Jess, yes, exactly. When I quit nuclear physics grad school, everyone argued with me by pointing out how well I was doing in my classes. The attitude was that anybody who can do physics will do physics, and there I was disproving it. Lots of very confused people there.
I write hard SF. I write fantasy with vacuum tubes in it. I write fantasy with nothing at all to do with physics or engineering in any way. I write stories because they interest me, and I do the research I have to do to get there.
My dad's father is a retired Lutheran pastor, and he's willing to swear to anyone who needs to know that not one of the things he did as a pastor in all his decades of ministry required the use of his genitals. I'll swear the same thing about physics research, either for its own sake or for a story, if you like: it didn't require the use of my genitals, and I didn't have to borrow my lab partners' either. I promise.
It's a heavy critique week for me -- I'm not part of any formal writing group but do critiques for friends on an as-needed basis, and apparently everybody needs them this week. But in the "published stuff" category, I'm reading Peter O'Donnell's Modesty Blaise.
Harriet, you might want to read Joanna Sinisalo's Troll, since it addresses exactly that question (among other, much larger and more serious ones).
Didn't we go through all the "letting them win" permutations with "letting the terrorists win" a couple years ago? Didn't we learn to see when that's a little ridiculous? How about "if you let George W. Bush force you to do the work you love poorly, you're letting him win?" I'd like to think this isn't a win-win situation for Bush. It certainly shouldn't be.
We need to be able to see the difference between "not doing this specific thing" and "doing nothing." We should see the difference between "one person doesn't make any difference" and "I have somewhere else to be making a difference." Certainly every person matters, but they don't all have to matter in the same way on the same day.
Thanks, Patrick. Much appreciated. I spent the whole time we were moving back to Minnesota fielding incredulous California whines: "How can you move back to the Midwest? It's so conservative." I got to the point where I would snap, "Paul Wellstone!" at all comers. Minneapolis. Is so conservative. Riiiiiight.
I now point out the elected governor of California when I hear about Midwestern conservatism.
I think one of the problems my generation (I'm 26) has with protests is that we are prone to overusing them. Ditto "consciousness-raising exercises." Every other week, someone at college was protesting something, and we had a student body of less than 3000. Some of that is self-selecting liberal arts college do-gooder stuff, but it's still an astonishing amount to protest without a heck of a lot of effect. Homelessness, for example: what, exactly, was the administration of my college going to do about homelessness? How was a protest supposed to change their actions, and towards whom? No one seemed to know or care.
I think the problem, Randall, is not that we don't know how to sacrifice so much as that we don't know what to sacrifice, or when. It's not that we/they haven't seen meaningful protest changing things. It's that we saw it (on film, mostly) and learned the wrong lessons.
Avram, I'm the granddaughter of a pastor, and I live with the son of a pastor. My mom is not ordained but is on the executive board for her denomination. And I constantly meet people who have never had an actual conversation with a member of any clergy. Who assume that all Christian clergy follow the same rules as they suppose Catholic clergy must follow (and heaven knows they make a muddle of the Catholic bits, too). Who think that if you're wearing a funny collar, they needn't bother because they already know what you think about anything at all. Who think they ought to be scared of my mom, my dad's father, or Timprov's dad, and that I will be, too.
Even among churchgoers, there are lots of people who avoid talking to the clergybeing or getting to know her/him as a human being, who tune out the sermon or conveniently forget the bits they didn't want to think about, who think that "Pastor" or "Father" is their clergyperson's first name. Some clergy find it to be a big problem with their jobs, and it bugs the heck out of the pastors' kids.
MD^2, I think for me the question is whether the shocking action is something you'd otherwise believe in saying/doing. I don't imagine that the people who participated in the kiss-ins Xopher mentioned had picked up the practice of kissing other gentlemen for the purpose of being shocking only. Rather, it was something they thought was right and reasonable (and they were right! and reasonable!), and it only needed to be done en masse to make that (shocking) point. I would think that, in an ideal world, each of them would have gone on kissing other gentlemen more or less at mutual will. It was a good thing on its own as well as being shocking at the time.
If I go up to my grandmother and say, "Grg fckng Bsh has fckd vr veterans and servicepeople in the following ways...", she will be shocked, but not by the list that follows. The shock at the language I used would be a distraction from my actual political point (that if she supports the military, she should oppose Bush), not a way to intensify it. I think that's what a lot of purely epater le bourgeois stuff does: it focuses on itself rather than on some other, better end.
Graydon, to come in really late here, I come from a Christian tradition that specifically teaches that that is not the meaning of the phrase "holy catholic church." We're supposed to recognize churches of other denominations and in other places as part of the same Body of Christ with us. That's what it's about from our perspective. Not that everybody's a Christian and it only remains to be seen which of us are good Christians and which bad. (Sadly, some of my relatives do seem to believe that. But I don't think that clause of the Creed is responsible.)
We often substitute a single word so that it's "holy Christian church" instead, just to be a little clearer about what it is that we're saying. That has its own interpretation problems, of course. Language. Pesky stuff.
I've been refraining from comment on this thread and its sibling because I'm not sure I can stop myself from going on at unreasonable length with experience and counterexperience. Suffice it to say that I'm sick of being the first or only "decent/good" Christian people meet. I'm sick of having them express shock that someone they like or often agree with follows that particular storyteller. I don't blame them for being surprised, considering how many jerk Christians there are -- but then, there are plenty of jerks in every religious and unreligious group. One thing for which we do not lack is jerks. And I'm always happy to hear folks like Patrick calling for fewer of them on any side of an issue.
Jo, is it something in the tea itself or just the warmth of the beverage? I have a gnat's tolerance for caffeine, so I usually steer clear of black tea. Will your average chamomile do the same thing, or is the soothing tea-specific?
Consider that the only Democrats to win the While house in the last quarter century were comfortable talking about their own faith, and coud talk credibly to communities of faith.
I've been thinking about what you said, Claude, and it reminded me of a problem I read in one of Andrew Greeley's Catholic sociology books. He noted that they'd done a study and found that 90% of regular churchgoers said that the sermon was the most important part of the service for them, and 10% of regular churchgoers said they were satisfied with the quality of sermons they were hearing. I can't help but wonder if the problem with talking about faith goes beyond the Democratic party a good ways.
The Republican party has successfully sold itself as the party of moral values.
Okay, hon, but how? Why do conservative Christians like my grandparents and your aunt and uncle believe in the Republican party as moral with all the horrible stuff various Republicans have done? Dick Cheney, moral rock? I mean, it's a cliche to list the Congresscritters who holler about family values as long as it's not their own family, but it's a cliche for a reason. To say nothing of moral business practices. So why are these folks credible to conservative Christians and not to the rest of us? I think it's true that they are. I just don't know how.
(Ah, the internet, where one can have a conversation with one's spouse two rooms and several hours away.)
How DOES the young man in the Tolkien costume respond if someone (not I) aggressively challenges his elaborate fantasy game? Retreat further? Break down in tears? Start thinking?
I'm sorry, the disconnect I feel reading your posts is still in play here, A.R. If someone ran up to me and shouted, "Stuff you like sucks, NYAH!" in my face, I would not retreat further (further?), break down in tears, or start thinking. Oh wait, I would start thinking. I'd start thinking, "that person's a jackass."
One of my best friends is in the SCA (although of course I wouldn't want my daughter to marry one), and he has a much firmer grip of the historical realities of pre-Renaissance Europe than most people. He wouldn't find a comment about his glasses challenging to any assumptions he was making, he would find it patronizing and stupid and unrelated to his views of history. (He also is pretty good with a great big stick, so I wouldn't recommend any hypothetical person go for his glasses.)
I just don't see how creating a fantasy culture and sealing oneself off from the real world are related. At least, not nearly that directly.
But then, I also have no desire to go kick Martin Amis in the shins. I think most literary types are not scoffing at SF for being impossible or poorly speculated. I think the ones who scoff want very different things out of a book and are sometimes unwilling to see that speculation about possible futures can be one of the functions of literature.
Just last week I got mail from a guy who reads my blog and wanted to know what someone who thought so seriously about craft was doing trying to work in a hack genre. He shared with me his received wisdom that the difference between "literary" fiction and "genre" fiction was solely the quality of the prose: if any of this Asimov Bradbury spaceship nonsense would only be well-written, it would be instantly elevated to the heights of literary fiction, but as it was still classified as genre fiction, he knew it was crap without having to read it. And I shouldn't sully my obvious talent learning bad habits from it.
And didn't understand why I didn't feel complimented.
The examples you come up with don't mean much in an emotional, I-saw-that-person kind of a way to anyone younger than the Baby Boomers.
That's funny, Josh, because I'm 25, and they mean a heck of a lot to me. And do you really think it's mostly our age group that's determining how the parties are seen? I really, really doubt it.
The fact remains that it's the Democrats, not the Republicans, who have had ordained ministers running in primaries for most of my life -- Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton are people one sees. If you're counting Carter's political career as the time he was in elected office and no more, you're ignoring many of the man's biggest achievements for peace and social justice. And the media isn't; Carter isn't invisible these days. Nor has he suddenly become apolitical. Campus Republicans at one of our local colleges were still urging people to protest against Nobel Peace Prize winners appearing, and part of their protest asked people to "kick Jimmy Carter in the teeth." That's younger folks than me, and Carter is still a symbol of liberalism for them.
This isn't about Boomers resting on their laurels.
Randolph: Generally, a Matthew 6:5 bumper sticker would be aimed at the fundies.
But this is part of the problem: with something like a bumper sticker, you can't have it say, "Matthew 6:5 but never mind if you're not a Christian because I'm really not trying to convert you." Public discourse (inasmuch as a bumper sticker can be discourse) is public. If you tell a thumper personally to go read Matt6, that's a different matter than putting the suggestion on your house or car.
Near us there is a house whose owner puts up huge signs reading, "U can't B both Christian and pro-choice" and similar things. (Apparently he will steal your letters if you try it.) It's one of the very few signs I've seen that successfully made it clear who its audience was, because if you're not claiming to be Christian in the first place, it's totally irrelevant. It's also pretty offensive to me, because it crosses over from, "I believe" to "you must believe" pretty firmly.
I almost have an easier time talking religion with a non-Christian or even a Baptist or a Catholic than I do with other Haugeans like myself. It's much easier to click the mental switch over to, "he/she is describing his beliefs and possibly why he holds them" instead of "he/she is telling me what I should believe."
Randolph again: I myself do not understand why moderate and leftist christians are not more politically prominent; bringing them to the fore would be an enormous boost to the Democrats.
How much more politically prominent do we get than Jimmy Carter, for heaven's sake? How many people have managed to miss the title "Reverend" in front of Al Sharpton's and Jesse Jackson's names? I think the problem is not that we don't have prominent moderate/leftist Christians, but that 1) they don't always represent the whole spectrum of moderate/leftist Christian beliefs (as pertains to gay marriage, for example) and 2) they don't rant as much about Jesus per unit political rant as right-wingers do. Also sometimes 3) they aren't taken seriously. For as much good as former-Pres. Carter does, I think he's classified as kind of a nice old guy rather than a major social-political force in most people's minds. Unjustly, I think.
When we keep saying things like "we need more prominent Christian moderate/leftists," we encourage politicians to continue to run as Christians even if they're not particularly committed to it personally. I think that's bad. Lieberman was the only prominent Democratic presidential candidate who did not state for the record that he was a Christian. Everybody else was already claiming it. They already do that song and dance. I don't see what we'd gain from more of it.
The problem with a bumper sticker reading "Matthew 6:5" is that most people who see it will roll their eyes and see another Christian preaching at them, rather than looking it up and reading it and going, "Oh, they're on my team, in a way!" Christians are pretty bad at bumper stickers. I saw one that said, "Christians aren't perfect, just forgiven." I know that was meant to combat a sense that Christians were arrogant in their own goodness, and yet the friends I was riding with (an atheist, two agnostics, and a Jew) agreed that it sounded smug to them, as if Christians claimed to be more forgiven than anyone else. I still have a juvenile attachment to, "Jesus Loves You, But the Rest of Us Think You're a Jerk." But that isn't really what we're going for here.
I agree with you, Lydy: we don't know what Jesus was really like in detail, and it's a bad idea to try to claim that we do. There are people who try to live his message (as best they know it) in various political directions, leaving aside those who don't really care how best to lead a life of loving their neighbors. I don't really feel comfortable telling someone that Jesus for-sure said something was or was not the province of Caesar -- if He dodged that particular question so neatly, I probably shouldn't attribute my own views to Him.
Nobody made me the grand arbiter of what is and is not "really" Christian. (Some days I have to repeat this many, many times as I read about various intolerant yahoos. But it's still true then.) If I go around pointing my finger at the "fake" Christians, I'm no better than the ones who think they know God's plan for everybody in intimate detail and are more than willing to share it.
Unfortunately, "We don't really know" is a position that seems to be hard to get across to people as a valid philosophical stance -- it's not a good soundbite. It's very vulnerable to people who claim they do know but who actually are on shaky ground at best. Another case of a virtue being a political weakness. Sigh.
The Quindlen column James quoted really spoke for me in a lot of ways. I think a lot of the problem comes from the fact that the Christians who aren't like the fundies Lydy's talking about are not comfortable Jesusizing our public lives. I told an acquaintance recently, "We're the quiet, lovey, almost-hippie-Jesus kind of Christians." After a startled pause, she said, "I didn't know there were that kind." It's the quiet part that really does us in. We're stuck either praying on street corners as we're explicitly told not to do and shoving religion in other people's faces (also not encouraged by that Jesus guy), or ceding the label to those who do.
I know of a normal suburban church here in the Midwest with two pastors, one whose son is part of a multi-adult family group and the other whose lesbian daughter used to be her hetero son. Both PKs and their families are loved and welcomed at that church. But part of the reason we're so comfortable there is that the pastors don't do a big dance about how accepting they are. They just give hugs and move on with the singing. I think it would weaken things if they had a whole routine about how accepting they are. I've seen a lot of churches do that with race/ethnicity and scare visitors away. I don't see how it'd work any better with sexuality issues.
Maybe we need bumper stickers analogous to the "I'm pro-life and I vote" ones: "I'm Christian, and I shut my mouth." I'd like to have seen a pastor or two going before that committee to talk about how much they wanted to be able to legally marry the homosexual couples in their congregation who were already married in the eyes of God. But beyond that, I'd much rather see secular justifications for secular policies, from religious and areligious folks alike.
Along JB Woodford's line, we bounced lasers off them and had the kids calculate the width of the CD tracks using the diffraction patterns. In my past life as a physics TA, that is, and probably in my far-future life as a parent.
My friends used to stick them in the microwave -- they made really cool patterns that way. But I am now officially a grown-up, and since I'd have to pay for the microwave if it got ruined....
Griff, do you have any evidence that generals are all more or less alike ("cut from the same cloth")? And do you have any evidence that members of the Armed Forces take killing lightly? My grandfather and uncle, retired Marines, don't take it any more lightly than my father, who was a conscientious objector during Vietnam; in fact, Grandpa went to Dad's hearing to help him get his CO status because he respected his beliefs.
I grew up in Omaha. With SAC/StratCom right there, it's a military town. I wasn't in Omaha when people started leaving for Iraq this time around, but I was there when Desert Storm started, and the whole town (several hundred thousand people) was subdued and terrified. We all knew people in the armed forces. They were our cousins and our siblings and our friends. My junior high principal was a reservist who got called up. There was nobody I knew who could stand back and label members of the military as someone else's; they were ours. (Incidentally, Omaha supported two SF bookstores and a good dozen gaming stores for years, mostly on the strength of people from the base. They're that flavor of ours, too.) And nobody wanted to see our men and women go shoot and get shot at. It was personally frightening. There was no way for us to make it impersonal the way you just have. "A warrior who will cater to the war crowd?" Most of the people who actually fight those wars would really prefer to pass out food to starving kids or do other peaceful/peacekeeping missions. What "war crowd" have you seen Clark allying himself with? It's only people who don't know members of the armed forces very well who can decide that they take killing lightly and love going to war.
I knew exactly one member of the armed forces who took killing lightly. He was 18 this year, and they sent him to Iraq, and he wanted to go shoot up Hussein's guys. He doesn't take it lightly any more. He can't.
Clark would not be my first choice for President, but deciding that all generals are alike and that they all take killing lightly is not a very bright move. It's like deciding that Carter must treat nuclear waste casually because of his nuclear background: unsupported by evidence. Just not true. "Feelings" of comfort or unease are not the way to make an informed voting decision. Or even an argument on someone's web forum.
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