Let’s Talk about Science Fiction, Babies

There’s an interesting discussion over at Pharyngula about the possibilities and dangers inherent in human genetic engineering.

The thread is slightly annoying — a fair bit of priveleged wanking, and no one really bringing sophisticated social theory to the table. But on balance, I’d say it’s mostly interesting, at least in terms of seeing how people want to forecast the future.

As I read the comment thread, the thing that strikes me most as a science fiction writer is how much the discourse of science fiction shapes the discourse about these future technologies. On an obvious level, there are appeals to Heinlein, Egan, and similar hard SF ilk. On a subtler level, the themes that people are presenting as thought-provoking in the discussion (what if we modified people to be obedient? what if there was speciation between upper class and lower class people? what if people want to modify their children in ways we find abhorrent?) are in fact staples of the science fiction genre.

In my opinion, near future hard SF (that’s science fiction that works with the best science contemporarily available to forcast events in the next, say, fifty years) has a problem. And that problem is plot. Consider Frankenstein, a very early work of science fiction — a scientist is able to create life, but the novel’s shape is that of a warning story. We Must Not Because.

Writers working within the constraints of traditional plotting have to find a conflict. Science fiction is often a medium of ideas, which means that the conflict generally has to be related to the idea. So, if you want to write about genetic engineering, you have to do so in a way that gives obeisance to conflict.

I am convinced this creates warning stories even where science fiction writers don’t want to write warning stories. It’s a natural form. If you want to write about Neat Idea X, and your story-writing formula is “create problem within the first two paragraphs,” then the urge is to warn against whatever Neat Idea X is. You still get to write about it.

A further problem is that ideas tend to be explored in a finite number of ways. On one hand, this is because the culture that gives rise to the science fiction has a certain number of associations with a given science fictional idea. The western writers who are forecasting dark, genetically engineered futures — and doing so with generally the same set of tools and projected outcomes — are writing within a western context that has certain central concerns about genetic engineering, and certain hegemonic assumptions about reproduction, etc. We would expect that the science fictional discourse would shift when you look at a different culture with different concerns and assumptions, and from what I know about the growing science fiction movements in India and China, this does indeed prove to be the case.

However, the interaction is recursive. Science fiction writers pen their works within the cultural context that shapes their concerns, assumptions, and the channels of their forecasting. At the same time, they shape the discourse. As John Scalzi pointed out last year when he generously agreed to speak to the science fiction class I was teaching, the shape of the cell phone bears an uncanny similarity to the shape of the Star Trek communicator. This particular convergence seems to be only one of many examples of scientists looking at science fictional technology and thinking, “Ooh, I want that!” Science fictionally proposed theories about space and space travel trickle down into the naming of things, and sometimes their study, in an observable fashion.

It’s trickier to observe other influences of science fiction writers on the discourse about science and the future, but they’re present. I’ve argued before that the ways in which people perceive the world are heavily influenced by narrative and story, and so the narratives that are introduced into the culture about certain ideas are shaped by that culture, but once they are present, they shape it as well. Ant-like matriarchal societies, huge TV screens showing Big Brother talking to you, sad grey-clad people in communist dystopias wearing jumpsuits and going through identical motions — these images have shaped some of our impressions of matriarchy, fascism, and communism. Many discussions of matriarchy, for instance, end up reaching back to the imagery that’s entered our cultural consciousness — and terms that evoke insects or hive-minds are deployed. The same thing happens with genetic engineering and the limited number of narratives and images we associate with it. The first few shiny, imagination-catching ideas tend to overwhelm our cultural ability to imagine other outcomes.

The Problems with Warning Stories

Warning stories can be great: fun to read, fun to write. Some of them are also interesting and sophisticated.

However, I worry about the endless parade of science fictional monsters tramping through our cultural imagination. Cloning does not work the way 90% of science fictional representations say it does. Really. Nothing like. I’ve been involved in many bizarre conversations with cloning opponents, and at a certain point, their arguments tend to hark back to weird cultural myths built out of Star Trek and Twilight Zone rip-offs.

There are three problems here.

1) Bad science: many science fiction writers wrote clones that worked in ways that have more to do with fantasy zombies than what actual clones could possibly be because those fantasy zombie clones were more useful for plot and conflict. Because most laypeople know very little about genetics or cloning, the bad science passes them by.

2) One-dimensional (or as good as) representation, which does not allow for ambiguity in the expression of the science fictional idea or the imagined cultural reaction to it.

3) The playing into monster story tropes which follow a certain formula, and therefore require the writer and audience to envision the science fictional idea as part of a monster mold.

Eventually, the combination of bad science, unambiguous representation, and the monster trope seeps down into our narrative about a science fictional idea, and that’s the point at which someone will seriously oppose cloning because they’re afraid that clones will share the memories, experiences, and developmental history of existing adults, and therefore be able to take over the world.

Breaking Out of the Warning Mold

Writers have several ways to navigate these problems while still paying proper attention to conflict. One is to make the conflict much smaller than the level of “Oh noes! Monsters!” which allows the science fiction trope to play out more subtly and resist becoming the basis for a monster-level plot. A fantastic example of this kind of writing as applied to the genetic engineering/cloning tropes, is Tananarive Due’s “Like Daughter,” a story in which a woman of color who was physically abused as a child decides to raise a clone of herself so that she can give “herself” a new, happy childhood. Unfortunately, the child suffers from being treated as a kind of doll and required to enact her mother’s fantasy upbringing. The mother’s best friend has to interfere and take the girl away.

I wish this story was online as it is truly remarkable. It can be found in the excellent anthology Dark Matter (a century of speculative fiction from the African Diaspora), edited by Sheree Thomas.

The conflict of “Like Daughter” echoes in several different directions. The conflict is personal in a way that survives outside the science fiction context, reflecting on the nature of mothers, daughters, and childhood trauma. The conflict is also sociological: as a professor of mine at UC Santa Cruz said about the story, the question of how to resolve traumatic history is particularly salient for the community of color, and it is no accident that the author is black. Thirdly, the conflict does revolve around the science fictional idea of cloning: without cloning, it would be impossible for the story’s conceit to exist. However, the clone does not need to be made into a monster (or, in the flip, made into a one-dimensionally virtuous yet beleaguered outsider) in order for the conflict to function, because the nature of the story’s conflict is subtle.

In science fiction communities, there’s a concept which has caused much war-drumming on one side, and much wailing and gnashing of teeth on the other. It’s a fledgling literary movement called mundane science fiction, or mundane SF. The mundane SF movement was started by science fiction writer Geoff Ryman. It asks writers to eschew some of science fiction’s splashier tropes in order to create more realistic, more resonant futures. In order to accomplish this, the mundane movement has banned certain topics, included AI, faster-than-light space travel, psychic energy, and aliens. I think cloning’s on the list.

I think that the banning of topics may accomplish slivers of the mundane SF movement’s goals, but that the movement would have been better off asking for limited scope instead of limited ideas. For me, the science fiction that feels most real and moving is not necessarily science fiction which does not contain aliens — Octavia Butler’s “Amnesty,” for instance, makes beautiful use of aliens — but that science fiction which limits its scope to investigating personal relationships within an altered future instead of grander, global-level catastrophes. That doesn’t mean I don’t enjoy other flavors of SF, but this is the type that generally moves me the most. (There are exceptions, such as Marge Piercy’s Woman on the Edge of Time, which definitely functions on a grand and global level.)

The other most dominant technique that I see writers using so that they can avoid monster story formulas while still exploring neat ideas and paying due deference to plot, is to make the science fictional trope part of the story’s background. For instance, in John Scalzi’s Old Man’s War, characters who become soldiers are genetically modified so that they are faster, stronger, greener, and melded with their own AIs. Scalzi’s plot revolves around a war which these characters are fighting. The genetic modifications are integral to the plot — they make the war possible — but they don’t need to be the impetus for conflict, because a different science fictional trope has taken that center stage.

Scalzi’s book works on a grand scale, but it’s also possible to background science fictional tropes while working on a more limited scale. One novel that comes to mind is Maureen McHugh’s China Mountain Zhang, in which many fascinating science fictional elements — future homophobia, America’s loss of primacy as a global power, the colonization of Mars, people who can use technology to have flying races — function as the background in service to the main characters’ more mundane problems. How can people learn to be happy with each other? How can a gay man, isolated and displaced, find his place in the world? The backdrops are Mars and a decaying future, but the problems are timeless.

Unfortunately, the technique of slipping science fictional ideas into the background so that the conflict can be derived from something else tends to work better for novels than short stories. Short stories are limited in how much they can tackle, so it’s difficult for them to investigate more than one idea at a time.

Science Fiction Writer’s Responsibility in Shaping the Discourse

It concerns me that when I look at a thread like the one on Pharyngula, I see a lot of analysis that’s shaped by science fiction narratives, when I know that some of those narratives are driven more by the need for an exciting plot than by any real scientific or sociological extrapolation.

People differ in the amount of responsibility that they feel art has to the real world. I’m on the high end: I’m all about social responsibility.

I think science fiction writers owe it to ourselves and to the culture not to use genre formulas without a clear understanding of what they are, what they do, and why we want to use them. That doesn’t mean genre formulas have to go away, but I’d like to see them used with awareness and deliberation. When they’re used with awareness and deliberation, they usually (in my experience) tend to shift anyway: new narrative possibilities open, and the characters, story, and discourse have a chance to breathe.

Melissa MacEwan has a remarkable post up documenting sixty-five examples of “gag gifts” which represent disembodied breasts. There are popsicles shaped like breasts (as above), pillows shaped like breasts, pasifiers shaped like breasts, frying pans made to make breast eggs, cake pans made to make breast cakes, soap breasts, slipper breasts, earmuff breasts, pasta breasts, candle breasts, mug breasts, and more.

Melissa writes:

I can, quite genuinely, understand why people look at one—or maybe even two, or three—of these items and dismiss them as “just a joke.” If I wrote a post about just a frying pan that turns eggs into boobs, I’m certain even some truly feminist women and men would defend it as just a bit of harmless kitsch. It’s just a joke; what’s the big deal? I get that; I really do.

Which is why I went for critical mass.

It isn’t just one “boob novelty” (or, as they tend to be called, “boobie novelty”). It’s sixty-five. If I hadn’t totally run out of steam, I probably could have included sixty-five more. And these things aren’t relegated to adult stores and websites—ads for the Jingle Jugs are being run on radio and TV during ballgames, and many of these items can be found in regular old party stores and gag shops like Spencer’s Gifts, which has franchises in every bloody mall in America. The “Stress Chest,” “Beer Boob,” and “Boobie Fuzzy Dice” are all sold at Spencer’s, right alongside Harry Potter action figures.

The ether is permeated with boob novelties (which is to say nothing of vagina novelties, women’s ass novelties, the women-as-toilets products, etc.), and while each on its own may not be such a terrible thing, the combined effect is having turned disembodied women’s body parts into just so much cultural detritus to be consumed or ignored. No rational person can argue that makes no difference to how women are viewed, as a group and as individuals, by men and by themselves. And that isn’t a laughing matter.

All of which I agree with.

I do disagree with her slightly here:

some readers may correctly note that one can increasingly find “penis popsicles” and the like, it is a false equivalence. In truth, the amplification of disembodied penis novelties serves merely to suggest a perniciously inaccurate illusion of equality… It’s a step forward only in a race to the bottom, and there is little to be gained by treating service to the lowest common denominator as a favorable equalizer.

She adds that “objectifying the body parts of either sex is exploitative.”

I don’t agree that disembodied body parts are inherently, in and of themselves, a problem. Disembodied hands, for instance, as in this mechanical construction that plays classical music:

Are really not problematic. Clearly, the mechanical hand is not comparable to the disembodied breasts — and that’s because there are different social meanings that construct disembodied hands, just as the social meanings that surround disembodied breasts are different from the social meanings that surround disembodied penises. Where disembodied breast novelties are problematic en masse, a disembodied hand, eye, or foot is not exploitative.

And neither does a disembodied breast have to be. In comments at Shakesville, Portly Dyke writes, “Even the stretch to find these items humorous means we all have to go back to 5th or 6th grade,” and I don’t think that’s true. I know highly intelligent, mature adults who think fart jokes are the funniest thing that ever happened. Senses of humor differer. Personally, I can imagine sex positive contexts in which a disembodied breast or penis would be genuinely funny, genuinely fun, and genuinely harmless.

But as Melissa MacEwan points out — that context is not the bulk of America, and particularly not given the ubiquity and social construction of the critical mass she has represented.

I urge you to go over and read her whole post. Not only is the whole list of items overwhelming to see in total, but she has a lot more smart comments about them.

UPDATE: Many of the images in Melissa’s post have been removed by Photobucket. As Melissa notes in comments, “That’s fairly ironic, given that they were images of fake breasts fashioned into various novelty items that are supposed to be “fun” and not offensive.”

How did I not know this exists in real life?

See below the fold for more, including a video….
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It strikes me that the North and the South have a lot in common, on the slavery issue. Both the North and the South have significant histories of racist slavery. Both of them tried to rewrite history, to make themselves look less awful.

The difference is that the North succeeded in rewriting history; very few people now remember that all the original Northern states were slave states. And in the North, just like in the South, it was not a moral awakening but a war that delivered a mortal blow to slavery; but in the North’s case, it was the Revolutionary War that did slavery in.¹

The South hasn’t succeeded that well, so everyone remembers that the South had slaves, but somehow many people now believe — contrary to what the South’s leaders, in the lead-up to the Civil War, said — that the South didn’t fight the civil war to preserve slavery.

I respect attempts to uncover the whitewashed history of slavery and racism in the northern states. But I don’t think that project either requires or excuses whitewashing the history of slavery and racism in the southern states.

1. I’m aware that slavery in the North didn’t end instantly with the Revolutionary War, any more than it ended instantly in the South with the Civil War. But in both cases, the War can reasonably be seen as the essential event bringing the eventual end about. (↩)

From the International Herald Tribune:

A female teacher and a 13-year-old student planned some sort of life together in Mexico after fleeing Nebraska together, but they were tripped up by a lack of cash, the Baja California policeman who detained the pair said Saturday.

Kelsey Peterson, a 25-year-old sixth-grade math teacher and basketball coach at Lexington Middle School, was detained Friday in the border city of Mexicali.

She was turned over to the FBI early Saturday and remains in custody. The boy, ________, is staying with relatives in Mexicali.

As an undocumented migrant, ________ apparently will not be allowed to return to the United States. But police here have told him to stay in touch in case he is needed to testify in any possible criminal case.

Via ¡Para Justicia y Libertad!, who also points out that U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement is refusing to say if they’re planning to deport the victim’s parents or not.

So when the next unauthorized migrant gets raped or kidnapped, the parents now have a very powerful reason to try and resolve the situation themselves, rather than report it to police. Lovely.

Tiny Cat Pants, in a post entitled “How Nice For Child Molesters,” gets at why this story is so horrifying:

Great. Let’s just have a whole underclass of people with no legal standing and no legal recourse and let’s just let every corrupt corporation and evil jackass prey on them while we all sit back and wring our hands about whether they don’t deserve it just a tiny bit because they or their parents came here illegally.

That will be good fun and totally moral!

For more discussion of this, see posts by Brownifemipower and Anxious Black Woman.

A fascinating New York Times article, “The Evangelical Crackup,” argues that the Evangelical right is changing; Bush disillusionment and the passing away of the elders is making a new Evangelical right that will be more focused on social work and fighting poverty, and less on restricting reproductive rights and fighting the gay menace.

Meanwhile, a younger generation of evangelical pastors — including the widely emulated preachers Rick Warren and Bill Hybels — are pushing the movement and its theology in new directions. There are many related ways to characterize the split: a push to better this world as well as save eternal souls; a focus on the spiritual growth that follows conversion rather than the yes-or-no moment of salvation; a renewed attention to Jesus’ teachings about social justice as well as about personal or sexual morality. However conceived, though, the result is a new interest in public policies that address problems of peace, health and poverty — problems, unlike abortion and same-sex marriage, where left and right compete to present the best answers.

The backlash on the right against Bush and the war has emboldened some previously circumspect evangelical leaders to criticize the leadership of the Christian conservative political movement. “The quickness to arms, the quickness to invade, I think that caused a kind of desertion of what has been known as the Christian right,” Hybels, whose Willow Creek Association now includes 12,000 churches, told me over the summer. “People who might be called progressive evangelicals or centrist evangelicals are one stirring away from a real awakening.”

I don’t know. The article’s author, David Kirkpatrick, has apparently put years into learning about the Evangelical movement, and I hesitate to question his expertise. But even so, what’s going on right now could just be a temporary retrenching in the wake of the failed Bush presidency; a more successful right-wing presidency, next year or four years after that or four after that, could bring all the borderline evangelicals right back into the fold.

Reading his article reminded me of the many right-wingers who have confidently declared feminism to be dead, again and again and again and again, every five or ten years for as long as I can recall. And, for that matter, conservatives who just a few years ago were pontificating on why it is the Democrats would Never Win Elections Again. They were wrong, and I suspect lefties who confidently predict the death of the Christian right are wrong for the same basic reason: It’s easy to believe what we wish to be true.¹

Over at Orcinus, Sara Robinson argues that we are going to see two Evangelical futures; much of the base will peel away into the mainstream, as the Times article argues is already happening, but a new hard-core of radical right Christians will remain, focused on Muslims rather than Blacks, queers or Mexicans as the new symbol of Ultimate Evilhood. (Robinson argues that the younger generation of evangelicals simply lacks the ferocity of homophobia necessary to maintain lesbians and gays as the ultimate boogie monsters). I’m not totally persuaded by Robinson — for example, her belief that anti-migrant xenophobia won’t find much traction in the US seems very optimistic, and very unlike what’s going on in the country today — but her discussion is smart and damned interesting. (I’m not sure that right-wing Christians will get much out of it other than pissed off, however.)

1. Since I wrote this paragraph, I came across this excellent post in the Revealer making the same argument about the Times article. (↩)

From Feministe, via Fetch Me My Axe:

Tuesday, November 6, is election day in Philadelphia, and presents an opportunity for Philly voters to do something about Judge Teresa Carr Deni, who recently dismissed rape charges against a defendant who stood accused of raping a prostitute at gunpoint because she felt it was a robbery, not a rape.

In a rare move, the Philadelphia Bar Association has come out against the retention of Judge Deni after initially recommending retention. If you’re a voter in Philadelphia, this is your chance to make a difference and boot out a judge who clearly does not know the law, or does not believe the law applies to sex workers.

Here.

From Reappropriate:

Story Quickpoints:

• In 2004, U.S. Border Patrol Agent Ephraim Cruz became a whistleblower against the mistreatment of detainees that he witnessed while working at the Douglas Border Patrol Station. Reported abuse of detainees included overcrowding of cells, denial of food for 20-30 hours to children and pregnant women, and the forcing of a male detainee into a “stress position” until he collapsed in pain and exhaustion.
• Though Ephraim wrote memos and letters to his supervisors and political representatives for nearly a year, nothing was done about the mistreatment of undocumented aliens at the Douglas station. Meanwhile, Ephraim faced retaliation from his co-workers and supervisors in U.S. Border Patrol for his whistle-blowing.
• In 2006, Ephraim was charged — and acquitted in federal court — of transporting an illegal immigrant across the border. Ephraim believes the charges brought against him were thinly-veiled retribution for his whistle-blowing.
• Now, U.S. Border Patrol is attempting to dismiss Ephraim based on the same charges that he was acquitted of by a federal court. He has until Friday (November 9, 2007) to either resign from his post or be fired.
• Ephraim doesn’t have the money to hire a civil attorney to help combat this latest move by the U.S. Border Patrol, nor can he find a lawyer willing to take on the case pro bono. Ephraim Cruz needs your help!
• If you are (or you know) a civil attorney experienced in a case like this and willing to help Ephraim, please email him at [email protected].
• If you are willing to donate a few dollars to offset Ephraim’s projected legal fees, please contact him at [email protected].
• If you are a blogger, journalist, or a member of a non-profit organization, please forward / re-post / link this post to everyone you know to help us get Ephraim’s story out!

Click through to Reappropriate to read the full story. Jenn at Reappropriate has really done a lot of good interviewing work, as well as quoting extensively from primary source documents; there’s a lot more to this story, and Jenn’s post, than the quickpoints quoted above.

UPDATE: For more background on this story, read these three stories from the Tucson Weekly: November 2005 (about the charges being pressed against Cruz), March 2007 (about Cruz’s acquittal), and September 2007 (about the apparent lack of investigation into Cruz’s allegations of abuse of migrants).

It was March 2004 when U.S. Border Patrol Agent Ephraim Cruz first broke ranks, by reporting the grave mistreatment of immigrant detainees at the agency’s station in Douglas.

But despite Border Patrol claims to the contrary, an investigation of these allegations may never have occurred. Or if it did, perhaps the results were too embarrassing for public consumption.

Either way, after a dizzying two months and several dozen phone calls, the Tucson Weekly has been unable to learn which government agency actually conducted the probe-or whether the investigation transpired at all. This failure denotes either outright stonewalling by the U.S. Department of Homeland Security-parent agent to the Border Patrol-or a startling level of federal ineptitude.

Sydney loves hanging off the side of the loft bed like this.

Odd milestone: For ages, Bean and I have been modeling the “see you later, alligator / in a while, crocodile” way of saying goodbye to Sydney (by saying goodbye to each other that way). For the last year or so, Sydney has been imitating us but not quite getting it: if you say “see you later, alligator” to Sydney on the way out of a room, she’d reply “see you later crocodile.”

But in the last week or two, she’s suddenly started responding “see you while crocodile.” Which still isn’t totally correct, but she suddenly gets that it’s supposed to rhyme.

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(See also: Racial Diversity In Presidential Campaign Staffs).

At The Huffington Post, Zephyr Teachout and Kelly Nuxoll provide a breakdown of presidential campaign staffs by gender. (They also provide links to an explanation of their methodology and a spreadsheet of their data). Yay them!

What they didn’t provide is simplistic color graphs for the simpleminded among us, like me. So that’s what I’m adding.

Erica at Slog writes:

Just two of 15 senior Edwards staffers are women, with women filling 37 percent of the top-paid roles. Three of Obama’s 12 senior staffers are women, and women fill 45 percent of the highest-paying jobs. […] On her campaign, eight of 14 senior staffers, 12 of the top-20 staffers, and 52 percent of the highest-paid staffers are women. Women are also much more likely to play important strategic roles in the Clinton campaign; in the other campaigns, women are more likely to work in finance and internal operations.

This may seem like petty stuff, but I think it foreshadows the gender breakdown of executive staff under a Clinton administration. As I’ve written before, gender matters. Women understand, and care about, women’s interests, which is one reason many women are supporting Clinton despite reservations about her politics.

TheGarance suggests that this data “can fairly be viewed as proxies for what their administrations would look like.” Matthew Yglesias expands on Garance’s point:

Indeed, my bet is that one of the most important legacies of a Hillary Clinton administration would be bequeathing to the Democratic Party a network of powerful plugged-in insiders that winds up containing substantially more women in senior roles than we have right now, along with perhaps a higher number of men comfortable working with power female colleagues and superiors. Given that the party’s voting base is composed mostly of women, this is a transformation that’s going to have to be made sooner or later, and the progressive coalition will definitely be stronger once it’s done.

For example — as Donna quoted in “Alas” comments — “The daughter of Mexican immigrants, Patti Solis hails from Chicago and likely to be White House chief of staff and gatekeeper should Mrs Clinton become president. The President’s Chief of Staff is a very powerful position sometimes dubbed “The Second-Most Powerful Man in Washington”. ”

Kevin Drum adds, “if you really want to see a testosterone imbalance, check out each candidate’s list of foreign policy advisors: a grand total of 7 women out of 148 advisers.”

Honestly, I still don’t favor Hillary among the Democrats running; I have problems with all the candidates, but Hillary’s generally hawkish views on international policy are a deal-killer for me. Nonetheless, it’s likely I’ll wind up voting for her in the general election, even if I vote against her in the primary. As Bitch PhD points out, that Hilary will probably bring in the most diverse staff with her — both racially and gender-wise — is a significant consolation.

And there’s no doubt, looking at those senior staff numbers, that Obama and Edwards both suck when it comes to hiring women into positions of power.

Curtsy: Ann at Feministing.

So I watched the new season of The Business, IFC’s oh-so cutting-edge parody of the movie business. Hey, look! Lance, the vain, shallow character very into his sexiness, comes back from the between-season break fat! And he initially tries to bluff past the problem! Hoooo-hah! Funny!

(But don’t worry, after some episodes of funny, funny fat suit jokes, he’s back to his thin self.)

Then I watched the new season of 30 Rock, Tina Fey’s critically-acclaimed mainstream sitcom that prides itself on quirky humor as it makes gentle fun of the TV business. Hey, look! Jenna, the vain, shallow character very into her sexiness, comes back from the between-season break fat! And she initially tries to bluff past the problem! Hoooo-hah! Funny!

(But don’t worry, after a few episodes of funny, funny fat suit jokes, she’s back to her thin self.)

Then yesterday I finally got around to watching the season premiere of Ugly Betty, the critically acclaimed dramedy that prides itself on not going along with the shallow appearance-obsessed bigotries of the rest of TV while it parodies the fashion business. Hey, look! Amanda, the vain, shallow character very into her sexiness, comes back from the between-season break fat! And she initially tries to bluff past the problem! Hoooo-hah! Funny!

(I haven’t watched any of the subsequent episodes yet. My guess is that after 1-3 episodes of funny, funny fat suit jokes, Amanda will be back to her thin self.)

So, remember:

1) Priding yourself on being original is no reason not to use a hackneyed fat suit gag.

2) Becoming fat is the oh-so-funny just desserts vain, sexy characters receive. It’s ironic, get it? Get it?

To be fair, 30 Rock made some feeble gestures at parodying the stupid tastelessness of anti-fat jokes on TV shows like… uh… 30 Rock. To me, this came across more as a attempt to have their cake and eat it too than as sincerely giving a damn about their support of bigotry against fat people.¹

But at least 30 Rock, loathsome as the fat suit plotline was, doesn’t pretend to be a progressive show that’s questioning norms of attractiveness. But for Ugly Betty, which is so sanctimonious about appearance issues,² to pander to anti-fat bigotry this way is extra-special, isn’t it?³

By the way, Ben Silverman, one of Ugly Betty’s executive producers, also co-created and produces The Biggest Loser.

1. Especially when they merchandise the bigotry they were supposedly making fun of. (↩)
2. I have nothing against sanctimony on appearance issues, as long as you really mean it and apply the critique to your own work. Ugly Betty doesn’t. (↩)
3. Not that this was even the most loathsome thing about that episode of Ugly Betty; the most loathsome thing was the critique of the shallow fashionistas trying to demonstrate how oh-so-very sensitive they are by using disaster victims as props, even as the episode’s script tried to demonstrate how oh-so-very sensitive Betty is by using disaster victims as props. (↩)

Via Language Log.

I was reminded of this by Why Am I Not Surprised?

On this date in 1979, a group made up of both African-Americans and European-Americans gathered in Greensboro, North Carolina, to protest against the Ku Klux Klan. As soon as they began, however, forty KKK members and American Nazis drove into the crowd, got out of their vehicles, got out their automatic weapons and opened fire, killing five and wounding ten others. The massacre was filmed by four television stations. Nevertheless, after two trials, two all-White juries acquited all defendents and no one has ever served a day in jail for these cold-blooded killings in broad daylight while law enforcement officers looked on.

Hey dudes and dudettes,

I’ve got a lot of grad school work to get done in the next couple weeks, so alas, my writing for Alas must suffer.

I’ve got a couple posts that are half-written, so I may be able to touch those up and get them online over the next couple weeks. There are also a few queer-centered writing projects I wanted to link to, so I may be able to get that done.

But on the whole, I’m going to be working on exams, non-fiction articles, critiques, and lesson plans, with a teaspoon of fiction writing on the side.

I first heard about this case when I was listening to BBC radio on Tuesday. I tuned in during the middle of of this story, and it seemed so bizarre that I couldn’t figure out what was going on. Well, now I got the chance to hear the whole story. It turns out that some foreign aid groups tried to take a group of 103 children out of the country. The aid workers are now accused of child trafficking and violating international laws.

Some members of the NGO Children Rescue/Arche de Zoe have been arrested for attempting to take the 21 girls and 82 boys - the youngest being about a year old and the oldest about 10 - out of Chad. The agency workers were French. Three journalists who were travelling with the volunteer workers and the Spanish crew who were to fly them back to France are also being held. In Chad’s capital, N’Djamena, a prosecutor on Wednesday also charged Jacques Wilmart, a Belgian pilot involved in the affair, with “complicity in abduction”, before sending him to jail.

Zoe’s Ark says it wanted to rescue children from Darfur, but French officials and UN aid workers say they believe many were from Chad and were not orphans.

The United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) called the attempt to separate the more than 100 young Chadian children from their parents and then take them to France for adoption an “illegal and totally irresponsible move.” The UN said the children had family in the country.

“They are not orphans and they were not sitting alone in the desert in Chad, they were living with their families in communities,” Annette Rehrl of U.N. refugee agency UNHCR told Reuters in Abeche.

UNICEF spokesperson Veronique Taveau told journalists in Geneva that what happened had violated international rules, such as The Hague Convention on international adoption and the Convention on the Rights of the Child.

Taveau said the case was not an isolated incident but one that was highly visible because of the size of the group of children.

L’Express reports the Europeans offered sweets and biscuits to encourage the children to leave their homes.

“My parents had gone to work in the fields. As we were playing some Chadians came and said here are some sweets, why don’t you follow us to Adre and then we’ll take you home. We were taken to the hospital in Adre,” said a young boy who gave his name as Osman. Adre is a town on the Chad-Sudan border.

“We spent seven days in Adre and I’ve been here in Abeche for more than one month. We were well fed by the whites, there was always food. I would like to go back to find my parents,” he told reporters at the Abeche orphanage where the children are being cared for by local and international aid workers.

Many European media outlets were putting a slightly more favorable spin on this, but as more information comes out, these so called aid groups are not looking good at all. The UN has said that most of these children were not orphans, which they found out from interviewing the older children. Now many of the children are separated from their families, and there are concerns that the youngest children may not be reunited because they are too young to talk. Needless to say this is not going over well with people all over Africa. As the International Herald Tribune article cited in this paragraph notes:

The scandal has sparked outrage and condemnation across Africa, where it has a deep resonance from the colonial era, when slave traders, missionaries and colonial officials blithely separated African families with little regard to their wishes. In Congo, government officials suspended all adoptions by foreigners to examine their procedures more carefully, according to The Associated Press, and protesters angry about the attempted kidnappings took to the streets in Chad.

The scandal has also raised tensions between Chad and France just as the European Union begins deploying a peacekeeping force in the region aimed at shoring up Chad, which has been increasingly drawn into the four-year-old conflict in neighboring Darfur.

This history is one reason why adoptions by Westerners are not common in African countries. Incidents like this contribute to the destruction black families, and I suspect these aid workers felt no need to respect the rights of poor black African families.¹

1. Why oh why am I having flashbacks to this old Rachel’s Tavern post/comment? I was so angry at that woman. I could barely contain myself. (↩)

Assuming that Obama or Clinton wins the Democratic nomination, that is. (Personally, I hope Dodd wins, but of Obama or Clinton I’d prefer Obama.)

From The Debate Link:

There is a very predictable media narrative that will form if two members of politically underrepresented groups appear on the Democratic ticket. One person is ground-breaking and history-making. Two people, by contrast, is an “affirmative action” choice and proof the Democrats are in thrall to “interest groups.” If Obama picks a woman, it will undoubtedly be cast as “appeasing” women’s groups who were ready to see Clinton break the ultimate glass ceiling. If Clinton picks a Black running mate, same thing, except replace NOW with the NAACP. This is what Derrick Bell calls the unspoken limit on affirmative action. Even if at first the diversity is applauded, at some point folks will start getting uncomfortable with too many women or people of color. A presidential ticket that doesn’t include a White male is virtually inconceivable, and it’s equally inconceivable that the media won’t make heavy note of that fact in the unlikely instance it comes into being.

(See also: Gender Ratios of Presidential Campaign Staffs.)

Via the blog Mercury Rising:

Some scattered thoughts:

1) Wish they had covered Dodd, who I am leaning towards favoring at the moment, due to his leadership in regards to FISA. (UPDATE: But having watched this clip, I’m now officially off the Dodd train.)

2) It’s not a surprise that the candidate who is Black has the greatest percentage of Black staffers, and that the candidate who is Latino has the greatest percentage of Latin@ staffers. It’s interesting, however, that Clinton has far and away the most Asian staffers. I have no idea what’s behind that; possibly it’s a secondary effect of a geographic difference?

3) Wow, are American Indians shut out of participation at this level.

4) Once again, Giuliani manages to be worse than other Republicans. (Speaking of Giuliani suckage, read this excellent post about Giuliani’s use of racism in his campaign for mayor.)

5) I’ve generally been anti-Clinton in this race, and I still am; she’s the most pro-war of the Democratic candidates, and that’s a deficit that nothing else overcomes, for me. But she’s the only one who can claim to have a staff that’s mostly people of color.

* * *

Feel free to use this thread for general discussion of the presidential race, as well as discussion of the above graphic.

This is neat:

The technology behind the wind-up radio could soon be helping to light up some of the poorest homes in Africa.
The Freeplay Foundation is developing prototypes of a charging station for house lights it hopes will improve the quality of life for many Africans.

The Foundation said the lights would replace the expensive, polluting and unhealthy alternatives many Africans currently use to light their homes.

Field testing of the prototypes will start in Kenya in the next few months.

A few basic facts remind us what electric lights can mean to those who don’t have them:

Kristine Pearson, director of the Freeplay Foundation, said few Africans in the continents most vulnerable areas had access to electricity to light homes.

“Their life stops or is very narrowed when the sun goes down,” she said. “Two extra hours of light would make a big difference to their life.”

The World Bank estimates that more than 500 million people in sub-Saharan Africa do not have access to electricity supplies that could be used to light their homes.

Instead, said Ms Pearson, many used kerosene lamps, battery-powered lights or wood fires as sources of illumination after sundown.

Buying kerosene or batteries can consume up to 15% of a household’s budget, said Ms Pearson. In addition wood was hard to gather and unhealthy to burn.

Also, I have to admit — I have a big soft spot for red pandas, which I think might be just about the cutest critter ever. So when I saw a link to a video of two elderly red pandas kissing and cuddling, I had to squee over and pass on the cute.

From “My Right Wing Dad .net,” an oddly compelling blog of right-wing email forwards, a poem called “When I Whine.” I think Jerry Lewis would find this poem beautiful.

Today, upon a bus, I saw a girl with golden hair
I looked at her and sighed and wished I was as fair.
When suddenly she rose to leave,
I saw her hobble down the aisle.
She had one leg and used a crutch
But as she passed, she passed a smile.
Oh, God, forgive me when I whine
I have 2 legs, the world is mine.

And that’s just the first stanza. The poet hasn’t even gotten to the blind kid who thanks sighted people for being willing to talk to a person like him. Go read, if you dare.