Andrew Hickey

It has been sportswriting law since 1992 that any article dealing with women in baseball must quote that line from A League of Their Own, and I have never been one to swim against the tide.  (Though, of course, it was written by someone who’s clearly never spent any time inside an MLB clubhouse, where tears are shed with gender-annihilating frequency.)

Judging from some of the reaction to this interesting article by Steven Goldman that appeared a few days back at SB Nation, there may be no crying in baseball, but whining in baseball fandom is still in copious supply.  In keeping with the internet-era dictate that all information must be filtered through the lens of one’s own personal rooting interests, a few women got in their digs (womanhood is not equal to motherhood, don’t you know), but the majority of complaints against Goldman’s speculations about the future of ladies in professional baseball came from men, toting their off-brand interpretations of logic and science as maces to guard the moat that separates the men from the girls.

Now, I’m not particularly champing at the bit to see women and gays in baseball merely for the sake of diversity.  Just as right-wing apologist/bow-tied geek George Will confessed in Ken Burns’ Baseball that when it came to his favorite sport, he was uncharacteristically Marxist and pro-union, so too do I depart from my normal egalitarianism when it comes to sports.  All I ever care about is whether or not someone can add to the number in the W column come year’s end; I’m all about meritocracy in this particular area of life.  If I really believed that women were incapable of performing at a major league level in baseball, I would have no wish to see that one last barrier be crossed.  (Gays in baseball aren’t really an issue, as they have populated the sport since its founding; the issue, rather, is acceptance of gays in baseball, which is not the responsibility of gay players, but of fans, media, and management.)

However, the arguments arrayed by inexplicably nervous men about the entry of women into one of the last realms they consider exclusively theirs may take the form of meritocratic arguments, but their purpose is plain old-fashioned bigotry, and their methods — most particularly the pseudo-science they toss around in a naggingly familiar game of pepper — are the same ones we heard over and over again before Jackie Robinson was finally given the opportunity to eradicate the sport’s color barrier.  While certain biological realities will assert themselves at various levels, the idea that there will never be a woman physically or mentally capable of playing top-level baseball against men is nonsense, and every argument deployed against the idea is pseudo-science of the same sort we heard 70 years ago against blacks:  they lack discipline.  They’re not smart enough.  They’re soft.  They’re weak.  They’re undisciplined.

Are men and women physically different?  It would be foolish to deny it.  But just as there is more difference within racial categories than there is between races, there is more difference between athletic and unathletic women than there is between athletic women and unathletic men.  Certainly there will be few women who are ever able to compete against the best men on a baseball diamond; but those who can will be infinitely superior to most men.  After all, most men aren’t good enough to play professional baseball, either; the fact that we may ultimately cultivate only one MLB-level female player for every hundred male players is itself no reason to keep women out entirely.  Of the 750 players currently active in the majors, only two are Korean, but no one would suggest that Koreans should be banned from the game because it is rare for them to have the ability to compete at its highest level.

The “upper body strength” argument is also often brought up, as if that was the only muscle group ever exercised in baseball.  Women’s generally superior leg muscles and hip torsion are never mentioned.  It may even be likely that the greatest players will always be men, but do we not let Ryan Zimmerman play because he is not Babe Ruth?  If no woman ever has the combination of upper-torso muscle power and height to be able to pitch like Randy Johnson, that is not to say no woman could ever pitch at a major league level.  I have personally seen plenty of women with craft and guile enough to strike out plenty of male hitters despite lacking 90mph velocity, and that’s a quality more needed than ever in an era when relief pitchers have assumed an extremely important role.  (For that matter, I’ve seen women bigger, stronger, and more overpowering as pitchers than the slight, clever Jim Parque, and he was good enough to win bronze in the Olympics and guide my White Sox to a playoff berth in 2000.)  If no woman ever has the power of a hulking slugger like Jim Thome, there is a long and rich history of little guys with strong wrists and keen eyes able to slash hits all over the ball yard.  Jackie Robinson was a great hitter, to be sure, but what was so disruptive about him was his gamesmanship, his speed, and his ability to manufacture runs out of sheer willpower; none of those are qualities stemming from the possession of a Y chromosome.  We have yet to see what kind of havoc a good female player could wreak, given the chance.

And the chance is what is not offered.  If women try to compete against men and fail, then they fail, but it should not be because they were not given the chance to try.  As Goldman observes, most women who show talent at baseball are shunted from a young age to the sport of softball instead; playing a different game with different tactics against other women instead of men, they never get the opportunity to find out how good they could be.  In any sport, one rises to the level of one’s competition; if women do not now play competitively against men, it is because they have not been allowed to do so.  This, of course, was the great tragedy of the MLB color barrier; we not only never got the chance to see how good many Negro League legends truly were because they were banned from competing against whites, but the white players of the era, too, must forever bear the asterisk indicating that they never truly played against the best of the best.  If we aren’t repeating that tragedy now, it is likely only in degree and not in kind.

In 1931, a minor league player for the Chattanooga Lookouts named Jackie Mitchell faced the New York Yankees in an exhibition game.  The Yankees of that year would go on to score more runs than any team in MLB history, and its two best hitters were Babe Ruth and Lou Gehrig.  Mitchell struck them both out.  Jackie Mitchell was a woman; the reaction to her astonishing feat was rather electrifying.  Ruth’s nice-guy demeanor vanished; he argued about the calls and later complained bitterly, wiping the juice of sour grapes from his chin, that it would be the end of baseball if women were allowed to play.  Commissioner  Kennesaw Mountain Landis, the commissioner of baseball who was responsible for relentlessly enforcing its color barrier, agreed, and enacted a ban on women playing professional baseball in the MLB system that stands to this day.  Mitchell was, even more astoundingly, only 17 years old when she sat down two of the most powerful sluggers the game has ever seen; if she was that good that young, who can say how good she might have gotten later on, if allowed to work out her talents against the best the game had to offer?

Most of the rest of the arguments against women in baseball reek of the same old sexist condescension that we’ve heard about every other minority group (and still do; just last week, Hawk Harrelson was off on one of his occasional tirades about how Latin hitters lack plate discipline and can’t perform in cold weather).  Women are too emotional (black lack discipline), women don’t have the willpower to play a hard game (blacks aren’t tough enough to play every day), women lack mental toughness (blacks are intellectually inferior).   Particularly absurd are the arguments that take the form of the gender barrier being “for their own good”; women shouldn’t be allowed to play, so the story goes, because men will resent them, because they will suffer discrimination and hatred and catcalling, because they will be sexually threatened.  Not only would a woman good enough to play in the majors be more than willing to take that chance for the historical opportunity that went with it, but these aren’t women’s problems.  They’re men’s problems.  If management can’t keep their teams from treating a woman with the same comradeship they do players of any other stripe, or make them stop harassing her and threatening her, then the league should take action against the team accordingly; the prejudice of others should never be a barrier to equality of opportunity.

Separate but equal is never really equal, no matter how it’s practiced.  It may very well be that the breaking of the gender barrier in baseball will be ugly, fraught with incident, and unfathomably difficult.  It may very well be that it is costly, painful, and rife with resentment.  It may even be the case that it produces only a very few female players at the major league level.  But if even one woman is kept out of the game for no good reason other than that she’s a woman, then equality of opportunity has been denied, justice has been ill served, and some team has cost itself a chance to win more games.  And that’s not something a real baseball fan can countenance.

I.

There was an argument on Tumblr which, like so many arguments on Tumblr, was terrible. I will rephrase it just a little to make a point.

Alice said something along the lines of “I hate people who frivolously diagnose themselves with autism without knowing anything about the disorder. They should stop thinking they’re ‘so speshul’ and go see a competent doctor.”

Beth answered something along the lines of “I diagnosed myself with autism, but only after a lot of careful research. I don’t have the opportunity to go see a doctor. I think what you’re saying is overly strict and hurtful to many people with autism.”

Alice then proceeded to tell Beth she disagreed, in that special way only Tumblr users can. I believe the word “cunt” was used.

I notice two things about the exchange.

First, why did Beth take the bait? Alice said she hated people who frivolously self-diagnosed without knowing anything about the disorder. Beth clearly was not such a person. Why didn’t she just say “Yes, please continue hating these hypothetical bad people who are not me”?

Second, why did Alice take the bait? Why didn’t she just say “I think you’ll find I wasn’t talking about you?”

II.

One of the cutting-edge advances in fallacy-ology has been the weak man, a terribly-named cousin of the straw man. The straw man is a terrible argument nobody really holds, which was only invented so your side had something easy to defeat. The weak man is a terrible argument that only a few unrepresentative people hold, which was only brought to prominence so your side had something easy to defeat.

For example, “I am a proud atheist and I don’t like religion. Think of the terrible things done by religion, like the actions of the Westboro Baptist Church. They try to disturb the funerals of heroes because they think God hates everybody. But this is horrible. Religious people can’t justify why they do things like this. That’s why I’m proud to be an atheist.”

It’s not a straw man. There really is a Westboro Baptist Church, for some reason. But one still feels like the atheist is making things just a little too easy on himself.

Maybe the problem is that the atheist is indirectly suggesting that Westboro Baptist Church is typical of religion? An implied falsehood?

Then suppose the atheist posts on Tumblr: “I hate religious people who are rabidly certain that the world was created in seven days or that all their enemies will burn in Hell, and try to justify it through ‘faith’. You know, the sort of people who think that the Bible has all the answers and who hate anyone who tries to think for themselves.”

Now there’s practically no implication that these people are typical. So that’s fine, right?

On the other side of the world, a religious person is writing “I hate atheists who think morality is relative, and that this gives them the right to murder however many people stand between them and a world where no one is allowed to believe in God”.

Again, not a straw man. The Soviet Union contained several million of these people. But if you’re an atheist, would you just let this pass?

How about “I hate black thugs who rob people”?

What are the chances a black guy reads that and says “Well, good thing I’m not a thug who robs people, he’ll probably love me”?

III.

What is the problem with statements like this?

First, they are meant to re-center a category. Remember, people think in terms of categories with central and noncentral members – a sparrow is a central bird, an ostrich a noncentral one. But if you live on the Ostrich World, which is inhabited only by ostriches, emus, and cassowaries, then probably an ostrich seems like a pretty central example of ‘bird’ and the first sparrow you see will be fantastically strange.

Right now most people’s central examples of religion are probably things like your local neighborhood church. If you’re American, it’s probably a bland Protestant denomination like the Episcopalians or something.

The guy whose central examples of religion are Pope Francis and the Dalai Lama is probably going to have a different perception of religion than the guy whose central examples are Torquemada and Fred Phelps. If you convert someone from the first kind of person to the second kind of person, you’ve gone most of the way to making them an atheist.

More important, if you convert a culture from thinking in the first type of way to thinking in the second type of way, then religious people will be unpopular and anyone trying to make a religious argument will have to spend the first five minutes of their speech explaining how they’re not Fred Phelps, honest, and no, they don’t picket any funerals. After all that time spent apologizing and defending themselves and distancing themselves from other religious people, they’re not likely to be able to make a very rousing argument for religion.

IV.

In Cowpox of Doubt, I mention the inoculation effect. When people see a terrible argument for an idea get defeated, they are more likely to doubt the idea later on, even if much better arguments show up.

Put this in the context of people attacking the Westboro Baptist Church. You see the attacker win a big victory over “religion”, broadly defined. Now you are less likely to believe in religion when a much more convincing one comes along.

I see the same thing in atheists’ odd fascination with creationism. Most of the religious people one encounters are not young-earth creationists. But these people have a dramatic hold on the atheist imagination.

And I think: well, maybe if people see atheists defeating a terrible argument for religion enough, atheists don’t have to defeat any of the others. People have already been inoculated against religion. “Oh, yeah, that was the thing with the creationism. Doesn’t seem very smart.”

If this is true, it means that all religious people, like it or not, are in the same boat. An atheist attacking creationism becomes a deadly threat for the average Christian, even if that Christian does not herself believe in creationism.

Likewise, when a religious person attacks atheists who are moral relativists, or communists, or murderers, then all atheists have to band together to stop it somehow or they will have successfully poisoned people against atheism.

V.

This is starting to sound a lot like something I wrote on my old blog about superweapons.

I suggested imagining yourself in the shoes of a Jew in czarist Russia. The big news story is about a Jewish man who killed a Christian child. As far as you can tell the story is true. It’s just disappointing that everyone who tells it is describing it as “A Jew killed a Christian kid today”. You don’t want to make a big deal over this, because no one is saying anything objectionable like “And so all Jews are evil”. Besides you’d hate to inject identity politics into this obvious tragedy. It just sort of makes you uncomfortable.

The next day you hear that the local priest is giving a sermon on how the Jews killed Christ. This statement seems historically plausible, and it’s part of the Christian religion, and no one is implying it says anything about the Jews today. You’d hate to be the guy who barges in and tries to tell the Christians what Biblical facts they can and can’t include in their sermons just because they offend you. It would make you an annoying busybody. So again you just get uncomfortable.

The next day you hear people complain about the greedy Jewish bankers who are ruining the world economy. And really a disproportionate number of bankers are Jewish, and bankers really do seem to be the source of a lot of economic problems. It seems kind of pedantic to interrupt every conversation with “But also some bankers are Christian, or Muslim, and even though a disproportionate number of bankers are Jewish that doesn’t mean the Jewish bankers are disproportionately active in ruining the world economy compared to their numbers.” So again you stay uncomfortable.

Then the next day you hear people complain about Israeli atrocities in Palestine (what, you thought this was past czarist Russia? This is future czarist Russia, after Putin finally gets the guts to crown himself). You understand that the Israelis really do commit some terrible acts. On the other hand, when people start talking about “Jewish atrocities” and “the need to protect Gentiles from Jewish rapacity” and “laws to stop all this horrible stuff the Jews are doing”, you just feel worried, even though you personally are not doing any horrible stuff and maybe they even have good reasons for phrasing it that way.

Then the next day you get in a business dispute with your neighbor. Maybe you loaned him some money and he doesn’t feel like paying you back. He tells you you’d better just give up, admit he is in the right, and apologize to him – because if the conflict escalated everyone would take his side because he is a Christian and you are a Jew. And everyone knows that Jews victimize Christians and are basically child-murdering Christ-killing economy-ruining atrocity-committing scum.

You have been boxed in by a serious of individually harmless but collectively dangerous statements. None of them individually referred to you – you weren’t murdering children or killing Christ or owning a bank. But they ended up getting you in the end anyway.

Depending on how likely you think this is, this kind of forces Jews together, makes them become strange bedfellows. You might not like what the Jews in Israel are doing in Palestine. But if you think someone’s trying to build a superweapon against you, and you don’t think you can differentiate yourself from the Israelis reliably, it’s in your best interest to defend them anyway.

VI.

I wrote the superweapon post to address some of my worries about feminism, so it would not be surprising at all if we found this dynamic there.

Feminists tend to talk about things like “Men tend to silence women and not respect their opinions” or “Men treat women like objects rather than people” or “Men keep sexually harassing women even when they make it clear they’re not interested”.

Put like that, it’s obvious why men might complain. But maybe some of the more sophisticated feminists say “Some men tend to silence women and not respect their opinions”. Or “Some men keep sexually harassing women even when they make it clear they’re not interested.”‘

And the weak-man-superweapon model would suggest that even this weakened version would make lots of men really uncomfortable.

From feminist website Bitchtopia (look, I don’t name these websites, I just link to them): Not All Men Are Like That:

I’ve heard this counter-argument almost every single time I’ve tried to bring up a feminist issue with a man: “but not all men are like that!”…

Having to point out that not every man exhibits explicitly harmful behavior allows for oppression to continue because having to say “some men do harmful things” gives oppressors peace of mind…

Sure, white men–you were brought up to feel entitled to anything you wanted and now you see anyone trying to have opportunities equal to yours as a threat…

When you say, “not all men are like that!” what you’re really saying is, “I don’t want to have to think about my privilege as a white man, so I’m going to try to defer the blame to other guys because I clearly don’t act like that.”

Nice try.

Remember, not wanting to be stereotyped based solely on your sex is the most sexist thing!

This is not just an idiosyncracy of Bitchtopia (look! I’m sorry! I swear I didn’t name that website!). There’s also an entire notallmenarelikethat dot tumblr dot com (of course there is) and it’s now a feminist meme abbreviated NAMALT.

But of course, it’s not just feminists. The gender-flipped version of feminism has the same thing. From men’s rights blog “The Spearhead”, which is not quite as badly named but still kind of funny if you think of it in a Freudian way:

Talking about the current sad state of dating and marriage in the USA will often elicit “Not All Women Are Like That” or NAWALT.

The first thing is not to contradict whoever makes that claim. Why? Because it is true. Not all women are skanks, attention whores or predators. The MRA cause is not helped by attacking people who speak truthfully.

[But the consequence of a] false positive is that a man ends up married to a skank, sociopath or gold digger. The cost of bad wife selection is so high that he is forced to turn away good women for fear of mistakenly choosing a bad one.

More polite and scientific than the feminist version, but the point is he expects men’s rights readers to be so familiar with “not all women are like that” that he’s perfectly comfortably abbreviating it NAWALT. Apparently there’s even a NAWALT video.

I don’t know where to find neo-Nazi blogs, but I’ll bet if there are some, they have places where they talk about how annoying it is when people try to distract from the real issues by using the old NAJALT.

VII.

But I shouldn’t make fun of NAJALT. There really are two equal and opposite problems going on here.

Imagine you’re an atheist. And you keep getting harassed by the Westboro Baptist Church. Maybe you’re gay. Maybe you’re not. Who knows why they do what they do? Anyway, they throw bricks through your window and send you threatening letters and picket some of your friends’ funerals.

And you say “People! We really need to do something about this Westboro Baptist Church! They’re horrible people!”

And you are met by a wall of religious people saying “Please stop talking about the Westboro Baptist Church, you are making us look really bad and it’s unfair because not all religious people are like that.”

And you say “I really am not that interested in religion, I just want them to stop throwing bricks through my window.”

And they say “Hey! I thought we told you to stop talking about them! You are unfairly discrediting us through the inoculation effect! That is epistemically unvirtuous!”

So the one problem is that people have a right not to have unfair below-the-belt tactics used to discredit them without ever responding to their real arguments.

And the other problem is that victims of nonrepresentative members of a group have the right to complain, even though those complaints will unfairly rebound upon the other members of that group.

Atheists who talk about the Westboro Baptist Church may be genuinely concerned about the Westboro Baptist Church. Or they may be unfairly trying to tar all religious people with that brush. Religious people have to fight back, even though the Westboro Baptists don’t deserve their support, because otherwise the atheists will have a superweapon against them. Thus, a stupid fight between atheists who don’t care about Westboro and religious people who don’t support them.

VIII.

This gives me some new views on political coalitions. I always thought that having things like political parties was stupid. Instead of identifying as a liberal and getting upset when someone insulted liberals or happy when someone praised liberals, I should say “These are my beliefs. There are other people who believe approximately the same thing, but the differences are sufficient that I just want to be judged on my own individual beliefs alone.”

The problem is, that doesn’t work. It’s not my decision whether or not I get to identify with other liberals or not. If other people think of me as a liberal, then anything other liberals do is going to reflect, positively or negatively, on me. And I’m going to have to join in the fight to keep liberals from being completely discredited, or else the fact that I didn’t share any of the opinions they were discredited for isn’t going to save me. I will be Worst Argument In The World-ed and swiftly dispatched.

In the example we started with, Beth chose to stand up for the people who self-diagnosed autism without careful research. This wasn’t because she considered herself a member of that category. It was because she decided that self-diagnosed autistics were going to stand or fall as a group, and if Alice succeeded in pushing her “We should dislike careless self-diagnosees” angle, then the fact that she wasn’t careless wouldn’t save her.

Alice, for her part, didn’t bother bringing up that she never accused Beth of being careless, or that Beth had no stake in the matter. She saw no point in pretending that boxing in Beth and the other careful self-diagnosers in with the careless ones wasn’t her strategy all along.

Why the title "The Last War in Albion"?

First, to be perfectly honest, because I like how it sounds. I knew I wanted to treat the Moore/Morrison rivalry as an occult war, partially for the obvious sensationalism, but also because I liked the idea of treating their beliefs in magic entirely seriously. And I liked the word "Albion" because it gave the whole thing a kind of mythic flavor - a sense that what they're fighting over isn't quite a real place at all - while still stressing the Britishness of the project.

And once you have that, the "last war" just feels appropriate. Like its a closed-off piece of history that one can write a dispassionate account of. Which, of course, I'm not actually doing, but which remains the underlying illusion or structure. In reality I suspect that this is Albion's last war in the same way that World War I ended all wars, but I think the eschatological lens sharpens everything in a useful way. 

Why write this much about this topic?

There are a lot of reasons, really. I think it can support that kind of work, first and foremost. I think you have an extraordinarily gifted generation of talent that came out of the UK in a particular period, and that had a huge influence on art and culture despite working in what is, in fact, a pretty marginal field. And I think that's an interesting story that's worth telling in detail. But you've also got, in Moore and Morrison, a really interesting division. I think underlying their mutual dislike is a really interesting philosophical and aesthetic difference, and that you can trace the ramifications of that difference out, using a really big canvas to get a sort of epic history. And that seems interesting. Literary criticism and biography as epic history isn't something that's been done a lot.

I was also interested in the question of influence. So much of the feud between Moore and Morrison comes down to arguing over who ripped off from who, which always struck me as a rather banal way to talk about influence. So I wanted to treat the question of influence seriously, trying to show how any attempt to follow a thread of influence back results inevitably in finding more influences than you expect, and that any claim to have come up with an idea first is always murky at best. And, perhaps more importantly, trying to show how something can wear its influences on its sleeve while still being a very new and interesting idea. And that requires a wide lens and a willingness to spend a lot of time in the historical trenches, so to speak. 

But perhaps most importantly, because I love so much of the material in question. There are loads of things I'm beyond excited to get to reread and to write about, from major works like Promethea, From Hell, The Invisibles, Sandman, and Transmetropolitan to idiosyncratic picks like Angel Passage, Brought to Light, The Filth, The Ocean at the End of the Lane, and Planetary. These are some of my favorite authors, and while there are some I love more than others, this is a project that over and over again serves up fantastic opportunities to write about cool things.

How many books do you expect there to be in The Last War in Albion?

I don’t know, honestly - I’ve not outlined out that strictly. Based on how far the first five got me… fifteen or so is probably a safe guess?

I think Last War on Albion looks very interesting, but I haven't read many comics. Do you think someone can enjoy it having only read Watchmen or is a more complete reading necessary?

I am told there are people enjoying it who have read essentially none of the comics. Certainly I write it with that possibility in mind. I figure given the extremely digressive style of it, I assume everything covered is new to someone. Certainly there are things that will be enriched by knowing the comics - most of them wry and understated jokes that refer to future events of the War. There’s a joke I do periodically where I use a terribly obscure example for the sole reason that it winks at something down the road - I think I worked in a reference to Robert Mayer’s Superfolks once that’s absolutely absurd as an illustration of the point I was making. 

And there’s the Blake stuff, which I kind of pointedly drop a little bit of context on, because I want that to always feel like a story already in progress. I don’t know that I ever want to actually explain why Blake makes an appearance in every chapter. I just sort of want to let him do his thing in the narrative in the hopes that eventually that thread will speak for itself. Though at some point I’ll have to deal with the question of what the previous Wars in Albion were, and certainly Blake is involved with one of those, though in some ways less as a combatant and more as a battleground. 

But for the most part, yes, it is written to be intelligible and enjoyable even if you’ve read just a small amount of the material in question. I suspect there are few people who have read none of the material at all who would enjoy it, but that’s more because I have trouble imagining that someone predisposed to liking Last War in Albion wouldn’t have had Sandman or Watchmen or V for Vendetta shoved in their face at some point in their lives.

Do you ever plan to do anything as gonzo as, say, TARDIS Eruditorum's Interference post on the scale of a single post for Last War in Albion, or will the bonkers-ness be long-term?

The bonkers-ness kind of has to be long term for The Last War in Albion, just because the structure requires a certain degree of consistency. So it’ll be things like the long parenthesis, the structure of the Watchmen book… there’s a six word phrase coming up in part five of the Captain Britain chapter that’s, in its own right, as gonzo as anything I’ve ever done.

To be honest, I think the purely structural games can get tired, and that the Interference post took one approach to its limit. I’ve done some other structural games in Eruditorum because they’re part of its form and approach at this point, but I think it’s time to put that tool away for a bit so that it doesn’t become a crutch.

Will the War get multiple posts a week once the Eruditorium is finished?

It'll probably move to twice weekly, yeah.

It seems like a lot of the figures in this War are white blokes. Aren’t there any British comics writers with interests in the occult from a wider variety of ethnicities or gender identities?

None of the five principals of the War constitute a massive blow for diversity, I fear - the wave of British creators who jumped over to the US all ultimately came out of the "Boys Magazine" tradition of Battle Picture Weekly and 2000 AD and the like. Largely as a result of that, it is unfortunately a very white male project, unfortunately.

That's not to say that minority concerns (of various sorts) aren't a big part of it. The issue of feminism is going to be a recurring one, queer issues will play a huge part... race will certainly pop up, though of the three is probably the one that will get the least direct coverage. But the white straight maleness of the protagonists is not going to be ignored, and is in fact going to be a major part of the next chapter, on Swamp Thing.

But ultimately, yes, this is the story of a bunch of white guys.

Could Moore and Morrison ever have been friends?

Yes, though they’d always have had significant differences. But then, so did Alan and Steve Moore. Ultimately, I think what soured all possibility of friendship was Morrison’s decision to design his public persona in opposition to Moore, particularly in the early 90s, a move that Moore took understandable umbrage over. And I think given that, the differences, and for that matter the similarities between them made their rivalry heat up considerably. But ultimately, I think Morrison's decision to embrace the role of the enfant terrible and spend interviews saying provocative things, including numerous jabs at Moore was the key event without which there wouldn't have been a rivalry. 

How do you think Alan Moore would react to finding out about the War (this would presumably happen once it went to print (if at all) due to his attitude towards the internet)?

I hope that as projects linking Grant Morrison to him go, he’d at least not hate it and denounce me as a charlatan, but you don’t embark on a sprawling work of criticism about Alan Moore without taking a deep breath and acknowledging the very real possibility that if he gets wind of it you’re going to get the experience of having one of your heroes and idols angrily denounce you in the most cuttingly savage way possible.

I’m trying to write something that, while I don’t think any of the principals will agree with entirely, all of them would at least look at and go “OK, that’s legitimate and reasonable criticism.” But, I mean, a critic who spends too much time with their eye on what the artists are going to think is a critic with real problems.

How do you envisage the current Marvelman reprints affecting the war and the telling of it? 

I think it's interesting that Miracleman's not really selling that well, although who knows if that's baked into the design to an extent. It's a very expensive way to republish it, certainly, given that one assumes the real goal is having some trades out when Gaiman starts doing new comics. Hopefully on a better production schedule than Sandman: Overture. I've got one eye on the reprint series as my ability to avoid doing Marvelman dwindles, although I'm still pretty committed to holding that back until Volume 2 as much as possible. I will say, I'm probably the one person who's glad that they cram every issue with crappy Mick Anglo reprints, since those suckers were impossible to find.


You're obviously much more focused on the Alan Moore side of this war, both in content and in prejudice. What would you say to Morrison's side that would make it worth their while to read TLWiA?

I do personally like Moore more than Morrison as a figure, but I'm trying to remain scrupulously fair in the telling of the War. It's just that Moore did start it - he had a several year period where he was the only game in town. You've got Morrison's juvenilia from 1979-80 or so, and I covered that first in part to avoid giving the impression that this was mostly about Moore. But for the first half of the decade... I mean, in February of 1985, which might be the busiest month of Moore's career in terms of publication, you have him starting doing backup stories in American Flagg, starting Book Two of the Ballad of Halo Jones, writing some of his most acclaimed Swamp Thing stuff (he wraps The Nukeface Papers and introduces John Constantine the next month), publishing stuff in three other DC titles, and he's still got an installment of V for Vendetta that comes out in the last issue of Warrior.

The same month, Grant Morrison publishes one installment of The Liberators, also in the last issue of Warrior, which is thus his first and last work for that publisher. He doesn't get another significant byline for over a year. 

So when you're telling that part of the story, it's hard not to focus heavily on Moore, because Moore was busy blazing the professional trail that Morrison and Gaiman would shortly be following. (And I mean professional - this isn't stylistic, this is "what magazines do you choose to write for.")

But when Morrison becomes a major figure again, I'm going to be as sympathetic to him as it's possible to be while remaining fair. Everybody gets the most redemptive reading I can muster for their actions. Which I think will work - I understand why people like Morrison. Hell, I like Morrison, just not quite as much as some of the other writers I'm dealing with. I can give a very good description of the pleasures of Morrison's work, and I will do so. Just, you know, not until we get to the point in the timeline where he's writing some.

Thanks to deathchrist2000, unnoun, What Happened to Robbie, timber-munkui, and jane for submitting questions.

As always, thanks for using my Amazon Affiliate links (US, UK, Canada).

I.

A patient of mine is getting to that age where she can’t support herself independently. She’s not a big fan of nursing homes, and I don’t blame her. She wants her son to take care of her.

Her son has a career, has a family, doesn’t have extra room in his house. Taking care of a sick elderly person is a full-time job, one that can involve everything from giving medications to emptying bedpans. He is not very keen on this plan.

And she says, come on, I worked hard to raise you, you owe me.

And I wonder, how far does this go?

Suppose she is going to need a decade of pretty much twenty-four hour care. She says “Well, I gave you two decades of essentially twenty four hour care. You owe me everything, you have to take care of me.”

Suppose she lives in a different state from him, and she really doesn’t want to leave the family home. She says “Quit your job, sell your house, and move to Michigan to take care of me. You owe me everything, you have to take care of me.”

Suppose his wife is really reluctant to share the house with a very demanding sick elderly person. Maybe she knows he works all day and realistically she’ll be the one doing the day-to-day caretaking. Maybe she’s not so keen on bedpan-emptying. Maybe she categorically refuses. And his mother says “Then divorce your wife and move to Michigan to take care of me. You owe me everything, you have to take care of me.”

Most Westerners would probably consider these requests unreasonable. But the mother is probably right. Probably she sacrificed more for her son than she’s asking him to sacrifice for her; the credit is still in her favor.

The problem with infinite debts is that they are really hard to repay.

This blog is really bad at staying away from politics for very long, so I’ll tell you what this reminds me. This reminds me of the argument some people make against libertarians: “You said you earned your money fair and square. But really, you owe a debt to society. If society hadn’t worked really hard inventing things like laws and public health, you would never have been able to found your successful business or even survive past birth. If other members of society hadn’t died fighting the Nazis and the Commies and whoever else they fought, you wouldn’t have the freedom that helped you succeed. So you owe us, and right now we’re calling in that debt in the form of a five percent higher tax rate.”

And a lot of libertarians get really angry at that argument because they don’t think it’s true, they think they don’t owe society anything.

I get really angry with that argument for the opposite reason. It is so true that one could presumably owe society anything.

What happens if society says “You owe us everything, pay us 10% higher taxes”?

“You owe us everything, pay us 100% higher taxes.”

“You owe us everything, go live in a cardboard box and give us the deed to your house so we can use it as a community center.”

“You owe us everything, I know you want to be a writer but what society really needs right now is oil rig workers, go become an oil rig worker.”

Of course, healthy societies do not say these things – but there have been a lot of unhealthy societies that have. I’m not worried that paying five percent higher taxes is going to lead to me being obligated to quit my job and become an oil rig worker. But the idea of handing society a blank check for anything they want out of me is pretty scary.

I kind of wonder how many of those libertarians who are so upset about a five percent tax raise would be perfectly happy with a Constitutional amendment saying “All rich people must pay 60% of their income in taxes, at which point their entire debt to society is discharged, we promise we will never raise this number above 60% or give them any grief after that, it’s right here in the Constitution.” Even if 60% was way more than a 5% raise over their current rate. 60% may be high, but it is notably lower than “infinity”. Just the acknowledgment that they’re allowed to have their own time and do things they like without being infinitely beholden to society at every moment would be pretty anxiety-relieving.

This is one reason I am so excited about Giving What We Can. Their rule is you give 10% of your income to charity, and you’re allowed in their little club and you get your name on their site as an Officially Recognized Good Person.

For years, I felt like I was probably ethically obligated to give all my income to charity, minus whatever I needed to survive. And the fact that I obviously wasn’t going to do that made me not give anything at all.

Once someone told me that my obligation wasn’t infinite, but just some finite amount like ten percent per year, every year, I was thrilled to be able to comply.

And of course there are people who make fun of this. “Oh, you really think you can just give an amount you find “convenient”, then feel like your conscience is clear and you can stop caring and be smug and self-satisfied?”

The proper response to this person is to ask whether they give so much as ten percent.

(“What? No, why should I?! I do my part by yelling at you!”)

II.

But I think the opposite tendency, the tendency to deny the debt entirely, also falls short of the mark.

I mean, there are good arguments for doing so. You never contracted the debt. Your mother never told you as an infant, “I will raise you, but only if you agree to take care of me in any way I require for the rest of my life”, and then made you sign it with your wee little baby hands, threatening to give you back to the stork if you refused. Society never said “We’ll provide you with public health and technological civilization, but only if you agree to pay any tax rate we set, here’s a ticket to Somalia if you refuse.”

For the decision theoretic take on the question, consider a variation on the Hitchhiker Problem. You’re lying unconscious in the desert, dying of thirst. A very selfish man drives by in his Jeep and considers rescuing you and bringing you to the nearest hospital. This very selfish man is only willing to go through the trouble if you pay him $100. He decides you probably will pay him $100 in gratitude for having been rescued, and so takes you to the hospital.

You wake up in the ICU, feeling cool and refreshed. The very selfish man is sitting by your bedside. “Hey,” he says. “I rescued you in the desert because I was pretty sure you’d pay me $100 for having done so. Will you give me the money?”

I think most of us would feel some obligation to give him the cash. This would be especially true if his actions were a big inconvenience to him – if he had to drive hundreds of miles out of his way, or if he had already paid the $50 doctor’s bill. Right now a lot of my ideas about morality revolve around “things that help you acausally coordinate hard decision theoretic problems”, and being willing to pay for debts you didn’t contract, as long as you still come out ahead, seems like one of those.

There’s another, more visceral argument. Imagine that my patient didn’t want her son to take 24 hour care of her. She just wanted him to come visit once a year, maybe for Christmas. “Please,” she says, “I’m really lonely and it would mean a lot to me to have you around.”

Now, that guy is under no obligation to go visit random elderly women on Christmas, even if those random elderly women would like company. But most of us would say he is under some obligation to visit his mother, or at least that he would be a pretty bad person if he refused. And it’s not just that she is closer to him. Most of us would cash out that obligation in terms of “Your mother did so much for you, can’t you do at least a little for her?”

This is a weird position. You can defend the guy having no debt to his mother. You can defend the guy having an infinite debt to his mother. But a small debt to his mother? Where does that come from?

III.

I struggle with this concept a lot. I don’t know the moral answer. But I do know the practical answer. Infinite debts make everyone miserable and tend not to be paid at all.

And the moral and practical are sometimes pretty closely aligned. If infinite debts make everyone miserable, then by the decision theoretic definition of morality above we might decide to forgive them. After all, every mother was also a child, and it may be that, at the point where you’re making timeless acausal Platonic contracts, everyone agrees to free their child from a debt to them as long as they are themselves freed from debt to their parents. Maybe they would agree that infinite creditors deserve a certain level of respect, very very high respect, but not enough that it ruins your life. This is frustratingly nontechnical. But timeless Platonic contracts are notoriously bad at giving specific figures. Sometimes you’ve just got to seize whatever you can get, find some socially sanctioned middle ground that doesn’t make you feel like you’re a bad person or that you can never enjoy yourself and draw a huge bright line there and defend it to the bitter end.

Maybe your infinite obligation to those worse off than you demands ten percent of your income.

And your infinite obligation to society demands that you pay tax at the prevailing rate.

And your infinite obligation to your mother demands that, at the very least, you call her up on Mother’s Day and tell her thanks.

None of those things clear your debt, exactly. But they keep you in good standing. You pay a tiny fraction of your debt, year after year, and it keeps the moral repo man from your door.

The problem with infinite debts is that they are really hard to repay. On the other hand, the interest can be quite manageable.

So much I was saving up. The conclusion of the Kawasaki Chronicles. Experimental protocols for dealing with AI-equipped toilets. Fiblets from upcoming stories in Tor.com and Neil Clarke’s latest anthology. Even some award that J. Pekka Mäkelä’s translation of Blindsight just won over in Finland. I was saving it all up for my return to the ‘crawl, which was going to happen once I got out from under today’s keynote address to the International  Association of Privacy Professionals (“A Suicide Bomber’s Guide to Online Privacy”— which actually has me kinda scared, insofar as I’m on right after they give an award to Canada’s Privacy Commissioner and I’m about to advocate law-breaking to an audience of lawyers).

All that went out the window on Tuesday. Time for another eulogy.

*

I wanted to be a marine biologist ever since I was around five or six years old. I still remember the moment.

It wasn’t until the age of fourteen, though, that I decided to specialize in marine mammals. I remember that moment too: it was the day I finished reading A Whale for the Killing, by Farley Mowat.

If you’re not Canadian, chances are you have no idea who the hell I’m talking about. Even if you are Canadian you might not have known until you woke up and found the man’s face plastered across the home page of your local news site. Farley Mowat was an author and (as all authors are) a liar, a gadfly and a conservationist. He was a passionate advocate on behalf of the biosphere, even though he got a lot of his facts wrong. (He was frequently referred to among my biologist buddies as “Hardly Know-it”.)  He wrote Never Cry Wolf,  a piece of semi-fictional propaganda massively influential in rehabilitating the wolf’s image in popular culture (and which was turned into a really good movie of the same name). He wrote the aforementioned A Whale for the Killing, which the Newfoundlanders it excoriated also describe as propaganda. (Not having been there I cannot judge, but the wanton cruelty described by that book certainly seems consistent with what I know of human nature.) It, too, was made into a movie: a significantly crappier made-for-TV production starring Peter Strauss as a noble American who takes a brave stand against Canadian hicks and savages bent on slaughtering one of nature’s most magnificent creatures. Or something.

Mowat wrote dozens of books, and numerous shorter works for newspapers and magazines.  One of these, back around 1981, accused scientists at the University of Guelph of putting out the eyes of captive seals with red-hot pokers. As it happened, I was a scientist (okay, grad student) at Guelph when that story ran; the first I learned of these atrocities was when a friend phoned me in the wee hours, rousing me from sleep to express her outrage at my barbaric behavior. (I was actually studying porpoises at the time, but apparently the body count of skewered-eyed seals was so high that everyone in the department pretty much had to be involved).

It did not endear me to the man.

Mowat followed me to British Columbia in 1984. I went to pursue a doctorate; he dropped by a couple months later to pimp his new book Sea of Slaughter (another enormously popular and influential tome, this time documenting Canada’s ongoing eradication of marine life along the Atlantic seaboard). My supervisor was one of three biologists who chatted with the man onstage during his appearance, so I managed to scam a good seat; and when they opened the floor to questions I put up my hand.

I pointed out the irony of finding one’s chosen profession— finding one’s chosen department— slandered by the very man whose writing had led me there in the first place. I asked where the hell he’d got the idea that we were puncturing seal eyeballs with red-hot pokers.

I’m not quite sure I bought his explanation. He said he’d heard that anecdote during a phone call with a certain marine mammal guy over in the veterinary college— someone who was known for his rough treatment of mammals, and not just marine ones (he sat on my committee; my thesis acknowledgements credit him for teaching me “the meaning of fear”). Still, this seemed way beyond the pale even for him. In hindsight I’m guessing there must have been a bad connection, a misheard phrase.

My point, though, is: Mowat came clean. He apologized immediately and with no defensiveness. “I was wrong,” he admitted. I remember wishing that real scientists admitted to their mistakes with such grace.

That was the sum total of my interaction with the man.  He popped up on the radar now and then over the following years: when the Ontario Science Center tried to get him involved in a whale display that fell through when he demanded to be put in charge of the project; when he was refused entry to the US as an “undesirable element” (which re-endeared me even more).  Over time I came to regard Mowat pretty much the way I regard David Suzuki: fallible, egotistical, maybe even corrupt— but on balance, someone who does more good than harm.

It’s not the sort of epitaph you can apply to many, these days.

Now he’s dead at 92, and for some reason I feel compelled to remark on the fact. I certainly didn’t know the man; one heckle from the cheap seats doesn’t make a relationship. I can’t even describe him as a major influence on my life. But he was a seminal one; he showed up at just the right moment, and nudged. His book was the butterfly that edged my life onto a whole new trajectory, set the course for my career during the last quarter of the Twentieth Century.

In a very real way, Farley Mowat made me the man I am today.

As I mentioned here last December, Shout Factory is bringing out a DVD set of appearances, many of them quite obscure, that the Marx Brothers made on television. It's being assembled by my pal Robert Bader — in fact, he's the one who told me about it — and he does real good DVDs that we all must own.

Recently at a Marx Brothers festival, he and Dick Cavett discussed the set and gave the crowd a little preview. That presentation is discussed here.

Now, this is the point where I'd usually post an Amazon link so you can pre-order it. Here it is but before you click, read the following. You probably don't want to order it from Amazon. If you order from Shout Factory, you get four discs of Groucho, Harpo and Chico cavorting, individually and collectively, on television. You get the same three-disc set Amazon is selling plus you get a bonus disc.

As I post this, the price for the 3-disc set only from Amazon is $37.98. Amazon, of course, has its price guarantee. If there's a lower price by the time it's released (August 12), you get the lower price.

The same set with the bonus disc version can be purchased over on this website and it's currently cheaper ($34.97), plus they're promising delivery a month sooner.

I should probably keep my mouth shut because I get a tiny commission if you order from Amazon via my links, whereas I get bupkis from Shout Factory. But I can't do that to you…not after all we've been through together. So get it from Shout Factory…and don't tell them Groucho sent you because he didn't. It was me.

On Thursday December 5, 1963 the Daily Express reported that on the previous evening twenty-four distinguished men had sat down for a traditional English dinner at the Royal Academy on Piccadilly. It was to celebrate the opening of ‘The Great Goya Exhibition’ and masterpieces from the Spanish master had come from all over Europe. Most importantly, and carefully concealed in a tomato train, eleven paintings had from come Franco’s Spain and had arrived in London the previous week.

The great and the good of the art world were present that night, except one – Dr. Consuelo Sanz Pastor – Inspector of Museums for Spain. Dr Pastor, who had actually accompanied the Prado pictures to Britain and had also played a major part in arranging the exhibition, was absent because she was a woman and, as the Daily Express stated rather casually, the Royal Academy ‘never breaks with its all-male tradition’.

One person who was at the dinner was Gerald Wellesley the 78 year old 7th Duke of Wellington. His famous predecessor the 1st Duke, while on service in the Peninsular war in 1812, had had his portrait painted by Goya. In 1963, to the general public in Britain at least, it was possibly Goya’s most famous painting. It wasn’t part of the prestigious exhibition, however, because it had been stolen.

On 21 August 1961, in the middle of the night and seemingly under the noses of five security guards, Goya’s portrait of the Duke of Wellington had been taken from the National Gallery. It was initially assumed to have been removed by the gallery authorities as there was no sign of break-in or forced entry and it was several hours before the painting was reported missing. When the important men of the art world sat down for the Royal Academy dinner two and a half years later, and despite a £5000 reward, there was still no clue to the painting’s whereabouts.

The disappearance of the Goya shocked the National Gallery. It was their first ever theft and the painting had been taken not three weeks after it had first been put on display. The director offered his resignation and the robbery led to an official inquiry into security at Britain’s national galleries and museums. Initially it was thought as some outrageous copycat stunt as it was, coincidentally, exactly fifty years after, to the day, that the Mona Lisa had been stolen from the Louvre in 1911.

A few months before the Goya’s appropriation, the New York oil magnate, collector and trustee of the Metropolitan Museum, Charles Wrightsman had bought the painting, originally owned by the Duke of Leeds, through an auction at Sotheby’s for £140,000 (over £2,500,000 today). There was widespread protest and questions were asked in parliament about how such a prestigious and patriotic work of art could possibly leave the country.

Wrightsman, generously, offered it to the National Gallery for the price he had paid. A charitable organisation called the Wolfson Foundation offered £100,000 which embarrassed the government to provide a further Treasury grant of £40,000. With almost indecent haste on 2 August 1961 the painting was put on display in a proud, prominent position at the top of the National Gallery’s central stairs.

A year before the theft and almost three hundred miles away in Newcastle a 61 year-old retired lorry-driver called Kempton Bunton was fined £2 for not having a TV licence. He was given seven days to pay. Two Post Office inquiry officers told the magistrate’s court that when they had visited Bunton’s house he had said to them:

My set is fixed for ITV only. Their picture is supplied for free. Why should I pay money to the BBC?

Only available in London, initially, Independent television had been introduced to Britain in September 1955. The North East was the last of the English regions to get its own television transmitter and the contract for the region was awarded on 12 December 1957 to a consortium that was led by film producer Sydney Box and the News Chronicle executives George and Alfred Black.

Tyne Tees Television went on air at 5 pm on 15 January 1959 and Harold Macmillan, a local MP but of course Prime Minister at the time was interviewed on the first night. This was followed by a programme called The Big Show which was notable, despite its name, for being broadcast from a particularly small studio.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hE01zC7EflQ

Tyne Tees opening night on 15th January 1959

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y-3aOViAxPQ

The Big Show

Mary Crozier of the Manchester Guardian and daughter of a former editor of that newspaper wrote about the Tyne Tees in 1960:

It makes no pretension whatever to meet highbrow tastes. Which must be in a great minority anyway…In light entertainment and comedy it has certainty and speed, and it was here that I saw some programmes fresher and saltier than some I see on the main network. I left Newcastle with the loud echoes of some “live” and many Ampexed programmes ringing in my ears and a new almost alarmed respect for the toughness of Tyneside television.

Kempton Bunton returned home from the magistrates court on the afternoon of Friday 29 April 1960 where he had been fined two pounds for the non-payment of his Television Licence. If he had turned on his television set, which of course was only tuned to Tyne Tees, he would have watched at 5.00pm The Roving Reasons – a new British 13-part children’s serial made by Associated-Rediffusion Television that featured the Reason family travelling the world with their father  -  a freelance reporter. Here is the Tyne Tees schedule for the rest of that night:

5.25pm Mickey Mouse Club

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x4C_lUy58Rw

5.55pm News

6.06pm NE News

6.13 Sports Desk

6.30 Biggles Flies North: part 2

7.00pm Star Parade

7.30pm Emergency Ward 10

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UlpB6K_jJCg

7.59 King George’s Jubilee Trust

8.15pm Take Your Pick – The first television game show on ITV and was the first show on British TV to offer monetary prizes. It was presented by Michael Miles.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=irg29je8G8k

8.40pm The Army Game

9.10pm Interpol Calling

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V7iY1Hmz-j8

9.40 News - ”The credit squeeze is back” was the big news of the day. Hire Purchase restrictions that were swept away two years before were back again. It was no longer be possible to get a car, a washing machine or a TV set without a deposit – and with four or five years to pay. From that morning, there had to be a downpayment of 4s. in the £1, and the “never never” period was restricted to two years. Britian’s HP debt in 1960 stood at nearly £900,000,000.

The other major story that day was about corruption in the world of football. Tom Finney was reported to have said the previous night:

I have been offered money to drop a match. It happened to me about 12 months ago. We were playing at home. I had just parked my car near the ground when a middle-aged man tapped me on the shoulder. He asked me if I was interested in making a some extra cash. I thought he was joking at first and told him that if he was really serious I would have to report the matter to the club. At the same time I told him what to do with his money. He was off like a shot.

9.52 Play: Bridge of Sighs

10.50 Have Gun, Will Travel

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xkXb45PyeCI

11.20 News: Epilogue: Close.

Kempton Bunton would not have cared in the slightest but on the other side, as you would have said in those days, the BBC transmitted an episode of Hancock’s Half-Hour called The East Cheam Centenary

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UdKyKB4D2ug

Tyne Tees knew its audience and by 1960 it had 150,000 more viewers than the BBC in their region. Not an inconsiderable amount, although it might have had something to do with the two hours of prime-time viewing on a Friday night the BBC gave over to International swimming and amateur boxing. Meanwhile the Tyne Tees Television fan Kempton Bunton continued his fight with the authorities over the non-payment of his television licence and the affair had now caught the interest of the national newspapers.

On May 20 1961 it was reported that the magistrates gave Bunton a further 7 days to pay his £2 fine otherwise he would be imprisoned for 13 days by default. Bunton told the magistrates:

Since I started this argument I have treated the BBC levy with the contempt it deserves. I say that the old folk should have free viewing right away. They are sick of empty promises given by forgetful governments. I would suggest that the red tape be cut, precedent forgotten and a quick Act passed through the House of Commons allowing old folk to take for nothing that which is already offered free.

In September, as he had still not paid a penny towards a Television licence, Bunton gave himself up to the police to serve a further 56 day prison sentence. Bunton this time stated:

This is a matter of principle for me. I believe that the air should be free. Why should millions of people be deprived of the pleasures of TV? Four pounds for a licence is not a lot of money, but to some people it is a huge sum. The standard of programmes on television may at times be ridiculed but I still maintain that it is a grand time-killer and of a special benefit to our old folk. Tyne-Tees offer me a free programme and I take it. I shall go on refusing to pay this ridiculous tax.

The ‘ridiculous tax’ was first introduced in November 1922 and originally called the Broadcasting Receiving Licence. It cost 10 shillings (50p but about £25 today) and it covered the existing BBC radio broadcasts. Later it also included the BBC’s 405-line television service introduced in November 1936 before it was suspended at the beginning of World War 2 in September 1939.

The Television Licence was introduced after the war in June 1946 to coincide with the post-war resumption of the BBC TV service that same month and it cost anyone with a television set £2 (about £73 today). It was increased to £3 in 1954 and when Kempton Bunton refused to buy his licence in 1960 they were costing £4 (about £86 today).

When the Goya was taken from the National Gallery the press enjoyed the confusion of the authorities. The Daily Express headline on 23^rd August 1961 was “No Goya – No Clue”, while the Daily Mirror joined in with:  “Who Stole it? Crook, Crank or Joker”. Ten days after it had been stolen, however, the Reuters news agency received an anonymous letter post-marked in Newcastle and dated 30 August 1961. It was optimistically addressed to: “Reuters News, London”. Written in capital letters it  read: ‘Query not, that I have the Goya’ and indeed included details of the back of the painting that enabled the authorities to know that they were dealing with the actual thief. The letter continued:

The act is an attempt to pick the pockets of those who love art more than charity . . . the picture is not, and will not be for sale – it is for ransom – £140,000 – to be given to charity.

In July 1963 another letter enclosed a label from the back of the painting and a fourth note encouraged the chairman of the National Gallery, Lord Robbins, to “assert thyself and get the damn thing on view again. I am offering three pennyworth of old Spanish firewood, in exchange for £140,000 of human happiness”.

In 1965 a letter was sent to the Daily Mirror suggesting that the portrait should be exhibited privately until £30,000 had been raised for charity. Then, and only then, would it be returned to the National Gallery. The Daily Mirror enthusiastically took up the challenge of organising such an exhibition and suggested that:

This great national art treasure should be taken immediately to the shop of any newsagent in the land.

The chairman of the trustees of the National Gallery, Lord Robbins also responded by describing what he thought he knew of the thief:

I feel I know him pretty well already…He is still probably fairly slim and physically fit, and the cunning which he carried out the raid suggest that he was probably a commando or something like that. A man without fear.

On Thursday May 27^th one more letter, or ‘com’ as the writer called it, was sent and now he was starting to have some fun:

Goya. Extra Com. Lost – one sporting offer. Propriety has won – charity has lost. Indeed a black day for journalism. I wonder if he is worthy of £2500 reward or should be be drummed out. We took the Goya in sporting endeavour – your Mr. Editor pinched it back by a broken promise. You furthermore have the effrontery to pat yourself on the back in your triumph. Animal – vegetable – or idiot.

Although neither the police nor the National Gallery were in a position to offer immunity from prosecution, the Mirror became a communication route and in May a left-luggage ticket from Rack C2 at New Street station in Birmingham arrived at their offices. This quickly led to the recovery of the painting. It was in relatively good condition but missing its frame.

The painting was shown at a press conference on 24 May 1965, and then was quickly put back on display, almost four years after it had been reported stolen.

On the 20^th July 1965 a large man, six feet tall, about sixteen stone and wearing a grey suit and hat stopped a policeman in central London and asked to be directed to the West End police station on Savile Row. When he arrived he told the desk sergeant:

My name is Kempton Bunton and I am turning myself in for the Goya.

When Bunton was asked whether he was saying that he had stolen it, he replied: “Of course, that is why I’m here”. He handed over a written statement that he had brought with him:

(1) My secret has leaked – I wouldn’t like a certain gentleman to benefit financially by speaking to the law.

(2) I am sick and tired of the whole affair.

(3) By surrendering in London I avoid the stigma of being brought here in ‘chains’.”

The next day at Bow Street magistrates court, Bunton was charged with the theft of the picture, demanding money from Lord Robbins with menaces, demanding money from the editor of the Daily Mirror with menaces and with ‘causing a nuisance to the public by the unlawful removal and wrongful detaining of a painting on display at the National Gallery’.

On 10 November 1965 Kempton Bunton pleaded ‘Not Guilty’ to all the charges at the Central Criminal Court. In evidence to his counsel, Mr Jeremy Hutchinson QC, Bunton said that he had never intended to deprive the National Gallery of the portrait permanently. Neither had he the intention of getting any money for himself by taking the portrait.

When he was asked how he had stolen the painting Bunton told the court that it was at 5.50 am and that the guards must have been playing cards. He had got in by using a ladder which had been left by builders against the outside wall. Bunton added that he had taken the painting because he had been incensed with the Government for not allowing free television licences to pensioners.

During his cross-examination of Bunton, Mr E.J.P. Cussen for the prosecution, asked: ”Are you not sure your object was to steal the portrait from the National Gallery in revenge for the way you had been treated by the authorities over your television licence”? Bunton replied ‘That is not correct’.

Mr Cussen continued “When you walked out of the National Gallery carrying the portrait were you saying to yourself: I always intend to return it?” To which Bunton replied: “It was no good to me otherwise. I would not have hung it in my kitchen!” Asked if he had ever told his wife that he had been holding the Goya for nearly four years, Bunton replied: “No, the world would have known if I had done so.”

Bunton was acquitted on four of the charges but convicted of stealing the frame and sentenced to just three months’ imprisonment. The judge in his summing up expressed what was generally the view, especially by the National Gallery, and one presumes all the museums and galleries around the country, that there cannot be people creeping into art galleries and removing paintings only to say later they were intending to bring them back. Three years later the Kempton Bunton case led to an important clause being inserted into the Theft Act of 1968, making it illegal to “remove without authority any object displayed or kept for display to the public in a building to which the public have access”.

The judge also pronounced, and again he couldn’t have been alone with his opinion, that the theft was a “remarkable feat” for the large, 17-stone, rather unfit Bunton who had long retired from driving because of a previous injury.

Everyone involved in the case must have thought that was absolutely that. However, less than three years later on June 22 1969 a small article appeared in the Observer.  The journalist Barrie Stuart-Penrose reported that the police now believed it was someone else and not Kempton Bunton that had stolen the Goya portrait. Rather oddly, considering the acres of newsprint used up when covering the original heist and the subsequent arrest and imprisonment of Kempton Bunton, the story disappeared without trace. Indeed, considering he was responsible for one of the great British art heists of the twentieth century, when Kempton Bunton died in Newcastle in 1976 it went largely unreported and there were no obituaries in the major newspapers.

In November 2012 a confidential Director of Public Prosecutions file was released at the National Archives. It identified the “thief” of the Goya Duke of Wellington portrait as the 20-year-old son of a retired Newcastle bus driver. His name was John Bunton and he was, of course, the son of Kempton Bunton.

On 30th May, 1969 John Bunton, aged 28 had been arrested and charged at Leeds Police Station for stealing a car. While at the station he made it known that he wanted to get an offence of some magnitude cleared up. He went on to admit stealing the Goya painting.

The police went to visit Kempton at 12 Yewcroft Avenue in Newcastle. He was now 65 and an old age pensioner and he admitted that it was his son John who had stolen the painting. He also admitted that he had committed perjury at his trail at the Central Criminal Court in 1965. After reading his son’s statement he agreed that it was what actually happened.

In August 1961 John Bunton was living at the Arlington Lodging House in Camden Town and on the 21st he stole a green Wolsley 1500 from a small lock-up in Old Street. He drove back to his lodgings where he remained until 4.00am and then drove to St Martins Street and parked along side the National Gallery. He scaled the wall of the Gallery in Orange Street by standing on a convenient parking meter.

There was some construction going on behind the wall and a wooden ladder about 2o ft long had been left lying around. John Bunton put the ladder up to an unlocked window which was about fifteen feet from the ground and without much trouble climbed though into a gents toilet.

John Bunton then made his way to the gallery which was at the top of the main steps. The Goya painting of the Duke of Wellington was there in a roped off enclosure and standing on an easel. He picked it up, it’s not a particularly large painting, and walked back to the gents toilet. He retraced his steps out of the gallery, this time helped by a lower wall which led up to the higher outer wall inside the premises.

John then gave the painting over to his father who had travelled down from Newcastle but who eventually took it back home with him. Four years later in May 1965 Kempton reqeusted that his son came and visited him in Newcastle. He gave John the Goya painting and asked him to take it to Birmingham and leave it at the Left Luggage at New Street station. Following Kempton’s instructions, it was John who actually sent the letter to the Daily Mirror on the 20th May 1965.

When John was asked by the police why he hadn’t come forward when his father was charged with the offence of stealing it, he said:

He told us not to. Ordered us. It was his wish.

Sir Norman Skelhorn, the Director of Public Prosecutions, told the police that John Bunton’s admission of guilt was almost certainly not sufficient to prosecute him. As for his father, Skelhorn ruled that it would be difficult to prosecute him for perjury as they would have to rely on the evidence of the son, who was clearly an unreliable witness. No further action was ever taken.

John Bunton, with the help of his father, managed to get away with one of the 20th-century’s greatest art heists.

In 1967 the Royal Academy invited Harold Wilson, the Prime Minister, to their annual dinner to be held on the 27th May. Wilson said “I’d love to come, but with Jennie Lee”. For the first time since 1769 a woman (Jennie Lee was the Arts Minister at the time) was present at a Royal Academy dinner. It was decided to invite some other eminent women as guests and the Times diary reported that Lady Gaitskell looked ‘striking in a dress of wild silk in a pleasing shade of yellow, and as for Miss Gertrude Hermes, A.R.A., she was seen smoking a thoroughly masculine cigar after dinner’.

While the Prime Minister and other prestigious guests were enjoying dinner at the Royal Academy, Kempton Bunton was presumably watching Tyne Tees television in his Newcastle council house. He may have enjoyed the 1955 Humphrey Bogart film We’re No Angels which was broadcast at 7.00pm and if he stayed up later he may have watched a precursor of Monty Python – At Last the 1948 Show which featured a sketch entitled Thief in the Library…

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=odXVuwifeTY

 

Thursday:

Wednesday night's Partly Political Broadside from Hard Labour seems to have got a lot of people talking.

Dan Hodges thinks Hard Labour have gone insane.

Owen Jones thinks it's lacking in hope.

(and it takes some doing for Mr Milipede to look like a less mature grown-up than my fellow Stopfordian!)

While the New Statesman thinks it means Labour are going all out for a majority.

Personally, I think that that last analysis is 100% wrong.

Because self-indulgently playing to their CORE VOTE prejudices is a sure sign that Labour are now falling back on a CORE VOTE STRATEGY.

Sure, Hard Labour supporters may all be very tickled with the "LOLS". But guess what – they were going to vote Hard Labour anyway!

EVERYONE ELSE is going "Well, that's a bit SHI—, er, negative!" And if you want to ensure a majority, then it's EVERYONE ELSE you should be talking to.

You need to be reaching out to floating voters and your rivals' supporters. You know, like that thing that Captain Clegg has been doing with his "we're the Party of IN", building a – dare I say – coalition of people because they support our actual POLICY on Europe, even if they've made up their mind to blame the Captain for not having given him a majority Liberal Democrat government in 2010.

Of course, to do that you do have to have some actual POLICIES to sell them. And it turns out that Hard Labour are coming up empty. Sort of a Hard Up Labour, in fact.

OK, Mr Milipede did have ONE policy – that "energy price freeze" lark that touched the media's sweet spot last year. But that is looking SO 2013, now that the energy companies have hiked their prices and announced their own eighteen month "price freezes" – just like Mr Ed and everyone else said they would – and the meeja have decided La Farage is their new darling.

And – in an obvious effort to strike it lucky with the same card twice – they have now announced they're in favour of rent controls as part of a continuing effort to try to REINTRODUCE THE CORN LAWS: i.e. to artificially depress prices thus cutting off SUPPLY making everyone worse off, rather than trying to address the real need which is increases in DEMAND.

To underline their paucity of ideas we have Mr John Crude Ass Cruddas (trying to get the silly names right…) – Mr Milipede's "policy co-ordinator"; an easy job when they've only got two policies, I suspect – writing in the Grauniad that: "Labour will pioneer the post-industrial economy" off the back of a new "Digital Revolution". So that's "post-industrial" in the sense of no one having any jobs? Do they really believe we'll all be e-commerce entrepreneurs and app-store millionaires? That's quite an upskilling they're promising. Or is it just an acid flashback to the dot-com bubble of 1997? And how did that work out, can anyone remember?

But it's all very thin stuff, dressed up with an anti-Farrago fringe of "No we ARE against the Kippers REALLY!" I guess it's because Cap'n Clegg's been questioning why their leader is not standing up for Europe against UKIP. Not so much "Where's Wally?" as "Where's Milly?". It must have really hit a nerve.

Vague promises of "devolution to our cities and regions" and "renewing the bonds of trust" and "new ways of doing politics" though will give anyone with even a passing familiarity with Lib Dem policy a profound sense of déjà vu.

It seems WILFULLY PERVERSE to depict Nick Clegg as NAKED just as you are trying to steal his clothes!

Oh yes, back to the barely-coherent "plot" of that election broadcast that sees a not-very-Clegg-alike "shrinking" as his promises are undermined by a nasty pseudo-Mr Balloon. It attacks Nick with all the usual old catalogue of allegations while simultaneously depicting him as being forced to do it all by the evil Tories. Well, make your mind up, boys: is he victim or villain?

I even feel some sympathy for the Conservatories in this. Absolutely they've made some pretty poor choices and there has been much pain, often falling on people who should NOT have been let down. But the Tories – and we – didn't do it for "teh Evils"! It was because Labour left behind a situation that was damn near IMPOSSIBLE.

The sort of Cameron-caricature depicted in Hard Labour's ad is the sort of thing you expect from Tweenie Trots in fashionable student debating clubs. But it's not proper politics, is it.

If you want to reduce some really complicated economic factors and impossibly hard decisions to Dr Evil stereotyping, then expect to see LABOUR BROKE THE ECONOMY coming right back at you. That's what everyone believes anyway, no matter how many times you trot out "No, it was like that when we found it, it was the bankers, it's not FAIR!"

In some ways the worst of all is the sheer ARROGANCE of the ad's conclusion that the British people will just drop a Happy Ending into Hard Labour's lap without the Milipedes, Ballses or Crude-asses having to DO any actual "labour" at all.

And in a way, they might. Because Labour's core vote strategy is to try and leverage the unfairness of the electoral system and scrape a majority out of the bare 35% of people who voted them in last time they were "elected", back under the old war-criminal Lord Blarimort.

Because it's quite clear now that they don't expect anyone else to vote for them. And why would they? There were no reasons to vote Labour here, no reaching out to the electorate, no "vision".

Their cartoon-Clegg might be naked on screen, but it's Hard Labour who look like the Emperor with No Clothes.

Yesterday, on the 225th anniversary of the inauguration of President George Washington, politicians and prominent fundraisers of the religious right gathered in the U.S. Capitol for a civil-religious political rally called “Washington: A Man of Prayer.”

Hosted by Mike Huckabee, the two hour event featured a variety of elected leaders, such as Rep. Tim Huelskamp and Rep. Steve King, who spoke together from the podium. Huelskamp asserted that God is at the heart of America because there is a small chapel located literally in the very center of the continent in Kansas, while King proclaimed that America was established by God.

Other speakers included right-wing political Republican megapastors Robert Jeffress and Jim Garlow, Rep. Michele Bachmann, the Liar Tony Perkins, Sen. Ted Cruz, and xenophobic anti-feminist activist Phyllis Schlafly.

None of these speakers is likely to mark another notable anniversary later this month. May 21 is Oney Judge Freedom Day, honoring the woman who liberated herself from enslavement by George Washington 218 years ago. Or, as Washington himself put it, in a letter to the kidnappers he hired to bring her back, the woman “who, without the least provocation absconded from her Mistress.”

Take a moment to savor that phrase, “without the least provocation.” It doesn’t seem to have occurred to Washington that enslavement — being denied freedom, having one’s labor stolen, being bred like cattle, having one’s children sold away — is every “provocation” and every justification anyone could ever need.

Ah, but he was just “a man of his time,” the saying goes. Malarkey. Washington’s initial plan to have Oney Judge abducted back into enslavement was nixed due to fears it would provoke an abolitionist riot. Abolitionists were people “of his time” too, but they weren’t abysmally wrong about this. They were a significant presence and they had a significant voice — one that Washington had every opportunity to hear, to consider, and to reject.

Washington spent years conspiring with kidnappers to reclaim this woman he considered his property, but he did so secretly and through back channels because he was concerned about his reputation. He didn’t dare to abduct her openly because that would have meant having to publicly defend and justify his actions. Kidnapping and enslavement and selling children were all perfectly legal at the time, but Washington — even as “a man of his time” — knew they were indefensible and unjust.

Oney Judge, who settled in New Hampshire, knew that the president was trying to re-enslave her, so she did something he regarded as astonishingly uppity: She offered to make a deal. Guarantee the freedom of her children and her own emancipation upon the death of the president and first lady, and Oney Judge would return voluntarily. Washington refused to bargain with slaves, writing to those he had sent to abduct her:

To enter into such a compromise with her, as she suggested to you, is totally inadmissible, for reasons that must strike at first view: for however well disposed I might be to a gradual abolition, or even to an entire emancipation of that description of People (if the latter was in itself practicable at this moment) it would neither be politic or just to reward unfaithfulness with a premature preference [of freedom]; and thereby discontent before hand the minds of all her fellow-servants who by their steady attachments are far more deserving than herself of favor.

Yeah, he would have loved to have done a “favor” for “that description of People,” but it just wasn’t “practicable at this moment.” That might create “discontent” among all those slaves — Washington can’t even be honest enough with himself to write the word — he pretends are contentedly “without the least provocation” to want to be free.

So how is it that this guy has come to be an avatar of piety, prayer and religious devotion? Why are Mike Huckabee, Michele Bachmann, Ted Cruz and TLTP holding up George Washington as a prayerful example for us all?

Well, here’s what Southern Baptist pastor Dan Cummins, who organized “Washington: A Man of Prayer” wrote about the event:

On May 7, 2014, members of Congress, Christian leaders, and people of faith in homes and churches across the nation will join together to honor Washington as a man of Christian faith. Together, we will offer prayers on behalf of the nation, our President and his Cabinet, the Supreme Court and its Justices, and members of Congress.

“Washington — A Man of Prayer” commemorates the events of April 30, 1789, when, after being sworn in at Federal Hall, President Washington, accompanied by Congress, proceeded to St. Paul’s Chapel where, as one of his first official acts, the president offered a prayer of dedication to God on America’s behalf.

Christianity isn’t sufficient for people like Cummins, so they go in search of other mythologies to supplement it. That’s what you’ll find in churches like those of Cummins and Jeffress and Garlow — a dissatisfaction with the gospel of Jesus Christ spurring an endless quest for other mythologies and ideologies to provide something easier and more comforting, no matter how bogus those mythologies and ideologies are known to be.

And this idea of George Washington as a pious, prayerful man devoting his presidency and the nation to God is utterly bogus. Just ask Oney Judge. She knew the man. She grew up in his household. She was his “property.”

Here again is an article from The Liberator, Jan. 1, 1847, written by the Rev. Benjamin Chase following his interview with Oney Judge Staines:

She, and the woman with whom she lives, (who is nearly of her age,) appear to be, and have the reputation of being imbued with the real spirit of Christianity. She says that the stories told of Washington’s piety and prayers, so far as she ever saw or heard while she was his slave, have no foundation. Card-playing and wine-drinking were the business at his parties, and he had more of such company Sundays than on any other day.

Chase’s next remark, written 167 years ago, tells you everything you need to know about events like “Washington: Man of Prayer,” about pastors like Cummins and Jeffress, politicians like Bachmann and Cruz, and grifters like Schlafly and TLTP:

Card-playing and wine-drinking were the business at his parties, and he had more of such company Sundays than on any other day. I do not mention this as showing, in my estimation, his anti-Christian character, so much as the bare fact of being a slaveholder, and not a hundredth part so much as trying to kidnap this woman; but, in the minds of the community, it will weigh infinitely more.

When card-playing, wine-drinking and skipping church are seen as morally grave behaviors, but enslavement and kidnapping are not, something is horribly, horribly wrong with “the minds of the community.”

 

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May 8th, 2014: TCAF is this weekend in Toronto! It's my favourite show of the year AND it's free AND it's in a gorgeous building (the Toronto Reference Library!). So if you're in Toronto, you should come and say hi to me and hundreds of other amazing cartoonists, and pick up some rad comics you won't find anywhere else! TCAF is seriously the best, you guys! – Ryan

Last night in a supermarket about 3 AM, I saw a woman have a serious breakdown. She was buying some items — not a lot, maybe $35.00 worth of cheese, meat and cereal. A basic shopping list. The checkout clerk rang her up, she swiped her credit card —

— and it was declined. No good. Not accepted.

The clerk was very polite in informing her she'd have to pay some other way but she had no other way: No cash, no other card. She did not seem shocked that her card was rejected; just that it had happened sooner than expected. "I thought I had more money left," she muttered before bursting into tears. They were not tears of embarrassment. They were tears of desperation and panic and "I don't know what to do anymore." (That was something else she said.)

I was two back from her in line. The man after her and ahead of me was an Orthodox Jew — beard, black suit and hat, ziziths dangling from under his coat. We stood there and watched this poor woman weeping. She was about 45, maybe 50. She looked sad before the clerk gave her the bad news, and you could tell it was the latest in a long string. "I can't pay," she moaned. "I don't know what to do."

The checkout clerk didn't know what to do, either. He gave a look to those of us in line. It seemed to be saying, "Please…let's give her a minute." No one in line was impatient.

And then the woman let out a cry. I cannot describe it. If I was writing a scene in a TV show and I wanted an actress to make that sound, I have no idea what words I would put on the page to tell her what I had in mind. I'd probably write something about a cry of pain that seemed to say, "I can't endure any more of this…there is too much pain in my life."

That still wouldn't get the actress to make that sound but it might summarize what was on that poor woman's mind at that moment. Clearly, she could not pay. Clearly, she could not get on with her life in any way without groceries.

I saw the gentleman ahead of me take out his wallet and check how much he had. I whispered to him, "I'll split it with you." Behind me, the next person in line pulled out a ten and a couple of others kicked in. There were at least ten people waiting to pay at this, the only counter open at this hour. Most of us got together and paid for the woman's groceries and we gave her about thirty dollars in cash that she really seemed to need.

She cried about that too, crying at the generosity but also, I'm sure, that she was dependent on, as they say, the kindness of strangers. She thanked us about eighty times and then made her way with her purchases out the door. (In my area, they have to charge now for paper bags. I noticed that the checker didn't charge her for the ones she needed.)

I have no idea where she was going. I wonder if she did.

The gent in front of me paid for his purchases and departed wordlessly. As I swiped my credit card, I turned to the people after me and said, "If this isn't accepted, you're all paying for my English Muffins." A bit of a laugh. Then I asked the checker, "How often does that happen?"

He said, "Maybe twice a week. When it happens, it happens most often on the late shift. But usually, they swear the card is good and our system is screwed-up. They get angry at us, like it's our fault they can't pay. Sometimes, customers like you pay for them. A couple of times, I've felt so bad for the people that I've paid for them. That's if it's only a few dollars. I couldn't have paid for this woman. Not on what we get paid here."

The next person in line said, "If you pay for them, do they come back the next night figuring you'll pay for them again?"

He said, "No, never. We never see them again. That woman who just left here…you will never see her in this market again. It's too painful. It just reminds them of how bad off they were that night."

[Cross-posted at Hatewatch.] 


Ernie Wayne terTelgte likes to style himself as a Montana mountain man, dressing in buckskins, boots and tricornered hats and sometimes bearing an old muzzle-loading musket. He likes to elaborate upon his theories about so-called sovereign citizenship in a florid 18th-century style. But it isn’t a silly nostalgia act.

The Bozeman man has, in fact, been challenging Montana’s courts and legal system in the name of his extremist belief system all while adopting anachronistic clothing and calling himself the “Natural Man.”

Asked to explain why he was fishing without a license, terTeltge told a judge: “I was searching for something to put in my stomach as I am recognized to be allowed to do by universal law,” he said. “I am the living man and I have the right to forage for food when I am hungry.”

This all could be written off as the peculiar antics of another kook with convoluted legal ideas – something not unheard of in Montana – but for the fact that terTeltge has amassed supporters locally and regionally. His fight with the courts over what began as a simple fishing citation has become the latest cause célèbre among the far right in the Mountain West, including the region’s antigovernment “Patriots” and associated militias.

Some have gone so far as to begin organizing “citizen grand juries,” another tactic of the sovereign citizen movement, which purport to allow ordinary citizens to present cases to the local sheriff and sit in judgment of local government officials. Indeed, terTeltge himself has played a leading role in helping to organize these “juries” in the Bozeman area.

These activities have a long history in Montana, including the Montana Freemen of the 1990s, some of whom were from the Bozeman area and who practiced a similar kind of “sovereign citizenship” theory in promoting their illegal moneymaking schemes. Indeed, one of terTeltge’s cohorts in forming a “citizen grand jury”, a Bozeman man named Steve McNeil, was heavily involved with the Freemen and was arrested at one of their trials in Billings in 1996. Other extremists, such as neo-Nazi Karl Gharst, have used “citizen grand juries” to threaten the Montana Human Rights Network.

In recent years, these ideas have been spread widely in places such as Montana through the auspices of the Tea Party movement, in which old “Patriot” movement ideas have commingled freely with mainstream conservative politics, to the point that in many parts of the state Tea Party ideologues are nearly indistinguishable from the militiamen who got their start there in the 1990s.

Ernie terTeltge appears to have gotten his start that way. He first appeared on the region’s political scene in 2010, leading a contingent of Tea Party demonstrators as they protested efforts to pass health care reform outside the Gallatin County Courthouse. TerTeltge was wearing his trademark mountain man outfit.

Then, in August 2013, terTeltge was caught fishing without a license at the Three Forks Pond, a state-managed area, and refused to give the game warden his name. He was subsequently charged with resisting arrest.

TerTeltge began demonstrating in front of the courthouse in Three Forks in early November as his court proceedings began. A video shows him holding up a cardboard sign and explaining sovereign citizen ideology to passersby on the street.

Then, on Nov. 19, he made a court appearance on the resisting-arrest charge in Three Forks before City Judge Wanda Drusch. It did not go well. He yelled at the judge: “Do not tell me to shut up! I am the living, natural man, and my voice will be heard!”

He also pointed at the American flag in the corner and told the judge: “That is the Jolly Roger, that thing you call the American flag with the golf fringe around it is the Jolly Roger, and you are acting as one of its privateers!”

When Drusch got up to confer with law enforcement officers, terTeltge and his supporters peremptorily marched out of the courtroom, got in their vehicles and departed.

That tactic did not work for his next court appearance three days later, however. Once again, terTeltge tried to buffalo Judge Drusch with a flood of pseudo-legal language even as she warned him continuously that he would be found in contempt of court if he did not desist. Finally she ordered deputies to arrest him, and they did, handcuffing terTeltge as he protested: “I cannot give you recognition, I am constrained by the United States Constitution of 1789.”

Things got even stickier in January when he went before Justice of the Peace Rick West, who sent terTeltge back to jail, again for contempt, after he refused to remove his hat in the courtroom. This time, he had a larger crowd of supporters, but there were also over 30 law enforcement officers present to keep the peace. TerTeltge wound up spending 30 days in jail.

This incident threw local “Patriots” into a tizzy. One of terTeltge’s allies –William Wolf, a formerly homeless man who has been involved in efforts by Bozeman-area extremists to file for political office as Democrats – threatened to arrest Judge West as a “sovereign citizen,” setting local law enforcement even further on edge.

Then Wolf approached Gallatin County commissioners about forming a “citizens grand jury” to review claims of “human rights violations” in terTeltge’s case. The idea proved somewhat popular in Bozeman; one gathering attracted over 50 people to discuss forming what they saw as challenge to “corrupt government.”

At his most recent appearance in March, however, terTeltge was more contrite and cooperative. As a result, Judge West did not return him to jail, and he was freed until his trials begin. His fishing license trial is scheduled to begin next week.

“Patriot” movement leaders are watching the case closely. Chuck Baldwin, the former Constitution Party candidate now living in the Flathead Valley in hopes of creating a white homeland, recently returned from his visit to the Bundy Ranch standoff in Nevada and regaled an audience in Kalispell with tales of the militias’ exploits in Nevada. Then Baldwin urged his audience to pay similar attention to terTeltge’s case.

“I realize, we all recognize that everybody cannot up and leave and go a thousand miles away, depending on your schedule, your home responsibilities, et cetera. We understand that,” Baldwin said. “We still have to be watchful here in the state of Montana. We’ve got a situation in Bozeman, right here in our state, that we need to take care of, and we really need to rally around. You’ll be hearing more about that soon.”

All of this far-right activism concerns local government officials, who have become all too familiar with this brand of extremism in recent years in Montana. Jim Taylor, legal director of the American Civil Liberties Union of Montana, noted that there’s nothing legal about these theories.

“You can’t just make up law. Law is what it is,” Taylor said. “You can’t just say, ‘And we’re going to have a grand jury on my block.’ It doesn’t work that way.”

I don't need to tell you about the global surveillance disclosures of 2013 to the present—it's no exaggeration to call them the biggest secret intelligence leak in history, a monumental gaffe (from the perspective of the espionage-industrial complex) and a security officer's worst nightmare.

But it occurs to me that it's worth pointing out that the NSA set themselves up for it by preventing the early internet specifications from including transport layer encryption.

At every step in the development of the public internet the NSA systematically lobbied for weaker security, to enhance their own information-gathering capabilities. The trouble is, the success of the internet protocols created a networking monoculture that the NSA themselves came to rely on for their internal infrastructure. The same security holes that the NSA relied on to gain access to your (or Osama bin Laden's) email allowed gangsters to steal passwords and login credentials and credit card numbers. And ultimately these same baked-in security holes allowed Edward Snowden—who, let us remember, is merely one guy: a talented system administrator and programmer, but no Clark Kent—to rampage through their internal information systems.

The moral of the story is clear: be very cautious about poisoning the banquet you serve your guests, lest you end up accidentally ingesting it yourself. And there's an unpalatable (to spooks) corollary: we the public aren't going to get a crime-free secure internet unless we re-engineer it to be NSA-proof. And because of the current idiotic fad for outsourcing key competences from the public to the private sector, the security-industrial contractors who benefit from the 80% of the NSA's budget that is outsourced are good for $60-80Bn a year. That means we can expect a firehose of lobbying slush funds to be directed against attempts to make the internet NSA-proof.

Worse. Even though the pursuit of this obsession with surveillance in the name of security is rendering our critical infrastructure insecure by design, making massive denial of service attacks and infrastructure attacks possible, any such attacks will be interpreted as a rationale to double-down on the very surveillance-friendly policies that make them possible. It's a self-reinforcing failure mode, and the more it fails the worse it will get. Sort of like the war on drugs, if the war on drugs had the capability to overflow and reprogram your next car's autopilot and drive you into a bridge support, or to fry your insulin pump, or empty your bank account, or cause grid blackouts and air traffic control outages. Because that's what the internet of things means: the secret police have installed locks in everything and the criminals are now selling each other skeleton keys.

The only way out of this I can see is to abolish the secret police and build out a new secure internet before the inevitable processes of institutional change generate a new rationale for spying on us. Unfortunately I see no way (at present) to pursue this agenda.

Some will accuse me of perseverating or refusing to let go (of something that wasn't even exactly atoned for but whatever). I really don't care, because clearly this is something people don't yet understand.

Under. No. Circumstances. Say. Some. People. Aren't. Human. EVER. DO NOT DO THIS.

Others will declare I am being too literal, but the history of these declarations, particularly for Autistic people, demands I be literal.

It's not just the changeling legends of old. It's how they live on in systemic dehumanizsation of Autistics & other disabled folks, a legacy we will never escape without radical changes.

People will say "well I hate people, so be glad you aren't one," but I am so very not being even a little facetious right now. This is not a topic for levity at this moment.

People deciding we aren't human gets us hurt, it gets us killed, it does tremendous emotional damage in addition to physical. It makes self loathing just a little bit easier.

I knew I wasn't a real person by kindergarten. Real people don't need to stand up sit down stand up sit down stand up sit down good girl MnM. Real people's names aren't at the top of a behavior star chart when everyone else is mean and scary and in their personal space (so much for ABC, eh?). Real people are allowed to laugh and to cry.

Real people are allowed opinions, even unpopular ones. Real people's socks & underwear aren't scrutinized daily to make sure they aren't inside out. Real people don't have everything they love leveraged to make them perform.

And then I was declared a good facsimile of a real person-but that was no better. Real people are allowed bad days; facsimiles are not. Real people can have quirks and odd habits. Real people can say "no".

Even today the changeling & demonic possession myths live on: real people aren't almost drowned in exorcisms (the first murder of an Autistic I followed closely? The boy was suffocated by a minister kneeling on his chest 'casting out demons'. That makes the holy water drowning look tame). Real people aren't scared within an inch of their lives to "bring you back to me". There are lines one does not cross when dealing with real people, lines that are trampled over when it's just us.

Because we aren't real people, & don't even get the rights of them when we pretend our damnedest.

This is the history--and the present--you dredge up for our community when you say someone, anyone, "isn't human". It's a history where people start from that assumption & where anything is justified to change that. And nonpeople are always scrutinized so closely we're never going to meet the moving standard.

It isn't funny, it isn't cute, and it isn't acceptable. Think, really think, before you write.

American executioners: untrained, incompetent, and "complete idiots".

I attended a conference panel debate this afternoon in which the participants were talking about children with special educational needs and how services can meet those needs in an era of diminished local authority budgets.

Then this evening I read about yesterday’s launch of the Liberal Democrat local election campaign. This seems to be based around a document detailing “Labour & Tory Incompetence & Waste".

According to the comment thread on Liberal Democrat Voice, these examples have been culled from the Daily Mail and the Taxpayers’ Alliance. And some of them, not surprisingly, start to unravel when you look at them closely.

This really is not good enough. Every informed voter knows that local authorities are facing enormous cuts in their funding.

Is the Liberal Democrat answer to people concerned about children with special educational needs really to say we could do all we want for them if only councils did not spend money on magicians or hamster welfare?

And do we expect them to be impressed by this?

Particularly applicable for sites with advertising from Patheos:

1. A prostitute has sex for money. Internet-writers write about sex for money. Try your utmost to remember the difference between your writing and prostitution.

. . . .

5.  An Internet-writer is judged on his ability to fulfill the promise of gratification hyperbolically stated at the beginning of his work. If you find it difficult to make your writing immediately gratifying, consider that it is the same thing as making your writing immediately forgettable. As a pear on the very verge of rot smells immediately sweet, as the lively kicking of the mortally ill is only an assurance of their final stiffening, and as the immediacy of the fashion trend is a promise that it will not transcend its own fashionability, so the immediacy of pleasure promised by an Internet-article is dialectically the promise that the article is on its road to death. If your writing is good because it gratifies a drive for novelty, promising “Things You Wish You Knew About ______,” then it must become bad in the reading which renders it old, the “Things You Wish You Knew” known.  No one re-reads their favorite BuzzFeed articles — they are killed in the reading, and a good Internet-writer is known by the popular corpses he leaves in his strut.

. . . .

7. Given a choice between stimulating the interest of a million people or ennobling the life of one, the former pays. Write then, for the crowd. To the extent a writer wants to engage not the particular person, but the crowd, is the extent to which he must destroy the personality of his own writing. For personality in writing is an invitation to personal relation, by which the reader encounters your writing as splaying outwards from an unrepeatable first-person perspective of the Cosmos. This encounter is not to be understood in an autobiographical sense, as when the reader leaves a work knowing things about the writer. To read Dostoyevsky is to encounter the unique person which is always the source of his work, a deeper encounter than any factual information about Dostoyevsky can provide.

Link to the rest at Patheos and thanks to Rick for the tip.

I finished Matt Taibbi’s new book, The Divide: American Injustice in the Age of the Wealth Gap, which I was reading in the evening before I went to bed. I am surprised that I was not given to uneasy and violent dreams as a result.

In the book, Taibbi one again looks at the financial crisis of 2008, a topic he’s no stranger to. He continues to be justifiably outraged that miles of fraud, perjury, racketeering, money laundering, grift — and, in one bizarre story — outright harassment, resulted in absolutely zero arrests. Instead, when anyone decided something needed to be punished at all, the punishment was a cost-of-doing-business fine, not paid out of any one person’s pocket, which didn’t prevent anyone from getting a fat bonus at the end. Not only was nothing done to significantly prevent this from happening again, there was an audible shrug from the SEC and the White House that, eh, what can you do? The perpetrators were free and seemingly encouraged to have another go at it.

This is a familiar story and though it continues to be outrageous and baffling, it’s become all too clear that nothing is going to come of it, so why harp on it again? This time, though, Taibbi looks beyond the story to tie it into something even larger, if you can imagine a larger target. Taibbi contrasts the glorious life and adventures of the too-rich-to-jail set with the other side of the spectrum, those barely — or not — scraping by.

He alternates between worlds, at once talking about sociopathic hedge fund managers with the minds of 14-year-old boys jacked up on Mountain Dew and repeated watchings of “Wall Street” and then moving to people who have government workers and cops inspecting their underwear to determine if it’s too sexy for them to receive public assistance. You have one group who can’t get arrested even when committing outright fraud and another for whom standing in front of their home can get their heads bounced on the sidewalk.

The “two Americas” trope isn’t particularly fresh either, but this contrast is still eye-opening. On the one hand you have a guy getting knocked around, abused, framed, and more-or-less convicted for smoking what someone thought was a joint. On the other hand you have HSBC, a bank that knowingly laundered over $600 million worth of money for Mexican drug cartels, yet paid nothing but a $1.9 billion fine, equivalent to about a month’s profit. Taibbi ties this in to a greater divide in American culture, that there are winners and losers, and what we’re seeing now is the circle of winners growing smaller and more powerful. It’s not hard for someone like me, a straight white male with a pretty good job, a marriage, a house, money in the bank, to look at this and still know that as far as the machine is concerned, I would be a loser. Pretty much everyone reading this would be. And normally I wouldn’t care, except that the “winners” are writing the laws, funding the candidates, filling the court benches. They run the show and they don’t care about you or me, except that we might currently be holding on to some money that they want. And what’s worse is, they have other losers convinced that if they just appease the winners enough, they’ll be winners too, or at the very least spared the winners’ wrath. This is absurd because the winners don’t even see anyone who isn’t them. They will frack on your land and destroy your retirement and mistakenly foreclose on your house and remove your health care not because they don’t like you — don’t flatter yourself — but because it gives them some money. That’s all. Some money was there to be made and they made it and now they’ll stride off and do some other thing to make more money and spare not a thought to anyone who was in the way.

This isn’t class warfare, as previous “Two Americas” observations stated. It’s worse. It’s a more Lovecraftian disinterested evil that destroys you while not even comprehending that you’re a thing that exists at all.

Taibbi points out, too, that this isn’t a Republicans and Democrats thing. Most of this nonsense has happened under and been fueled by the socialist leftist Obama, who gave us this lovely quote:

Well, first on the issue of prosecutions on Wall Street, one of the biggest problems about the collapse of Lehmans and the subsequent financial crisis and the whole subprime lending fiasco is that a lot of that stuff wasn’t necessarily illegal, it was just immoral or inappropriate or reckless. That’s exactly why we needed to pass Dodd-Frank, to prohibit some of these practices.

The financial sector is very creative and they are always looking for ways to make money. That’s their job. And if there are loopholes and rules that can be bent and arbitrage to be had, they will take advantage of it. So without commenting on particular prosecutions — obviously that’s not my job; that’s the Attorney General’s job — I think part of people’s frustrations, part of my frustration, was a lot of practices that should not have been allowed weren’t necessarily against the law, but they had a huge destructive impact. And that’s why it was important for us to put in place financial rules that protect the American people from reckless decision-making and irresponsible behavior.

We can’t prosecute the banks because “a lot of” the things they did “weren’t necessarily against the law”. Never mind the things that were — money laundering, perjury, and fraud supposedly are — these people aren’t criminals, just “creative”. They found loopholes, bent rules, and made money. And in the one America, the only America that matters, they’re not crooks, they’re at worst mischievous scamps, and at best, goddamn titans of capitalism. The things they did which weren’t necessarily illegal still aren’t necessarily illegal, and the things they did that were are okay because if you throw someone in jail for losing 40% of the wealth in the world in a Ponzi scheme, it might hurt the economy. This is the President speaking, the far-left Communist who is destroying America, saying we simply have to accept our Winner overlords. What else can we possibly do? Say what you will about Bush, he at least prosecuted Enron.

It would be a mistake to simply note that the people on the other side of this story are minorities, though most “losers” are minorities and most minorities are “losers”. They’re the poor. And while their minority status can’t be overlooked in their poor status, I believe these days that it’s the lack of money instead of the abundance of pigment that dooms them. Taibbi looks at a system that exists to take poor people and run them through a grinder repeatedly until every possible nickel has been run out of them. After all, someone has to fill the private prisons. When they have no money, they can sit in a cell and create earnings for Corrections Corporation of America (CXW on NASDAQ). The system works to keep the people at that level at that level, and to push others towards it once their financial usefulness wears out. It’s a machine designed for one purpose: to draw money towards the top to be skimmed off by the winners. It’s the opposite of trickle-down. And it works, exactly as designed.

And the machine is working its way up. It’s just now starting on the middle-class. What little outrage over the economy we’ve seen has largely manifested in the form of white people angry at being treated the way non-whites have been treated for years. When we were grabbing your food stamps it was to teach you fiscal responsibility, but taking my social security is an outrage. When you were saddled with a debt spiral because you had to go to shady payday loan services, that was your poor management skills, but my student debt is a serious problem. You lost your house because “some people” are just not prepared for the responsibility of home ownership. I got foreclosed on because of some shifty bank doings. However you sell it to yourself, the result is the same. You have some money, they want it. And they’ll do whatever isn’t “necessarily illegal” to get it.

I’m now reading Days of Destruction, Days of Revolt, by Chris Hedges and Joe Sacco. It’s a look at what the authors call “sacrifice zones”, the places in the country that have been allowed to go to hell as a concession to boundless capitalism. The book was written in 2011 and came out in 2012, and the foreword says that originally they didn’t have much of anything hopeful to end on, but then the Occupy movement started and it seems like at last the American citizenry is ready to try and put an end to this nonsense. Taibbi’s book was written in 2013 and has no such note in it.

I’m happy to announce that “Unlocked: An Oral History of Haden’s Syndrome” is now available in electronic form, in English, pretty much everywhere in the world, or at least everywhere that Tor has been able to get it into ebook retail systems. It’s a novella, set in the world of my upcoming novel Lock In, and it tells the story of the disease — Haden’s syndrome — which plays a significant role in that novel. The story is told from the mouths of those afflicted with the disease, the doctor and scientists who fought it, the lawyers and politicians who navigated its political consequences, and others who saw the world shaped by the consequences of this worldwide epidemic.

You won’t have to read “Unlocked” to follow what happens in Lock In (not in the least because Lock In was written first, before I had a thought to write the novella), nor does “Unlocked” contain spoilers for Lock In. They are complementary documents of a near future. If you read them both, you’ll have a wider view of the world I created. But both stand on their own.

I’ve mentioned before why I decided to write “Unlocked” (and why I decided to write it as an oral history), so I won’t cover that again now. But I will say that I’m really pleased with how “Unlocked” turned out. It’s a type of storytelling I’ve always wanted to do. I think you’re going to like the results.

The eBook of the novella is $1.99, and it also includes the first chapter of Lock In — an exclusive sneak that, for now at least, you can’t get anywhere else. So: Bonus!

Some links for US readers:

Amazon|Barnes & Noble|Google Play|iBookstore

For everyone else, check your local eBook retailers. I did a spot check of various Amazon sites across the globe and it was in all of them that I checked.

For those interested in a hardcover version, remember that Subterranean Press will have a signed, limited edition available later in the year (which you can preorder now). I can’t tell you who the cover artist for the hardcover version is yet, but I can tell you that I am awesomely excited about it. For audiophiles, Audible also has plans for a version of “Unlocked” — more details on that later.

Enjoy, and happy reading!

Ukip has chosen Roger Helmer as its candidate in the Newark by-election.

The Roger Helmer label on this blog will tell you everything you need to know about the man and his politics.

Look out for his belief that there are two kinds of rape, his struggles finding an office in Market Harborough and his insistence that a lecturer on UFOs should succeed him in the European Parliament.

And believe me, it wasn’t just the other women. If it had been only that, I could have handled it. A girl comes to expect things like that from certain men, especially from an ‘artistic’ type. There was also the drinking. The temper. The strangers barging in at three in the morning.

And yet you stayed around.

Well, what else could I do? I’d given up my own career to help put him through school. It’s not like I could just go out and get a job.

Hmm.

What does that mean?

I didn’t say anything.

You said ‘hmm’. And you rolled your eyes.

No I did not.

You did. I saw you.

Look, let’s get back to the subject at hand. After The Noon of Ray Crandall was published, the two of you moved to Los Angeles so that he could do some work in Hollywood.

Everyone assumes that we were happiest then, but it’s a lie. The money was just rolling in, it’s true, but the more we got, the more we spent. He started believing his own hype, and he was drinking more than ever. He pushed and pushed to keep producing just so he could maintain that level of income. The money was ruining him.

Yeah, I bet you really hated that.

Look, what are we doing this interview for? You obviously don’t think very much of me.

Well, it’s just…

Come on, kid. Spit it out.

You were his wife, and you were in a position to know him better than anyone. But it seems like you don’t have anything good to say about him. I realize he had flaws. A lot of great men have flaws. But it’s not like he ate babies.

Shows how much you know.

I mean, if you hated him so much, why did you stay married to…I beg your pardon?

Forget it.  I’ve said too much already.

He ate babies.

No! Not…routinely.

What are you talking about?

He didn’t even eat them whole. Just a foot here, a shoulder there, half a head sometimes. Really, if you put them all together, they probably don’t even add up to one entire baby. So you couldn’t say, technically, that he ‘ate babies’.

What…why would he…why did he eat babies?

It’s called writer’s block, kid. Maybe you’ll get it one day.

And he ate babies to get rid of it?

No! Not at all.

So you’re just pulling my…

He ate them to forestall it.

What?

When he’d start work on a new novel, he’d eat part of a baby. He said it focused his attention on the job at hand. New book, new baby. All part of the process of creation, he’d say. He always put it like this: ‘I bring one in, I take one out.’ Like a life force, I guess. Are you going to write that down?

Why?

It’s a, what do you call it, an aphorism. I thought you literary types loved that shit.

Frankly, I don’t believe you. Why wasn’t he ever caught? You’d think that someone would miss seventeen babies.

Thirteen.

But he wrote…

He only started doing it after the fourth book. Before that he tried other stuff.

Like what?

Oh, you know. Picking a name out of the phone book, thumbing through a deck of playing cards, watching the soap operas. That sort of thing. But after Heart of Ice was published, nothing was working, and I was pregnant with our first kid, and he said iI tell you this, Lisa, if I don’t come up with something soon, I’m going to have to eat that baby.’ He was always a man of his word.

So you’re saying all the babies were yours?

Sure. That’s why nobody missed them. They were all mine. I wasn’t much for public appearances, so no one noticed. Our friends just thought I had a bunch of miscarriages.

Oh, come on.

Hey, we’ve got a bunch of dumb friends. I don’t deny it. The reason he always had such a temper is because of our stupid friends, and also because he eventually became so prolific he was writing the books quicker than I could get pregnant.

What’d he do then, strangle puppies?

Okay, mister funny man. I thought this was a documentary, not a comedy.

Sorry.

Anyway, he only strangled puppies for short pieces like magazine articles or book reviews.

Look, I’m not calling you a liar…

Yes you are.

Maybe I am. It’s just hard to believe. Why did you put up with it? Killing and eating all thirteen of your children?

To be fair, he only killed twelve of them. One died in childbirth. He only ate a little bit of that one.

Still, though.

Look, honey…that’s what it’s like living with a creative person. You learn to be supportive of their little quirks.

Quirks! He ate babies, for God’s sake.

Well, sure, but — look.  It’s all a matter of perspective. It’s not like he tore their hearts out and burned them, or killed people and had sex with the corpses or something.

I suppose so.

I’m a lucky woman, really. You should hear what Mrs. Garcia-Marquez had to go through. Now that man was a genius.

Heroism is a tricky thing.  It’s difficult to define to the point that it’s almost entirely personal; it’s a thorny enough social concept that we spend endless hours debating what we mean by it in both fiction and reality.  Some people don’t like the very idea, finding it too troublesome and too prone to elevate one person above the mass, and spend their time either deconstructing the concept or denying that it can ever be fairly applied to anyone; for these people, sniffing out feet of clay is a full-time occupation.  For others, there aren’t enough heroes; so desperately do they reckon we need them that they have extended the franchise even to those who don’t want to be included, making them (usually unwillingly) into ‘role models’ under the assumption that you should be a moral exemplar to children just because you’re good at dunking a basketball.

In real life, heroism is pretty rare — I’d go as far as to say thankfully rare.  My own heroes are terribly few, decency and talent being such infrequent bedfellows; I tend to reserve the work for the likes of Martin Luther King, Mohandas Gandhi, and the like, who not only did the incomparable work of helping to free millions from cruelty and oppression, but who did it in a way that is almost literally unimaginable to me.  I don’t particularly value non-violence as a practice, which makes it all the more amazing to me that these people did what they did in the way they did it.  Other people are so starved for heroes that they will make one of just about anyone — this guy, for example, is Sean Hannity’s new hero du jour (replacing the disgraced Cliven Bundy), even though the manner in which he butchered two teenaged housebreakers is more reminiscent of a serial killer than it is a paragon of justice.

People used to be very much in the habit of making artists into heroes, a practice I find so juvenile and naïve that I can scarcely believe it’s lasted so long, and indeed seems to make a comeback with every young generation, with people who have not yet learned that the qualities that make one a great practitioner of their art are often the same qualities that make one a rather indecent human being.  But if we are saddled with the childish habit of thinking of ordinary people blessed with talent as needing to be morally upstanding, perhaps it is because, in what increasingly seems to be a period of cultural decadence, our public taste has become more childish.  In what we are condescendingly assured is a golden age of television, the discussion of many of the most critically celebrated shows – Game of Thrones, Mad Men, Breaking Bad, Hannibal — revolves around moral conceptions so simple-minded that it sometimes sounds shocking coming from the mouths of grown adults.  We demand not only representation and sympathy, but relatability, even purity:  characters sold to us as deeply flawed suddenly let us down if they prove to be too flawed, as if they were family members who are not just reprobates, but ungrateful about it.

But then, if the minds of critics and fans are confused, who can blame them?  In this era of the showrunner, the franchise, and the creator under the knout of a whole legion of recappers and re-hashers, the word of the artist is now the Word of God, reader response theory be damned.  So if they insist on a particularly banal and poorly thought-out  interpretation of their work, who can blame their followers for taking it to heart?  Here, for example, is a comment made during one of the recent depressing contretemps about sexism in the comics industry:

I think that a huge problem is people who read comics and don’t understand the point of superheroes, which is to be the best version of yourself. 

That’s comics writer Brian Michael Bendis, ‘explaining’ what the ‘point’ of superheroes is to those who have the bad taste to like them and then behave in a manner Bendis finds unsuitable to the behavior of people who like the same things he likes. This is not to defend the misogynistic and repulsive attitudes he’s attacking, but what’s with this fat-headed lecture?  Art is not responsible to the people who like it, and if you wish to call someone out for being a sexist prick, just call them a sexist prick, and spare me the bafflegab propaganda about the correct meaning of things and who you do and don’t want reading your work.  Bendis, before he became one of the biggest names in the industry and started believing his own public relations, used to write stories of great moral torment and complexity, and trusted his readers to make a respectable show of understanding them without resorting to this kind of nonsense.

If we’re going to talk about the ‘point’ of superheroes, the discussion is likely to end up on one end of the spectrum (the point is to sell images of over-muscled lunatics roughing it up to arrested adolescents) or the other (the point varies wildly depending on who is writing, what character is being written about, what their intentions are, and how they are delivered.  But wherever it ends up, it’s not likely to be within a thousand leagues of “be the best version of yourself”.  While superhero stories have always been some variety of power fantasy, they have never been the same one; the common conception of each is miles apart.  The version of Superman that dwells in our collective consciousness is in many ways that of a benevolent God, morally worthy and capable of saving us through a combination of divine power and personal inspiration; that of Batman is a stunted boy’s dreams of eternal vengeance; that of Wonder Woman a knotty picture of a woman of great power but, literally and figuratively, bound and restrained by the expectations of others.  Spider-Man tells us the painful lesson of a child being forced to deal with the responsibilities of becoming an adult.  The Fantastic Four is about how staying together as a family can mean condemning the people you love to mutual agony.  None of these stories, at their core, are about being “the best version of yourself”; we cannot be Superman, we should not be Batman, and we wouldn’t want to be the Fantastic Four.

Honestly, this sort of low-grade silliness is beneath even comics; it exhausts me.  Is the Punisher the best version of anyone’s self?  (Maybe Byron Smith.)  Who is the Hulk the best version of?  What happened to comic book heroes being our own versions of myth — that is to say, of flawed gods, all too human in nature, often jealous and petty and wrong, amongst whose vast power and moral struggles we mere mortals must navigate?  When did we switch to a conception of them as our own versions of Jesus, without moral stain and forever held up as our example to always do good? That’s not why I started reading comics, and I can’t think of a single superhero story I’ve really liked in which that was the way they were presented.  Nerd-culture icons often balk at having their media categorized as children’s stories, but this isn’t the talk of a serious writer interested in presenting a convincing adult story, in creating narratives in which more than one reader can find more than one answer, in exploring the differences between valor and courage.  It’s the talk of someone using their art as a blunt instrument to make himself feel better about his own upstanding self by reducing the complexity of fiction to an on-off switch.  That’s not the direction our art needs to be heading right now.

“'You're probably right, but that's not what the public is expecting — this is Hollywood and I want to give people something that's close to what they expect”

-Steven Spielberg to Jacques Vallée

It is named, of course, after J. Allen Hynek's system of classification. Hynek was an astronomer who worked with the United States Air Force as a scientific consultant into their studies into the UFO phenomenon, most famously Project Blue Book. Initially a staunch skeptic, Hynek's views began to change as he investigated more and more and more cases and it became less and less easy for him to discount the credibility of the witnesses he interviewed. After a falling out with the Air Force, Hynek spent the rest of his life investigating UFO cases on a personal basis, and is considering the pioneer of scientific research into UFOs. His famous scale is as follows, in order of increasing high strangeness:

• Nocturnal Lights: Sightings of unexplained lights in the night sky.
• Daylight Discs: Sightings of disc-shaped objects during the daytime.
• Radar-Visual: Confirmed radar hits.
• Close Encounters of the First Kind: A UFO observed less than 500 feet away.
• Close Encounters of the Second Kind: A UFO, sighted less than 500 feet away, with a seemingly discernible physical effect.
• Close Encounters of the Third Kind: A UFO sighted less than 500 feet away, accompanied by sightings of animated beings.

That Steven Spielberg named a movie after Hynek's scale (not to mention casting Hynek himself as an extra in the climactic meeting with the Mothership, along with UFOlogist Stanton Friedman, famous for his interest in the Roswell case) is well known for being the impetus for it becoming ingrained in pop consciousness. But it also reveals the extent to which Close Encounters of the Third Kind is genuinely indebted to a specific philosophy: Friedman's presence aside, this is not actually a movie about UFOlogy. Indeed, ironically in spite of his influence on the field, Hynek was not what we'd think of today as a UFOlogist and the work he did would likely be met with some suspicion, if not outright scorn, in modern UFOlogy.

No, Close Encounters of the Third Kind is a movie about spiritualism, childhood, wonder, and the sacred music of the universe. And that makes it pretty much the single most important and powerful work we've looked at so far.

Steven Spielberg, as a creative figure, is often criticized for his fixation on a somewhat vapid notion of “childlike wonder”, and there is something to that. Spielberg has always privileged the child's perspective (or what he perceives a child's perspective to be) and does seem to feel there's something genuinely special about the way children see the world. And certainly it can be argued that starting with E.T. he begins to dutifully recite these themes as comfortable platitudes film after film. But, in regards to Close Encounters of the Third Kind in particular, two things really need to be established early on: One, though this is Spielberg's first post-Jaws work, he's still something of an up-and-coming filmmaker coasting on the latter film's success. At this point, he still very much has something to say and something to prove. And two, Spielberg's interest in childhood, at least in this case, does not come from a place of cloying sentimentality, but from his interest in exploring his own positionality and life experiences.

Steven Spielberg is someone who grew up knowing from a very young age that making movies is all he ever wanted to do. He's the success story every aspiring indie filmmaker dreams of someday being able to emulate. But what this also means is that Steven Spielberg is someone who has a deep, instinctual understanding of images, memories and the power they have over us. It was a confluence of both that compelled a young Spielberg to create the work that became Close Encounters of the Third Kind when he and his father watched a meteor shower together one night. Some of my earliest and most formative memories are images of the night sky, so I speak from experience when I say I can understand the impact this might have had on someone as creative and imaginative as him.

These images seemed to linger with Spielberg as he made his first commercial movie as a teenager called Firelight, which was essentially the first draft of Close Encounters of the Third Kind, incorporating almost all of the same shots and scenes with the exception of having the aliens be malevolent. Six years later, he wrote the short story Experiences, which tells of a group of teenagers who witness an unexplained light show in the sky one night at the local lovers' lane. It's with Experiences that Spielberg seems to begin to crystallize what these images mean to him: A group of ordinary, working-class people share something together that changes how they view themselves and their connection to the world by exposing them to the cosmic whole. This is not the pomp and grandeur of religious visions, at least as commonly depicted, this is an intimate moment of soft, gentle beauty that quietly brings them a newfound sense of personal understanding.

Throughout the 1970s, Spielberg developed an interest in the growing fascination with the UFO phenomenon, and initially attempted to pitch either a documentary or a docudrama about it, but was always rejected and, eventually, Jaws took precedence over anything else. It's this that informs Close Encounters of the Third Kind as much as anything else, because the 1970s were the true heyday of inexplicata and high strangeness. Although the modern UFO phenomenon as it is usually conceptualized dates to the 1940s and 1950s and thus is more properly seen as a contemporary of the Golden Age of science fiction, with which it ran parallel, it was the 1970s that saw the highest concentration of sightings that form the background of what the field of Forteanism is today.

In April of 1977, the same year Close Encounters of the Third Kind was released, multiple witnesses claimed to have sighted a pale creature with large eyes and limbs like tendrils haunting the town of Dover, Massachusetts in an event that has come to be known as “The Dover Demon Case” and that launched the cryptozoological and Fortean career of behavioural scientist Loren Coleman. Two years prior to that, John Keel published his landmark work of investigative journalism The Mothman Prophecies, which retold his firsthand experiences trying to report on a series of bizarre and unexplainable events in Point Pleasant, West Virginia leading up to the collapse of the Silver Bridge, including multiple sightings of glowing, shape-changing lights in the sky, a reported contactee case with a being known as Indrid Cold, the definitive, archetypical Men in Black account and, of course, the titular Mothman: A six-foot tall, black, winged humanoid resembling a headless torso with glowing red eyes where its chest should be and enormous black wings, thought by some to be a spiritual guardian come to warn of impending doom. Although all the Point Pleasant events happened in 1966 and 1967, Keel's book wasn't published until 1975, which is when the story became a mainstream phenomenon.

One year before the publication of The Mothman Prophecies, in 1973-4, there was a rash of unexplainable events throughout the state of Pennsylvania, including a plethora of UFO sightings that corresponded with sightings of Bigfoot-like creatures with green, glowing eyes who seemed to appear out of and disappear into thin air at will. Cases like these and other such events throughout the 1970s began to blur the lines between conventional UFOlogy, which had long held (and still does) to the “ETH” or “extraterrestrial hypothesis”, (which predictably, claimed that UFOs are spacecraft piloted by advanced visitors from other planets), an attitude which defined the so-called UFO era of the 1940s and 1950s, and Forteanism, a discipline which hadn't been seriously examined in a century.

Named for natural scientist and satirist Charles Fort and his concept of “Damned Data”, Forteanism simply means the scientific pursuit of anomalous and unexplained phenomenon that conventional science doesn't like to soil its hands with and a rejection of the claim made by anyone, even scientists, to posses Ultimate Knowledge. And Close Encounters of the Third Kind is very much a part of this zeitgeist: Far from being a throwback to Golden Age Hard SF, UFOlogy, Roswellianism and the ETH (despite the UFOs in the movie actually being extraterrestrials), Close Encounters of the Third Kind takes the tortured, wailing Fortean soul of the 1970s and sets it at ease by combining it with Steven Spielberg's rapturous sense of cosmic oneness and personal memory. There are three key figures here: One, of course, is Spielberg himself. Second is Richard Dreyfuss' character Roy Neary, and third is Jacques Vallée.

A former student of J. Allen Hynek, Jacques Vallée is a computer scientist and astronomer who helped create computer models of Mars for NASA and worked with the early ARPANET experiments, but who is likely most famous for his captivating and controversial theories about the UFO phenomenon. A self-described “heretic among heretics”, Vallée gained fame in the UFOlogy community for providing a credible scientific defense of the ETH...before then going on to completely reject it, or rather to reject its self-assured universal acceptance amongst UFOlogists as being too narrow (how very Fortean).

Drawing on Hynek, Vallée believes that we should be open to the possibility that what we know as the UFO phenomenon could actually be a series of different phenomenon, one of which could be a singular nonhuman intelligence that has existed alongside humanity that adapts different cultural forms, perhaps as part of a shared collective unconsciousness. Vallée was the first researcher to compare modern UFO reports to ancient stories about encounters with faery and travelling to Otherworlds, as described in his book Passport to Magonia, and to point out the UFO phenomenon has existed practically since the dawn of humanity (his most recent book, Wonders in the Sky, is a rather staggering work that chronicles every single UFO sighting of scientific merit *in history* up to the 1880s-I highly recommend it).

Steven Spielberg was provably influenced by Vallée's work when making Close Encounters of the Third Kind, because not only did he bring Vallée on as a consultant, he also explicitly based Doctor Lacombe, François Truffaut's character in the film, on Vallée himself. But while Vallée frequently openly wonders about his hypothesized nonhuman intelligence potentially manipulating humans for some unknown and unseen purpose, Spielberg's idealism, and, I'll say it, childlike sense of wonder, prevents him from being that cynical, and Close Encounters of the Third Kind has all of this in droves. The scene on the hill where the contactees watch the UFOs glide over the road before flying off in formation perfectly conveys a profound sense of cosmic wonder, beauty, love and togetherness, which is mirrored again when Jillian and Roy tearfully watch the aliens greet the humans in the film's final moments. At no point in the movie do the UFOs once feel frightening or threatening: Strange, mysterious and difficult to understand, yes, but never scary. When we see those lights in the sky at night, we feel nothing but an overwhelming sense of joy and kindness.

Spielberg's focus on children is easy to see throughout the film. Barry is the first person who is contacted, and he's the only main character who is never unnerved or confused by what's going on: He simply accepts and understands. The aliens themselves look remarkably childlike too, so it's quite easy to read this as Spielberg saying a child's perspective is the best way to engage with the world and attain higher states of enlightenment. And it's easy from this to launch into the typical criticism of Spielberg, that his focus on childlike wonder embraces naivete and sentimentality at the expense of adult experience. But to do this, we would have to ignore practically everything else about Close Encounters of the Third Kind: Unlike with E.T. and Elliot, Barry is manifestly not the protagonist here, Roy and Jillian are (actually, to be perfectly accurate, the protagonist is really probably Lacombe, though the film is really quite good at building an ensemble cast for what it is) and it's not his perspective we're supposed to be paying the most attention to.

Like Experiences before it, Close Encounters of the Third Kind is really about the intersection of the greater universe with everyday, working-class people. The mythic with the mundane. This is the most obvious with telephone repairman Roy and single mom Jillian, but none of the other people contacted come from particularly privileged backgrounds either, from the other blue-collar people Roy and Jillian meet on the Indiana-Ohio line to the farmers and nomads in Mongolia, India and the Sonora Desert. Even Lacombe, who is a scientist and spends most of the movie running around with the military, is just someone who wants to understand his place in the universe and is at frequent odds with his ostensible superiors (which mirrors the real life Jacques Vallée's distrust of the military establishment: It was his witnessing of the immediate wiping of record tapes capturing a retrograde satellite while working for the French Space Agency in 1955, a time when no space agency had the means to launch an artificial satellite, that inspired him to take up independent UFO investigation in the first place).

“The sun came out last night. And it sang to me.”

Close Encounters of the Third Kind is sometimes read to have Christian undertones (odd, given Spielberg's Jewish heritage), and there is the slightest hint of pop Christianity about it: The Ten Commandments comes on television at one point, and the aliens greeting Roy and escorting him into the Mothership looks a bit like angels escorting someone to heaven (Roy's arms are even outstretched, and he has been described as a Moses figure. Yes this, is from the Old Testament, but the iconography on display, especially The Ten Commandments, is obviously pop Christian).

A few things strike me about this reading: For one, Jacques Vallée would probably point out a lot of things described in the Bible could be read as UFO sightings. Secondly, it's silly to suggest Spielberg didn't know who his audience was in the 1970s United States (Hint: the major's comment when the army is trying to figure out how to evacuate the area around Devil's Tower about “every Christian soul” is a big clue). But what really disabuses me of any pop Christian reading of this movie is its most iconic aspects: Devil's Tower, and those five little notes.

It would be facile to claim that the aliens in Close Encounters of the Third Kind simply communicate through music, or that music is their language. That's plainly not what's going on: Rather, it's music that both the aliens and the humans recognise as a *universal* form of expression. Recent neurological studies suggest that our reaction to music is largely on the subconscious level, literally resonating with parts of our brain that no other art form can reach. Music is something very primal, and this is once again something mystics have known for centuries. Shamans around the world use music to help enter trance and attain altered states of consciousness, and the Gnostic heretics believe in the concept of musica universalis, “The Music of the Spheres”, upon which the entire universe is built.

And again, Steven Spielberg understands this: Lacombe and his team travel to India to learn the famous five notes, where the aliens have quite clearly already been. To me, this is one of the most hauntingly powerful and moving scenes, not just in Close Encounters of the Third Kind, but in all of cinema, as the entire population of an Indian spiritual sect has turned out to chant that indescribably lovely musical sequence at the sky in unison. Spielberg and his team gave us an unabashed Classic Hollywood moment in just about the last moment it was possible to do so. I hear, and feel that chant, and its powerful sense of understanding, resonate in my mind long after the credits to the actual movie roll.

(Which is not, of course, to discount the more famous synthesizer version at the end: A soft, poignant, gently yearning rendition that's quintessentially Long 1980s and an elegant masterpiece of electronica. I dare you not to cry along with Jillian when you first hear it.)

And furthermore, it provides us with all the material we need to redeem the heavy military focus elsewhere in the movie: It's simply not the case that the US military were the ones who made first contact, in spite of them getting the climactic scene: The aliens came and spoke to people all over the world, and, just as Jacques Vallée felt, each group of people interprets the experience through the lens of their own culture. Which is indeed what happened to Roy and Jillian too, and what Experiences was trying to get at: It's the same thing William Shatner was trying to tell us on The Transformed Man-Ultimately, we all have to look within ourselves to work out what enlightenment and the transcendent means to us individually and as communal beings. Imagine a scene as spectacular and wondrous as the Indiana/Ohio line or the climax at Devil's Tower playing out each night to different people all over the world: *That's* what's happening during the cuts in Close Encounters of the Third Kind.

There is, of course, Devil's Tower itself. The special effects of the scene are of course magnificent: Douglas Trumbull did them, and he also similarly supervised the effects shots on 2001: A Space Odyssey, Star Trek: The Motion Picture and Blade Runner, meaning he's pretty much responsible for every one of the most iconic and memorable images from my moviegoing career. I'm constantly awestruck by Trumbull's work: He's an unabashed master at perfectly conveying the most esoteric and indescribable visions and landscapes, which also makes me more than a little jealous of his raw talent. As someone who constantly struggles trying to convey their visions and imaginary worlds in an artistic form, there's not much I wouldn't give for an ounce of Trumbull's skill.

But the power of this moment extends beyond the scene itself: Loren Coleman, an expert in both behavioural patterns and Fortean inexplicata, often points out how places that have certain names (most frequently ones that in some way or another reference devils or faeries) tend to have a much higher concentration and rate of high strangeness than others. Like his frequent nods to the work of J. Allen Hynek and Jacques Vallée, this shows that Steven Spielberg quite evidently did his homework properly. Of course the aliens would point Lacombe's research team to Devil's Tower. And of course, it would be a Tower, a structure that commands a sense of mystery, awe and wonder as it rises from the Earth like a tuning fork or maestro's baton, to tune into the eternal music of the universe.

If Close Encounters of the Third Kind is indebted to any part of Westernism, it's not pop Christianity, but rather a resurrection of esoteric gnosticism fused with ancient pagan tales of faery-lands and Otherworlds (also note how the people who return from the ship at the end have not aged since they were last seen, just as travellers to the Land of Eternal Summer do not age at the same rate as people in our world do). This is, in fact, a story about ordinary people who have a chance encounter leading them to fall into a whole new world, or rather, who gain the experience and knowledge to understand the harmony between worlds that unites us all together. It's a story about the rediscovery of mysticism, shamanism and enlightenment in the late-capitalism, modernist West, and its trying to tell us such things belong to all of humankind, but especially to the ordinary folks.

It is also true, however, that Close Encounters of the Third Kind is oftentimes more about the awe one feels at the dawn of such a journey, not the wisdom one learns from undertaking the journey itself. In many was this could be seen as a return to children's literature, and thus another example of Steven Spielberg's “childlike naivete”. But, to borrow from Shigeru Miyamoto, one not need be a child or revert to the mentality of child to understand wonder and joy at experiencing the Cosmic Whole: One merely needs to consciously understand some things that children may know innately and retain that throughout our lives. Always keep learning and growing, but never lose sight of what connects you to your fellow beings and the larger universe. And remember to smile about it, because that's the most joyous feeling of all. If Close Encounters of the Third Kind is children's literature, it's children's literature for adults, remaining as cosmically profound and moving as it is structurally simplistic. I think we need more things like that.

If that's hopelessly naive and childish, than guilty as charged.

I will submit Close Encounters of the Third Kind is not *quite* a perfect movie. There are things about it I've always had problems with, and even Steven Spielberg says there are things about it he would change, but I'm actually going to disagree with him on what. Spielberg says that he made the film before he became a father, and had he made it now he would never have let Roy board the Mothership and “abandon” Ronnie and his children. Well, with all due respect to Mr. Spielberg...he's wrong. Ever since becoming a parent, Spielberg has supplanted his themes of childlike wonder with an equally strong emphasis on the importance and responsibilities of fatherhood, the most egregious example I can think of is turning Captain Haddock into a father figure for Tintin in his Adventures of Tintin movie, which couldn't misread both characters any harder if it tried. I hate to say parenthood ruins people's sense of creativity and imagination...but in this case it kinda did.

The thing is, Ronnie and those kids are *not* Roy's family. That's actually the whole point of their entire role in the movie: Roy didn't “abandon” them, they left him because they couldn't understand him and Ronnie in particular simply could not accept that the world was not as neat, orderly and mundane as she wanted to think it was. Just like William Shatner said, enlightenment looks like raving lunacy to the unenlightened, or to those too scared to try for it. Props go to Teri Garr here, by the way, who plays Ronnie as essentially what Roberta Lincoln from “Assignment: Earth” would be like as a housewife, which is as demonstrative of her considerable acting chops as it is somewhat sad, considering two of her three most famous roles are harried, frenzied and ditzy blonde women (and speaking of the original Star Trek, I have to say I noticed and appreciated Roy's AMT USS Enterprise and Klingon Battlecruiser mobile). No, Roy's real family is Jillian and Barry, and *that's* where Close Encounters of the Third Kind actually drops the ball.

The scene at the end where Jillian explains to Roy that she's “not ready” and stays behind to pick up Barry while Roy leaves to join the aliens is basically inexplicable and inexcusable. The entire movie has been building to bringing Roy and Jillian together because of their shared experiences...and now it splits them up, at the most crucial scene in the whole film? To paraphrase Roy himself, why can't they all go together? Because there's a real sexism here, as it implies Jillian's entire motivation was to look after Barry (which it isn't, but that's the implication of that scene) and this means the movie ends on the really sour note that men can go on transcendent mystical adventures and so can children because of their unique perspective, but women can't because they're too domestic (I know there are women in the military unit that leaves at the end, but why wouldn't you have your actual heroine among them?). I can forgive Ronnie because being willfully blinkered is part of her character, but there's absolutely no reason or excuse for Jillian not to leave with Roy. In fact, it submarines the entire message of the rest of the film: She had the exact same kind of shamanic experience and is every bit as entitled to it as he is, and furthermore, they love each other goddammit.

(Incidentally, Teri Garr initially tried out for Jillian's role, which she really wanted and I actually would have liked to see).

There are a few other little things that are maybe less successful than others: Something could be made about the fact that there are fewer nonwhite, non-Western characters depicted as individuals when compared to the Westerners: Mongolia, Mexico and, as brilliant as the rest of the scene ultimately is, India, are all ultimately portrayed as somewhat homogenous and uniform, though there *are* nonwhite, non-Western characters too (most notably the African American air traffic controller in Indianapolis and a few officers in the climactic scene at Devil's Tower). Although that noted, I tend to feel Close Encounters of the Third Kind is much, much better than Hollywood's usual standards when it comes to this sort of thing and while these inconsistencies should be pointed out, they're nowhere near bad enough to damn the whole film.

Which is actually my takeaway from this movie in general: Close Encounters of the Third Kind is a profound, moving, inspirational work that should stir the soul of anyone who watches it. It may not be the most comprehensive overview of everything it tackles, but you'd be hard pressed to find a better introduction in the world of mass market Soda Pop Art, especially one that leaves you with more vivid images and more powerful emotions. Coming during Hollywood's last great stab at relevance, its a fitting reminder of the things the cinematic spectacle model could actually do right, and also arguably the last moment where it did do them right. There aren't many times I truly *get* Hollywood or will praise its overt embrace of spectacle, but as far as I'm concerned Close Encounters of the Third Kind is without question the pinnacle of what Hollywood can do.

It is, quite simply, the greatest live action science fiction movie of all time.

I get from one to five calls a day from folks who claim to be contractors. Some of them probably are. Some of them are probably outta-work folks who answered an ad somewhere that they could make Big Bucks from their home phone. They were sent a script and a list of numbers to call…and if calling and reading me that script results in me hiring their construction firm to construct, they will get a commission.

As I've written here before, a lot of those scripts commence with outright lying…

Hello, Mr. Evanier! My name is Sam Footface with Fazzblatt Construction. We spoke last August and you were so nice to me but you said you weren't quite ready to do that construction work you had planned on your home and you said to call back in May. If you're ready now, I would like to send one of our crew members over to give you that free estimate we discussed…"

I stop them after the part about how we spoke last August and I say, "No, we didn't. You're lying." At that point, they either hang up or they argue for about twenty seconds and hang up…and I don't blame them. They're obviously not going to sell me and they have other names on their lists. I wonder what the batting average is on a job like that. One nibble out of a hundred? One out of five hundred?

I wonder how those people feel about getting the figurative door slammed in their faces every minute or so, hour after hour. They also have to depend on their employer giving them an honest reporting of what kind of business resulted from their calling and giving them an accurate accounting of the sales on which their commissions will be based. How far can you trust an employer that hired you to lie to people?

Of all the zillion and one calls I've received, my favorite well may be one that came in last week. I suspect the caller in this case actually was a contractor and not a very successful one. The guy sounded weary and fed up…kind of like Don Imus without the cheery twinkle in his voice. Here with fictitious names inserted is how that call went…

HIM: Mr. Evanier, this is Harvey Sneezeguard with Sneezeguard Construction. I'm wondering if you need any work done on your home…

ME: You're about the eighth contractor to call me this week and it's only Tuesday so —

HIM: Hey, listen, I don't need you to act like I'm wasting your time. I'm just trying to earn a living like a good American and I don't need you pissing on a hard-working family man trying to feed his family. And don't you lecture me either about how you're on the "No Call List." It doesn't apply to individual businesses like mine and I can call you and do whatever I have to do grow my business and keep the doors open. If you don't need any contracting at the moment, fine. But don't tell me I'm wasting your time because you don't know me and you have no right to say that!

ME: How soon can you be here to start building an add-on to my home?

No, I didn't speak that last line and it wouldn't have mattered if I had because he slammed down the phone after he said what he said. This is not the first call like this I've received with a lot of hostility involved but it was the most amazing. Anyone wondering why this guy is in such need of customers?

I read this recent piece on how Harper Lee has finally allowed an e-book edition of her classic novel To Kill a Mockingbird, to be produced. Of course, in the absence of an authorised e-book that readers can pay for, there are plenty of unauthorised ones — it’s trivial to find on any torrent site. My eye was caught by a comment on the article, discussing the existence of these pirate e-books:

This is sad, but doesn’t surprise me. Its the reality of the world we live in today. I suspect the biggest purchasers of this e-book will be over the age of 40 – those under don’t tend to realise the purpose or value of copyright.

That is exactly wrong.

Because the purpose of copyright is not to reward authors (or, more often these days, copyright holders who are not authors but acquirers). It’s to benefit society. The principles underlying copyright laws in different countries are much the same, but the copyright clause of the U.S. Constitution spells it out nicely:

[Congress is empowered] To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries.

I’m sure you follow: giving authors exclusive rights to their creations is not the purpose of copyright; it’s the mechanism. The purpose is to promote the progress of science and art.

In effect, society says to creative people: “We want you to create useful and interesting work. Because we want society to get the benefit of that work, we’ll offer you a financial incentive to create it, by giving up a portion of the work’s value for a limited time. By allowing you alone to exploit it, we hope that the total value generated for society will exceed the value lost.”

And of course that’s gone terribly wrong. One reason for this is that copyright terms grow ever longer — in the US, works are now protected until 70 years after the death of the author — so that the value realised by society is reduced for typically a century or so. The “for a limited time” clause is effectively ignored.

To Kill a Mockingbird was published in 1960. Under the earliest US copyright law, which had a term of 14 years, it would have gone into the public domain in 1974 unless Lee took steps to renew that copyright for another 14 years — something she would have been able to do just once. That would have allowed it to stay in copyright until 1988. In other words, even had its copyright been renewed, To Kill a Mockingbird would now have been in the public domain for more than a quarter of a century.

Instead, it’s remained in copyright (and will remain so for at least another 70 years). So royalties have continued to flow. It’s perhaps largely for this reason that Harper Lee never got around to completing another book — Mockingbird became her meal-ticket for life. In short, in this case copyright law did the exact opposite of what it was intended for: it removed the incentive to create more works.

The answer of course is a return to much shorter copyright terms. While copyright holders continue to screw everyone, all the time, huge swathes of the population will continue to hold copyright in contempt. The only way to save it is to wind it back to what it was intended to be.

 

Same-sex marriages and coats of arms.

You didn't think I was really going to skip this one, did you?

But this is going to be a different sort of Star Wars retrospective then is perhaps the expected norm. Because I really find all the major things that can be said about this movie to be not only obvious, but commonly accepted knowledge. And ultimately because, one or two points notwithstanding, the legacy and impact of Star Wars are not actually especially important here in Star Trek land.

The major intersection between Star Wars and Star Trek I can think of is far more materialistic than inspirational: Paramount's decision to scrap Star Trek Phase II and greenlight Star Trek: The Motion Picture instead would seem to be the standard response, but that actually had far more to do with Close Encounters of the Third Kind then it did with Episode IV, as during the period between the two films everyone largely assumed Star Wars was a fluke and science fiction held no promise for regular, reliable success at the box office. The only other thing I can think of off the top of my head is the frequent description of Benjamin Sisko's story as a “Hero's Journey”, which to me is just as much about a fundamental failure to understand what Star Trek: Deep Space Nine was supposed to be about then it is about Star Wars cementing itself into the collective Western consciousness.

I am, of course, expected to talk about Joseph Campbell, the Myth of the Hero, how Star Wars draws on many myth and story archetypes from around the world and how that transformed not only the pop culture landscape, but how people respond to all stories at an instinctual level. It's had an incalculable impact on entire generations of writers and readers alike, and I'm sure you all are waiting for me to say something about it. The thing is, absolutely everybody who has ever written about Star Wars has talked about this: Star Wars is, in fact, one of the most overanalysed and overstudied works of fiction in history. I'll just let James Rolfe explain this in a far more heartfelt, poignant and personal way then I could ever manage, and then call in Phil Sandifer to make the case for the prosecution (in spite of me largely disagreeing completely with his opinion of Star Trek) and to point out the problems with the Campbellian approach. I have literally nothing more to contribute.

One observation I will make is that one of the reasons at least the original Star Wars had the impact it did was because it is very good at building a sense of a larger pre-exisiting world and history that we only get fleeting glimpses of. Everything from the famous opening text crawl, to Obi-Wan telling Luke about the mysterious and long-departed Jedi, to the Jawa merchants and the canteen on Tatooine (with its twin suns) to the Empire itself, is described in terms that make them seem equally wondrous, fantastical and mundane. Star Wars, right from the very beginning, seems to exist in a grand, rich world of its own, and the fact that the characters were all very well versed in what this world was and how it worked and we as the audience very much weren't was surely fascinating at the time, and made it all the easier to become drawn to Luke Skywalker and his Hero's Journey Myth Arc. And I will grant that Star Trek, in spite of its ridiculous predilection to pointless fanwank, is simply nowhere near as good at this: It's not reliably great at instilling that particular kind of wonder and imagination, even in the cases where it really, really needed to be (Bajor springs immediately to mind here).

But the thing is, for whatever reason, Star Wars' magic spell never worked on me. I can't really tell you why (well, I can to some extent, but I'll talk about that later), it just didn't. What interests me the most about Star Wars as a work is how patchwork a thing it really is. The iconic look and feel of the series is of course due to Ralph McQuarrie, as is well known by now, and most of the world-building elements come from Alan Dean Foster. Even the much talked-about toyetic nature of Star Wars comes from somebody else, namely Steven Spielberg. During the production of Close Encounters of the Third Kind, Spielberg was approached by Kenner who wanted to use the film as the basis for a large-scale new line of toys. Spielberg pointed them in the direction of an up-and-coming filmmaker named George Lucas who was working on a new science fiction film that he felt might be more what Kenner was looking for.

Most tellingly, though George Lucas gets a bunch of credit for taking the Myth of the Hero stuff and translating it into the context of a science fiction blockbuster, neither he nor anyone else associated with it seemed to talk that angle up much until The Empire Strikes Back, which was also suspiciously around the time Joseph Campbell was starting to get really popular as a fixture on PBS and when discourse about Star Wars was starting to reach critical mass. Furthermore, in spite of what literally everyone says, as far as I understand it The Empire Strikes Back was never even planned, nor, for that matter, was Return of the Jedi or any other Star Wars work: The original film was a total gamble with no real expectations, and it retroactively became the first part of an epic when George Lucas realised how successful it had been (I don't have a specific link here, but search Cracked.com for “Star Wars”: They do a surprising amount of historical mythbusting in this regard).

So what we have here is, like all examples of large-scale Soda Pop Art, a loose, dissociated collection of things that have been given the appearance of being a singular, monolithic, untouchable artistic statement in the wake of, and to capitalize on, its unexpected popular and critical success. Indeed, I'm not even convinced that Star Wars' resurrection of the pulp style of science fiction was in any way unique apart from being the first real time this was done on a blockbuster, hyper-mainstream scale. Certainly not when compared to the fusion of Hard SF, Pulp sci-fi and soap opera that characterizes, say, Star Trek. Which is, incidentally, what this blog is about.

Looking at Star Wars from a Star Trek perspective (or, at least mine) is a confusing experience. There was a period in my life where it seemed the most obvious thing in the world to view Star Wars and the Star Wars faithful (who I once derisively nicknamed “Warries” as payback for “Trekkie”-It was very, very long ago and I wasn't any cleverer at that time then I am now) as The Enemy. This was exacerbated by the fact that the Star Wars fans I did know were extremely loyal and combative, and took every opportunity to attack me for my love of Star Trek and indifference to their franchise. This became especially painful for me when Star Wars began to take over *massively* in the 1990s on the back of the home video and theatrical re-releases, Special Editions and prequel films while Star Trek faltered and stumbled through that same era, beginning its long, slow slide towards irrelevance the moment Star Trek: The Next Generation signed off. Nor did it help when, in response to this, the Hasbro Star Wars toy line absolutely exploded, relegating my beloved Playmates Star Trek line to extinction, ironically doing so on the back of Playmates' reinvigoration of the toy industry.

(This is a longstanding source of enmity between me and Star Wars: I explicitly blame it for preventing me from being able to find figures of Tasha Yar, Ro Laren and the *entire* Star Trek: Deep Space Nine line for over a *decade*. Similarly, I'm also less than thrilled that the “official” Star Wars “holiday” on May 4 each and every year completely overshadows the actual history of the day, which is, among other things, Alice Liddel's birthday and the day when Alice's Adventures in Wonderland is said to take place, as well as a major date in revolutionary politics. Sometimes it feels like this franchise is deliberately harassing me.)

Indeed, this seemed to be the accepted thing for at least a time. Star Wars fans and Star Trek fans were not seen in polite company together, and there was no love lost between the two camps. One of the foundational pop culture debates has always been: “Star Wars or Star Trek?”, to the point it's even a question on OKCupid. But then there came a period where there started to be more of a bleedover between the two fandoms, and I'm not sure where to draw the line here. I want to say it wasn't any time in my lifetime: Maybe it was with The Phantom Menace, as that was the first Star Wars in living memory of the generation for whom fandoms stopped being seen as a sparring, factionalized things and became things you collected: The Tumblr generation talks at great length about all the different fandoms they're a part of where when I was younger you only tended to have one (the obvious thing that changed was, of course, the Internet. No, I'm not doing a Sensor Scan on that).

But then there does seem to be the belief among some people that the people who like Star Trek should like Star Wars as well, and I'm not sure why, as they're not even remotely the same thing: While both Star Wars and Star Trek can loosely be called sci-fi-fantasy, Star Wars owes far, far more to the epic sword-and-socery adventure serials and dimestore novels then Star Trek, which is more its own weird little thing. If you could sum up Star Trek's brand of sci-fi fantasy, you might say it's about exploring the territory between the mythic and the mundane and what it means to be utopian. Star Trek isn't always as true to its underlying philosophy as it really needs to be, but Star Wars doesn't even have an underlying philosophy, except for some superficial motifs haphazardly lifted from Eastern mysticism and United States-ized to make them palatable to a popcorn blockbuster audience.

(There is an argument to be made here that it's specifically this slapdash syncretism and hyper-mainstream status that allows Star Wars to be many people's first interaction with the concept of comparative mythology, and I grant that: Star Wars isn't particularly good at this, but it's likely the first exposure many people are going to have with the idea.)

I want to say this shift in attitude has to do with Nerd Culture, who stereotypically enjoy anything that's remotely science-y (it doesn't have to be actual science and very frequently isn't: The key is that it's science-y and thus has a whiff of futurism, technofetishism and elitism about it), but then again one of the biggest joint Star Trek and Star Wars fans I can think of is VFX artist and professional MythBuster Grant Imahara, who I wouldn't call part of Nerd Culture. Imahara is more what I'd refer to as a Maker Hobbyist and has a fascination with tinkering, the process of making movies and practical effects, which is not something the average Nerd cares about.

(The reverse is also true: The Makers I know who aren't interested in the filmmaking side of things couldn't care less about Nerd Culture stuff.)

Indeed, Imahara, as well as his colleagues at M5, did a lot of the effects for the Star Wars prequels themselves. But Imahara also talks about how much he was inspired by “Arena” and watching Captain Kirk build the tree cannon as a kid (not to mention the fact he's as of this writing the current Mr. Sulu, which means I probably ought to talk about him more often), which is a statement that would have been considered blasphemous when I was younger. No, M5 may be heroes to a certain sect of Nerds, but they're not Nerds themselves.

But I've run into this attitude and overlap elsewhere too. As a matter of fact, it's the primary reason I have a history with Star Wars to talk about in the first place. My parents strongly pushed me to watch the original Star Wars trilogy after my love of Star Trek started to blossom, being of the belief that because I clearly liked science fiction now and Star Wars was science fiction too, I'd like it just as much as Star Trek. This...did not go over well with me at first and it took some arm twisting to get me to actually sit down with these movies. Even then I knew Star Trek and Star Wars were never supposed to meet, and watching the original trilogy felt a little bit like betrayal. Though I will say I didn't *hate* the first movie when I finally saw it, and I remember actually being impressed with a few things. Naturally, Princess Leia was my favourite, and I also liked the design of the X-Wings and the Death Star, as well as the trench run bit from the end. I liked the other two movies significantly less (though I did dig the Luke vs. Vader tightrope battle over the pit scene in Empire Strikes Back), to the point I actively disliked Return of the Jedi, and I'm still not a fan of either it or Empire to this day.

But in spite of this, and even though I quite enjoyed the Star Wars: Rogue Squadron video games from the late-90s and early-2000s, Star Wars simply did not have the profound, life-changing impact on me that it seems to have had on everyone else (Well, everyone save Phil Sandifer, obviously). People who I'd otherwise consider kindred spirits and fellow travellers (like James Rolfe above) don't hesitate to share their breathless love of the Star Wars Saga, and it always leaves me feeling left out. Even Michael Kirkbride, one of the lead designers on The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind and someone who has become a massively inspirational figure for me, was profoundly shaped by Star Wars, so much so that in 1999 he and fellow Elder Scrolls luminaries Kurt Kuhlmann and Ken Rolston pitched a television show set in the Star Wars universe called Star Wars: Rebellion, which would have chronicled the rise of the Rebel Alliance, and, knowing who was involved, would likely have been a brilliant, subversive and transformative take on the franchise and probably the single greatest science fiction show of its time. It bothers me that I can't see the same things people like them see in Star Wars.

(Though now that I've said that I wonder if one of these things might in fact be the same thing I see in Star Trek: The fact it's a contemporary myth structure drawing from a wide pool of cultural themes and motifs that has grown to such a size it belongs to everyone. It's telling to me that at least Kirkbride's background is in comparative religion: He and his co-writers are the only people apart from Aleister Crowley and Alan Moore I've ever read who can do syncretism without lapsing into cultural appropriation. In fact, given that and where my interests for future projects lie, this means I may have to actually cover Star Wars: Rebellion in depth at some point.)

This is actually the real legacy of Star Wars for me: It left me with a profound feeling of loneliness and isolation, because it was so obviously a shared cultural signifier that I was denied participating in because I simply didn't get it. Everyone else I know seems to have the exact same story and experience with the original Star Wars Trilogy...except me. Everyone shares their fond, vivid memories of having their lives changed, eyes opened and worldviews shifted upon viewing these films at an early age...except me. And, as the Hasbro Star Wars line snowballed to greater and greater sizes, displacing everything else and pushing the Playmates Star Trek line I loved so much and so deeply further and further to the margins of each and every toy store I visited, my lack of understanding turned to active anger and resentment, as it seemed to be a metaphor in plastic for the direction science fiction fandom was starting to go in the 1990s. And it was a direction that had no place for me anymore.