The most recent 20 comments posted to Electrolite by Timothy Burke:

I could pick a fight with Avedon's perfected certainty about the root causes of sex crime, since the rather massive body of research into it demonstrates no such perfected certainty, but...

Let's go to the end statement instead, because I think it perfectly captures the fundamental lack of curiosity and the resulting gap in knowledge that I'm hearing from a lot of people.

So, you say, the religious right doesn't think that it's involved in good works, in the creation of its own vision of social justice: it is just about forcing itself on others with no aim other than to force itself on others. It purposely wishes to save fetuses in order to have them die later. It is purposefully devoted to terrorizing everyone else.

First, if that was offered as an explanation of militant Islamism, a great many of the people who are satisfied with a representation of the American religious right in these terms would object that this was too simplistic and manichean a view, would insist that we have to think about root causes of Islamic militancy, that we have to understand social contexts, that we have to disaggregate the diverse reasons why people are drawn into movements that commit terrorism. Etc.

But suppose you're satisfied with this sort of rhetoric as an empirical description of the motives of both militant Islamicists and the American religious right. Can I ask you this? Why are they that way? Don't tell me what you think they're doing, or what their motivations are. I want to know the reason for your vision of their motivations.

It's one thing to view a particular individual as unusually motivated by what we might term "evil". Then I think you can just say, "It's a mystery", or "It's because he was locked in a closet for hours as a child" or "It's because he's a genetic sociopath". It's another thing to view a huge swath of people who are concentrated in particular communities or institutions that way.

Marxism or certain varieties of Enlightenment liberalism (think Hobbes) are about the only disciplined body of thought that have coherent answers for you about large-scale social motivations. But the Marxist answer in this case would have to be a complicated one, because on balance, the religious right is less wealthy than their cosmopolitan opponents. They're not a classic capitalist ruling class who dominate because it is in their own economic interests to do so. You'd have to do some pretty intricate thinking about the nature of social struggle in this case, and it is by no means certain that you'd be able to preserve your own claims to total virtue and a clear demonization of them in reverse in the process. (This is basically the Thomas Frank insight in What's the Matter With Kansas). If you took a more Hobbsean view that all social life is the struggle of all groups for social power, that society is just a constrained form of the struggle to domination, then that too is morally neutral. They're just doing what you do, what all social beings do. The only mystery there becomes why they're winning and you're losing: under such a heading, you can't make a moral distinction between you and them that doesn't amount to, "I like me, and I don't like not-me; I want me to win".

Suppose you say, "No, it's not domination as a Marxist or Hobbsean (or even Nietzschean) might have it, not a quasi-rational or 'natural' form of social struggle. It's that the religious right is composed of people who all share a social pathology that was maybe legitimate or non-evil once, but which has become corrupted over time. Now it reproduces itself--they train their kids who train their kids and so on. It's a *culture*". This also makes for problems. If it's a "culture", what makes it different from all the other "cultures" that we appreciate, respect, give autonomy to, even when those cultures contain practices and beliefs we ourselves don't like, or even when those cultures intersect our own unfavorably? Would you accept "cultural" explanations of African-American poverty? If not, why not, if your explanation of the religious right is "cultural" in this sense? More to the point, on what grounds do you depart from a kind of value-free neutrality in viewing other "cultures" than your own to deem one wrong or morally objectionable? When a culture tries illegitimately to change YOUR culture? But isn't that the origin of one of the major complaints of the religious right, that the secular left in the 1970s insisted, and still insists at times, in intervening into the practices and everyday social life of their culture? If what makes the culture of the religious right objectionable is its attempt to change the culture of others, we had better take a look at our own. Moreover, this still doesn't answer a lot of questions. Where do cultures come from? What are their boundaries? Is their culture really separable from our culture? Who are "we", anyway? How did our culture achieve moral neutrality while theirs fell from it? What makes us (you) special? etc. If this is your line of explanation, you have a great deal of historical labor to do, to find out what makes a culture, how it came to be. You cannot be incurious or simplistic about it; you can't just say, "They want to dominate us". It's not an option under this heading.

Or suppose you decline and say, "It's really very simple: they're just bad people with the bad aim to make the rest of us live the way they want. I don't have to explain myself: they're wrong, I am right". That ends up making the religious right out to be millions of Dr. Evils, fathomlessly malevolent social beings who just want to conquer the world and get...one...million...dollars. That might be an ok way to come at the problem if we were all living in a nursery rhyme or a fantasy novel, but we're not. As a pure practical matter of politics, this view gives you absolutely zero direction about what to do next, given that I don't think there's going to be a James Bond who comes and blows up the Secret Headquarters of the bad guys for us. As a philosophical understanding of why you're involved in political struggle, it amounts to not much more than a tantrum.

Understanding the sources of other people's social conviction in ways that grants the authenticity, the ways in which those convictions make sense to those who hold them, doesn't make your own opposition to those convictions less effective. In fact, I'd argue the reverse. It may give you a much more powerful way to answer back to your opponents, it may give you insight into why they do what they do and what they may do next. It may also lead, in various ways, to the construction of lines of compromise or truce, but that's kind of a necessity anyway in the context of political struggle within a nation. What's the alternative to working out a lasting settlement of disputes with the religious right? It's either coming up with a strategy that permanently locks them into an electoral minority and imposes our views on them--I hope everyone on the left NOW sees why this is not a morally sound approach, because we can see how it feels--or we exterminate our enemies quite literally. Otherwise, you're going to have to live with them--doesn't that obligate you to try and understand them in terms more complicated than "They just want to rule the world?"

TomB wrote: "Seattle was a turning point, a major defeat and loss of initiative for the left." Hence my complaint that "the left" might really not have been at stake in Seattle, just "anti-globalization", which I submit is a much smaller set.

I think that some of the Seattle protesters were against globalization, period. Some were for globalization if it was progressive. That's a pretty big difference that all the talk about a "coalition" can't paper over, nor all the attempt to blame the media or some other boojum for the failure of Seattle to bloom into some grand social movement distract from.

Eh, since we're talking about Seattle.

1) The idea that the Seattle protestors were, might have become or are "the left" and anyone else wasn't is one of the reasons no "movement" came out of it--because some progressives legitimately don't think that anti-globalization as it manifested there, and I'm NOT talking about the fringe anarchists, is a particularly progressive movement. So for one, if Seattle didn't engender much in terms of a triumphant social movement, it's because the driving arguments presented in the streets at that moment raised objections even "within" the left.

2) The fact that Stiglitz and many others have spurred reform of major international institutions that the anti-globalization activists targeted was not caused by Seattle. It wasn't wholly unrelated to it, either, but there's a very subtantial disconnect between the transformation of multilateral international institutions in the past decade and the general sentiments of anti-globalization activism.

3) Anti-globalization activism as it manifested in Seattle and since also had some serious internal tensions (quite aside from the tensions between 'pro-globalization' progressives and anti-globalization ones). The unions were, if you listened carefully, actually arguing for *more* globalization inasmuch as their driving argument was to make international labor regulations and enforcement of labor rights much stronger. Other groups there were narrowly concerned with particular forms of multinational capitalism, whle still others take a much more totalistic, pseudo-nationalist line on all manifestations of globalization, including the vast array of phenomenon glossed as "cultural imperialism".

Nice to see Rick Perlstein (and PNH) stepping up on this issue. We'll see what effect is has: the protest-no-matter-what crowd is just as unpersuadable as a core Bush voter.

There's really only two reasons for mass protest: 1) as persuasive theater and 2) as serious attempt to cause the functioning of a particular government or institution to come crashing to a halt until it meets some concrete demand (which might include surrendering the government).

If it's 1), well, be persuasive then. This does not mean persuading yourself and your immediate circle of protesting friends that you're really righteous, because you're already persuaded of that. You could accomplish that persuasion just by having a cocktail party at your house and screaming, "FUCK BUSH!" in between sips. So who are you trying to persuade right now? 1) The few swing voters that remain. 2) The moderate Kerry voters who need to *not* be persuaded to drift away. 3) The moderate, wavering Bush voter who might defect or might at the least not bother to show up at the polling place (the more likely of the two results). 4) Naderites. Of these, only #4 is likely to be impressed with the kinds of protests that Perlstein is criticizing. 1-2-3 might all be lost by the wrong kind of theatre staged in the wrong kind of way. And don't blame the media: protesters are to blame when they stop traffic, pull all sorts of no-business-as-usual crap, and carry ANSWER-level fringe slogans on their signs.

If it's the second option--an attempt to bring government crashing to its knees--don't make me laugh. I suppose protesters who were sufficiently canny and organized could pretty well bollix up NYC's municipal government for two or three days during the convention, but that's it.

Kind of an aside, since the Roth piece is interesting and has some things to say that I like, but...

Tom Tomorrow can bite my wang AND kiss my ass. For free.

I agree with Clay overall, at any rate. I'm not sure how much the Deaniacs fairly can be held guilty of failing to try "the hardest thing in the world". From where I sit, it seems a fair cop.

What I like about Clay's emphasis on changing minds is his reminder that it is not only hard but humbling. Yes. It involves coming inside the other guy's frame of mind, inside his logic, and accepting those things--not just trying to speak his language as a kind of con-man trick, but really accepting and understanding premises and evidence and ideas that are not your own, without surrendering a reasonable belief that you have a better idea or more favorable choice.

That is hard. It is humbling. And let me say that you get a lot of shit from a lot of people when you do it. I get pretty tired of that sometimes.

Amazing.

On Spirit's troubles, I'm sure everybody's thinking the same thing:

"Oh, DAMN it, Spirit opened an email attachment in Outlook Express that was an executable."

Totally surreal. Like an acid flashback to Vietnam. No, not the war in Iraq, which is really quite different than Vietnam in a lot of ways. But the response to criticism? The same. Of course, in Rumsfeld's case that's because he was in the executive branch back then, too, as David W. notes.

Yonmei gets it. It's not the kids, it's the parents with kids. Actually, the Wiggles were gracious, friendly and patient with everyone. It's just that flinch I saw on one of them, and the aggressiveness of the parents-with-kids. I think these guys genuinely enjoy the attention of children, but the 2-4 year olds who like them best actually generally wouldn't grab at them in a public setting. In fact, most of the kids I saw were either blithely unaware of the "real" presence of the Wiggles, or innocently excited by it, the same way my daughter gets exciting when she sees a guy dressed up as Chuck E. Cheese. The parents-with-kids ambushes were something else entirely, I felt.

Quick thing to Lydia:

The worlds you know aren't in my original piece because...I wasn't writing about you. I kind of get it coming and going in your post. I was writing about the human obligations that are involved when you meet a celebrity or object of devotion, and how some people fail of their obligations, not about social networks of fans. So if you don't see yourself in what I wrote, good. The only hobbyhorse I'm continuing to ride is an argument that SF fans, and comics fans, and many other fans, can be to my mind overly sensitive to perceived criticism or misrepresentation.

More complicated thing:

All communities, cultures, societies, feel misrepresented when someone who is Not One of Us writes about What We Think Might Be Us. It's one of the complications that comes with all ethnography. Cultures (and subcultures) often don't feel that what someone has to say about them captures the private, internal, lived experience of being in them. And of course it doesn't: how could it? That's really not the issue. Someone who is not of a culture or subculture can sometimes see something true in it that its adherents could never see (and vice-versa, can miss profound truths that only an adherent could see). Moreover, sometimes what makes a subculture matter in some profound way to the world as a whole is what others who are not part of it say about it, salvage from it, interpret is as. What Tony Horowitz had to say about Civil War re-enactors is, I know very well from my own research, not especially appreciated by some of them. But that's one part because he got at some uncomfortable truths and one part because he compressed the complexity of things into simpler translations for outsiders. I think in the end that for Civil War re-enactors to matter to anyone besides themselves--and maybe even to themselves--they needed a Horowitz to come along and look at them with a fresh eye. His book reconnects them to the culture from which they come, and makes them meaningful to others besides themselves. That's good, I think.

Much more complicated thing still:

I don't know if I'm Not One of You. Which I think is the subtle thing moving on a subterranean level in some of the discussions here. I have an encyclopedic knowledge of SF, fantasy, comic books and computer games. Much of my private mental life is invested in those genres. I'm engaged at the periphery of the social networks Patrick refers to. I'm often asked to "represent" SF and related genres to people who don't know them. I've dabbled in academic criticism of fantasy literature and computer games, and I might do more of that in the near-future. I'm not, however, an active fan in the sense that I think Lydia is thinking of, or at least, not in a dedicated, regular, committed fashion. So there is a question about whether I'm a fan. I think I am, or I think the term ought to be broad enough to encompass me. I suspect Lydia disagrees. Which is another thing that's pretty typical with subcultures, to which she is clearly referring: there are people at the heart or core of them who question the right of anyone at the periphery to claim membership; there are people at the periphery who have a vested interest in widenining the definition. And then there's people wholly outside the subculture for whom such distinctions are often wholly immaterial.

What can I say, man? We don't seem to be disagreeing about much except about who was snarky to whom first. Since I didn't mention you in my first essay, I think I win that argument. Then the next argument is who was snarkier to whom overall, and maybe I lose there. I think we need to get our straw men together for a party, we can just park them by the poolside with some drinks in their hands while we go talk about our favorite SF writers.

The Comics Journal phenom is a real one, though, and I stand by my characterization of it as a *general* dynamic among SF fans, even if I wash my hands of it as a response specifically to your response to something that annoys you about the culture which my first piece accidentally seemed to remind you of.

Too bad. I'm just trying to figure out why you (and a couple of others) so assertively mistook me for a boojum that I think you have some legitimate right to regard with annoyance. Never mind what I actually said, either, I guess, because you haven't bothered with most of it (either essay).

The only real or meaningful disagreement here, as far as I'm concerned, is this: is fandom necessarily and intrinsically social, a "network"? Or does it also encompass mostly solitary acts of devotional knowledge and study, and also obsessional activities of the kind that I view with distaste? If you want to insist that fandom is nothing more and nothing less than the social networks that form the central axis of your own sense of fandom, and that all other things commonly associated with it are something else then yeah, we disagree. Because I think fandom is all those things as once. If you just want people to understand that fandom is largely or centrally constituted by the networks of affinity that inform your sense of it, and the other sorts of practices are bookends or outliers to that central core, I'm hip to that, but I nothing I've written is meant to contradict that assertion, and I object to being made, in that case, to stand in for some other target--and seek explanation for why you would have me do so.

A follow-up essay at my blog now.

But Mitch Wagner expresses very well what I was trying to get at, and takes it deeper. Yes, it is also hard to know what to do when you meet someone whose work has touched you deeply, particularly when you think you've come to know something about that person from reading their work, when you feel (as you should) a quality of connection to them. I've felt that also as a historian, actually, when I have met someone who has been a part of events that I have studied or who has written archival documents that I have read. I feel ten kinds of awkward, even worse than I do ordinarily in collecting oral histories. You don't really know whether you know this person or not, and what you're entitled to say or think in their presence.

Believe me, if I'm ever at a dinner and Dan Simmons or David Zindell or John Barnes or Greg Bear or Vernor Vinge or Ursula K. LeGuin sits down next to me, I'm going to have to stab myself with a fork to keep from gushing praise in an intrusive way. I almost wet myself in anxiety when the students asked me to be on a little panel here at a local SF convention with Greg Frost and Michael Swanwick, as an academic commentator. So yes, this is complicated.

But yes, some fans--not just or even primarily SF fans--cross a boundary of sorts. Maybe they're just assholes, and fannishness has nothing to do with it.

Now that's a work of beauty, that chart.

Oh, I'd agree with that too, and it is another problem with my original piece, to some extent: many fandoms, whether the kind you're describing, or the kind I'm squicked by, intermingle and intertwine with the texts, performances and practices to which they are devoted, often to the point where you can't really tell the difference any longer. That's another of Henry Jenkins' points in his work Textual Poachers, that the culture industry and fandoms are often very productively connected to each other.

Science fiction is an especially good example of that: the fecundity of fandoms (both the Klingon costume stalking-James-Doohan wearing your Starfleet uniform to a jury selection process kind, and the "bohemian network of affinity groups" kind, clearly has had an enormous, mostly positive, effect on science fiction. Sometimes it also constricts the possibilities of the genre, perhaps, by creating market-reinforced rules, but mostly not.

In the end, my point is pretty simple: anything that keeps you from recognizing that Greg from the Wiggles is trying to load his luggage on the tour bus or have a quiet lunch, or recognizing that the author whose work you love appreciates that you've bought his book but doesn't really want to know you personally because he's just that way, is a bad thing. Stephen King said it best in Misery, I guess: it's not like the fan there is typical or normal; fannishness is only the alibi for her descent into madness.

I'd add that it seems to me that Patrick's sense of fandom seems largely synonymous with what I'd call "criticism": a body of interested readers and writers knowledgably discussing, criticizing and interpreting a particular cultural form, text or genre. Where he got the idea that I was slagging off on that, I don't know, but either I made some big boo-boos in my little piece or he made some big boo-boos in reading it.

Or both.

My post makes a distinction overly crudely, yes, and a hackneyed one at that. It's rather like the people who spend time distinguishing between erotica and pornography in order to validate their masturbatory practices and consign someone else's to the outer darkness.

But in fact, this is exactly what my little essay is about, really: getting squicked by people whose operational practice of being fans is radically different than my own. Squicking being a slightly irrational, vaguely indefensible sense of disgust when you see something similar to your own way of being but just so slightly different. Furries doing cybersex squick me, but cybersex per se doesn't. I can't quite clearly articulate the difference, but there is a difference to me, and it doesn't quite seem like a "you say tomat-oh, I say tom-ateo" thing.

Here the distinction I'm trying to put my finger on is maybe not really about fandom at all, but about how or when we recognize the humanity of cultural production. Honestly, yes, I do relate to texts differently than I relate to the person I'm having lunch with. Texts are, in some very important sense, things. Things have identities, characters, a persistent nature; I relate to things, not merely use them. But a human being is something else, at least when they're here and in my presence and worthy of the same ordinary respect I accord anyone else.

I am a fan, of a number of things. A devotee. Even an obsessional--which is not the same thing as being a fan. Some things, my fannishness is about a canonical command of the totality of a particular cultural form, text or practice. Some things, it's about collecting--my home bookcases are festooned with action figures. Some things, it's even about creating sustained fictions and ancillary cultural productions of the kinds Henry Jenkins talks about, stuff that I know looks like bizarre effluvia to anyone else. I've written narratives of the adventures of my computer game characters and posted them to message boards. That surely qualifies me as a card-carrying member of the Klingon forehead-wearing Klub.

It's just that fan identification is for some people a passport to the kind of narcissism that licenses them to ignore the humanity of the objects of their devotion. It's one of the roads, and by means not the only or even most important one, to celebrity worship. And celebrity worship, when it brings someone into the presence of the object of their devotion, is at the least kind of sad, and at the worst, grotesque. In that respect, yes, I'd like to throw down the temple and smash the graven idols.

But I'm still a fan, and like most of you, because in my heart of hearts, I think I'm a slan, you know?

Was just commenting on this over on Crooked Timber. This kind of thing is a parlor game, a fun one, but any good game needs rules. Without first an agreement on the chronological period (lots of posts above wander well back of the 20th Century in their picks) and more importantly on the meaning of the term "great" (great as moral, political or intellectual exemplar; great as in hugely consequential in contingent individual ways on the course of events; great as in achieving long-lasting and pervasive influence on the thought and action of many other people), the debate is kind of a pointless one. Three people operating off different rules for their lists can only hope to find the common denominator person who makes them all (which is why Gandhi, for example, ends up on all the lists, from all sides of the spectrum).

Oh, he might know what it means. In fact, I consider it likely, for all the reasons you observe.

But he isn't necessarily or even likely to be wearing it because he is trying to communicate something about himself, which is what Patrick is using to critique the "Islamacists hate the United States for its culture of freedom" argument. I'm simply saying that the guy's T-shirt (and body language) don't tell you anything necessarily about his motivations for fighting the US.

A colleague of mine and I were once talking about how we had given some undergraduates a photo of a young Nigerian man in the city of Kano wearing a Cleveland Indians baseball cap in addition to items of clothing manufactured from all over West Africa. Invariably the students wanted to talk about the baseball cap, and thought it indicated that the man had some dgree of identification with US culture.

They ignored the fact that the rest of his clothes said equally interesting things about a regional economic trade in textiles--and that the cap had gotten to Nigeria not because some clever retailer had decided to satisfy a demand for US-identified clothes and imported a bunch of baseball caps, but because there is a gigantic global market for secondhand clothes that circulates American discards into Africa. The guy had the cap because it was cheap: it didn't say a thing about his outlook on life or America.

Same thing here. The photo neither proves nor disproves the notion that some or most Islamicist fundamentalists dislike the West for its culture or political philosophy. It only demonstrates that secondhand clothing from the US is available in the Muslim world as well. Not everybody gets to walk into a JC Pennys and decide that they want to buy and wear a particular shirt because it somehow expresses something important about themselves. Most of the developing world follows a different logic: what is available and affordable? There *are* consumer choices that people in developing societies make that are highly meaningful acts of social communication, but T-shirts aren't commonly among them.

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