Santorum and his discontents

I hate that I'm writing about Santorum. 

I don't think he has a chance in hell of winning the Republican nomination; most of the crap about his offering a challenge to Romney is just the media's horse race fever. [Just for fun: Slate has a fun horse race graphic — but note that even when Santorum is "surging ahead," he's 30+ delegates behind Romney.] Waste of my time. And probably yours, for which I apologize.

Nonetheless...

Here's Santorum on the audacity of Obama urging everyone to go to college (it's only a little over a minute, so please watch this one — no matter how painful...):

And here, he doubles down on Meet the Press (this one's a little longer, but it's still under three minutes — I summarize below, if three minutes is too long to suffer this fool) : 

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[In case you don't suffer fools lightly: Among other things, Santorum complains about the "over-politicized values and political [sic] correct values" of the left, which are found on "most colleges and university campuses," and claims — as if this is in contrast to Obama — that he advocates everyone having the opportunity to attend a college or any other higher level of training.  "It doesn't mean you have to go to a four-year college degree," he says, "and the president saying that everyone should — I think that everyone should have the opportunity. The question is, what's best for you?"  Santorum argues that not everyone has the skills for college; he "disagrees" with telling people, "unless you do this, then you're not living up to our goals." He then suggests — again, as if this is somehow in contrast to Obama — that trade schools are a good alternative for many people, and that we shouldn't "look down our noses" at people who opt for such alternatives as "less, just because you didn't get a four year college degree."]

I don't even know where to begin to make a coherent response. Maybe I can't.

But how about starting here, in Obama's speech to the Joint Session of Congress in 2009:

It is our responsibility as lawmakers and educators to make this system work. But it is the responsibility of every citizen to participate in it. And so tonight, I ask every American to commit to at least one year or more of higher education or career training. This can be community college or a four-year school; vocational training or an apprenticeship. But whatever the training may be, every American will need to get more than a high school diploma. And dropping out of high school is no longer an option. It's not just quitting on yourself, it's quitting on your country — and this country needs and values the talents of every American. That is why we will provide the support necessary for you to complete college and meet a new goal: by 2020, America will once again have the highest proportion of college graduates in the world. (my emphasis)

[You can watch the speech or read the transcript, if you like. Obama's comments on education in general start at 29:14; the above quote starts at 31:36. And, if this means anything, not everything he proposes sits well with me... but that's not the point here.] 


Despite Santorum's claims, Obama never suggested that everyone go to a four year college and get a degree. Does Obama call for the highest proportion of college graduates in the world? Yes... and given that, aside from a handful of entrepreneurs whose exception proves the rule, this is in most cases the most effective road to success, it seems a reasonable goal.

But that's not even what has me spitting. 

Please watch ten seconds of that first clip again —  from 0:42-0:52. 

(I'll wait...)

If all we had was the transcript — the words on paper — the context would seem pretty clearly to be all about those god damned "liberal" college professors "indoctrinating" their poor, vulnerable college students. (Don't get me started on this patronizing view of students....)

If we did a little research (pretending for a moment that we took this idiot seriously), we'd find that this complaint about liberal indoctrination comes from personal experience: In a follow-up interview with George Stephanopoulos, for example, he complained about how, at Penn State, he was "docked" for his conservative views. But I'm going to say this: If his speech were an argumentative essay, I'd dock his ass, too. But it wouldn't be for conservative views; it would be for misrepresenting his opposition, and for faulty logic. Something for which, incidentally, I dock people with whom I agree.

But really, I've paid way more attention to Santorum than he deserves.  What I really care about is  his audience.

I know it's painful, but please watch that first clip again, paying attention to the difference in audience response to each of his... claims(?).

Claim 1: "President Obama once said that he wants everybody in America to go to college. What a snob." 

Reaction: As you'd expect with any joke, surprised laughter, followed by applause. (Kudos to the three men who didn't react...)

Claim 2: "There are good decent men and women who go out and work hard every day and put their skills to test that aren't taught by some liberal college professor trying to indoctrinate them."  

Reaction: Applause, cheering, whistling.

Claim 3: "Oh, I understand why he wants you to go to college. He wants to remake you into his image."

Reaction: (And here's the break...) No laughter, no applause. Instead, there's a kind of murmuring, punctuated by a sudden "Yeah!" from the crowd.

Why the difference?

My take: we've moved from Comedy Central to Revival Hour. 

The rhetoric here is Biblical: the phrase remade in his image resonates with the Biblical creation story, where God says, "Let us make man in our image." This puts Obama in the role of usurper, trying to take the role of God. Like Lucifer. 

Or worse, given that he's a black man... Can you say, "Uppity"?

No doubt people will say I've gone too far. Santorum — Catholic or no — isn't clever enough to demonize his opponent so subtly (though that's what speech writers are for...).  Maybe. But listen again to the audience's reactions. The difference is obvious: the first two claims draw laughter and applause; the third doesn't — though, in my view, it is no less approving. Indeed, it may be more so.

Santorum, though frightening, is irrelevant. But the people who listen to him, who applaud him, who grin at what a "snob" (can you say, "Uppity"?) our president is for emphasizing education, of all things... these people will transfer their loyalties (and votes) to whichever candidate claims the GOP nomination (okay, okay, Romney). 

And these are the people who scare the beJESUS out of me.

Gaming and Sci-Fi

Gaming — the video variety, not the gambling kind — has made itself at home in our cultural consciousness. It's been settling in for awhile, probably for longer than I've been aware.

There have been, of course, the staggering, multi-billion dollar revenues that gaming companies rake in. But money is only so interesting. It's more interesting to me when relatively marginalized activities hit the mainstream.

One of my favorite podcasts, On the Media, ran — and a year later reprised — an hour-long look at the history, influence, culture, and future of videogaming. Toward the end was an interview with a game designer, Jane McGonigal, whose TED talk asks why the real world doesn't work more like an online game. Her project, as she puts it: "to make it as easy to save the world in real life as it is to save the world in online games." It's an interesting presentation, both for her optimistic argument and for the nervous laughter at many of the statistics she spashes on the screen. Is gaming mainstream now? Maybe. But not comfortably so.

I've just recently finished three science fiction narratives that tap into this zeitgeist to a meaningful extent. Since I didn't choose the books with this in mind —that is, I didn't set out to read a series of books dealing with gamers and gaming — it probably gives me a heightened, and perhaps false, impression that video games have become, for science fiction writers, important technologies worth exploring in depth. Nonetheless...

 I read Neil Stephenson's Reamde simply because I like Stephenson and I'd put his latest book on my Amazon wish list. Merry Christmas!

(A brief aside: In a lot of ways, I wish I'd put his previous book, Anathem, on that list; I think it would have been more interesting, since Reamde is more of a thriller than one of his usual "big idea" books. Fortunately, a Stephenson thriller is far better than most.)

At the heart of Reamde is a World of Warcraft-like game: one of the main characters is the owner and originator of the game, and the events of the narrative are kicked into gear through concrete interactions between gamers in their game world and their real world. I don't want to give away more than that; it's a romp, full of surprises, and certainly worth the many hours it takes to read (it's a long one, clocking in at 1000+ pages). My point: one of the main character's invented the game, and the novel takes place in and around that game.

I stumbled upon Ready Player One, by Ernest Cline, through an Audible.com recommendation on one of the podcasts I listen to (apparently, the book is read, to the delight of many a geek, by Wil Wheaton). I put it on my Amazon wish list, too, and, voilà: it too appeared at Christmas.

Ready Player One is another romp — more fun but not as interesting as Reamde, in my view. In Cline's book, the founder of a video game — one that has become an almost Matrix-like escape for a devastated world--dies and leaves his unbelievably massive fortune to whoever can find an "Easter egg" buried somewhere in the game universe. And since the deceased designer was an '80s freak, the gameplay — and the book — is jam-packed with all kinds of 80s pop-culture references — games, of course, but also music, TV, and movies. Nothing of earth shattering importance, but a good ride.


From the recommendation of another podcast, I got ahold of Daniel Suarez's Daemon and its sequel, Freedom™. In this case, I had no idea what I was getting into, just that someone I respected liked the books and that they were sci fi. (I didn't even know, until I finished Daemon, that Freedom™ continued the story.) I was thus a bit surprised to find that these books also deal with the legacy of the founder of a video game empire--though in this case, the battle is not for an Easter egg of riches, but for — wait for it — the survival of the human race.

Of the three narratives, Suarez's is by far the most interesting. For one thing, if I were still in grad school research mode, the cross between  posthuman and ambiguous utopia would be right up my alley. But I think the judgment holds even without my special interest; like the other books, Daemon and Freedom™ have their share of romp, but it all serves a larger project of raising frightening questions about the world we, the readers, find ourselves in today.

And, while the story sometimes becomes a bit pedantic in its lectures about the causes of various economic woes, these lectures are always followed up by a satisfying massacre of the otherwise untouchable guilty parties.

I have a stack of papers waiting to be graded, so I don't have time to meditate on the way that videogaming has found itself at the heart of so much good (and popular) sci fi. It reminds me of the spate of jacked-into-the-net movies that came out in 1999 — The Matrix, The Thirteenth Floor, and eXistenz... The question of how we would (or wouldn't) be able to tell the difference between a real and a virtual world seemed to become suddenly very important for awhile there...

Anyway: fun stuff.  I recommend all four books, even though I'm not really a gamer, and the 80s isn't really my decade.

(Another brief aside, though: If you haven't read Stephenson before, I'd recommend Snow Crash (second only to Gibson's Neuromancer as exemplar of cuperpunk) or Cryptonomicon (a unique mix of historical fiction, computer science, and thriller--and yes, I used the word unique. Because I think it is.)