Beowabbit

This is copied from Facebook; it makes a better LJ post, actually.

Roughly once a day these days, I read or hear about some piece of Islamophobia that I mean to mention here, but I usually don’t actually carve out the time to do it.

What I heard on NPR this morning was much smaller than most of them, merely a turn of phrase by a reporter who was probably trying to be honest, fair, and inoffensive. Discussing the upcoming GOP debate, he said that one thing that was sure to come up was “the Muslim question”. In the context of Donald Trump’s xenophobia and its political implications, those words made some sense, but given the current tenor of political discourse in this country, it was hard not to be reminded of the phrase “die Judenfrage”, and hearing “the Muslim question” in serious reporting in 2015 gave me chills.

I haven’t read news reports about tonight’s debate yet, but some of what Trump says to defend his hideous, un-American plan to discriminate against people based solely on their religion starts with the assumption that the U.S. government’s policy of sending American citizens of Japanese ancestry in much of the country to internment camps during WWII was justified! I thought that the general consensus since, oh, I dunno, 1960 or maybe 1970 was that it was an appalling unconstitutional blot on American history that must never be allowed to happen again.

It’s bizarre that an America with an African American president and same-sex marriage legal nationwide (neither of which I was 100% sure would be possible in my lifetime 20 or 30 years ago) has had its Overton window dragged so far in the direction of racism and bigotry.

A friend of mine pointed me at this article about an event which is more typical of the things get my blood boiling these days than the three clumsy but probably not malicious words quoted above:

If You See Something, Say Something (It's Not About What You Think It Is)

There’s an apocryphal story (but with some seed of truth) that the occupying Nazis ordered the Jews of Denmark to wear yellow Stars of David, and the King of Denmark declared that all Danes should wear them and wore one himself, and the Nazis backed down. That didn’t happen, but the King of Denmark (and many ordinary Danish gentiles) did in fact oppose Nazi racism as much as they could, and I would encourage all my non-Muslim friends to read https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christian_X_of_Denmark and http://www.snopes.com/history/govern/yellowstars.asp for inspiration against the day (I hope it never comes) when all decent Americans need to pin yellow crescents to our clothing.

This is friends-only because, honestly, I don’t feel entirely safe getting it spread across the Internet with my name attached. But feel free to copy and paste publicly or privately without attribution.

Happy Thanksgiving to all, and especially to my darling beloved plumtreeblossom, with whom I’m sharing my seventh Thanksgiving today, and to my mother silverlibre, who came out from Illinois to share it with us. And happy Thanksgiving to all of you!

( Cut for politics of Thanksgiving. )

It’s been so long since I posted what was going on in my life that I’ve got a lot to catch up on. Apologies for filling up your F’list. If you’re lucky, I’ll run out of steam and you won’t have to plow through all of it.

But before I start trying to catch up, I have to at least put my fabulous weekend of food, arts, and love with my honeywuzzle into (metaphorical) bullet points.

Food: Saturday dinner was beef, carrots, and potatoes in the crockpot. (Also a sliced onion, but that didn’t come out very well the way I cooked it; next time I might go back to French onion soup.) The base was (originally alcoholic) apple cider.

Sunday morning my wuzzle made me something amazing that had just popped into her head the other day: pineapple upside-down pancakes! They were awesome. There’s a photo and some description in her journal.

Arts: On Saturday we saw Cirque du Soleil: Totem, which is currently touring in Boston. It was spectacular and lavish and stunning and impressive, but it also had some race and gender/power stuff in it that made me very uncomfortable. And unfortunately the acts that were technically most spectacular happened to be the ones that bugged me the most in that way. I had read a little bit about that before I went, and through the first part (before the intermission) I was thinking to myself, well, yeah, there’s some weird ethnic fetishization here and there, but all in all it’s not as bad as I’d feared. But oh, my, the second half made up for it! I hope to get time and mental energy to write more about this at some point, but given how unlikely that is, for now I’ll just point you to— oh, wait, I can’t; that’s a locked entry. Well, this YouTube video will give you a notion of what I’m talking about, although I don’t think you can see enough of the costumes in that to get a full sense of the spectacular wrongness. And one of the trapeze acts involved a woman being led blindfolded to a man on a trapeze, and then finding herself lifted into the air with him. She resists his advances for a while, but it’s all OK in the end because no means maybe and maybe means yes and she ends up happily acquiescing. OK, circus (like opera) is not where I would go for originality or emotional truth or serious discourse about power and consent, but really? In 2012? (That was another one of the ones that was just stunning and beautiful and impressive as a piece of circus art — lots of instances of her dropping and him catching her by an ankle or a wrist, for instance — that was marred for me by the politics of the thin veneer of narrative.) And I found it more frustrating because so many of the acts didn’t have stuff like that that bothered me, and I wish I’d been able to just revel in the spectacle and enjoy all of them. All that said, I am still very glad we went and had a fabulous time. EDIT: This YouTube video gives a bit of a flavour of the show. (The Sioux hoop dance you see a bit of in that video was apparently actually done by Sioux hoop dancers and done in consultation with some office of the Sioux Nation; that’s not the horribly wrong roller-skating bit I’m talking about above.)

On Sunday we saw the Randolph Theater Company’s performance of Avenue Q, which was spectacular and hilarious and a great demonstration of the fact that racism in art doesn’t bother me nearly as much, if at all, when it’s consciously (even if frivolously) being addressed as a topic of the work.

Love: See above about the pineapple upside-down pancakes. While she was cooking me sweet love in a frying pan, I was doing her laundry. (The dryer at her house is busted, and three flights down from her apartment anyway.) And the first cosmos of the season blossomed this weekend while she was here; my flowers date from her giving me some wildflower seeds (notably cosmos) as a gift early in our relationship so they have a bit of a special meaning for us.

There was also a conversation in the car about cannibalism (with a detour into black pudding) which reminded me how well suited we are to one another. I love this wuzzle!

Um, I guess that was a bit longer than bullet points. Sorry!

Some of what I’ve been reading and watching lately:

• The Cleanest Race: How North Koreans See Themselves and Why It Matters, by B. R. Myers This was a fascinating read. I never was able to shake the awareness that I was seeing North Korea through the filter of one person, though. (For instance, there are several places where Myers writes, essentially, All other Western North Korea experts think that X, because they’re deceived by Y, but I know that Z.) And some of the contrasts he tries to make between the North Korean personality cult and (say) those of Stalin’s USSR or Ceauşescu’s Romania seem somewhat contrived — sure, North Korea is really an authoritarian rightist state with a very thin Marxist veneer, and lots of other layers, rather than a socialist state organized along Marxist principles. But the same is true to varying degrees of the Soviet Union, China, and so on, and to say that North Korea is different from Stalin’s USSR because it’s not really Marxist is a bit unconvincing. But it was certainly a fascinating read, and maybe any book about North Korea is going to feel like that just because there’s so little information available in English about North Korea.
• We Can Remember It for You Wholesale (Wikipedia link with spoilers), by Phillip K. Dick. This is the novella that the movie Total Recall (which I haven’t yet seen) was loosely based on. The premise is that memories are malleable, and can be implanted and removed or covered over. There’s a bit of an industry in giving people fake memories of things they want to do but can’t afford, like a vacation to Mars, or memories that are essentially fantasy fulfilment, like having been a secret agent. Of course, in the novella, things eventually go wrong...
• Rogue Moon (Wikipedia link with spoilers) by Algis Budrys. Part of the premise of this short novel is that the Americans (still in the throes of the space race with the Soviets) have developed a sort of teleportation along the lines of Star Trek’s transporter: your body is taken apart here by a scanning beam that records the position and motion of every atom in it (in the novel’s decidedly non-quantum physics), and then recreated from raw materials at the receiving site. (In fact, I have no evidence of this but I suspect this novel was the inspiration for the transporter; the novel was published in 1960 and won a Hugo in 1961, so it’s easy to imagine that Roddenberry or one of his colleagues might have remembered it while they sat around a table trying to figure out a plausible way to avoid having to do expensive and time-consuming planet-landing shots.) But the novel makes quite a lot of the fact that the original body is destroyed, and the person who appears at the receiving site is a replica, albeit with all of the original’s memories. This was a good read despite, or perhaps because of, being so dated; it was fascinating to read hard science fiction with extremely futuristic technology set in the Cold-War early 1960s, with the social expectations and prejudices of the time.
• And I’m not nearly through it, but I’ve recently started The Swerve: How the World Became Modern, by Stephen Greenblatt, which is fascinating so far. It tells the story of how Lucretius’ philosophical poem On the Nature of Things, lost for centuries, was discovered in the early 15th century, and of its huge impact on the course of Western intellectual history.

And I’ve already mentioned that plumtreeblossom and I watched King Corn the other day, and that we’ve been watching Ken Burns’ The Civil War (Wikipedia, PBS). I think the juxtaposition of We Can Remember It for You Wholesale, Rogue Moon, and Moon, which plumtreeblossom and I watched a few weeks ago, was a particularly good one; they all muse on identity, consciousness, and personhood in very similar ways. I’m glad I happened to encounter them around the same time.

Great weekend with my darling plumtreeblossom, despite my body not coöperating. ( Cut for length. )

And I’m going to sleep well tonight!

PS — If you didn’t follow the cut, you missed my recommendation of the movie Moon. We thought it was great and we both encourage you to see it. Not available on Netflix video-on-demand any more, but available from Amazon.

Yay for marriage equality in New York State!

Amina A. has posted a couple very interesting speculations about what a democratic Syria would look like.

After Assad Goes: 1. Inside Syria tries to answer the question “What do the protesters want?” and comes up with a fairly optimistic answer.

After Assad 2: Beyond our Borders (which I’ve only read about half of and very quickly skimmed the rest, since plumtreeblossom and I are trying to get out the door to get to EarthFest on the Esplanade) talks about how a democratic Syria would look to its neighbours (short answer, “Terrifying!”). This is really interesting, and I think these issues are part of why the U.S. has been (even) slower and more tentative about supporting the Syrian protesters than it was about supporting the Egyptian ones. As important as Egypt is in the region, it’s (very large) influence was fairly simple and straightforward.¹ Syria, though, has complex and far-reaching unpredictable tentacles in all sorts of nearby countries — and moreover, nearby countries have complex and far-reaching and unpredictable tentacles in it, too!

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¹ To my untrained, not particularly well informed eye, anyway. Of course Egyptian foreign policy has changed in some important ways since the revolution, too.

I’ve been meaning to post links to these blogs for a while:

• A Gay Girl in Damascus
  What it says on the tin. Amina lived in the US for several years, and then moved back to Syria a while ago. I found her blog a few days ago thanks to a link from a coworker — around the same time the secret police started looking for her and she went underground. So far she’s still posting.
• Egyptian Chronicles
  A fascinating firsthand account of the revolution and the early days of the new Egypt

These blogs remind me of the fall of the Soviet Union, which had joined Usenet (then in its heyday) just a few months or maybe a year before. An employee of the Soviet Union’s first public ISP of my vague online acquaintance was going to the White House (the Russian parliament building), joining in demonstrations, listening to Yeltsin standing up on a tank defending the Parliament, and then going back to work and posting about it; history shared from across the world almost in real time by an ordinary person living it. It’s odd to think how new and incredible that concept was then, and how relatively commonplace it is now. (And of course, given how central Facebook and Twitter and YouTube have been to the Arab Spring, that sort of decentralized citizen journalism now makes history rather than just observing and recording it.)

The last few days have been excellent. plumtreeblossom has had some good news: (1) thanks to Jim Bunning backing down, her unemployment benefits were reinstated — along with most other people’s who were in her situation —, although there was a lot of confusion around that fact as Massachusetts’ unemployment office ramped up again, (2) she has a temp gig for the next few weeks, which she’s had a day of so far and it seems pleasant, if not as lucrative as one might want, and (3) I’m going to let her post about lest I steal her thunder.

I had several very social days; got together with a friend on Wednesday, saw surrealestate and a bunch of her friends for games on Thursday (although I conked out kind of early), and had dinner with eisa on Friday.

Thursday night (after games, which she couldn’t make it to) I stayed at plumtreeblossom’s, and then last night she cooked dinner for me — a wonderful meal in the crockpot — before we went to a delightful and colourful birthday party where there was much dancing to ’80s music. (And I again conked out early, but I am told I was very cute snoozing in the dance hall.)

Today we slept late, and the weather was so warm, sunny, and delightful that we walked to Davis Square and shared an ice cream sundae sitting outside and listening to a (quite good) busker.

Got to talk to my sister and brother-in-law yesterday. She’s home from the hospital, as is one of the twins, and the other one is expected to come home on Monday. Our mother’s flying out there on Thursday.

And I got my formal official paper offer letter from MIT in the mail today.

It’s sure feeling like spring!

(Thanks to everybody who answered my David Paterson question!)

There’s a great podcasting app available for my new phone (an Android Dev Phone, the unlocked version of the T-Mobile G1, about which I could write an awful lot if I had the time and energy), so I’ve been listening to a lot of podcasts. Most often, I’m listening to On Point. (It’s two hours every weekday, so that’s a lot to listen to even if I don’t listen to every show.)

Tonight, I listened to yesterday’s segment “Everything, Incorporated”, in which Douglass Rushkoff talks about the ideas in his new book Life, Inc.. I found it really really interesting. He talks about the origins of the modern corporation and of money, about railroads and corn and hiring a lactation consultant to teach you how to breastfeed so you don’t have to impose on mothers you know to talk to you about it and about being criticised by his neigbours for posting about a mugging because they thought it would hurt their property values. It’s a fascinating scratch-the-surface but very interesting examination of how we ended up with the social and economic structure we live in. It touches (briefly) on an idea I’ve had rolling around in my head for a long time and wanted to post about (but never collected my thoughts enough) about how money distorts our priorities and our notions of sacrifice and benefit, because some kinds of value and importance are much more easily measurable with money than other kinds.

Anyway, if any of that sounds interesting, I would encourage you to listen to it. The page linked above has a big “Listen to This Show” button to stream it, or you can download he mp3 here.