Alan, I'll say that the woman's hurt is the sort that can't readily be fixed by litigation. The available facts of our lives are part of the raw material of creativity, and it's possible both to say "that hurts" and "I shouldn't try to stop that". I say this as someone who received deeply manipulative psychological abuse in my early BBSing days and had the exchanges logged by the instigator, who posted them online, complete with ironic comments about my descriptions of them to him (since I didn't know he was the one doing it) and how much it hurt. Less public than a major play, perhaps, but no less painful.
My own favorite author for useful sex scenes is Michael Kube-McDowell. There's a devastating scene in Alternities, between a couple whose marriage is failing. We see the scene from the man's point of view, and then later from the woman's. The particular kind of disaster it is matters very much to both of them and to the rest of the story.
I agree with Avram that the explicit scene isn't always desirable. Sometimes the challenge should be, I think, to put that passion into other contexts. I would rather see a fade than a scene done poorly, and sometimes sex scenes are generic because they are in fact not very good vessels for insights into the passions that drive the characters.
Law & Order, particularly in its first, hmm, half dozen or so seasons, is the counter-example here. We knew essentially nothing about the characters' personal lives, and never saw them except in the context of work. Yet it's a show filled with a lot of personal passion, tangled histories, and all the human complexity that makes life fun to watch, just anchored in the sphere of work. I'd like to see other stories infuse other aspects of life with the same passion.
I can't find the link right now, but Nathan Newman marshalled evidence earlier this year suggesting that union membership and large personal-injury settlements are inversely correlated: in states with relatively high rates of union membership, large awards are scarcer, and vice versa. The states most favored by that fraction of personal-injury lawyers who inspire the stereotype are pretty much all in the South, dirt poor and thoroughly un-organized. I'd never thought it about it before, but his statistics seemed sound, and it fits in with the story Teresa is presenting for us here: the personal-injury claim is the response people pursue when they can't get justice other ways, and the assault on it from big business is very much an effort to deepen the "heads we win, tails you lose" chasm.
Steve, the volume of spam is difficult to overstate (more than half of all e-mail), and is routinely cited as a factor in the collapse of small ISPs and in decisions by folks who had been hosting their own domains to stop doing so. It is a genuinely serious burden on the network as a whole. It increases the rate of failure for legitimate communication, disrupting legitimate personal and commercial exchanges. That would be a problem even if there were no fraud or abuse in the nature of what spammers push for sale, and of course they do. Early on it was possible for some of them to say "I didn't realize..." and genuinely be clueless rather than malicious. It's not possible to do that any more. This is reckless disregard for consequences, that is a category of behavior the law rightly frowns on.
I have, Graydon, but I should re-read it. Thanks for the reminder.
Quoting myself from LiveJournal about the urban archipelago...
If I had the piece to edit and develop, I'd chop off about 20% of it, starting with all the "we hate red-state stereotypes" and "we don't care" rhetoric and moving on to a bunch of the anti-suburban rhetoric. I have precious little use for hatemongering, and like some of the folks posting in comments, I have friends, relatives, and loved ones in rural places, in rural states, with different ideas than mine, and a country that can't accommodate them as well as me isn't worth bothering with. I think that there's a real need for a better alternative news system, and part of it will be editors willing to tell themselves and their writers to cut out the crap.
(I do think it morally and tactically sound to talk about what "red state" cultures owe financially to those they're hating, and make it something to discuss with regard to eliminating dependency, not subsidizing failure, and the like.)
But on the other hand, I find the notion of an urban-focused politics deeply appealing. The federal government is on a completely unsustainable course and completely without the normal compensating mechanisms. The Democrats made some bad innovations in the field of subverting minority power, and the Republicans have made a whole more. Many states are also deeply and thoroughly screwed in the budgeting. A fair number of cities and urban areas, though, are in pretty decent fiscal health and have the space to engage in some experimentation.
This is, of course, nothing but classic federalism.
I'm a big believer in trying things out. Feeling wistful about things you might have done but didn't can turn from vaguely aggravating to deeply poisonous, if it's not untreated, particularly if (like me) you're prone to clinical depression and other complications. What's true for individuals is true for communities, too. Likewise, there's nothing like cold hard reality to make an originally promising but unviable idea seem not so hot. It's better to do and see, and best if a bunch of people do a bunch of different things so that we can actually compare. The current Republican fondness for one-size-fits-all solutions is as unappealing to me as it was when it was standard Democratic fodder. And in practical terms, the social units best equipped to try significant changes in funding and operating services are cities and urban areas.
"Cities and urban areas" is a fairly loose and awkward phrase, and it's an awkward conceptual group, too. My own feeling is that it's suburb + core that adds up to all of what I consider a city, and that even though there are folkways within that cluster that I find less than desirable, they play their part in a healthy economy and society just like the ones I do like. I strongly suspect, for instance, that providing some accommodation for people who like more sprawl than I think wise makes it easier to manage overall sprawl. Certainly eliminationist rhetoric always breeds its virulent opposite. And in practical terms there's stuff that takes big space to hold and use.
What most appeals to me in the urban archipelago screed is not so much the "fuck you" to the rest of the country as the "we can do it here" attitude. It's possible to get some possibly good things going and see how they actually work, without trying to persuade everyone else to do the same. In a moment when the larger-scale institutions seem both wrong-headed and increasingly invulnerable to tempering, that's the message that encourages me.
If I had the urban archipelago article to edit, I'd slash about 20% of it, including all of the "we don't care" and "we're the real Americans" rhetoric. I do think that the positive agenda of doing at city levels what won't happen at state or national levels makes sense.
Harry, I've been reading the article in fits and starts, and finding much to like in it.
Anna: That tangle of complexity in culture and politics is a familiar one, and I like your description. It's good to remember that people can like these things and dislike those, very much, at the same time, and know that they're bound together, and yet want to encourage one and not the other...life is hard sometimes. :)
Jerry: Patrick has already hit on the key point but...
Precisely nothing in your post was news to me. Nor, I'd imagine, would any of it surprise someone like Dith Pran, or Vaclav Havel, or any of the other people of good will and great courage who've struggled with tyranny around the world. And it is true that despite all America's sins, there is something remarkable and admirable about the American experiment which has attracted attention and respect. In my opinion, rightly so.
Sometimes these virtues exist in greater tension with practice than other times. It seems to me that there's never been more tension between the virtues and the practice in my lifetime (born in 1965) than under this current president. But I hope to live into a time when the two are more congruent, as do many others in the country and out of it. And this hope is not at all incompatible with an awareness of our failures. I am not basing my hope on the belief that America has always been wonderful, or even always been tolerably okay.
You are, Kathy. It's a thing to be appreciative for. It's good you have it! Use it well. :)
Sean and others: I voted for neither Gore nor Bush in 2000, thinking them not wildly different, so I can address. Yes, the information was out there, and those of us who ignored it, we were wrong. I was wrong. I dismissed the people most informed about Bush's history and the records of the people around him as "shrill" and things like that. In some cases I said things like "that's just conspiracy-mongering", ignoring my own hard-earned knowledge that people do sometimes act in conspiratorial ways and that the category of malefactors of great wealth had not been abolished. I was too prepared to play cynical games of moral equivalency for reasons different in inspiration than those of Nader supporters, but functionally wrong in precisely the same way, and I let it distract me from even the sort of effort I put into evaluating candidates for local offices, let alone someone who's going to be boss of the biggest center of power in the world. I am not being facetious when I say that I regard some significant fraction of any good I may be able to do or support now as atonement for that terribly damaging act of unjustified cynical detachment. I wasn't the only one who fucked up big-time that way, but I'm one who did, and man do I regret it now.
Our hosts were among those who were entirely right about it, and said so, and pointed the rest of us at evidence in favor of their assertions. It wasn't lack of evidence that made some of us refuse to pay attention. It was just refusal to pay attention, an unwillingness to make distinctions in the pursuit of an ideal alternative. But it doesn't matter how noble our intentions may have been. The fact is that we turned away from reality, and yes, we were warned and informed at the time.
There is also a simple and solid logic in putting particular weight on the failure of judgment on the part of people like you and me. We are not theocrats, nor plutocrats, nor foes of modernity. We profess to want equality of opportunity, the reduction of oligarchical power, peace, security for people with minority desires and lifestyles, and a bunch else that's been savaged and will be savaged more. We were concerned with reducing the power of precisely the people who ended up in charge. We weren't indifferent to what was at stake, but we didn't back up our concerns with anything like adequate attention. We should have supported Gore and opposed Bush. We went AWOL at a time when it really mattered...and while we couldn't have seen the specifics of 9/11 or anything like that, the policies and hopes of this crew were out there to see. Bush's record as governor, the careers of Cheney and the others, it was there to know, and we let down our ideals by declining to know it and act on it.
It's certainly good we got clues later on. But we will always be in order in displaying a certain humility in listening to those who got it right the first time around.
Lis' comments just brought a couple things together in my brane.
It's often pointed out that even the poor are likely to have a fair number of luxuries, from TVs with cable to game consoles to multiple cell phones, and so on. What's seldom pointed out is that the cost of many of these together does not equal what people without jobs that cover a lot of insurance would have to pay for anything like decent health coverage. A whole bunch of items costing $20-50 a month plus some bigger purchases a few times a year is still likely to come far short of the several hundred dollars a month that families have to pay. If anyone in the family has chronic conditions, the cost goes up even more.
So we end up with a boom in consumer goods partly because there's no real reason not to. Doing without all that stuff wouldn't make a difference, not in an era when real wages stagnate while the cost of insurance rises 10-30% in the course of a year. No amount of savings available to people working steady but unlucrative jobs can close the gap. If it were possible to get good coverage for a family of four for, say, $75-100 a month, you'd see a lot of luxury spending among the poor drop off because they'd like to have their health and well-being attended to. Some folks no doubt don't care. But many do care, it's just that they can correctly work out that the important thing they want is simply out of reach for them.
There's also something to be said for continuing to be an example of honorable behavior even as one's opponents are revealing themselves to be completely rectocranially inverted. It fits with the idea I've seen recently about acting as more parliamentary opposition.
My personal blame list begins with Bush voters and with those who didn't vote. I still think Nader voters who don't believe in the doctrine of collapse and revolution owe the rest of us an apology for helping tip things in 2000, but they seem pretty much irrelevant to the 2004 situation. These weird sore winners really bug me a lot, and mystify me.
Outstanding, Teresa. I'm in full agreement on all points.
I need to do up a screed about how and why it isn't a mark of disrespect or contempt to say "I think you're wrong" and "I think I'm right". Nobody's entitled to feel that others all agree with them, and a basic part of maturity (heck, of childhood well before adolescence) should be learning to deal with people who see things differently and still get some things done.
And yes, passionately yes, about letting the world down. I grew up in the '70s and '80s with kids who'd been Vietnamese boat people, refugees from death squads of right and left in Central America, escapees from behind the Iron Curtain and from the post-colonial wars in Africa...their coming to America made sense. Right now, I'm not so sure it does. Oh, sure, we are for the moment still better in many ways than the pisspot tyrannies of the Third World. But so much of that is inertia. The rule of law has been explicitly repudiated at the top, and it's just a matter of time before it trickles on down....
One of the really moving experiences of my college years was hearing Dith Pran talk after a screening of The Killing Fields. I was at the time (mid-'80s) prone to a certain anti-American attitude. Pran's words did much to snap me out of it, reminding us all that the American ideal and experience was a key force in liberation struggles around the world, even when American practice fell short. We ought to love our potential as so many others love it, and when it failed to be real, make it so. I think of that now, and wonder what's to be done.
Glad to help, Ariella. What it means, of course, is that I've got a long list of books I'd like to buy but haven't. :) I'm also fortunate - and I do regard this as a matter of neurological happenstance - to enjoy both audiobooks and e-books on my sundry handheld devices, so that much of my new reading only consumes bits rather than shelf space. That doesn't work for everyone, of course, and I wouldn't want to sound hectoring or superior about it; I confine myself to "check it out as a possibility".
Tracey: Interesting. (The other trigger for me was a fire destroying the upper floor of the two-story apartment building where I had a ground-floor apartment. Thinking about what would be involved with replacing things made me think a lot about what mattered to me for preservation, too.)
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