Wish I had something more profound to say, but I'll stick with everyone else. Good luck, and feel better!
What's unnerving is that I read this here, and then I read SFGate, my old hometown newspaper and a usual bastion of liberality, and the story they tell is that the police cracked down on people who had urine jars and were lighting cars on fire. If I'd read nothing but my usually hugely liberal paper, all I would have seen is that there were some troublemakers, but the police done took care of it.
As somebody who enjoys reading comic books (well, once they're compiled into graphic novels -- I don't have the time to look for them issue by issue, and I like big books), I'm immediately defensive. But as somebody noted above, a whole lot of what superhero comics are is fantasy wish-fulfillment, and wishing that the line between good and evil were clean and easily discernable is, I think, completely fair. (Trying to apply that particular fantasy to real life is not.)
I'd also differentiate between heroes who fight evil because normal law enforcement is clearly outclassed, heroes who fight evil because normal law enforcement isn't competent to do so, and heroes who fight evil because normal law enforcement is possibly corrupt.
Superman is pretty easily the former -- if he's fighting Darkseid or whatever giant robot Luthor just flew in to terrorize the city, he's essentially slaying dragons. That's a fantasy of a big hero to write unwriteable wrongs.
Batman is (in many versions of his very long history) the middle version, and that's the one I find troubling. The hero who's fighting people that the police COULD fight, if they'd just get their acts together and not be so constrained by procedure. (And yeah, sometimes he's helping the police and working with them, but his most recent comic incarnations are quite a bit more distant than that.)
The final version could well be the X-Men -- a lot of the time, they're fighting a corrupt Senator's evil robots, or a rogue general's lab-grown supervillain. That actually bypasses the "incompetent law" angle that Batman uses and goes straight to "evil law", the notion that the law is flat-out working against the oppressed.
I wouldn't see the Klan as identifying with the X-Men, because the X-Men are deliberately set up as the minority Other that the conservative white folks detest and fear. I'd see the Klan as identifying more with the "incompetent law" comics -- which, offhand, would be Batman, the Punisher, and some of Daredevil. Those are the comics in which somebody is brave enough to go into the darkness to take down the ugly evil that the goodhearted but inept cops just can't handle themselves.
re:Greg@127: Exactly. Terrorists are a lot like bullies (possibly exactly like bullies) in that fear and panic is a reinforcement for their activities. My biggest problem with the execution of the response to the perceived threat (and not, say, the aftermath) is that the response is neither proportionate nor sustainable.
Blowing a million dollars and shutting down the city over a few LiteBrites is like dropping all your schoolbooks, flailing wildly, and screaming, "No, no, STOP!" when somebody accidentally bumps into you in the school hallway. Boston has just shown any terrorists who read the papers that the city can be stirred into an expensive panic quickly and easily.
And if I were a terrorist, the fact that the response wasn't sustainable would mean that all I'd have to do is put up LiteBrites every few weeks until the city, embarrassed and over budget, initiated the inevitable "adjustment of response policies". Then, once the police had their hands tied, THAT's when I'd start planning my ACTUAL bomb attack.
This might be a misunderstanding on my part (based on not understanding or not remembering correctly things my Wiccan buddies told me), but is the Rede tied in with the threefold rule, where the pragmatic reason for not trying to get people struck by lightning is because you'd get struck by lightning three times, too?
(I know that that's possibly the most dumbed-down version of Wiccan ethics of all time, and may not even be correct -- or my friend may have belonged to a different branch -- but bear with me.)
If that's the reason, and heck, even if "And it harm none" be the reason, I think you're in the clear.
If you reset a bone, yeah, it hurts like heck. But you're not doing it to torture the injured party. You're doing it to help the thing heal correctly. And similarly, if somebody (in this case, GWB) absolutely vitally needs to grow as an individual, you are not hurting him by sending strong suggestions that he learn the error of his ways in order to become a better person, even if that education happens to be a painful one for him.
I'm not trying to giggle about loopholes. I consider "education" a valid and beneficial wish or prayer or magical request, even if it stings. And if I get three times the education about the things I'm doing wrong in my own life, that's all the better for me.
(Corrections welcome. IANAWiccan.)
Hey, the best-rated novel gets published! It CAN'T be a waste of time! I mean, isn't winning contests the way most novels get published these days?
As somebody who sometimes disagrees with what you and Patrick write (I remember getting heated around Katrina-time last year), I really really REALLY appreciate that you do.
It's good, and it's important. I don't think you're going to win over anybody who isn't already on your side, and that's sometimes what I complain about, but in my more enlightened and less pigheaded moments, I can accept that it's not all about winning everybody over to your side. Some people are going to be closeminded and evil no matter how many times you rub their noses in the facts.
And what you're doing is, I think, really important for dealing with those people. It feels to me like you're planting a flag in the ground and rallying others, reminding them that there are opinions beyond those found in the Wal-Mart magazine rack. That's huge.
So keep it up, and good luck.
Thanks for the pointers, folks. I'll bring that up, and see what else a little digging can produce. Much appreciated... and yeah, it's an uphill battle.
I brought this up with a conservative friend of mine, asking what the conservative response was. I consider him a good friend and a good person, and I'm always interested in how he and I seem to be reading radically different newspapers.
His responses were:
1) This story isn't being discussed right now in conservative forums or blogs. It's a non-issue. They're all talking about immigration. He hadn't even heard it -- and this is someone who reads a lot of the conservative blogs and watches Fox News. He is well-informed within the conservative arena. That struck me as slightly scary.
2) After giving it a quick read, he said that his first impression was that this wasn't proof that Bush used this information as a lie to start a war under false pretenses, since it came out after the war was already underway. My friend readily admits that Bush's prewar assertions have been wrong so far, but he didn't see this as proof that Bush was lying -- since it was possible that Bush might not have read a report filed just two days before Bush made his statement. (And when I say that he admits Bush was wrong, I mean that he admits that we haven't found the weapons. He still believes that Saddam was dangerous enough that it's good for him to be out of power.)
Again, my friend has no objections to the truth. If I can show him a timeline, with links to each stage of that timeline, he's willing to look. He might come up with a justification (like, "He might have had to lie because giving out the real information on why they had to go to war would have strengthened the terrorists,"), but I'd like to take that as it comes.
So, here's what would really help me in continuing this dialogue with my friend:
1) A link to Bush's original statement that those trailers were used for biological weapons, complete with the date and where he made that statement. My google search came up with bupkus, and the Washington Post article (and the others like it) didn't have helpful links to the articles regarding Bush's original statement.
2) A page with a solid timeline, so that I can show logically when the invasion began, when the trailers were found, when the report was made, and when Bush made the report, all on one page.
While I understand the need to vent, and I really like Making Light is a great place in that regard, just telling me that my conservative friend is an evil person who's given up his humanity isn't going to help me convince him of anything. He's not socially conservative, and he's got no worries about gay marriage -- he's the strong-defense conservative, the kind that we really need to bring into the fold if the country is going to move away from Bush-and-friends in the coming years.
Crap.
I was really hoping that that was going to be proven to be untrue, or that there'd be an immediate and massive crackdown that punished those who did it and those who allowed it and... well, crap.
It's like we've become the British army in a Mel Gibson movie.
"Join the armed forces, and go after the families of criminals!" That makes one hell of a recruiting slogan.
Leigh: That's a great point with regard to structure. I was so busy noting that lousy ways in which he built suspense that I overlooked the fact that he was building suspense in the right places and at the right times, generally speaking. Worth thinking about.
Will Entrekin wrote:
"But it's terrible. It's just dreck, plain and simple. For all the reasons already mentioned in this thread and probably a thousand others."
I am in no way debating that point.
"Personally, I wouldn't be happy to retire on a terrible book. No matter how much money I made from it, I wouldn't be happy about having written a bad book."
...and:
"As for "average readers"... you're a writer. You shouldn't *be* an average reader.
And, as a writer, you should be writing for yourself *first*. Else, where's the fun?"
That's a tad condescending, and you seem to have inferred somehow, despite the multiple caveats I put into my post, that I really really loved the book and think it's a valuable primer for how to write a blockbuster, and that I want to write exactly like Dan Brown.
I don't.
However, I think that it's a bit silly to say that it has no redeeming value whatsoever, and that even people who want to write GOOD books shouldn't take a look at it and try to figure out what made it so popular.
And gosh, I should have known that trying to point out some of the things I found interesting -- not even the plot, which was formulaic with a bit of new paint, but the style in which he wrote -- would get me branded as a shameless hack who just wants to write crappy books and retire. That's not what I wrote, and I believe that a careful reading of my post would bear that out.
I'm *not* an average reader. I was so bored with the plot by a third of the way through that I was analyzing his scene composition and information-delivery style to see how he did what he did. An average reader at my level of enjoyment would have put the book down -- except that the average reader really loved this book, and told his or her friends to read it.
You're not obliged to like the book, and I certainly didn't, but if you don't think you can learn anything from a book that's sold as well as this one has, then what you perceive as your own high standards are working against you here.
"Did Brown do something right to sell as well as his book did? Perhaps. But also consider his publisher sent out thousands of ARCs, and had full page ads, and etc. There was a huge push."
Not sure what the point is, here. Yeah, any book I sell might or might not have that kind of backing. That's not something I can control. What I can control is how I write my book. In fact, that's about the only thing I've got full control over.
"...it's far, far better than "The DaVinci Code" in many, many ways. It's smart and literate, and you can learn as much, if not more, about structure from it as you can from "Code"."
Much as I appreciate you offering me a reading list, you err in assuming that the only book I've ever read to learn style is "The DaVinci Code". In fact, barring a few guilty pleasures, most of what I read these days is stuff I'm looking at for style and structure. If I happen to enjoy the book, that's a big plus. I didn't enjoy this one, but again, it's been on the bestseller lists forever. It seemed worth getting through to try to figure out what gave it such great word-of mouth.
Incidentally, how many weeks did "Tropic of Night" spend on the bestseller lists?
Again, to rererereiterate: I'm not in favor of writing bad books. I am in favor of looking at popular books to see if I can write a popular book of my own, preferably a very good one. There's a subtle difference there.
Also, I'm by no means certain that POV-cheats, infodumps, and flashy macguffins overlaying a formulaic plot are WHY the book was so successful. It could be that it's popular DESPITE those features. I had hoped those might be ideas worth discussing, instead of just assuming that I was praising Dan Brown and posting my stated desire to be just like him.
Sandy: What about the part where the Anaconda coils around that dude and then bites down on the helpless dude's head and SNAPS HIS NECK? C'mon. That part was awesome. Watching an Anaconda neck-snap somebody like the ex-Navy Seal protagonist of a mass-market action thriller is worth the price of admission all by itself.
I read the book as an exercise in "Okay, I'd like to be a very popular novelist, so what in this book do I think has resulted in it being on the bestseller list for half a decade or so?"
I did finish it, though I didn't really enjoy it a whole bunch. And yeah, it was pretty stupid in a lot of ways. I did, however, feel like I took away some useful thoughts, at least for my own writing. The short versions of what I remember are:
1) The average reader doesn't care about cheap author tricks. Dan Brown would do those awful things where you're in somebody's head and they'd see something horrifying, and then they'd talk about how horrifying it was for six pages without telling you what it was, and then they'd do a scene-cut. Blatant POV violation, but the average reader just went, "Oooooh! Suspense!" So I'm not going to worry quite as much as I used to about keeping my point of view sacred.
2) The average reader doesn't really care how you infodump. Apparently the average reader is just fine with having the main character be in the middle of a frantic chase scene and then flash back to a course he taught several years ago on art history -- and then give you that scene complete with dialogue from students he was teaching, only to then flash back to the chase scene with a muttered, "Damn it, man, focus on the present! There's no time to recollect!" And there, you've just infodumped, and you didn't have to try real hard to integrate it seamlessly into the present.
3) The average reader likes to THINK of themselves as cultured and open to new things, but really wants to feel comfortable. Take away the trappings of the cool gadgets and pseudoscience, and what you have is a by-the-numbers thriller with a by-the-numbers plot and by-the-numbers outlandish characters. This, for me, was the most valuable lesson -- if I decide to break some rules and write something weird and different, I'm going to try to make the weird and different be the setting or the philosophizing or whatever. I'm going to keep my plots nice and accessible.
I emphasize that I didn't actually enjoy the book, that I alternated between bemusement and annoyance for a lot of it, and that I read it because it had been on the bestseller list for-freaking-ever, and regardless of how much I might turn up my nose at it, there's got to be something useful to learn there for anyone who wants to be a popular author. (Which is not to say that everyone should want to be a popular author, or that being a popular author requires being exactly like Dan Brown. But he evidently did some things right, given his sales figures.)
I'd have no problem (beyond the practical, of course) killing someone who attacked me or my family on the street if I thought that my wife's life or son's life were in danger. Heck, several of the martial arts techniques I practice every week are specifically designed to kill somebody. I'm under no illusions that I'd be fine with it afterward -- that's the kind of thing that keeps you awake nights for the rest of your life -- but it's easily the lesser of two evils in a him-or-me situation.
In the same vein, I have no problem with police officers killing someone to protect innocent bystanders or stop a killer from escaping. I most certainly want there to be an investigation every time that happens, but I'm not opposed to it in principle.
What I'm seeing here with some of William's stuff, however, is a lack of distinction between directly stopping someone from killing and killing somebody you have in custody, in a secure facility from which he isn't ever going to escape.
There's no protection here. He's not going to do anything to anyone, ever again, from inside that cell. Movies in which serial killers escape from their high-security prisons or convince groupies living outside to kill for them make it seem like an everyday thing, but it's such a rare, rare thing these days that I don't consider it a valid argument.
As for deterring other folks, that's been proven rather conclusively to not work, at least in the eyes of most psychologists. As I, a non-psych guy who has psych friends who've explained it to me, understand it, the delay between sentencing and execution and the delay between arrest and sentencing are both so large that while it might work intellectually, it doesn't get the same "touch hot stove == BURN" deterring factor that proponents suggest.
Heck, anybody who's tried to potty train a dog knows that whacking them on the nose with a rolled up newspaper only really works if you do it RIGHT AFTER they've pooped on the carpet. If you do it ten minutes after they've pooped, you might feel better for having taken out your frustrations on something, but the dog doesn't get it. Neither do murderers -- unless you can shoot them RIGHT AFTER they kill somebody, the idea of deterrance doesn't really hold water. And shooting somebody right as you catch them is tricky because, well, you know, trials.
The only idea that ever held water for me was the emotional needs of the family -- and I think that's been answered here by others already. If someone murdered a member of my family, I'd hope that I had the moral fiber to ask the judge to let them live. I doubt I'd have the moral fiber to ask for anything better than life without parole, but I'm only human.
A friend of my wife's works for the patent office as a lawyer, as does her husband (if I'm remembering this right). I don't know about underfunded, but they were understaffed, and I vaguely recall there being some kind of asinine system whereby they were rewarded for the number of items they got through in a given month -- and also by how much improvement they showed in getting through items from month to month.
In essence, somebody who comes in lazy and gradually picks up his pace gets rewarded, while somebody who comes in working her hardest and gets better but not faster doesn't receive the same bonuses.
Under those circumstances, the patent office is putting in place systems specifically designed to encourage the approval of idiotic patents.
(Mind you, this was about four or five years ago over a very nice meal in a very loud restaurant, and I could be remembering some elements wrong. Both the husband and wife seemed very sure about this, and very cynical, and laughingly happy that at least a few patents hadn't gotten through.
Everyone else has already said what needs saying, but I'm sorry to hear that, and I hope that hot cocoa (I just tend to add extra to soy milk if necessary, often with a little straight suger to boost if the consistency doesn't seem right) and a strong fan work well in combination.
Not exactly the same, but the one that killed me this morning on the radio:
VIMY
(Steve and Rob Ritchie)
CHORUS
Raise your flask; aim your rifles high
I've had a dream, I've seen we three should have no fear at all
You'll die in Kenora, Billy; you, Jim, in Winnipeg
And I will end my days in Montreal
These people come to see me in my bedroom
With faces dim and names I can't recall
Some woman with a golden ring she comes to comb my hair
Then she dresses me and walks me down the hall
Well I can still put one foot before the other,
If someone points the way for me to go
Today the sun is shining and a crowd has gathered 'round
They put circles of red flowers on the stone
Chorus
Old Jim Rankin stood behind me in the tunnel
Spat on his bayonet and he wiped it with his hand
And he rocked from heel to heel, blew out his cheeks and whistled
While we waited for the signal to advance
Jimmy Rankin he was twenty and we thought him an old man
He said he'd fathered children by the score
By girls back in Winnipeg and girls in Calais
And he bragged, by God, there'd be a hundred more
Chorus
And Billy Whitefish from Kenora: jet black hair and eyes like coal
We all called him 'Chief' behind his back
He never smiled or laughed or joked or spoke that much at all
Just sat and smoked while we waited to attack
Well they poured shells over our heads into the hillside
In thirty yards our kit and boots were full of mud
But as we made the ridge, Jimmy went down on both knees
And he coughed into his sleeve and there was blood
Chorus
The last sound I ever heard was an explosion
And bodies flew like apples thrown by boys play
When I could see again, I was alone Jimmy wasn't there
And a crater marked the hillside where he'd lain
And Billy Whitefish from Kenora wound up in a German trench
Where he captured their machine gun all alone
And held them off until his ammunition was all spent
And they swarmed around and they hacked him to the bone
Chorus
Now every day I still remember what I told them
My two friends who that day from this earth were torn
And the craters and the trenches where they died now bear the names
Of the cities and the towns where they were born
Chorus
Serge, was it "Lord of the G-Strings"? Because that one was hilarious. My wife actually made me stop when we hit it rolling through late-night television (Skinemax, I believe), and we ended up watching about a half hour of it.
Stupid sex scenes, but absolutely hilarious for post-midnight viewing, and at least a third of the humor was intentional.
| Year | Number of comments posted |
|---|---|
| 2008 | 3 |
| 2007 | 2 |
| 2006 | 6 |
| 2005 | 25 |
| 2004 | 6 |
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