Condom Referendum: Los Angeles 2012 (17 NOV. 2012)

         Cheers for the voters of Los Angeles County! Two cheers for their approving 2012 County Measure B, the initiative requiring condoms in pornographic videos shot in LA County!

         Not three cheers: the law raises serious questions on free speech and the limits of government power, topics about which you will hear plenty because the condom requirement is opposed by the porn industry. (An industry I will not knock: the big-time spending that keeps America out of another Great Depression includes the great three p’s of Politics, Pot, and Porn.) Two cheers, though: since the law moves in positive directions on crucial issues of public health and toward reasonable resolution — not solution but messily political, tolerable resolution — of the profoundly dangerous issue of abortion.

         For me, the strongest objection to Measure B is that it requires artists, or at least communicators, to propagandize in support of policy endorsed by the State: in this case “the State” in its very minor incarnation of the County of Los Angeles. I’m a life-member of the American Civil Liberties Union, and even more than to censorship I object to requiring people to participate in propaganda. Still, the message to be propagated by Measure B is important enough that I support the idea for professional pornography shot in the LA area and would support similar laws throughout the porn-producing and porn-consuming world (which I guess is most places on Earth populated by humans).

         As the anti-Measure B forces will explain vigorously and at length, sexually-transmitted diseases (STDs) aren’t a major issue with porn performers: porn actors know who their fellow cast members at least by name and have probably checked out their filmographies on the web — and porn professionals get tested regularly for STDs.

         Sexually-transmitted diseases are, however, major issues outside of pornography.

         AIDS the last couple of decades has gotten a lot of attention — along with such other sexually-charged, politicized diseases as breast and prostrate cancer — but there are other STDs.

         During the 1964 summer I worked for Illinois Public Health — and 1964 was in the late 1950s in terms of American sexuality — there was no big public announcement, but the word went around the lab I worked in that gonorrhea was pretty much endemic in the State of Illinois and that the State’s public health concentration — in what was called “venereal disease” at the time — would be on following up on cases of syphilis before syphilis became endemic.

         Gonorrhea is a bothersome disease, and one becoming antibiotic resistant. Syphilis can be deadly. And syphilis is on the rise again — especially in the Developing World — and the spread of syphilis, and STDs generally, can be reduced by widespread use of condoms.

         Widespread condom use also decreases unwanted pregnancies.

         My words here are “reduced” and “decreases,” and for the general point it’s irrelevant that condoms aren’t 100% effective. Few things are. In terms of public health, significant reduction is just fine. In terms of individuals — your kids for example — well, anything worth doing is worth taking some risks to do, and a whole lot of people, obviously, think sex is worth doing. So if you’re not out there campaigning against skydiving or high school football or collegiate boxing, don’t speak out too vociferously about the failure rate of condoms.

The contribution of unprotected sex to disturbingly high rates of abortion is profoundly important because a fair number of people, including powerful and influential people, judge abortion to be a variety of murder. Now add to that conclusion the observation that unwanted pregnancies are the major cause of abortion, and note further that sexually mature, uncastrated and unspayed humans will “to it” (copulate) whatever the laws may happen to be (Measure for Measure 2.1).

         The logic of seeing abortion as murder, or close to murder, leads to seeing widespread abortion as the moral equivalent of mass murder, a conclusion that justifies extreme measures “to stop the slaughter.”

         If it is to the shame of the Allies in World War II that they didn’t bomb the Nazi death camps — and it is — then what is to be said about those who would compromise on abortion in our time? Should we not, instead, praise those who bomb abortion clinics.

Get the point? And to that point add back that epidemic AIDS is a continuing threat in Africa and residual AIDS is still an incipient threat in the developed world. Less horrific STDs are a also significant issue of public health, and there is a long and justified tradition of allowing even extreme restrictions of individual freedom — e.g., quarantine for infectious diseases — when necessary to protect public health.

         So: (1) STDs threaten public health. And (2) The abortion rate is too high, period, and as a philosophically vexed and festering political issue — a morally charged issue with deep roots and radical implications — abortion is a constant threat to social peace.

         Both threats can be reduced, and as a practical matter harm reduction and risk reduction are the best we can do, and condoms are useful for reducing STDs and reducing unwanted pregnancies.

         Condoms also give sexually mature human males control over our reproduction and propagandizing for the use of condoms reminds the many occasionally forgetful dick-heads out there that contraception is (also) a male responsibility.

         So it is very important to encourage condom usage, and one way to encourage using condoms is to make it cool and, if possible, just “the way things are done” (in this case, many kinds of sex).

         Images of condoms on porn stars — and maybe some dialog — can get across that message. Real men, the message goes, can get it up and keep it up with a condom on. Real women can get their men up and keep them up and sometimes help get that condom on in interesting and really sexy ways. Real women put out for real men, i.e., real men wearing condoms.

And if there’s an “ageist” message as well — impotent old men avoid condoms, and old couples needn’t bother — well, this old man would be willing to put up with that. (Old farts still control the government and economy so we can be magnanimous about some teasing [and there’s money for rich old men investing in Viagra/Trojan cross-marketing …].)

         I’d also recommend condom pushing with amateur porn. If exhibitionists with decent bodies and delusions of talent want to upload to a porn site, they can demonstrate that whatever weird-ass sh*t they’re doing won’t spread a disease or get someone pregnant who doesn’t want to be pregnant.

Regulating amateur film-making is even more problematic than with the pros, but I would hope that Measure B would pressure porn sites to make clear that every medium has rules for “Standards and Practices” and that responsible pornos — classy, professional looking pornos — feature guys with condoms.

         “Because that’s the way it’s done.” That’s the message you want: condoms should become fashionable and then unremarkable, like not spitting on the floor, or even in a spittoon.

         Or at least that’s the way it should be done until STDs go the way of smallpox and polio and until we get effective contraception for males and females rather more elegant that rubbers.

         Until people are fertile only when they desire to reproduce, until the human population is a whole lot healthier than we are today — until then, guys, “Wrap that Willy!”

         So two cheers to the good voters of LA County for drafting porn stars as role models for condom use.

         Maybe just one cheer: the whole celebrity “role model” idea is bad. But make that one rousing cheer: slowing the spread of STDs, reducing the number of abortions, and teaching guys to act responsibly overbalances a lot of bad.

Porn in the Public Interest (3 May 2013)

{Bloggers Note: For whatever reasons, this post on OpenSalon got more hits — a whole lot more — than other individual item I've ever posted to the web.}

Headlines in the News:

"Gates Foundation Funds Development of High Tech Condoms"; 

"California’s landmark condoms in porn bill (AB 332) 

clears first Assembly committee, 5 to 1" (References: Gates, AB 332) 

       
            If fashion can get people, especially young people, to tattoo and pierce their bodies, shave their genitals, wear stiletto heals and low-rider pants, and — in the developed world — buy water in small bottles; then fashion can also be a force for good, encouraging condom use.

            So there should be strong support for California Assembly Bill 332 and similar legislation in other states requiring condoms on male actors in pornographic movies. The argument for condom use for sex-workplace safety is legitimate, but there's a more pressing argument for such legislation as a truly public, public health issue. In their way, porn stars are role models, and if their example can be a major influence getting young people to shave like semi-pro swimmers or body builders, porn-actor behavior can be important in making condom-use fashionable, normal, and normative: perhaps even, in the old expression, cool. Condom use as normal behavior for young people has obvious benefits limiting sexually-transmitted diseases, reducing unwanted pregnancies and, hence, the numbers of abortions, and more generally encouraging responsibility among older boys and young men, who should take responsibility for their reproduction and health.

            As part of a larger public information program — i.e., "Wrap That Willy!" propaganda — porn stars can inculcate the doctrines that "Real Men Control Their Reproduction" and "Real Men Can Hold an Erection Well Enough to Be Cool in Condoms." Well, and that Real Women limit their heterosex lives to such Real Men, and have the sexiness and know-how to help their men, let's say, achieve and maintain their "reality."

            Parents and other older adults could also get involved.

            "Late adolescence" was invented during my lifetime, and it isn't a good idea. "The pill" was an excellent idea, except insofar as its existence got people to think contraception an issue for just women and girls. At 18-years old, I was expected to be a young adult, and a good while before I turned 18 my father gave me an optimistically large box of condoms and told me, "Until you know what to do with it; keep it in your pants." I suspect that bit of SexEd was more useful than most of what gets taught in US schools.

            Parents, however, are radically limited in their influence over fashion; stardom, including porn-star stardom, is powerful.

A Tale of Two Commercials: "1984" vs. "Agent Smith" (5 May 2013)

            Super Bowl Sunday, 22 January 1984, saw the one-time airing of one of the most elegant pieces of cinematic art of which I am aware: Ridley Scott's TV ad for the Apple Macintosh, "1984."

            Into a gray, Orwellian, almost entirely male world runs a woman in color, including red shorts. Into a world of robotized/roboticized people and Stalinist-Modern semi-high-tech, she brings a hammer. And into a very literally Orwellian view-screen out of Nineteen Eighty-Four, she throws that hammer.

            Right on, lady!

            To combine a couple ads for the Macintosh, and add one widely held prejudice, the athlete in red helps introduce "for the rest of us" a computer — never named — that will free us from, say, IBM products, "So 1984 won't be like … 1984."

            As anyone who knows me and/or my writing knows, I really despise advertising and urge all and sundry to turn away from commercials, and warn that every time ads get even a microsecond of our attention, that much the hucksters have won. Still, Ridley Scott's "1984" ad is freaking brilliant.
            It is also, looking back — and allowing for a whole lot of contradictions and ironies and hypocrisies — a cultural marker of some significance.

            Fast-forward thirty years, then back up a bit.

            April 2013 saw wide-spread airing of what Lewis Murphy of a couple respectable ListServs describes as "the latest in a sequence of SF themed commercials from GE," that's General Electric, each featuring "various famous robots (or A.I.), including the Lost In Space robot and Data from Star Trek: TNG" — that's The Next Generation, the one with Patrick Stewart. "There is another [commercial] featuring KITT from Knight Rider."

            The recent commercial appears to be titled "Agent of Good" on the GE home page as of 4 May 2013 and is listed as "GE Commercial — Agent of Good: Connected Hospitals" in its most popular YouTube incarnations. I just went with "Agent of Good" in my wiki on "The Human Machine Interface" and described it like this:

Agent Smith from the Matrix series […] pushes General Electric hospital products. Significant for recycling a major virtual/cybernetic villain into a spokesbeing who is believed by the GE advertising people appropriate to offer lollipops to a boy as Neo is offered the red pill or the blue pill by Morpheus in the initial MATRIX film: a scene of potential child seduction older viewers might find highly creepy. Smith, opening lines: "I have found software that intrigues me; it appears it is an agent of good," connecting GE hardware and software allowing virtual multiple-presence and connecting patients via data (sic) to "software, to nurses to the right people and machines." Images feature multiple Smiths (as in the later MATRIX movies) roaming a hospital, where we also see impressive contemporary medical machinery, with visible, but not stressed, GE logos. This technology, Smith tells us, is "Helping hospitals treat people even better, while dramatically reducing waiting time. Now a waiting room" — nearly empty waiting room shown — "is just a room." Title card: "BRILLIANT MACHINES ARE TRANSFORMING THE WAY WE WORK."

             I commented to Lewis Murphy and the others on the Science Fiction Research Association List, that General Electric's SF commercials make sense as an advertising campaign aimed at middle-age/middle-management folk who order Hospital-size medical devices and at the secondary target of old-fogey doctors and patients who are uncomfortable about technological take-over.

            The commercials' message, which I'll her format suitably for relatively subtle, subliminal screen titles: Machines Are Our Friends (like Robbie and Data and KITT); Even The Really Scary Threats Are Our Friends Now, or at least not too scary anymore (maybe like the comic Nazis on Hogan's Heroes).

            Some politically trivial geeks and academics aside, few people think much about commercials. Among those in the target audiences who know and remember Agent Smith, the warm and fuzzy nostalgia of the Matrix memories will mostly overpower any worries about the technologies that Agent Smith quietly endorses and powerfully symbolizes.

            In its way, the Agent Smith commercial is as technically brilliant as Ridley Scott's "1984 (For the Rest of Us)" pushing Mac v. IBM. That Agent Smith/GE is the hero of this latest one indicates important changes, a couple of which are good.

            Scott and the folk at AppleCorp had a large supply of gonads, gall, and chutzpah to appropriate George Orwell's dystopic vision in Nineteen Eighty-Four — and more gall to directly rip off the telescreen in Michael Radner's 1984 film Nineteen Eighty-Four (either that or Radner ripped off Scott or both followed Orwell very carefully — or there was one hell of a coincidence). Still, allowing for all those contradiction, ironies, and hypocrisies, AppleCorp and Scott were on the side of the angels in 1984 in pitting user-friendly, decentralized, and relatively democratic — in 1984 — little Macintosh against IBM-style computers and the IBM business model.

            Today we know that web-based, "iTech," Little Brother technology is a major threat, but there is still much to be said in favot of attacks on Big Brother, and that is what we see in Scott's "1984"; however hypocritically, Scott's female little-David-Macintosh symbol smashes the telescreen of IBM-ish Big Brother.

            The "Agent Smith" commercial supports GE — the Corporate Person and human people who gave us the politicized Ronald Reagan — and big-machine technology. The recent commercial "normalizes" technology that is omnipresent and invasive and eases us over our fears.

            Medical software can indeed be "an agent of good": in a sense a "recuperated," rehabilitated Agent Smith. Big GE medical machines can also be good — and rationalizing and making more efficient the connections among the machines, software, and humans is mostly a good thing.

            Mostly.

            We should still fear Agent Smith and all he stands for and remain very, very cautious in dealing with the medTech wonders from GE and other huge corporate entities.

            Big Brother still needs the occasional hammer-throw hammer thrown into his telepresent face. Agent Smith will never be unambiguously "an agent of good," someone to trust offering candy or life-determining decisions to children.


            We may be fogetting such lessons, and the Agent Smith commercial may be a sign of that dangerous amnesia.

Media Objectivity? Nah. Honesty & Responsibility? Maybe. (2 Dec. 2013)

 "No blood, no news" — Chicago TV station manager, 1970

(and Dean Rusk, disapproving)

                  "The observer is part of the system." — Chem 101, day 1, 1961

            
            I am not feeling very positive right about now toward American journalism, nor, for that matter, a whole lot of fictional movies and "reality" TV shows. More exactly, right about now, I'm pretty disgusted.

            There was a train derailment in the Bronx this morning, and at least four people are confirmed dead (the number may be higher by the time you read this). The fact of a train wreck is indeed news, and there may be important news coming out of the story, but as of 10 AM Pacific Standard Time on Sunday, 1 December 2013, there was just the quickly-reported fact of the wreck when CNN went full frontal on what they admitted — indeed, stressed — was "BREAKING NEWS" and pre-empted Fareed Zakaria's GPS program to show an aerial photo and get comments from witnesses and, essentially, invite a substantial audience to gawk at a transportation accident.

            Now that, in a sense, is objectivity: the nasty sense of treating other feeling and thinking creatures (your fellow human beings, fellow citizens) as objects of spectacle and whatever the word is for the analog of spectacle when you're not voyeuristically viewing but listening.

            Serious consideration of how we in America have failed to maintain much of our infrastructure, with passenger railroads a prime example — now that is worth in-depth coverage. But the roadbed in the Bronx may've been newly repaired and the tracks in peachy-keen condition; the accident may've been caused by some variety of human error that falls into the category of "Horrors happen."

            CNN didn't know because they were reporting "BREAKING NEWS" and therefore mostly not news at all. They could have shown the recorded Fareed Zakaria program and gotten to the train wreck later — at least, let's say, a day later — when there'd be actual information to report.

            And I'd be a viewer interested in such information, since I take trains regularly and had just e-mailed to a travel agent (younger readers can look up "travel agent") my tentative itinerary for a trip involving Amtrak's Texas Eagle Los Angeles to Chicago and the Southwest Chief Chicago to LA, plus a number of shorter trips on commuter runs.

            However, if I'm in a train that goes off the tracks, I'd prefer it if the media whores — including amateur media sluts with cell phone cameras — kept their distance until there was some solid news, the reporting whereof might serve the public interest. So my elliptical-trainer gym viewing got me pissed off enough to inspire exercise but didn't give help my staying informed.

            I returned from the gym to read a page-one story in my local newspaper, "Americans lose trust / Poll finds suspicion lurks in dealings with others." Somewhat mischievously, I checked out the editorial section to see if there was a mea culpa there from the Editorial Board of The Ventura County Star or some columnist. Silly me! There was, of course no apology from the Star, and I doubt there will be apologies from more than a couple media outlets — out of hundreds or thousands (depending what you count) — for their contributions to American distrust of most institutions and of one another.

             "If it bleeds, / It leads," as they say in the TV news trade, and, more generally, "Good news is no news." American news media, along with police dramas and "reality" shows like COPS, present to viewers an America in which dangers to life limb lurk around every corner. Every school shooting in White and/or upscale neighborhoods gets major media play; "sex trafficking" is talked about as if it were the 18^th-century slave trade; and the media offer a figurative megaphone for every member of The Responsible Parents Brigade pushing a doctrine of "Stranger Danger" and the risk of letting children boot up the computer and go on line, let alone out the door.

            Plus, of course, we get all warnings against fraud and scams and the significantly named "confidence games."

            There is nothing wrong with any of this in moderation. Shoot-em-up/Blow-em-up movies can be fun; murder, rape, mayhem, theft and major felonies are news; and there are, God knows, some real asshole gonifs out there waiting to rip off the unwary.

            What is missing in the rough arts of popular culture is some balance of the sort audiences once saw in Shakespeare's obscenely bloody King Lear. There's violence in Lear, but also acts of gratuitous kindness and decency to balance somewhat — the proportion is 1:3 — acts of viciousness. What is missing in the news is context combined with a sense of proportion.

            Instead of the opening news-story paragraphs of disturbing or uplifting "human interest" before getting to, say, some school-house horror, we could have a brief explanation of how rare school violence is and how safe US schools generally are. After we've been reminded that even in dangerous neighborhoods — maybe especially in dangerous neighborhoods — school are about the safest places kids can be, then the reporter can hit us with the grisly, reader-grabbing, ad-selling details of Gunfight at Alferd Packer Memorial High.

            Summary time:

            Objectivity in any strong sense of the term is impossible. As I learned in Introductory Chemistry, and you should have learned somewhere in school, "The observer is part of the system." This is a rule even in physics or astronomy. To measure the position and/or vector of a small particle, you have to measure it, which will change the system in ways that can't be predicted exactly; so you get the uncomfortable fact of Uncertainty: get an exact measurement — an ideal measurement — of position, and you can't know the velocity; get an exact measure of vector velocity (I'm mixing terms here), and you can't determine position. In astronomy, you needn't worry about, say, looking at the Crab Nebula and affecting it. However, you, a human and a specific human, are looking at it, and it may be that the most interesting things about the Crab Nebula can't be detected with vision or any other sense with which human beings have evolved. It may be that the most interesting things about the Crab Nebula can only be learned with senses and/or instruments of which we can't conceive. "The observer is part of the system" even in astronomy if for no other reason than you can't get observations for human-conducted science without involving humans.

            Objectivity in some strong sense is more clearly impossible if you have humans dealing with humans. An anthropologist can't write a paper delivering to us The Village; s/he can only give us the village with an anthropologist wandering around asking weird questions. Or we get the village with an anthropologist viewing it from close enough that s/he will report villagers acting suspiciously, like they thought someone was spying on them — or we get a necessarily vague report from a distant observer.

            Journalists can't give you The Story; they can only give you stories as put together by journalists, who change things just by their presence — think of turning the cameras on at a demonstration — or by asking questions. What's been called New York Times objective style, reporting without the word "I," is always and necessarily at least a small lie. A novelist can give you a story with a "third-person, 'omniscient' Narrator," because the novelist is the creator of the world narrated; reporters can only give you stories with reporters poking around in them: reporters who are actual human beings (most of them) with feelings, beliefs, ideas, ideologies, language, and the other standard human psychological equipment. So some bias is inevitable.

            Objectivity in a literal, moral sense is not desirable; treating journalistic subjects like objects is reprehensible. Objectivity in a literal, "epistemological" sense is impossible: neither reporters nor anyone else can get outside the world and describe it with the accuracy of a god.

            Media folk, though, can try to report honestly, fairly, and compassionately. They can educate their reader about contexts and give some idea of proportion (statistics can be handy here, e.g., in assessments of "Stranger Danger" or risk assessment generally). Studio executives can try to avoid the mildly grotesque voyeurism of "reality" television and shark-week/car-crash news. Studio executives can hire producers who'll use writers who can grab an audience's attention without house invasions or child abductions by pedophile cannibals or "blowing shit up."


            The media can do better than invite us to gawk at car crashes and train wrecks, or play on our fears.

All We Have Is Time, and Too Many People Want Mine (2 Jan. 2014))

A hundred years from now we'll all be dead!

A hundred years from now we'll all be dead!

So no matter what is done and no matter what is said,

A hundred years from now and we'll all be dead!

— Moderately traditional kids' song

  

           My mother's three brothers were dead before I finished school, so they had to have died at a fairly young age; my mother lived to 69, and my father made it to 72. Me, I'm about to turn 71, and, I've been thinking about time. "A hundred years from now and we'll all be dead," indeed; but it's going to be a good deal sooner for me.

            Anyway, I'm feeling more up close and personal on a theme I've dealt with before more philosophically: the insightful if overstated teaching, "All we have is time."

            This idea is part of the premise of Harlan Ellison's great dystopian SF story, "'Repent, Harlequin!' Said the Ticktockman," but Ellison's take is a Modern one, from the world of railroad schedules and analog clocks, and Charles Chaplin's clown caught in the gears of a giant machine: the world of Big-Brother style totalitarianism. Such threats are still with us, God knows, but I think the long-term danger in the United States is more like what we see in Dave Eggers's The Circle (2013): a kindly, largely free-market, little-brother totalitarianism, where the assaults on increasing number of people's time aren't so much "Fordist" assembly lines as multiple screens and windows of office computers and the repeated demands made upon us over our networks and smartphones.

            The Circle is not a subtle book, and its main concern is with privacy, and the decline thereof, with time usurpation a minor point. So the theme of time is handled quickly and directly. Eggers's  postmodern version of the assembly-line speedup in Modern Times (1936) is a digitalized speedup built into the digitalized workplace. The anti-hero of The Circle is Mae Holland, who starts out in customer relations with one screen in front of her and goals for how many customer contacts to handle with what degree of satisfaction. And, as you can guess, the screens keep multiplying, along with the tasks for her, significantly including tasks to keep up her social life as a member of the corporate community.

            If the community offers all sorts of activities, isn't it one's duty to participate? If one can provide feedback and reassurance and reinforcement to one's colleagues and many Facebook-analog "friends," doesn't it become one's duty to do so?

            Of course it does! And in the chilling parody/appropriation of the three slogans of The Party in Nineteen Eighty-Four, at The Circle we have the three-part mantra, "Secrets are Lies. / Caring Is Sharing. / Privacy Is Theft."

            Again, and very obviously, the main concern here is with privacy, but "Caring Is Sharing" also has a time component. Mae is overwhelmed by inputs on her screens not just by her business tasks but also in sharing socially. The point is made explicit when Mae's parents explain that they have fled Circle involvement — involvement was the price for their much-needed health insurance — for reasons beyond the surveillance of their lives The Circle demands.

            Mae has gone "transparent" and is on-line and communicating visuals and audios almost without interruption, and she shares with her many followers her parents' medical challenges, and what would correspond to their e-mail address.          On their way off the grid, Mae's parents send her and us the arithmetic calculating that even their cursory responses to all the well-wishes and advice and "Smiles" (= "Like's") sent them would require sixteen hours of labor a day.

            If you can keep in "Constant Contact" with all your "Friends," caring people do so.
            Similarly with offering "feedback" and "input" into the system. Mae and the co-workers of her "pod" (no shit: pod, as with dolphins) really do work hard to serve their customers, and, when it gets down to it, their careers at The Circle depend on getting good scores on the quick surveys their customers are asked to fill out after each contact with customer service. I, for one, used to get paid to take surveys on products — mostly batteries, for whatever reason — but, golly gee, I feel hard-pressed when asked to fill in a survey without being paid to do so if it will help keep employed some phone-bank serf. "Oh, and remember: anything less than 'Exceptional Service' is a bad mark for me" (as I'm told, e.g., when checking out of the Service Dept. at Toyota [at The Circle, they like A+ averages: 98%]); so I take a little extra time explaining in under 200 words on some survey forms that "competent" is quite enough for me, or I take a little extra time deciding to lie rather than risk the job of a perfectly competent, if unexceptional, service rep.

            Well, you get the point; as I said, The Circle is not subtle and shouldn't be, and subtlety has never been one of my strong points. Eggers's main target is indeed mostly increasing violations of privacy through digital technology, but there is also the point of increasing violations of "the right to be let alone" in demands on our time from various government bureaus and agencies — hey, save those receipts for tax time; and classify them; and sort them; and record them — but also and sometimes overwhelmingly by bosses, businesses, family, colleagues, and friends.

            Only governments can throw us in jail for refusing to give them our time — jury duty for a few days, which is OK; a year or so in Vietnam, which is, say, more problematic — and only our bosses can fire us. Still, there are penalties if you don't do the paper work for the people insuring you, and there are different sorts of penalties if you don't get back to family and friends and Facebook "Friends" to share with the group. It is no big deal to throw out the junk snail mail or delete e-mails or text messages you don't want. But there are penalties if you toss something actually important, and deleting the crap may not take much time, but it does take time, and worrying about that missing tax bill or credit card is, well, worry.

            ("When should I expect my credit card?" / "We mailed it ten days ago." / "What was the return address on the envelope?" / "Nothing specific: That's our policy for your security." / "Well my policy is to throw out unopened any envelope without an identifiable return address." / "We can send you a new card; expect it in three days." / "Okay, I'll spend a week feeling up envelopes. [Hmm … Sorry I put it that way.]")
            In 1976, Thomas J. Remington wrote a beautiful essay on "touch" in the fiction to the mid-70's of Ursula K. Le Guin. He noted that Le Guin (who is a communitarian sort) highly values touch and human connectedness. In my scholarly mode, I agreed with Tom but pointed out that "touch" in Le Guin's works could be bad. It is good to be in touch with family, friends, community, tribe, and outward; it is good to be part of a communal network. But a network can become a net, a trap; touch can be the communication of love; or it can be when you're trapped between your bratty kid brother and sister in the back seat of the car with them seeing how often they can touch you touch you touch you until you go quietly berserk. It is good to spend time together with the family. And then more time, and then you bloody well have to get away from the kids, and they have to get away from you and have time for themselves.

            It is a good thing to get some time off from family and friends, and one of the great gifts of the labor movement was the weekend, when one can get away from work. First, if nothing else, it is a very bad thing to strangle your children or for them to take a baseball bat to you: prudence and decency recommend some time to oneself. Second, though, it is exploitation or even expropriation if your boss or country or loved ones demand "constant contact" and have you on call 24/7.

            A quotation attributed to Oscar Wilde is "The trouble with Socialism is that it takes too many evenings." Whoever said it, the point is a valid one, even for a social democrat such as I. "All we have is time," in a sense, and people should not take any from us without solid payment, including their time returned. We humans are social animals and bonding and family and community and solidarity are good things; we are also individuals, with a right, much of the time, to be let alone, to quite literally seize time for ourselves and hold it precious.


            Not all property is theft, P-J Proudhon's slogan notwithstanding, nor is most privacy theft; privacy and refusal to have our time imposed upon can be taking back that which is most essentially ours. 

The Liberal Media (and Other Urban Legends) [23 Sept. 2014]

In 2003, Eric Alterman published a book titled with the rhetorical question, What Liberal Media? His subtitle was (and remains), "The Truth About Bias and the News," and his topic was the news media. Still, the point holds far beyond the news: "the media" as a large set are certianly not Leftist, and not even all that Liberal.

            * The "Liberal Hollywood/Liberal Media" accusation, when not just a canard, is based in the fact that many media people are liberals. That fact is significant. As the old rule of thumb says, "Consider the source." More important, though, is the proverbial wisdom, "The proof of the pudding is in the eating, which translates out of outdated British into "The test of a desert is what it tastes like" — and means here that what counts a whole lot more than who's producing the media "product" is what that product is and how it functions socially and politically. What really counts isn't source but content; you have to look at the content of the wide range of media to which people in media-saturated cultures are exposed.
            * Most important for the US and other strongly capitalist countries is the bombardment by advertising: nowadays up to eight out of thirty minutes on a high-earning show like The Colbert Report or The Daily Show are taken up by commercials; and almost every commercial has at least the touch of the subtext, CONSUMPTION IS GOOD; CAPITALISM IS GOOD. BUY! Even if all of news programming has been taken over by rabid Bolsheviks, most of the message of the media still reinforces Capitalism.
            * The very form of traditional genres has political implication. E.g., the plot arc of traditional romantic comedy leads to the domestication of young people by bringing them into a crucial reinforcement of the status quo: marriage. At the end of a traditional romantic comedy, "A new and better world coalesces around a central couple," to slightly paraphrase  Northrop Frye, but not a world that is radically different. This will continue to be true with gay rom-coms leading toward gay marriage (as Andrew Sullivan has pointed out, early on and repeatedly, gay marriage is conservative).
            * The very form of the police procedural and Law’n’Order movies reinforces Law’n’Order — and hypocritically or paradoxically undermines law insofar as recent cop dramas endorse cops’ violating the Bill of Rights and reinforce the ideal of the Cowboy Cop/Dirty Harry sort vs. a stick-in-the-mud like Joe Friday on the old Dragnet. And few shows nowadays celebrate defense attorneys like Perry Mason, or a Public Defender. We can argue whether the Right-wing or the Left is more likely nowadays to condemn "jack-booted storm troopers" of the law, but for sure the encouragement of violations of civil liberties is not part of the Liberal agenda.
            * There are anti-war movies; there are, however, a hell of a lot more movies and video games and such that celebrate the military and warfare. More generally, conflict resolution in many films and video games and TV shows is handled by violence, usually without much counting of the cost of violence. From time to time, members of the US Republican Party have complained of "Liberal Democrat [sic] Wars," with some justification; but, still, celebration of the military and, let's say, fondness for force have, generally, not been Liberal.
                        And there is another point with the media, especially war narratives and "action" movies: much of the action is the very casual killing of young men; and easing the acceptance of the guy population as cannon fodder — or maybe drone targets nowadays — makes militaristic thinking more easy. Consider the film The Drop (2014). The film succeeds, and I watched it not as a student of film but like a normal human being and let the movie have its way with me: watching the film with "that willing suspension of disbelief for the moment, which constitutes poetic faith," and, more relevantly, watching and listening with the suspension, for the moment, of my real-world ethical code. In that state I was quite concerned watching The Drop about the safety of a pit bull puppy, and feared for its well-being — but didn't care much when men were killed.
                        Whole genres of films and television shows pander to "the male gaze" and way too many movies and TV shows luxuriate in images of women suffering. Casual handing of the deaths of young men is no better — and both are common, and neither is Liberal.
            * The most basic premise of paranormal/supernatural films is, obviously, belief in the existence of the paranormal (etc.), often accompanied by a denigration of stodgy, commonsensical, and/or scientifically-minded folk who are skeptical of phenomena "beyond our ken." Such exercises in imagination are often entertaining and always, and necessarily, are useful as exercises in imagination. (The muscle analogy is over-used but true enough: a well-toned imagination is as important as well-toned muscles.) Still, there are some people who take the paranormal and supernatural much too seriously — and science-fictional premises like hostile, abducting aliens as well — and carry over into the real world a gullibility for hocus-pocus and suspicion of science, scientists, intellectuals generally, all egg-head authority figures, and common sense.
            * Usually with deaths in drama, "The rest is silence." However, when they open their mouths on the topic, so to speak, most dramas endorse the idea of some sort of afterlife. You may get a film where the funeral features the great poem from Koheleth, "For everything there is a time and a season" — but not even a Biblical quotation on Hey, when you’re dead, you’re dead ("I said in my heart with regard to the sons of men that God is testing them to show them that they are but beasts. For the fate of the sons of men and the fate of beasts is the same; as one dies, so dies the other. They all have the same lifebreath, and man has no advantage over the beasts […]" [Ecclesiastes 3.19]). Religion and Liberalism can go together nicely, thank you — "Episcopalian Liberal" and "Jewish Liberals" are clichés, not oxymorons — but religiosity and faith in a "separable soul" with afterlife help conservative causes more than that clichéd "liberal agenda."
            * A fair number of movies and TV shows, and some news stories, feature macho assholes with little consciousness that they’re assholes. E.g., authoritarian coaches in sports films, the Drill Instructor with a butt-of-iron but heart-of-cold in old war movies: fairly often such characters are macho assholes, don't know they're macho assholes, and are not recognized in the works as macho assholes. Indeed, my well-to-do, well-bred students at Miami University (Oxford, OH) generally lacked the phrase and concept, "macho asshole" and thought "macho" an unambiguously positive term and much macho asshole-itry as normal and, among coaches and some athletes and such, even normative, admirable behavior.
            * A hierarchical system is usually taken for granted in many works, most blatantly in my viewing experience in the setting up of the Star Trek: Voyager series. The inheritors of the STAR TREK franchise had a chance to come up with a whole new way to run a starship with Voyager, and what did they do? They reintroduce a chain of command, just with a woman as captain and the rebellious sorts integrated into it. Hierarchy and deference to rank is more (small "c") conservative than liberal.
            * Many movies and TV shows are borderline pornographic in celebrating "Life-Styles of the Rich and Famous," with poor folk and workers and other such riff-raff invisible. Workers as such usually show up in Satire or Comedy, and worker issues, such as unions are pretty much invisible. Newspapers have Business Sections; I can’t recall a Labor Section.

Etc., emphatically including conservative and, for a long time, downright reactionary indoctrination on race and gender (Birth of a Nation, Gone with the Wind, Father Knows Best).

Where there’s a legitimate complaint, I think, is from religious folk. The Simpson family isn’t religious, but they do go to church now and then — and that’s unusual in TV and movies. To repeat what I’d like to make into a cliché about most characters in art until recently: "They don’t piss, and they don’t pray." And some of the films coming out that do have religious themes are pretty bad. As Justin Chang says about the film Persecuted, (2014), "At a time when the world offers no shortage of examples of what actual religious persecution looks like, for a film to indulge in this particular brand of self-righteous fearmongering isn't just clueless or reckless; it is an act of contemptible irresponsibility."
            Updating my formula: nowadays we have a kind of karmic balance between films with all manner of release of unprecious bodily fluids and other films where it seems that all they do is pray or get hung up on religious issues; few strike reasonable balances on people as animal animals, and animals for whom spiritual longings and concerns — "a religious capacity" — are at least a human "Mode" of thought based in "the natural capacities of the mind" (from Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Dispossessed ch. 1). 

As Peter Biskind taught us in Seeing Is Believing, an ideological back-and-forth has been going on in movies from at least the 1950s — and before, with films I've mentioned like Birth of a Nation and Gone with the Wind, but also Liberal films like Metropolis and downright lying "manifest destiny propaganda like They Died with Their Boots on. So why do we get that, uh, trope of "The Liberal Media"? I'll give the basic answer to that question with another question (hey — I taught for forty years): "Does a fish know it's in water?" Probably not, not unless it's a bottom dweller or flying fish or gets hooked or netted and hauled out. Most Americans are so immersed in capitalist, commercial, basically Conservative culture that we don't even see it. What people notice is the less orthodox Liberal stuff, and with the actual American Left — Democratic Socialists and beyond — having been (mostly figuratively) dead or at least spitting up blood from 1968 on, the Liberal messages sound pretty racy.

Recall that Bill Clinton and Al Gore are basically Eisenhower Republicans, as are many politicians today called "Liberal"; and then acknowledge that America is still a largely conservative country. Our media — generally, in its wide swath — reflect that conservatism, and reinforce it.