained, the main benefit is to allow a few “take away” lessons to truly sink in; the lesser benefit is to have enough space for a critical, calm look at a book the public is so excited about…

For me, a way to understand Internet surfers is to picture a ship, after a three-hour tour, washed aground on an uncharted desert isle. Remember? The ship’s name, Minnow, was a satire, according to wikipedia. Minnow was the television executive who deplored how TV was a “vast wasteland.” (The fault, dear Gilligan, is not within our executives but within ourselves)

It’s nice to be able to look at wikipedia, nice to have my personal computer, but if I “channel flip” through web sites too fast, if I won’t read anything longer than a few hundred words, and, most importantly, if I won’t pause to reflect... then in the end I will be just another television zombie, sans brains; in the end, sans memories, I will have created my own Internet wasteland.

In the end, I refuse to take that easy way out. Back in my childhood I read works by people who met the challenges of mountains, deep seas and difficult books. I hope I can learn, someday, both to read, and to write, as well as they did.

Sean Crawford

Praying for peace

August, 2011

Footnotes:

~My childish memory is weak on science, and Ullman may have writ the piece before or after.

~Out of principle I no longer do links but I have made one for Stevey. He has two essay sites and it would be a pity if a reader's web search found only his most recent site.

~No longer do links? In the working world, of course, I save people precious seconds, such as by leaving my telephone number in a message to a person who already has my phone number on his Rolodex. But at the same time, in the real world, I don't see people as being quite so busy.
As explained in previous essays, (Most recently in March, 2011, Done and Learned) making links for volunteers who are reading for their leisure, and not for their business, can all too easily become casting pearls before swine.

Readers Enjoy Battlestar Galactica

2011-08-06T19:55:00.000-07:00

www.essaysbysean.blogspot.com

One of the nice things about the dark show Battlestar Galactica (BSG) is that it lessens my loneliness. In a time when most people see the world through a lens of television instead of books, the makers of BSG are surely like me: avid readers. How rare for Hollywood. New York Times best-selling author Rita Mae Brown, another avid reader, reports her frustration at "creative" Hollywood meetings. Everyone makes their references... in terms of other movies! They read not books nor stage plays, neither do they know the world.

Strange- you would think that anyone responsible for millions of dollars would take the time to get some book learning- perhaps they wish to fit in with rich blond hotel-owning peers.

Writer Donald Hamilton, in his grim Matt Helm spy series, spoke for a lot of us: Helm mostly works on American soil. Like me, Helm has days of feeling alienated and frustrated. An experienced war veteran, Helm finds himself saddled with horrified bungling young partners, always liberals, bungling because their philosophies and actions come from watching TV. Furthermore, Helm's boss, one of the most dangerous men in the world, has a Winston Churchill-like distaste for imprecision or destruction of the English language. Me too. (A courtroom observer may be uninterested; the judge must be disinterested.) As with BSG, I found the Helm series lessened my sense of isolation: Like Helm, I too sometimes wonder what planet liberals come from. I guess liberals spend fewer man-hours reading than they do watching TV.

Helm grew up on a practical ranch; I grew up far from any boob tube city folk. Our shack had a chimney (for coal and wood) but no TV antenna. When Dad built his tar-shingled house over in the next field, using his veteran's allowance, he made sure of one thing: every blessed room had a stout overhead light. He valued reading. I never had to frown and try to keep my book in the light of a lampshade; I never had to drag a table lamp over until my elbow threatened ruin. Now that I'm grown up enough to "waste" money on American hotels I find they are just like American living rooms: designed to encourage TV over reading.

(Fiat lux)

Yesterday a Filipino told me that, like me, she was really struck by the absence of light over here. Back home even cheap hotels have overhead light. My only answer for her was that a Canadian lady once told me that being forced to use lamps "felt elegant." Go figure.

I grew up with a jumbled basement, sans attic. A book lay face up called D-Day 6th of June 1944. A date I can't forget. (Dad landed on the 16th.) Brochures on civil defense lay in a cupboard. I learned that one should put furniture against the walls and windows, and that basement cement would block rays better than a wooden wall. Of course I read novels about atomic attack, such as a Reader's Digest condensed 1954 book Tomorrow! by Philip Wylie, a tale of two towns and their volunteer civil defense preparations. I read stories of life among the ruins. To this day I can't look at a city real estate map, with concentric circles showing the distance to downtown, without thinking of radii of destruction and ground zero.

One year, as an adult in the 1980s, I lived in a boarding house with two young men. They watched a television special movie, The Day After. The men were amazed, simply amazed, to see that atomic war was that bad. I almost bared my canines to snarl, "Where were you in sixty-two?" But I didn't. Those young men had never traveled to '62 or anywhere else. Not via books. Only TV was real.

Years later various men and women who saw Saving Private Ryan told me they had no idea, none, that war was so bad. Again I manfully restrained myself. 'Think positive,' I told myself; 'bless the innocent civilians,' I said. After all, on the idiot box, war was small elite teams with minimal casualties. Real cool. Maybe someone would be wounded in the right shoulder. My father knew better. He knew war was not cool.

In my big brother's room I once found a signet edition of Robert Heinlein's Revolt in 2100. (Recently I bought that same yellowing edition just for the cover art.) In the story, published in 1948, the U.S. is under a theocracy. The future regime varies from historical oppressions only in the details. Unlike sharia law, all the stonings are impromptu, ...instead of Taliban patroling the sidewalk to whip transgressors, there are secret police. The hero joins the underground. Soon he is considered for work as an assassin, but unfortunately, psyco-aptitude tests are clear: He has an even chance of being caught on his first time out. The real assassins have a kill ratio of "three point seven accomplished missions" before being stopped. They carry cyanide... Is this too grim? A few years later I read that for tank destroyers in WWII the kill ratio was... three panzers before being killed themselves. One of my fellow writers was with the TD's. He received four bronze stars. I'm grateful he made it back. These sorts of statistics never make it to Hollywood. Non-democracies make life grim for all of us, but like agent Matt Helm I try to be facing life, by reading books, and not always be escaping into television.

(Bronze stars)

And so I am grateful for a little line in Battlestar Galactica. Picture the colonies's best athletes. They had been training in remote hills when the Cylons killed everybody else. So the players begin armed resistance. Eventualy they are found by a lady pilot from the Galactica. A famous team captain gives the pilot his report. I was touched; it turns out the vast majority of athletes they started out with are dead... For Hollywood, that is a rare moment of reality. But BSG has many such moments.

On the first episode of BSG I thought of Matt Helm: I saw how the old executive officer, a war veteran, is hated by the young training crew. Then war- an attack. Suddenly the Galactica is losing air- the old XO slams the airtight door and dogs it shut: trapping and killing the crew on the other side. Now the horrified people really hate him! I stood up, "Yes!" And all this being shown not in a big tragic movie but in a mere TV show.

The makers of BSG read enough to know things. They know that a freedom loving pro-abortionist can change her mind when the world changes... and that legalities matter. They know, surely from reading, that a pilot officer carries a side arm merely because it fits in the cockpit; an army officer carries a dinky little pistol for a different reason. Near the end of season three old Adama figuratively puts his pistol to the head of a young woman beloved to him, and to we viewers, and says, his tears held back, that he will kill her if that is what it takes to ensure that all future orders, no matter how unwanted, will always be instantly carried out... This echoes a young officer in the episode Fragged, and seasoned officers on the Battlestar Pegasus. It ain't pretty, but then again, truth does have a special beauty. War is not like TV...

(Eternal present)

I suppose "watching TV and never reading" is the secret to being an unresponsible liberal: staying in a bubble of now-time. Never weaving together a personal sense of world history. Focusing on a TV-like eternal present without consequences .... And if such a person gives loud narrow-eyed opinions then people holding library cards will back away and be silent; then he can tell himself that smart conservatives don't matter, don't count, and shouldn't even be around us liberals...

A certain BSG episode about civilian resistance "is almost unwatchable" said a friend. I agreed. I am reminded of that French-made documentary that exposed French WWII resistance, The Sorrow and the Pity. By showing living witnesses it achieved great power. It went unseen in France for ten years although you could watch it here. I saw it only once, with all my brothers, on a black and white TV with rabbit ears. The documentary, unseen by lovers of soap operas, was my first exposure to irony, or counterpoint, or whatever you call it, because at the end of that horrible show a man appears on camera to say he will sing a happy song. He ends the show singing!...

Today I'm amazed, and grateful, that BSG has tackled such subjects as the sorrow of resistance and pitiful human suicide bombers. The producers and writers are not afraid to read; not afraid to tell.

As one of the older seasoned actors, Edward James Olmos, said, "You will never see another program like this again in your lifetime."

Sean Crawford

wishing for someone to say,

"Let me tell you about this book I'm reading!"

Summer, 2008

~ Commander Adama is no Captain Kirk: at the start of the mini-series he is being retired because he is not good enough to make admiral; his old XO is not good enough to make captain.

~Ms Brown's harsh observations of Hollywood are in her book Starting From Scratch: A Different kind of Writer's Manual.

~A good explaination of "infotainment" is in Neil Postman's Amusing Ourselves to Death.

Battlestar Galactica is Post 9/11

2011-08-03T06:02:00.000-07:00

www.essaysbysean.blogspot.com

Battlestar Galactica (BSG) is "The best show on television" says Newsday, while the Globe and Mail reports that what BSG does is tackle current issues such as 9/11. It is, it does. What strikes me is how different the show is from The Original Series (TOS) of the late 1970s, post Vietnam. If TV reflects society, then society sure has changed. We can no longer turn away from life.

The old show was happy and shiny, even "campy." The new is as dark as night with a lot of the two words that win wars: "Yes, Sir." In BSG people take their situation very seriously: "The war is over. We lost."

Nobody said that on the post Vietnam show. For nobody back then was truly saying, "We lost." No introspection. Even idealists would say in their hearts "the army" lost. The army merely called the war a "conflict." The schoolteacher's ROM resource base, ERIC, did not add "Vietnam war" until 1983. The viewers who watched longhaired casual people on a Battlestar were viewers turning away from responsibility, away from war, religion and politics.

Religion? The viewers of TOS sang, "Imagine there's no heaven." In BSG both the humans and the Cylon robots have a religion. After the Cylon sneak attack the surviving humans hold a church service, not a funeral, with bodies laid out in rows front. Here the survivors, atheists and devout alike, take great comfort ...I have read that after 9/11 the "latte democrats" struggled over people needing a religious ceremony.

Politics? The very word gave viewers of TOS a "yuck" face. They imagined a community life devoid of "politics." They knew who Nixon was but not who their own alderman or senator was. They couldn't imagine that in the 21st Century there would be states where people don't just talk and filibuster. No, they swing heavy clubs and they form militias. In BSG there is a clear sense that a healthy society requires a Constitution and legalities to hold back the chaos that results when groups oppose the community with their own agenda.

The viewers of TOS seemed to lack this sense. They couldn't think that extremist combatants, opposed to politics, could launch giant rockets and cross-border attacks without civilian permission. (Hezbollah in Lebanon)

Civilians in TOS were mere background, "a rag tag fleet." In BSG a schoolteacher is sworn in as president and commander-in-chief. While staying with the civil fleet she doesn't blindly oppose her soldiers for being "establishment" and "baby killers." Not like people in the 1970s. I think of her as a one-person board of directors: being there to cooperate and guide as well as lead. In a democracy, so do we all.

War? Societies change; a squadron leader changes. At first he ends his briefing to Galactica pilots by saying, "Be careful out there." Then, in private, his best friend gives him hell. "'Be careful?' You're supposed to say, 'good hunting!'...We are at war!"

Soon after 9/11 I realized we could not turn back the clock. But I never imagined a show like Battlestar Galactica ...

Sean Crawford
August 2011
Calgary
Footnote: I posted essays on BSG in October and August of 2011.