The Human Journey Is Just Beginning . . . Or, Watching Star Trek: The Motion Picture With My Girlfriend

For my birthday, my girlfriend got me the Blu-Ray collection of the first six Star Trek films.  And then, just to prove that she loves me, she watched the Motion Picture with me.  All the way through.  And only fell asleep once.

That's a pretty big deal.  The most she knows of Star Trek is that 'splosion-laden parody from J.J. Abrams.  See, back in the late 70s, science fiction wasn't exactly a big property.  2001: A Space Odyssey had come out in 1968.  Stanley Kubrick's masterpiece set both the mood and tone in science fiction for the next decade.  The story was intellectual and dense; the plot was nearly incomprehensible on the first screening (and second, third, and fourth), and matched outstanding acting and exquisite modeling with a breathtaking musical score.

Then Star Wars: A New Hope happened.  It fundamentally altered the viewing public's perception of what a movie could be, and how science fiction ought to be presented.  But Star Wars isn't really science fiction.  Sure, most of the story happens in space but for all it's vacuum bona fides, the technology and plot are purely fantastical.

Sure -- most of the time we lump science fiction and fantasy together (they even have a nifty moniker: SFF) but the two are fundamentally different genres that happen to share a common origin.  But while fantasy hints that the universe is inherently inexplicable, science fiction examines the ways in which the universe can be understood.  Where they overlap is their reliance on knowledge.

In fantasy, that knowledge is arcane and restricted through either initiation or fortune to a select few.  Science fiction revels in the fact that with a little hard work the universe can be understood by everyone.  And in the fiction of SF, the reader himself is the initiate.

Back to Star Trek: The Motion Picture.  After Star Wars shattered just about every record ever, executives at Paramount Studios needed something spacey.  They already had Star Trek, and were working on a new television series, called Phase II, and spurred by the dedicated activism of fans.

The Motion Picture is something really special, encapsulating Gene Roddenberry's truly novel future within the framework of a genuinely compelling science fiction story.  The plot is simple enough: a vast, incomprehensible alien entity of unimaginable power and destructive capability is on a straight shot to Earth.  The U.S.S. Enterprise is the only starship within interception range.  Admiral/Captain Kirk and his crew head out to investigate, and hopefully turn it back.

If the movie had been shot today, the ending would be pretty simple.  After investigating the heretofore inscrutable, indefatigable, and indestructible thing they would have discovered a vital weakness and exploited it.  The movie would have ended with a vast fireball and Kirk high-fiving Spock on the bridge.

Except this was made back when movies weren't just Hollywood execs standing around in a circle-jerk.

The Motion Picture ends with discovery.  The entire movie is an extended meditation on the meaning of life (highlighted by a five-minute overture that would have left audiences isolated in the womb-like darkness of a movie theater) so it is appropriate that the final epigram announces "The Human journey is just beginning." It ends with a moment of reflection on what it means to be human.

Phase II Enterprise

But this first film is more than simply good science fiction; it's the most realized vision of the future in any of the Star Trek films.  Gene Roddenberry's utopian vision is reflected best here by allowing audiences to really see the future.  We see civilians, contractors, a dynamic range of social and sexual mores, the reality of space travel, and the inherent dangers associated with any technology.

One of the truly visceral moments of peril is when a transporter malfunction scrambles two people in mid-transport.  Ostensibly, this is to give both Spock and McCoy a plausible excuse to rejoin the crew of the Enterprise, but it does double-duty and elaborates the dangers of simply existing while illuminating Kirk's character.  When we see the restrained grief, and the terse consolation of the transporter tech, we are reminded that with authority comes responsibility and know that these deaths will weigh on Kirk.  But as important, he'll push on and accomplish the mission. 

Watching this movie with my uninitiated girlfriend brought out something else.  At one point, she commented that she would like to be friends with Spock.  Besides being incredibly cute, it reminded me that these characters feel real.  I would never want to hang out with any of the characters in Abrams's Star Trek (except possibly Scotty, but that's just because I think we could go find Nick Frost and grab a pint). But in The Motion Picture, these people all feel incredibly real, and more importantly, their relationships feel like more than reflexive tropes satirizing archetypes. 

Which is just to say that while Abrams's films are entertaining -- with their running, running, 'splosions, angst, faux pseudoscience, 'splosions and more 'splosions -- they are neither fantastical nor science fictional.  They don't elaborate on friendship, duty, compassion, or the search for meaning.  And beating the bad guy literally means beating the bad guy.  They're shallow romps.

The Motion Picture offers -- in fact it practically invites -- a second viewing.  It's almost certain that it will reward the effort.  Its intellectual precursor 2001 suggests a second watching, but is less successful than The Motion Picture.  For these reasons and more you should give it a chance this weekend, sit down with a beer, and really dive into the best of all Star Trek films. 

Where Do Babies Come From? . . . Or, Sexism And Women In Fantasy

A lot of electrons have been spilled recently about the presence (or lack thereof) and roles of women in fantasy stories.  Both The Mary Sue and Tansy Roberts have weighed in on the supposed historical justification of sexism in the fantasy genre, and each author makes compelling arguments.  Basically, it goes that women throughout history have played vital roles and pursued all sorts of careers so it makes little sense to indulge historically inaccurate portrayals of women in fantasy stories.

Roberts's critique of The Mary Sue is spot on:

"History is not a long series of centuries in which men did all the interesting/important things and women stayed home and twiddled their thumbs in between pushing out babies, making soup and dying in childbirth.

History is actually a long series of centuries of men writing down what they thought was important and interesting, and FORGETTING TO WRITE ABOUT WOMEN. It’s also a long series of centuries of women’s work and women’s writing being actively denigrated by men. Writings were destroyed, contributions were downplayed, and women were actively oppressed against, absolutely."

Her point is absolutely right, but then she moves to identify the two main tropes in fantasy as military/warfare and politics.  Magic is identified as a strong third, and links these to male dominance in historical reporting.  Ignoring the role that women played in war and politics, however, is a willful ignorance on the part of ancient reporters, and continues to be so in the fantasy genre.

"When it comes to politics, I’m sorry, but there are no excuses. Sure, women have been excluded from the public political process for large swathes of history and culture (except, you know, when they weren’t—even the supreme patriarchy that was Rome didn’t have complete control over the provinces, where female politicians and civil servants sprung up like weeds) but public is only one piece of politics. The Mary Sue article refers substantially to Game of Thrones, and that’s a very good example, but again you can look to history—as soon as there is any form of dynastic element to your politics, then women are IMPORTANT. Even when the political careers are solely male, those men have wives and families who have a stake in the proceedings and the outcomes, they have risks to take and campaigns to wage every bit as much as the men. And if the women’s politics are happening in salons rather than assembly halls… maybe you should be peeking into those salons. I can guarantee political DYNAMITE is going on in there. With finger sandwiches and mint tea? Why not?"

Okay, that makes a bit of sense.  But here's where I digress.  Historically inspired stories, like the fantastically successful Game of Thrones mentioned above, replicate stereotypes and inadequately populate fantastical worlds with shallow or fulsome representations of human activity.

I don't really want to engage the staggering sexism in fantasy except to make a more general point: historically inspired fantasy is boring.  Don't get me wrong, history is chock full of great stories, and they're perfect jumping off points for a couple dozen novels.  But historically flavored novels that simply replace the Lancasters with the Lannisters and England for Westeros (but what if St. George really did kill a dragon?) is about as interesting as sitting in traffic.

I suspect that my distaste for George Martin's novels stems from its conscious departure from fantasy tropes; instead of dealing with heroes and magic, his world is ours, though dimly glimpsed.  Essentially, it's bad fantasy and boring history, yet readers mistake it for verisimilitude the way a man dying of thirst will mistake a mirage for an oasis in the desert.

So thinking about fantasy as somehow a historical representation misses the point entirely.  Literature in all its guises is about human behavior.  Science fiction and fantasy offer wonder, but they also allow us to examine our present and speculate about our future.  Political worries, cultural values, dominant hierarchies are all reflected in fantasy and reveal a glimpse of the zeitgeist.  That is their power.

Science fiction excels by extrapolating human achievements to their logical end.  Fantasy can do the same by extrapolating human activity in settings beyond the mundane.  J.R.R. Tolkien reproduced the Earthly milieu consciously.  Writers following in that vein from Robert Jordan to Terry Brooks continued that trend with greater or lesser success.  Where G.R.R. Martin succeeds is creating a world disengaged from the environment of evolutionary adaptation -- though by failing to follow his worldbuilding to a logical end it quickly reveals its shaky foundations.  Brandon Sanderson's Way of Kings successfully disengages from a historical model by creating whole-cloth both a world and its inhabitants.

Marie Antoinette

None of these authors engage the elephant in the fantastical room, however.  Why there are human beings more or less indistinguishable from the reader is never addressed.  Indeed, it remains such a persistent trope that it is rarely considered.  C.S. Friedman's Coldfire Trilogy successfully tackles the trope by wrapping it science fiction -- the human beings in her story are the descendants of human colonists on an alien world (where physics is kind of wonky -- a concession to the genre which corresponds well enough with what we know of science).

Regardless, instead of confronting sexism in the genre, commentators like Tansy Roberts should instead engage sexism in our own culture (and in our authors), and recast the mirror which reflects it.  And calling your empire

When Dominant Culture Doesn't Dominate . . . Or, Cosplay, Geek Culture, and Bourgeois Culture

It's pretty self-explanatory

By Steven McLain

In the 1940s, Stetson Kennedy undertook an anti-racism campaign premised on a simple idea.  Whenever someone heard bigoted speech, that person should frown.  It's brilliant in its simplicity, and highlights the power of ostracism and social acceptance as a means of change.  Stetson was a landmark figure in the struggle against Jim Crow laws, and his bravery in infiltrating and revealing the secret rituals and codewords of the Ku Klux Klan seriously undermined that organization.

After infiltrating the KKK he filtered their secrets to the Superman radio drama, when engaged the popular icon in a fight against bigotry and exposed the organization to its own farce. 

Seriously, how cool a name is Stetson?

Kennedy died in 2011, but both his infiltration of the KKK and his "Frown Campaign" are useful in analyzing the power and delineations of culture.  These in turn can help us identify when and where certain cultures exist, when they have been appropriated, and when they have willingly submerged themselves into the bourgeois culture.

I'd like to make a couple of definitions clear from the outset, since I'll be using them in somewhat esoteric ways (which also differ from social scientists' and semiologists' definition).  First, let's acknowledge that culture is a tough thing to define, since it is inherently nebulous.  But if you can't define what exactly culture is, you can at least define its function.

For the sake of this argument, culture consists of the transmittable values and practices which signify inclusion in a group.  Basically, culture delineates "us" from "them" and includes language (including jargon, accent, patois, etc.), styles of clothing, taboos, rituals, and meaning attached to specific markers (such as flags, buttons, logos, brands, etc.).  You're probably not aware of these things until you enter a different culture, but it's abundantly clear when someone doesn't belong to your culture by the way they walk, talk, or dress.

Kennedy (and Martin Luther King, Jr. incidentally) believed that the bulk of people were good, and could challenge bigoted attitudes by expressing their disdain.  Frowning was a way to demonstrate disapproval, and subtly alter perceptions.  But it relied on a shift in the bourgeois culture so that bigotry was a cultural distinction.  In a sense, bigotry alienated you from bourgeois culture.

Now, generally when we talk about culture, we use hierarchical words of dominance and submission which disguises the real nature of culture as a progressive continuum.  That is, while there are major and minor cultures, one need not inhabit one or the other; indeed, one can occupy multiple cultures at the same time (and probably does).  Instead of dominant or submissive cultures (sub-cultures as they're often called), bourgeois culture reflects the idea that communities often embrace a single, overarching culture under which multiple, fluid identities can emerge and flourish.

When Martin Luther King identified racism, poverty, and militarism as evils, it was precisely because they dehumanized individuals as means to an end, or by obscuring their humanity by overlooking their individuality, or through bigotry.

King said of poverty:

“There is nothing new about poverty. What is new, however, is that we now have the resources to get rid of it. The time has come for an all-out world war against poverty … The well off and the secure have too often become indifferent and oblivious to the poverty and deprivation in their midst. Ultimately a great nation is a compassionate nation. No individual or nation can be great if it does not have a concern for ‘the least of these.”

 And racism:

“Racism is a philosophy based on a contempt for life. It is the arrogant assertion that one race is the center of value and object of devotion, before which other races must kneel in submission. It is the absurd dogma that one race is responsible for all the progress of history and alone can assure the progress of the future. Racism is total estrangement. It separates not only bodies, but minds and spirits. Inevitably it descends to inflicting spiritual and physical homicide upon the out-group.”

And militarism:

“A true revolution of values will lay hands on the world order and say of war- ‘This way of settling differences is not just.’ This way of burning human beings with napalm, of filling our nation’s homes with orphans and widows, of injecting poisonous drugs of hate into the veins of peoples normally humane, of sending men home from dark and bloody battlefields physically handicapped psychologically deranged, cannot be reconciled with wisdom, justice and love. A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death.”

MLK

But if he were alive today, I have no doubt Martin Luther King would include consumerism on his list of modern evils right there with racism, poverty, and militarism.

Consumerism exists in that same spectrum of evil by reducing individuals to means of acquiring.  Rather than basing individual worth on the merit of being a human being, what you own determines your worth.  These aren't new criticisms, and shouldn't shock you, but take a moment to really consider what it means that bourgeois culture is also a consumer culture. 

The word "bourgeois" has a tortured history.  It initially indicated the French middle class which emerged between the aristocracy and peasants.  During the French Revolution it acquired a pejorative status which persisted into the nineteenth century, where it eventually acquired its labor implications.  Marx and Engels used bourgeois to signal the propertied owners of capital who alienated workers from their labor.  This is the meaning it largely kept through the mid-twentieth century, until it came to first signify the bureaucratic authority emerging in the Western world; finally it acquired a class signifier in the early twenty-first century and was appropriated by trend-setters and the petty intelligentsia when it was crafted into the patois.  "Bougie" became an indication of pedestrian pretension. 

An example from the Seattle Times helps emphasize that distinction:

“In an urban environment, in the elements, you want to feel protected,” says Gregg Andrews, fashion creative director at Nordstrom. “You don’t want to feel that you can’t walk on broken concrete. There’s this fashion utility to a boot that makes it very appealing.”

Plus, he says, “boots are sorta like sunglasses — they give you instant attitude . . . A woman could own an entire closet of boots that really would change the look of everything that’s in her wardrobe.”
We will mix and match so many shirts, sweaters, jackets and pants that they couldn’t possibly add up to a cohesive outfit, yet make it look fresh and “seasonless,” to borrow a term used to describe the direction in menswear for the coming year.

We will pair soft fabrics with the leather that will be everywhere this fall, wear white after Labor Day and shamelessly pile on two or three shades of the season’s go-to colors: green, blue and red. We will make tie-dye look bougie and make [ombré] look hippie." [emphasis my own]

Oh, those French

But despite definitional slippage, bourgeois maintains its connection to the middle class, to a system of virtue ethics firmly tied to a social and economic class.  The rise of the middle class is a historical phenomenon which pre-dates the industrial revolution.  It is tied to social movements even today, and indicates a broadening access to political and economic power.  The decline of the middle class is not a signifier of declining economic power per se, but rather points to gradual lessening of access to that power by the largest segment of nation's population.

That intersection creates a unique cultural imperative which includes and supersedes every other culture.  Bourgeois culture in America (and perhaps in most of the developed and emerging world) is associated almost entirely with consumerism.  Worth and value are predicated on one's ability to acquire and conspicuously consume.  These cultural assumptions are what underpin Apple's yearly unveiling of new and only slightly improved iPhones.  Fundamentally, the iPhone and the iPhone 5 are no different (let's not even mention the distinction between the S and C), and the iPhone itself represents only minor aesthetic improvements on pre-existing technology.

Rather, the acquisition and conspicuous consumption of these technology signify inclusion within a particular culture.  That the gold iPhone 5 is seen as a status symbol should surprise no one.  Rather, as an indication of the power of bourgeois culture, the iPhone is the most obvious example of one culture embraced and enfolded by bourgeois culture.

This is not a condemnation of either bourgeois culture, or any of the cultures which oppose or embrace it.  Indeed, many cultures are complementary, or even supplement, bourgeois culture.  Some cultures actively reject bourgeois culture and try to embrace self-sufficiency and autonomy, or see the obvious environmental damage our particular bourgeois culture causes and attempt to meliorate their own impact. 

Culture-jacking

Other cultures which began in conscious opposition to bourgeois culture lack the power or the organization to successfully reject it and either embrace or are co-opted by bourgeois culture.  Consumerism is such a prevalent and powerful force that the latter is more likely the case.  Bourgeois culture may colonize alien cultures and gradually incorporate them into itself, expressing alienness as novelty (culture-jacking, if you will) -- the Asian fetish of the early twentieth century and the television show "The Big Bang Theory" are equally representative of this phenomenon.

It's also what lends legitimacy to a particular culture.  Legitimate cultures consciously articulate a particular vision of the good life.  What that vision is remains irrelevant.  Rather, what is important is that a culture express that vision through its cultural markers.  Remember Kennedy and his frown campaign?  The power of bourgeois culture overruled deeply ingrained bigotry (along with the active participation of civil rights activists, legislators, and the oppressed themselves).  Kennedy was able to de-legitimize the KKK by exposing their secrets to ridicule.  Their cultural signifiers became markers of absurdity.

By appropriating those markers instead, the bourgeois culture maintains the sense of separateness while utilizing the power which separates culture to advance its own agenda.  Geek culture, which peaked in the 80s and early 90s, offered a significantly peculiar version of the good life to differentiate it from bourgeois culture of the time.

Highlighted by a preoccupation with science and technology, geek culture presented furthering of knowledge as an end to itself.  Geek culture embraced the rational enlightenment virtues of previous generations and molded it with a fascination of technology.  The result was a vision in which science and technology were lauded for their own sake, and elevated what bourgeois culture considered hobbies to ends of themselves.  Geek culture appropriated the mode of bourgeois culture as the means for its own ends; this appropriation both legitimized and enabled geek cultures to oppose bourgeois culture.

By Ibrahim Evsan

But by the early twenty-first century, bourgeois culture responded by re-appropriating the symbols of geek culture into itself.  The pre-eminent example is the colonization of Comic-Con by a consumer culture marked by conspicuous consumption and acquisition as a determination of worth.  And we should be clear that legitimation is not itself a moral judgement, but rather a statement of definition.  That is, to be legitimate, a culture must correspond itself to a peculiar vision of the good life which differs from another culture.

Indeed, the simple proliferation of Comic-Cons (San Diego, New York, Portland, OR, etc.) are not indicative of the power of a particular culture, but rather representative of the appropriation of geek culture to bourgeois culture.  Geek culture may persist, but incoherently.   

Legitimization is both a strategy and goal of bourgeois culture.  As a strategy, it allows bourgeois culture to colonize peculiar cultures.  This is also why I suspect that cosplay is itself not a legitimate culture.  Emerging from both geek and nerd culture (historically an offshoot of Renaissance Fairs and, I imagine, the costuming impulses of Halloween) it allows both men and women an opportunity to assume alternate and deviate identities.

Though I can't speak to motivations, and while much of it seems like a harmless vacation from the self, cosplayers such as Ani Mia, Jenni Hashimoto (who was featured in a Business Insider expose of the New York Comic-Con) and other members of that community who peddle their wares (as it were) on the internet or on cable reality television (such as The SyFy Channel's "Heroes of Cosplay") have either consciously adopted bourgeois culture, or been appropriated by it.  Failing to cogently express a vision of the good life, and adopting the vision of a competing culture reveals their complicity in delegitimizing their peculiar culture.

The "Fake Geek Girl" controversy raging throughout the interwebs is a clear indication that geek communities understand that their culture is being appropriated.  Alice Vega, a geek commentator, offers a few words of live-and-let-live that hints at libertarian moral laissez faire but fails to recognize the invidiousness of these cultural appropriations.

"First off, a Fake Geek Girl is defined as a female of any age faking it in the geek culture, i.e. cosplaying characters she doesn’t know, saying she’s a gamer but has never touched a Playstation, etc. You might have seen some of these girls or know some yourself. But here’s a newsflash: Who the fuck cares?"

Vampirella at Rose City Comicon

Her rant betrays her naivety.  "Heroes of Cosplay" may indeed introduce outsiders to a niche hobby, and may help inspire new fans to go out and indulge their self-obscuring fantasies.  And "fake geek girls" may indeed by culture-jacking geek culture as a means to garner attention, or they may be intentionally sexualizing themselves as a means of re-appropriating their sexuality from a dominance culture they navigate at their own peril.  What commentators like Vega and the geek community in general fail to understand, however, is that they are willing participants in their own appropriation.

So while the libertarian in me is crying "no harm no foul," the better part of my nature is worrying that people are building castles in the air and failing to address the real problem.  As a self-identified geek I understand the frustration of the community, but want to point out that it's already too late.  Unless we can re-craft a peculiar vision of the good life, bourgeois culture will always win. 

When Kant Played Football . . . Or, Injury and Dehumanization In College Sports

One of the more worrying trends at Universities and colleges in the United States is the increasing emphasis on collegiate sports over academics.  To be fair, sports have an important place.  Douglas MacArthur, while commander of West Point, called the athletic pitch "The field of friendly strife."  He saw the link between martial virtues and sports clearly.  The emphasize camaraderie and physical courage, and helped foster a sense of tribal affiliation among onlookers.  The dedication of ardent fans is really the only proof you'll need: It is why riots break out when one team loses.

In college sports, those rivalries aren't quite as intense (we hope).  They are nonetheless pervasive, and generate a level of commitment which solidifies unique brand loyalties.  And universities aren't particularly cagey about fostering that loyalty.  When Oregon State University shifted to a new logo and new uniforms for the 2013 season Head Coach Mike Riley made it clear that it was part of a strategy to boost recruiting.

Though why anyone would want to be one of the Nutrias is beyond me

“This stuff absolutely matters to kids, and I think it looks really sharp [. . .] It’s cool that the kids are so excited about it. During the season, we were able to sneak a peak at some of the helmets, and the guys loved it.”

And success on the field has significant impact on university recruitment in general.  A winning team attracts high school juniors who care less about academics than who has the better team.  In Oregon, a state without major league sports, college football rivalry is elevated to the same status as the 49s vs Raiders.  But the same is true elsewhere.  According to a CNBC report, college football

pulls in $5 billion a year, which is more than Facebook, Twitter, and Candy Crush combined.

The singular difference between college football of today, and MacArthur's "field of friendly strife" is that today economic forces compel each team to compete not just on the field but also on the free market.  The central tenet of free-market ideology is that competition refines a product and establishes equilibrium between supply and demand.

(AP photo/Bill Haber)

The inherent problem in this equation is that the product are human beings struggling not to be better football players (we hope) but rather to become educated members of society.  We trust that education is the end, and that football is a means to accomplishing those goals.  But as football becomes commoditized, the people are increasingly marginalized.

It seems like a truism, but winning is the goal; human beings are lumped onto one side of the equation which ultimately yields victory.  While most coaches, and certainly university administrators would argue that they ultimately have the students' interests in mind, market forces offer incentives to behave as though players were cogs in the athletic machine.

The evidence for that atmosphere of commoditization is mounting.  Today, PBS released a documentary on the dangers of professional football.  "League of Denial: The NFL's Concussion Crisis" highlights the work of Dr. Bennet Omalu.  A pathologist trained in neuropathology, Omalu examined the brain of Mike Webster, a former Hall of Fame player who retired in 1991.  Webster died in 2002 following mental degeneration which left him staring into space in a Pittsburgh train station.  When Omalu examined Webster's brain, instead of finding traces of Alzheimer's, he discovered that "its cells had been strangled by excess tau proteins released after collisions."  His diagnosis of chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE) should have been a wake up call to NFL doctors, but instead they minimized his findings and appealed to him to keep quiet.

“‘Bennet, do you know the implications of what you’re doing?’” Omalu recalled being asked by a league doctor. “He said, ‘If 10 percent of mothers in this country would begin to perceive football as a dangerous sport, that is the end of football.’”

According to the Center for the Study of Traumatic Encephalopathy, chronic traumatic encephalopathy is a progressive degenerative disease found in the brains of people who experience multiple concussions.  Certain athletes are particularly prone to them, and was thought to be limited to sports such as boxing and hockey which traditionally experience high rates of concussion.  More worrying is that subconcussive hits -- violent hits that are nevertheless not traumatic enough to cause a concussion -- also cause CTE by causing a buildup of the abnormal protein tau.  "These changes in the brain can begin months, years, or even decades after the last brain trauma or end of active athletic involvement."  Despite ardent attempts to reduce harm, the damage might already be there.  Since CTE is exacerbated by every hit, a long history of trauma further heightens athletes' risk.

The link between the NFL and college sports isn't subtle.  Watch a game and as the on-screen stats pop up, notice where each player went to college.  At the professional level, college affiliation doesn't matter.  Instead, it reinforces which school is a good football school.  It's a feedback loop that promotes college programs and helps recruitment.  The academic implications are worrying enough, but the documentary goes on to make a profound criticism.

One of the world’s leading authorities on the topic, Dr. Ann McKee, told the filmmakers she thinks it’s possible every athlete in pro football has CTE in one form or another, and that the condition may also affect high school and college players. This means there are tens of millions of former and current players who are potentially susceptible to the disease’s long-term effects—anger, agitation, a loss of focus and memory. Even those who don’t care about football should care about what resembles a public health crisis. [Emphasis my own.]

So while we as consumers of athletic entertainment demand teams with higher win-loss ratios, we inadvertently expose our children to exponential levels of harm.

Certainly, this is not a call to end high school, college, or professional sports.  But it should be a call to re-evaluate our roles in a worrying trend, and ponder how we think about our athletes.

I'll just leave this here to think about.

Are they human beings and (as Kant said) worthy to be considered as ends unto themselves, or are they facilitators of our entertainment?  Because if they are merely cogs in the machine whose goal is literally a goal, then we needn't accommodate demands for increased protection any more than we would for a prize horse, or a NASCAR stock car.

The very fact that we do consider their appeals for basic protection reveals that we are uncomfortable making that distinction.  I'd argue that we should in fact be working toward maximizing protection, which might mean slowing down the game, or de-emphasizing our own need for entertainment.

This isn't to say that all risk can or should be eliminated from our lives.  Hardiness and resilience are necessary virtues, and should be cultivated in our children.  Moreover, college sports have consistently facilitated social mobility, offering an opportunity for low-income students to access advanced education.  And lest we become the Long Island middle school that banned cartwheels, we have to accept that some risk is unavoidable.  But we ought not revel in it, or reduce players to means to an end.

Political Animals . . . Or, A House Divided

US Capitol

I've been spending some time recently grappling over the apparently schismatic divide in the Congress.  Bipartisanship seems dead and compromise has become the shibboleth of Tea Party and ultra-conservatives desperate to dismantle the Obama Administration.  It feels like a crisis, and in some ways it is.  But in others, it's just another example of how a party out of power curtails the power of the party currently holding the reigns of state. 

When the Republicans lost the White House and much of Congress in 1933, it inaugurated a 20-year rule by the Democrats which Republicans ardently resisted.  Senators like Robert Taft from Ohio made their bones challenging the New Deal.  In many ways, they were right to do so.  The New Deal introduced a level of government intrusion which was genuinely novel.  It was a break from American politics which still resonates.

FDR

Opposition to FDR dragged Republicans into positions which today seem ridiculous--even stupid.  Watching from our side of the Atlantic, Republicans opposed American involvement in the European war then burgeoning.  Germany had recently grown belligerent, and the rise of fascists states signaled an ideological shift away from the centuries long liberal, humanist project Western Europe had been undertaking.  To many observers, the real danger lay to the West as Japan invaded Manchuria and introduced levels of barbarity unknown to the modern world.  Famously, Taft warned that Germany would never be a threat.  Whether or not FDR understood the true danger of Nazi aggression is still debatable; regardless, he dragged the nation into war with a persistence that would bewilder people like John McCain today.

Senator Ted Harkin

So these sorts of schism aren't particular uncommon.  But when reports emerge from Washington that this level of tension hasn't been seen since the Civil War, it inspires wariness.  Senator Tom Harkin, an Iowa Democrat announced that the dynamic in Congress today is "very dangerous" and reminds him of "the breakup of the Union before the Civil War."

From the National Journal 

On the Senate floor before 10 a.m. Friday, the senator gave a speech describing how American politics have reached the level at which “a small group of willful men and women who have a certain ideology”—read: the tea party and Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas—have been able to take over the congressional budget debate in the last week. “Since they can’t get their way,” Harkin said, “they’re going to create this confusion and discourse and hope that the public will be so mixed up in who is to blame for this, that they’ll blame both sides.” [...]

This isn’t the first time the senator has spoken out about the spiraling budget and the fight over Obamacare. Harkin suggested Thursday that Cruz looked “foolish” for his “little tirade” that lasted from Tuesday afternoon until Wednesday morning. Harkin called out Cruz as being part of “the most extreme tea-party wing” of his party, and for his “ideology-driven obstructionism.”

Maybe this is just another bit of hyperbole, but it's struck me in the last few weeks that the dynamic of who votes blue versus who votes red has dramatically shifted in the United States.  And those shifts are largely along geographic lines.  Not so much North/South or even East/West but rather urban/rural.

Population Density

The population shift from farms to cities isn't a new observation.  According to the World Health Organization more people live in cities than on farms, and the trend is likely to continue, with 60% of the world living in cities by 2030.  The numbers in the United States are even higher, with 80% of the population in metropolitan areas.  With most reports on demographic growth in the United States focusing on the low population rate, relative high rate of immigration, and shifts in ethnic composition, they generally fail to analyze the shift in American populations from rural populations to concentrated urban populations.

This has dangerous implications in politics since is presupposes that regardless of where you live, Republicans and Democrats should appeal to the population in roughly equal proportions.  That is, half of a city's population should be democrat, and the other half republican.  The same is true in farm communities and so-called frontier communities in Alaska.  This simply isn't the case.

Voting breakdown by county

The University of Michigan has produced a stunning representation of voting patterns in the United States since the election of 2012.  The maps, the article makes clear, slightly misrepresent the actual dynamic of voting patterns, but the data makes one thing clear: high population density areas tend to vote blue.  I suspect the Republican screed against government interference and personal autonomy appeals to rural voters, who are either ignorant of the interconnectedness of a global economy, or who are able to ignore that interconnectedness by repeating a Golden Myth of personal triumph.

And the divide is likely to increase.  With more people turning to cities, the power of the Democratic Party will grow.  Democratic politics is simply more equipped to respond to urban problems.  Appeals to urban populations will find more and more power concentrated in the Democrats until the GOP itself becomes a shibboleth--obsolete and foundering for voters.  The Tea Party is the first indication that the GOP recognizes its obsolescence.  When any group starts looking backward instead of forward, it will flounder and die.

Young Republicans

The only way to regain Republican strength is to find means of appealing to urban voters who recognize the necessity of some government intrusion in their lives.  Young democrats are educated and innovative.  Young republicans ought to be the same, and find means of addressing the needs of the growing segments of the population occupying an urban landscape.  

The End of the World . . . Or, What Do Cabin in the Woods and The World's End Have To Do With Syria?

Before we begin, if you haven't seen them already, go watch Cabin in the Woods and The World's End.  They're both fantastic movies and deserve to be seen.  Don't worry, I'll wait.

***

Okay.  Now that you're back, and imagining that about half of you reading this still haven't seen these two movies, fair warning: there be spoilers ahead.

On Tuesday September 3, Secretaries Kerry and Hagel, with General Dempsey outlined for the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations the Obama Administration's reasons for specific and limited use of the American Armed Forces in Syria.  As far as I can make out, their reasons are limited to the same hyper-masculine honor-culture bravado we should all remember from high school: If we don't stick up for ourselves, we'll get walked all over.  In effect, by not intervening when we said we would (the whole "red line" over use of chemical weapons) we would appear weak to the leaders of other rogue states, such as North Korea and Iran. 

http://www.polgeonow.com/2013/08/syria-civil-war-map-august-2013-11.html

The trouble is, we've all grown up since then.  Imagine if you confronted the same schoolyard bully as an adult.  They're locked in their six (or sixteen) year old body while you have a decade or more of experience, wisdom, social connections and money to leverage against them.  Responding with the use of force is silly.  But in honor culture, any slight must be met with strict, unmitigated force.  It is the rational of the street thug who, when asked why he behaved as he did, responds with a simple, "because he dissed me."  The excuse is as hollow to our ears as the Administration's justifications to intervene in Syria.

This kind of internationalism is morally bankrupt, and threatens to drain the coffers of the United States and its allies. 

As I listened to the arguments, I was increasingly (and a little uneasily) aware of certain similarities between non-interventionists in Congress and the protagonists of the two movies cited above. 

These two movies, one American, the other British, reveal a distinct rejection of authoritarian intervention.  They highlight a growing concern that our leaders (or traditional authority in general) is unable to adequately speak to our desires.  At their hearts, they reveal a desire for liberty regardless (or in full knowledge of) the consequences. 

But more broadly, they signal a rejection of meddling that has important repercussions on the foreign policy of sovereign nations.  It seems hardly coincidental that last week the British Parliament voted against the Prime Minster's appeal to stand with the United States in opposing Bashar Al-Assad's regime.  The "special relationship" shared by Britain and the United States was fostered in the Second World War and persisted throughout the Cold War, as fears of imperial communism gripped both nations.  But following the Cold War that relationship has been frequently tested, most lately by revelations of pervasive spying by the NSA on British citizens.  But the revelation had been strained since Gulf War numero dos.  These latest allegations of weapons of mass destruction seem to have broken British credulity. 

In fact, we see that growing incredulity mounting in popular films.

In Cabin in the Woods, the familiar horror trope is turned on its head.  After a group of teens arrive at a--you guessed it--cabin in the woods, supernatural forces begin killing them off.  In the end, only two survive and they are confronted with the knowledge that the entire situation was a requisite sacrifice to ensure that a much greater evil was not released.  Their deaths, in a sense, release the pressure on hell and keep Earth safe that much longer.  With this knowledge, our two survivors have the option of sacrificing themselves for the greater good of mankind, or allowing Satan to roam the Earth.  They decide that mankind doesn't deserve to go on.  It's a surprising ending, but not wholly unexpected.  Manipulated by shadowy government agents throughout the movie, their lives and deaths are treated callously and marked by dark humor; the audience is meant to view the agents' behavior as representative of traditional authority in general--callously disregarding the lives they're meant to safeguard.

In The World's End, a group of five friends reassemble thirty years later to finish a pub-crawl they began when they were eighteen.  With the gloss of youth tarnished by failure and loss, they painfully reunite and return to their childhood town but quickly realize that the town has changed.  The changes go beyond cosmetic, and are not limited to McDonaldification, or Starbuckification.  Instead, the people themselves are plain and unassuming, but nevertheless retain an ominous blandness.  They are Stepford Wives writ across the population.  Our heroes discover that the town has been invaded by aliens. 

But the aliens' invasion isn't necessarily malevolent so much as it's paternalistic.  They want to shape human culture to become more genial, so that we can enter galactic civilization which views us as parochial barbarians.  In the end, our heroes' drunken belligerence persuades the aliens that we simply aren't worth it.  The results are . . . Apocalyptic. 

These two movies, the British resolution, and the growing reluctance of American citizens to take government intrusion (from the NSA to the TSA) lying down all signal a sea change in popular political culture.  Secretary Kerry called this "armchair isolationism" that would embolden terrorist groups.  Americans rightly dismiss his belligerence as exaggerated and unnecessary.  Moreover, it condescends to thoughtful analysis and retards debate.  Instead, this is a moment to reflect on the force America wishes to be in the 21st century. 

The Magic of Science . . . Or, Elysium Review

I saw Elysium last week.  It's taken me a while to comment on Neil Blomkamp's newest sci-fi effort for the simple reason that almost as soon as I left the theater I'd forgotten the movie.  Built around the story of Max (played by Matt Damon), it's a purposeless effort that degenerates into rambling, plotless meandering about halfway through.  Basically, after an industrial accident leaves Max with only five days to live, he sets off on a journey that will take him to Elysium, which possesses technology which can cure him. 

Visually it's a standout, if your baseline for special effects is sometime around 2001.  Everything is as gritty and solid as what you'd expect from Black Hawk Down.  I suppose that's impressive, because in this case nothing is actually real.  Green screen and computer effects abound, and are never intrusive.  This is a good thing.  The world definitely feels real, but there's no real awe in the movie.

And as far as science fiction is concerned, I'm not entirely convinced that this is movie belongs in that genre.  Though it takes place in the future, has some pretty cool tech, there's not a lot of science involved.

Let me explain.  The technology is good, and has a solid, believable feel.  But the science is entirely absent.  The physics of the Elysium hub are wonky, at best, and the medical technology is simply magic.  Apparently in this future, disease is completely eradicated and all it takes to cure even advanced cancer is to wave some sort of "healing light" over the patient's body.

This makes the movie less science fiction and more fantasy. 

It's an ongoing problem as Americans' knowledge of science becomes increasingly divorced from their technological prowess.  A two year-old can manipulate an iPad and operate the Blu-Ray player better than many adults.  Cell phones deliver constant streams of information without the operator needing to know how.  Indeed, the complex ballet of satellites, cell towers, internet trunks, operating systems, computer coding, software, hardware, etc., are totally opaque to most operators.  This makes them inexplicable.

As I've often said, we live in a magical age.  The dictum that sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic applies.  The ineffable cause which lies behind the effect of your iPhone making calls and surfing the web means that you experience a sense of powerlessness.  You no longer control your own world, even as you manipulate it.

And we fear what we don't understand.

It's not surprising that conservative Republicans in the United States are pushing back against educational reforms that might actually work.  Comprised largely of the undereducated, they sense their powerlessness and inaccurately attribute it to government interference and shadowy liberal conspiracies.  Certainly, government intrusion is on the rise, and I'm certain PRISM and the NSA are getting a kick out of my ongoing ramblings.  But the real solution isn't withdrawal but increased participation in government and education.

What Elysium suggests is that the merger between corporations and governments (the two are largely indistinguishable in the movie) create uncrossable gaps between rich and power.  That gap is regularly bridged in the movie, however, so I'm not sure just what the moral of the story is supposed to be.  Even more worrying, the director fails to explain how the very limited resources of Elysium can be leveraged to cure the entire planet of its (incomprehensibly many) woes.  Every other person seems to have cerebral palsy, polio, or some other malady and the level of welfare would certainly have exhausted resources a long time ago.  (Which is probably why a very few fled Earth.  It wasn't selfishness but enlightened self-preservation.)

So as far as political statements go, it's milquetoast, and draping a science-fiction action adventure with that pale velvet means the whole movie suffers.  While it didn't suck, and I didn't feel cheated of the price of admission, it was nevertheless kind of blah.  

Wait till it comes out on Netflix.

(But, if you're in the mood for compelling science fiction that happens to also star Sharlto Copley in a supporting role, go see Europa Report.)

(And for a fun read on the actual science behind this movie, take a look at the Stanford torus.)

Undaunted Fraud . . . Or, What Is History? Pt 3

Stephen E. Ambrose

This isn't news.  When Stephen Ambrose was accused of citing numerous works nearly verbatim without proper attribution, it was in the middle of the another plagiarism scandal involving Doris Kearns Goodwin.  You might know her from Team of Rivals, the book which laid the foundation for Stephen Spielberg's Lincoln. 

Back in 2002, ferreting out plagiarism in popular history seemed all the rage as journalists and amateur historians began noticing errors and discrepancies in Stephen Ambrose's The Wild Blue.  According to Fred Barnes over at The Weekly Standard, Ambrose lifted substantial sections from Thomas Childers's book Wings of Morning: The Story of the Last American Bomber Shot Down over Germany in World War II.  Childers, a University of Pennsylvania history professor, was attributed in footnotes, but his words remained largely unchanged in Ambrose's book.

At the same time that this was brewing, The Daily Standard turned its attention to Doris Goodwin and noted that much of her work on The Fitzgeralds and the Kennedys pulled material from Lynne McTaggart's book, Kathleen Kennedy: Her Life and Times.  As with Ambrose, Goodwin was charged with lifting whole sentences and failing to attribute them properly.  In essence, she claimed another's work as her own.

A bookshop.  Cuz, you know, that's where real history happens.

In work that relies to a considerable extent on the work of others, plagiarism is always a looming danger.  Most academics rely on the research of others; indeed, modern research is more like adding a single pebble to an edifice than in laying foundations or erecting the framework.  We rely on the work of others to reinforce our work, or to support our conclusions.  The interpretation is often unique, and the work is genuine, but it relies on the work of others.  Clearly delineating what is your own from the another's work is necessary to build credibility and reproducibility. 

Because historians rely so heavily on sources, it's often difficult to reproduce certain conclusions.  The necessary documents are sometimes hidden in archives.  Those archives are more often than not on the other side of the country and can be accessed only with difficulty and expense.  So we trust that others have done a good job; that trust is built on an unshakable foundation of historical ethics.  And plagiarism undermines that foundation. 

To her credit, when Goodwin was called on her plagiarism, she responded by acknowledging her error and strove to correct it.  Though many charge that her correctives were insufficient, she nonetheless seemed to respond in a more forthright manner than Ambrose. 

Doris Kearns Goodwin

But his errors were more grievous.  He'd long been in arrears with veterans groups for his sometimes unflattering portrayal of soldiers in the second world war.  Their charges are serious, but far from condemnatory, since historians often make unflattering claims against revered figures and individual experience may differ from the broad summary which historians try to make.  More serious are accusations that Ambrose distorted the historical record or inflated his sources. 

In 2001, after the publication of his book Nothing Like It in the World: The Men Who Built the Transcontinental Railroad, 1863–1869 describing the building of the Pacific Railroad, a group of railroad historians compiled a paper detailing the numerous factual errors it contained.  Writing for the Journal of American History, reviewer Walter Nugent was driven to exasperation by the frequent factual errors.

What initially brought this whole controversy to my attention, however, was the revelation by Tim Rives, Deputy Director of the Eisenhower Presidential Center that Ambrose grossly distorted his relationship with the former President.  As Ambrose told it, Eisenhower approached him to write his biography after the former President read Ambrose's biography of Henry Halleck.  No such thing happened.  In fact it was the other way around, and Rives had the letter to show that Ambrose approached Eisenhower. 

Henry Halleck

When Ambrose's two volume biography was finally published, he cited the hundreds of hours of interviews he had had with the President as the source of many of his conclusions.  Once again, Eisenhower's exhaustive schedule told another story.  It showed Ambrose speaking with Eisenhower three times for a grand total of less than half a dozen hours.  Furthermore, Rives goes on to assert that interview times that Ambros claims in his book Supreme Commander just don't jive with Eisenhower's personal schedule. 

Basically, he made it up. 

This is ridiculously frustrating for a profession that already deals with the lay perception that "you just make stuff up."  The rigors of historical research and writing require that historians adhere to a level of ethical conduct just as strenuous as physical researchers. 

Share The Road . . . Or, Where Not To Shop In Corvallis

Let's talk about customer service.  Here in Corvallis in the old downtown area, four (at least) bicycle shops co-mingle in a small two block stretch.  Peak Sports, Bike N Hike, Corvallis Cyclery, and Cyclotopia all vie for customers' dollars. 

Each store specializes a bit.  Cyclotopia and the Cyclery offer recumbent bikes and accoutrement that seems a bit left of center.  Bike N Hike and Peak Sports are both hybrid shops, offering bicycle gear (and bicycles) as part of "outdoor activities" in general.  Peak Sports has several different store fronts, specializing in outdoors in general, bike stuff, and bike repair.  Bike N Hike is basically just bikes. 

It seems strange that so many stores would crowd the same street, and I wondered if the demand justified the supply.

This is a college town after all, and between the months of September and June the population swells by 26,000 people.  That effectively doubles the population of Corvallis and these stores are all located within easy walking distance of Oregon State University.  During the peak school year, it makes sense that they would have enough dollars to keep the doors open.

And I suspect this is part of the problem.

With so many customers, demand is almost assured.  The money always flows.  This reduces incentive to stress high quality customer service.

Customer service is the single factor which separates two shops with comparable product and price point.  It's literally the difference between buying something at store X or store Y.

This last week, I've been trying to get my bike and myself road ready for the coming fall and winter.  That meant a tune-up on the bike (it was pretty bad) and a jacket that would stand up not only to the rain but also to the copious amounts of sweat biking pumps out.  According to bicycling.com "[a] cyclist can shed two to three pounds an hour while riding hard."  A pound works out to 16 ounces (or two cups) of sweat.  My commute is roughly two and a half hours round trip.  You figure it out.

It's not quite the season to look for waterproof jackets though but Oregon is fickle, and it could rain tomorrow or hold off till November.  I wanted to be prepared.

I did my research, and when I was ready starting shopping around for the best price.  I went to Peak first.

It's a good sized store, seems pretty well stocked.  It certainly had the requisite supply of bikes hanging on the wall.  But walking in is daunting.  First, the five guys standing at the cash register took a long time to acknowledge I'd come into the store.  I wandered into a side room before one of them bothered asking me if I needed any help.  When I laid out my requirements he looked around as if I'd just asked him the dimensions to Noah's Ark. 

"I don't know," he said.

Then he walked away leaving me eyeballing the merchandise.  Finally, I wandered away.  That guy, just then, lost the store at least $200. 

The guys at Bike N Hike were much more helpful, but in that kind of gruff, no-nonsense way you expect from a good mechanic.  They didn't have the jacket I needed either, but they were knowledgeable, and offered me some good advice.  They also did tune ups, something I'd never gotten around to asking about at Peak.  I brought my bike to them and they had it back to me the next day.

But still, I hadn't found my jacket.  A week went by, and I rode into town a few times.  By that point, it was quickly becoming apparent that my butt couldn't handle the pressure.  I needed padded cycling shorts but I didn't want to spend a fortune on them.  Again, I made the rounds.

All other things being equal, I like The Cyclery and Cyclotopia better than Peak and Bike N Hike.  They're smaller stores, and Cyclotopia especially has a kind of artisanal feel.  Their staff are helpful and they have more niche products.  If you're on a recumbent bike, or you need gear that you won't find elsewhere, I'd hit them up first.  But I just needed shorts, and their prices are a bit higher than elsewhere.

Regardless, I wound up going back to Peak against my better judgement.  The situation remained unchanged.  The five guys at the front ignored me for five minutes and when I said I needed shorts they kind of waved me toward the clothing section.  But I must have repeated that I needed a jacket because after another cow-faced "I don't know," a woman came out to ask if I was the customer who'd inquired about the jacket.

Her name is Joy, and she was a Godsend.  Not only did she know her merchandise and help me pick out a jacket that met all my specifications, but when she discovered it wasn't in stock anywhere she called the manufacturer in Portland and had them hunt one down for me.  But I'm one of those shoppers that needs immediate gratification and since I was dropping a couple notes, I wanted it now.  Expedited shipping wasn't too expensive, so I asked her to see if I could get it the next day.  She called to the warehouse and tried to make it happen.

But Joy's shift was ending.  The people at the warehouse had to find the shipment to rush it, so they asked to call back.  Joy turned my order over to one of the guys there (whose name I remember, but I've made an oath not speak ill of anyone on the interwebs) and I left with the expectation that I'd get a call that day saying it was being shipping, and a call the next day saying my jacket had arrived.

I received neither of those calls. 

Dude dropped the ball.  I probably won't shop there again.

The moral of this story is cautionary: Don't shop at Peak in Corvallis.  Or if you must, ask for Joy.