Reverse Discrimination?

Credit to my wife, who caught this in the ads of our local paper, The Union.

Palin 2012: You Betcha!

A colleague in my English Department stumbled across this pin on his way into his local grocery store. I'm afraid it's just the type of thing I fall in love with, for so many reasons--not the least of which is my uncertainty about whether or not it's actually serious.

So a-googling I went to find a copy of the pin I could call my own. No luck--though I did find a surprising amount of "Palin 2012" paraphernalia available: T-shirts with pics of the lovely governor looking pensively (dare I say, presidentially?) into the distance, the White House in the background; pins with "Palin 2012" emblazoned over the silhouette of a moose; "You betcha!" bumper stickers.

I also learned, with equal parts astonishment, horror, and delight, that there is an actual movement to get this woman into the White House.

Even more astonishing, horrifying, and delightful: this is not--I repeat, not--merely the cravings of a lunatic fringe.

Last November, the Rasmussen poll found that 64% of Republicans identified Palin as their choice for the 2012 presidential nominee--with Huckabee and Romney, her closest contenders, at 12% and 11% respectively. A Gallup poll agreed: 67% of Republicans and Republican-leaning independents said they would like to see Palin run for president in 2012. (In the Gallup poll, respondents were not asked to choose among possible candiates, so Romney and Huckabee fared better--62% and 61%, respectively. But they still trailed her.)

As of last week, some of the glow may have faded a bit, but Rasmussen still found that a majority of Republicans (55%) and of Evangelical Christians (57%) think Palin should be the role model for the Republican party in the future.

So is the "Dream Comes True" pin serious or ironic? I found both answers unsatisfying. On the one hand, in perhaps most other contexts, it would be pretty clearly insulting. On the other hand, I have seen her and her fans embrace much of this image--check out the Sarah Palin 2012 calendar given out as a free gift with a subscription to the conservative rag "Newsmax."

Palin is the moose-hunting hockey mom, giving her Thanksgiving interview while some guy slaughters a turkey behind her, championing our country's proud Joes (Six-Pack, the Plumber, etc.)--the straight-talking maverick from the proud state of Alaska. (And, too, she was a beauty queen...)

In the end, a History colleague of mine clarified it for me: the pin is probably meant ironically, but there is a group of her followers who might not find it so.

Ah, ambiguity.

P.S. Thanks to that English colleague who saw my distress at not being able to find the pin, and who generously gave it to me. It now leans proudly against my SWAT Team sno-globe--which, of course, plays a music box version of Bach's lovely "Minuet in G."

Book Review: The Disappeared

Kristine Kathryn Rusch's The Disappeared: A Retrieval Artist Novel is one of those science fiction books that I don't regret having read, but I probably wouldn't recommend it to others. Its heart is right: it sets up an interesting (and troubling) premise and drops the premise into a futuristic detective story. Unfortunately, the execution is a bit weak; Rusch just isn't that great a writer -- at least, she wasn't in 2002, when this novel was published. But The Disappeared is the first novel of a series, and I liked it enough to give the series a second try. Maybe she's improved.

It's probably not fair, either, that I listened to this book while still in the middle of Pynchon's latest. Anything read under such circumstance is bound to suffer.

The premise of Rusch's novel, as I said, is strong: multicultural tribunals and treaties among humans and at least 3 alien races have set up a situation where humans may be subject to (from the human perspective) extremely harsh penalties for (again, from the human perspective) minor or unintentional crimes. At its best, science fiction dramatizes ambiguous ethical situations just like this one. A great dramatization avoids preaching and keeps all sides of the ethical ambiguity fully in place -- a sci-fi version, I suppose, of Keats's negative capability. And for the most part, and through most of The Disappeared, Rusch succeeds.

In the end, though, the author seems to come down sqaurely on the side of the humans. Of course, it's hard to disagree, if only because we as readers are, on the whole, ourselves human.

But the ultimate erasure of ethical ambiguity isn't simply a matter of author/reader ethnocentrism. The real problem lies with a competing insistence on keeping the aliens alien. The reader gets the story of what "crimes" these humans-on-the-lam have committed, but it's all filtered through other humans. This isn't right, the main characters -- humans on the run from this harsh justice, or the two detectives suddenly faced with a rash of what might be called extradition orders -- continually conclude, and the only exposure we get to the aliens' perspective comes through translators who interpret not only the words but the motives of the aliens.

The insistence on the aliens' status as alien is admirable. I hate works that come to the conclusion that deep down we're all the same. But a side effect of this insistence is an inability to get beyond the ethocentrism that, at least in the case of this novel, is at the heart of the book's ethical exploration. In the end, as sci-fi is often accused of being, The Disappeared is a profoundly conservative book.

Ten Songs I Wish I'd Written

Iris - Goo Goo Dolls
You May Be Right - Billy Joel (only a lot louder)
Personal Jesus - Depeche Mode
Last Plane Out - Toy Matinee
No More Mr. Nice Guy - Alice Cooper
Theme from The Pink Panther - Henry Mancini
Air on the G String - Bach (no jokes about the title, please)
Monkey Dance - T-Bone Burnett
Watching the Detectives - Elvis Costello
Bridge over Troubled Water - Simon and Garfunkel

Scooby-Doo? Where are you?

I was looking over my five year old's shoulder as he watched some WBKids! online. He stumbled across a new and improved "Shaggy and Scooby-Doo Get a Clue!" He thought it was hilarious.

I wanted to cry.

I hate when new versions destroy the spirit of the old version. (OT: Most egregious example = Tom Cruise's one-man "Mission Impossible," a remake of a show that always emphasized the team. And don't get me started on what they did to Phelps.)

In the Scooby-Doo cartoon, there was an evil scientist--a regular villain on the show, I've learned--who manages to invent an actual invisibility ray... The Mystery Machine has become some sort of morphing thingy--flying, in this case... Scooby snacks are nanotech-enhanced whatevers... Shaggy and Scooby actually accept missions from some robot butler of Uncle Albert...

I can't go on.

This is just wrong. I mention only a few reasons:

• In the original, the gang traveled randomly across the country, stumbling into all kinds of adventures. There were no regular villains--there couldn't be, because the gang was never in the same place twice.
• Actual invisibility? The original Scooby-Doo was about the triumph of Reason. Monsters and goblins and ghosts--oh my!--always turned out to be some mundane human in costume, never anything supernatural or pseudo-scientific. (Wikipedia tells me that this convention was abandoned several iterations of Scooby ago. I shudder.)
• The Mystery Machine was a 70s love van. It got the gang from point A to point B, wherever that turned out to be. I don't remember it ever playing any other role than that. The gang triumphed on their own merits, not from the help of advanced Mystery Machine technology.
• The only power Scooby snacks offered was as a bribe; Scooby's desire to have a snack invariably saved the day. (So maybe the cartoon was not really the triumph of Reason so much as the triumph of Appetite.)
• In the original, Shaggy and Scooby were always cowards. They would never accept a mission. Period. Part of the humor and charm of the original came from them finding themselves in scary situations and rising to the occasion. Sort of.

I weep for the youth of America--nay, the world.

Sleep > Caffeine

Aside from the time it takes, sleep is better than caffeine.