Re: Nagin: It seems like a lot of the negative commentary about Nagin is that he's not a good commander. God knows NO could use a good commander right now, but I sure don't want my mayor to run my city like a military organization. I can't fault Nagin for being a city official rather than an officer.
For instance, Erik V. Olson objected to Nagin's ignoring looting and focusing on search and rescue, then reversing himself. But I'm looking at Jim Macdonald's post mentioning that the three priorities in ICS are life safety, mitigating the situation, securing property. Looks to me like Nagin ignored people stealing food, water, and yeah, even jeans and TVs ("securing property") in order to pull people off rooftops ("life safety") until the looting turned into something much more violent, something life-threatening. That sounds like responding to the situation, not flip-flopping.
Well, if you go back far enough to early myths, they're explanations of real things, no? I would hazard a guess--anthropology is not my field--that they were meant as literal explanations in the same way that we produce scientific theories now, except with a lot more of the "it should happen that way" aspect.
Look at the Renaissance for a lot of wacky science theory that obeys the same motivational rules as, for instance, magical realism. Some people--Mary Gentle comes to mind--have played some very elegant games with literalizing those beliefs. (And she says a few things about it in a article which could do without the first page or two of apology. Among other things, she says a science fiction novel based on Hermetic science means that "the reader is continually disoriented", and I think that's something a lot of good sf&f tries to do: take away something we rely on, so that we have to actually think about what's going on.)
Jo, thank you! "Because the world ought to work like that" is a really helpful way of addressing the questions I was blundering around with. It's very hard for me to justify these distinctions on the basis of content, what actually happens, and "the author writes as though they believe in what they're writing" wasn't quite working for me either, for this problem anyway. But motivation or causality, that seems right. A little like sympathetic magic, really. (And Sean Stewart is one of the people who I've always thought _is_ writing magical realism in genre fantasy.)
Perhaps that's why there's this weird functional/effective overlap between the literalism we're talking about and the metaphor that people want it to be. It aligns so precisely that we need a different kind of suspension of disbelief, one that allows for, I don't know, a little more of the pathetic fallacy. Seriously: don't we tend to reject the storm that comes in the middle of the fight?
JvP quoted thus: "If there is a ghost in a story of magical realism, the ghost is not a fantasy element but a manifestation of the reality of people who believe in and have 'real' experiences of ghosts."
It seems like it'd be productive, then, to distinguish between "'real' experiences of ghosts" and literal, actual zombies. Or elves. Whatever. "Anyone can tell" the difference between a traditional fantasy novel and Gabriel Garcia Marquez, right? But I haven't figured out yet how we can describe that distinction without backing off on "of course our zombies are literally real". Or, on the other hand, why people on the other side of the fence draw their line to include magical realism. I'd like to, though; this kind of breakdown of categories is always where the good questions are.
I don't think it's a bad idea to try to hang onto some of the ideals of the Constitution, though. Recall that Lincoln, although obsessively concerned with the rule of law and therefore reluctant to restrict the legal rights of slaveholders, nevertheless relied on the principles of the Constitution to demonstrate the wrongness of slavery. And, ultimately, to end it.
I wouldn't argue (as Lincoln pretty much did) that the technical legality of abusing non-citizens overrides the other principles of the Constitution; but I don't think it's time to give up on using those principles in a philosophical or legal dispute. It reminds me a little too much of giving up on the flag because it's been coopted.
My understanding's that the US has a terrible history of using citizenship to determine rights or the lack thereof. Hell, we're still arguing about what rights Puerto Ricans have, and they are US citizens. Immigration controls are used in cases where terrorism can't be proven, for instance: round 'em up on terrorism charges, fail to assemble sufficient evidence, deport them because in the mean time you've found that they're out of status.
| Year | Number of comments posted |
|---|---|
| 2005 | 7 |
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