Monthly Archives: September 2010

Politics Seattle Writing

Political Satire

September 28, 2010 – 8:15 am

Once I left Microsoft I joined a Daytime Writing Group meetup, mostly as an excuse to get out of the house. Every week I’d go and share the latest chapter of my “Ayn Rand meets J.K. Rowling meets Joseph Heller meets Tom Wolfe” novel-in-progress and listen to everyone else’s latest vampire romance (the genre, not the band*).

While most of the participants were pleasant and helpful, after a few weeks we were joined by an extremely unpleasant woman who angrily criticized my story for not being set in the “country” of Timbuktu and for not acknowledging the accomplishments of “shamanic healers.” After a couple of weeks I decided that the positive interactions with the rest of the group weren’t enough to compensate for the aggravation of dealing with Large Miss Unpleasant, and I stopped attending.

But I’m still on the mailing list, which is how I learned that Daily-Show co-founder Lizz Winstead was conducting a “Political Satire Writing Workshop.” Of course there’s nothing I like better than writing political satire, unless it’s writing religious satire or spreadsheet how-to books or short stories about a boy who likes to play baseball but is no good at it.

Being Seattle, it ended up being more of a “Left-Wing Political Satire Writing Workshop,” with a collective glee focused on the comedic potential of Dick Cheney’s lack of pulse, Dick Cheney’s daughter’s self-hating lesbianness, something else Dick Cheney, and the word “teabagger.”

Still, we had a valuable discussion about comedy writing and the creative process, and I bit my tongue whenever people mocked a candidate’s dabbling in “witchcraft” as if its beliefs were prima facie more ludicrous than the beliefs of Catholicism or Judaism.

Since we were in the International (i.e. East Asian) District, we took a break for bubble tea, after which we divided into groups to bang out some political satire projects.

Most of the suggestions were things I couldn’t in good conscience write about (“teabaggers,” disparaging the Second Amendment, etc…), but one of my workshopmates suggested a news item about a Republican Senator who gave a somewhat oblivious speech assuming that his audience (being good Americans) all earned over $250,000K a year.

The truth, when we Googled it, was slightly less damning (the audience consisted of Chamber of Commerce members), but “Senator lives in insular world, assumes everyone is rich like him” was something I could work with. It was a group effort, so there are ideas in it that I wouldn’t have put in myself, but — for a political satire piece written collaboratively with other Seattleites — it’s actually not bad.

You can see it (along with the other groups’ pieces — ours is the one that’s not about Glenn Beck or “Teabaggers”) here, first in an edited-by-Lizz version, then in the original. I like the edited version better in some ways, worse in others, and I’d probably like some compromise version the best.

At the end I gifted Lizz with a copy of my book, which I predict she enjoys all the way up to the “Environmentalism is false” chapter.

* My fact-checker tells me there’s no such band as Vampire Romance. Well, there should be!

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Education Life Personal

Correlation and Causation

September 27, 2010 – 9:24 am

Another day, another plan to spend more money on education:

President Obama said on the “Today” show Monday morning that American students attend school a month less than kids in other countries — contending that the school-year gap puts them at a competitive disadvantage in the global economy. “The idea of a longer school year, I think, makes sense,” he said, when asked if kids should go to school year-round.

The logic here is pretty sound:

A) Other countries have longer school years.
B) Other countries produce more “competitive” graduates.
C) Therefore, we need a longer school year.

There are a number of other attractive policy prescriptions that follow from the same reasoning. For example, here’s a similar plan to increase standardized test scores:

A) Asian students eat more rice than non-Asians.
B) Asian students do best on standardized tests.
C) Therefore, we should feed our students more rice.

–

Just so we’re clear, it’s certainly possible that spirit-crushing, year-round education is in part responsible for the “competitiveness” of other countries’ graduates. It’s certainly more likely to be true than it would be if we observed that countries with year-round education produced “less competitive” graduates.

Nonetheless, in the absence of a clear causal mechanism, it’s possible that there are other differences between those countries and ours that are much more reponsible for any differences in “competitiveness.” Maybe they have smarter students, or they don’t put lead in their school lunches, or they don’t make their 8th-graders play “concussion ball” in gym class. It’s always worth checking to make sure you’ve got causality correct before you eliminate summer vacation.

–

Another key plank of Obama’s proposed reforms involves “evaluation of teachers based on their students’ test performance.” This is fine, I suppose, if you want to define a good teacher as one whose students perform well (or perhaps better than they used to) on tests. It’s not clear to me that this is the best criterion, but I never paid a whole lot of attention to most of my teachers anyway, and I always liked best the ones who taught interesting things and who let me sleep in class when I was tired.

And in some ways this aspect of the debate seems silly, because back when I was in school everyone knew which teachers were good and which weren’t. We didn’t need Value-Added Analyses or Professional Observers or DNA Tests, we just knew. Everyone knew. Students knew. Parents knew. Other teachers knew. Everyone knew.

Not that it mattered, since you didn’t get to choose your teachers. Sure, if you signed up for Latin then you were going to have the Latin teacher, and if you signed up for German then you were going to have the German teacher, and if you signed up for Calculus BC then you were going to have the Calculus BC teacher.

But when you signed up for 10th grade World History (which you would, since it was pretty much required) you were going to end up with a crapshoot of a teacher. Maybe you’d get a good one, maybe you’d get a bad one. (I got an awesome one, who insisted that Turkey was a de facto US colony since we had missile bases there, and who let me sleep in class, but that was pretty much just dumb luck on my part.)

The same was mildly true in college, where freshman science and engineering majors had to take a year-long “survey course in the humanities.” Since there were lots of science and engineering majors, there were lots of course sections of HUMA 101 and 102, taught by anyone who couldn’t talk his way out of it.

My first semester (Bible, Plato, Homer, Virgil, Canterbury Tales, etc…) was taught by a Women’s Studies professor from Germany who always brought her “friend” to class and who made most of the works about Women’s Studies. (Our crowning achievement, if I may brag, was that we convinced her to let us bring in a boom box and listen to “Achilles Last Stand” as part of our discussion of the Iliad).

My second (Shakespeare, Descartes, Kant, Flaubert, Kafka, etc…) was taught by a Continental philosopher who used terms we didn’t understand like “cathectic” and “I-thou duality” and hated every paper I wrote except for my final one, a giant clusterfuck of buzzwords tying together Kafka, the Tower of Babel, “modernity” [another of his favorites], and all sorts of other bullshit that I made sound like one of his lectures as much as I could. (I still preferred him to the first professor, though.)

Neither of them really instilled any sort of appreciation in me for the stuff we read, whereas the “American Literature of the 1970′s” course I took (“There is nothing in the world more helpless and irresponsible and depraved than a man in the depths of an ether binge.”) was taught by a grad student with no agenda other than that he really loved the books, and so I grew to love some of them too. It was, as you might guess, not a required course, and if it had turned out terrible I might well have dropped it.

The HUMA courses, though, were both required and capped at ~20 students, which meant you needed to fight for a slip of paper with a time that worked for you and then just put up with whatever luck-of-the-draw teacher that worked out to. I guarantee you that if there were any actual choice involved then the first teacher’s class would have (after a semester or two during which institutional knowledge was being generated) been routinely empty, as it deserved to be.

Anyway, my point is that everyone knows which teachers are good and which aren’t, and all this talk of “testing” and “value-added analysis” and whatnot is just a way of pretending that we don’t. If you were to let students and parents choose which teachers they wanted, I bet things would get sorted out really quickly.

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Religion

Converts Are the Worst

September 23, 2010 – 10:31 am

The other day I was in the midst of killing a party by talking about my book when someone asked me for my favorite religious joke. It is, of course, Emo Philips’s funniest religious joke of all time, and off the top of my head I did it very poor justice.

One of my other favorite religious jokes involves the Jew whose father sends him to college with a warning not to marry a shiksa:

Sure enough, his senior year at school he falls in love with a non-Jewish girl. She loves him too, but he tells her he can’t marry her because she’s not Jewish.

“Don’t worry,” she says. “I’ll convert.” After serious study, the girl converts. They marry and go off on their honeymoon in Monaco.

Four weeks later, back at home, Saturday morning at 8:00, the phone rings at their house. It’s the boy’s father. He’s livid. “You know the last Saturday of every month we go over the books at the office. Why aren’t you here?”

“I can’t come,” the boy says. “My wife says it’s forbidden. It’s Shabbat. We’re heading off to shul.”

“I told you not to marry a [fucking] shiksa,” the father screams.

On the internet this joke seems to get referenced a lot in discussions of intermarriage, which is odd, because it’s doesn’t really say anything about intermarriage. It’s about religious conversion, and in particular about how converts are the worst.

It seems like they always end up as true believers who never understand stuff that everyone knows, like how Jesus’s hatred of premarital sex contained an exception for “petting to climax,” and how the dietary laws outlined in scripture were never intended to apply to meals at Fuddrucker’s, and how commandments like “Thou Shalt Not Make Graven Footwear” are really just suggestions.

So it’s no surprise that it’s a convert who got Converse to stop selling their Jimi Hendrix “Axis: Bold as Love” sneakers because the album art depicts Jimi as some sort of Hindu god. (Notwithstanding the fact that your local Indian grocery sells all sorts of bric-a-brac and posters depicting basically the exact same thing, minus Jimi, of course).

A quick Google search reveals that the chief complainer is an elderly white woman who converted to Hinduism “perhaps [by] Karmic destiny” and who (back in 2000) was president of her local chapter of VHP, a bunch of crazy Hindu nationalists whose agenda includes demolishing mosques in order to build temples to Ram, and treating cow slaughter as murder, and various other sorts of Hindu fanaticism.

(“I told you not to marry a fucking non-Hindu!”)

Meanwhile, some Hindus are patting themselves on the back that their people choose “the democratic way of protesting” (i.e. writing angry letters) and forwent the “we’ll get violent if you use our gods as shoe decoration” reactions that seem to be in vogue. One could, I suppose, point out that if not for the current “make fun of my god[s] and I’ll kill you” zeitgeist, companies might be more inclined to dismiss the cranks and whiners of the world as cranks and whiners.

Nonetheless, good for them standing up to a big wicked company who wanted to put pictures on shoes that might have hurt people’s delicate feelings. If they don’t have any future plans, might I suggest taking on Babar, whose existence is an obvious disrepect to Lord Ganesh?

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Personal Politics Seattle Writing

Using Statistics to Coddle Vagrants

September 22, 2010 – 1:02 pm

I left Microsoft at the end of May, largely so that I could write my opus magnum book on Excel. At the time I set a September 1 deadline for having the first draft done. That seemed like the right amount of time, but I failed to predict that I’d spend a substantial chunk of August doing consulting work, and so I slipped the deadline.

I shifted it two weeks later, to September 15, which I slipped again due to unavoidable commitments like going to the Puyallup Fair and drinking beer and napping. Finally I pushed it to September 17, which I met by arbitrarily deciding that several components of the book were “not part of the first draft.” Right now I’m letting people read it for feedback, after which I’ll revise it, beg famous authors for blurbs (*cough* Philip Roth *cough*), and start selling the heck out of it.

While the book is out for alpha testing, I’ve shifted gears for several days to focus on other things like fiction-writing contests and shaving and working on an Ignite Seattle talk.

Ignite Seattle is a 4-times-a-year collection of 5-minute talks. As best I can tell, you submit a proposal, and “they” choose their favorites to actually give the talks. I attended the last one, and a surprising number of the speakers were introduced as “my longtime friend” or “my frat brother from college” or “my concubine,” which makes me suspect there’s a cronyism element involved. There also appears to be some sort of sex-quotaism, as they back-patted themselves for exceeding the (presumably court-imposed) 40%-female-speakers requirement.

I didn’t get the sense that the people picking the talks were demographically identical to the people listening to the talks, which sets up something of a political-primary dynamic: play to the base to get through the first round then pivot back to the center.

In any event, I think I need a more congenial title than “How Do You Like Obama Now, You Kitchen-Composting, Vagrant-Coddling, Prius-Driving Useful Idiots?” Maybe something more geek-friendly like “Eleven.com: Using Statistics to Model Elections in Washington State” or Seattle-friendly like “Home Composting Projects That Also Help Vagrants” or even a mixture of the two like “Using Statistics To Coddle Vagrants.” [Insert your own p-value joke here.]

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Philosophy Politics Religion

Blasphemy and Forced Reverence

September 10, 2010 – 12:02 pm

On Facebook I list my Religious Views as “irreverence,” which is pretty perfectly descriptive. This means that you can believe any crazy thing you want, but I’m allowed to make fun of you for it if I like. Basically, I’m under no obligation to “respect” your beliefs just because they’re your beliefs. I’ll respect them if they strike me as, well, respectworthy, and I won’t if they don’t.

(Curiously, this makes me a dick, while the infinitely more grotesque “you believe what you want, but if it’s different from what I believe then Jesus is going to torture you forever” is considered in perfectly good taste. Go figure.)

In areas other than religion this approach to respect is totally non-controversial. No one demands that you respect your neighbor’s furry lifestyle, your parents’ musical tastes, or your ex-girlfriend’s body-art aesthetics.

But as soon as someone calls those beliefs “religion,” your lack of respect instantly becomes the awful crime of blasphemy:

Blasphemy is irreverence toward holy personages, religious artifacts, customs, and beliefs.

Now, blasphemy itself represents a proud religious tradition. Abraham, the founder of Judaism, blasphemed against the gods of his day (although eventually his followers decided that blasphemy against their beliefs was in fact a capital offense). Jesus blasphemed against the Jewish faith (although eventually his followers declared that blasphemy against their beliefs was in fact the one unforgiveable sin.) Muhammad blasphemed against the polytheistic Meccans (although eventually his followers decided that the penalty for blasphemy against their beliefs might include flogging, amputation, or beheading).

In every case there was a tension between

* what those in power wanted, and
* what the little guy thought was true

Abraham was the “little guy” standing up to the much more powerful idolators. Jesus was the “little guy” standing up to the Jewish establishment. Mohammed was the “little guy” standing up to the Meccans. In the unlikely event that any of their stories actually happened, then most surely they were attacked at the time for being “un-Meccan” or “contrary to Judean values” or “dangerous to our troops in Afghanistan.”

In fact, the whole concept of “blasphemy” boils down to the position “I’m more powerful than you are, and I’ll punish you if you don’t revere all the arbitrary things I say you should.” Contra Obama, if anything is “contrary to what this country stands for,” it’s that. In North Korea, you revere whatever they tell you to. In Afghanistan, you revere whatever they tell you to. In Soviet Russia, you revere whatever they tell you to. (Alternatively, “In Soviet Russia, Quran burns you.”)

In America, you revere whatever the fuck you want. If you want to draw a cartoon, you draw that cartoon. If you want to set a flag on fire, you set that flag on fire. If you want to put a skit on national TV that makes fun of the President, you put that skit on TV. If you want to make a musical that mocks the Book of Mormon, you make that musical. And, yes, if you want to set a “holy” book on fire, then you set that book on fire. The fact that the only people willing to take a stand on this are right-for-the-wrong-reasons lunatics like Terry Jones and Fred Phelps is so disturbing that it keeps me up at night.

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Philosophy Politics Religion

Book Burnings and “Americanism”

September 8, 2010 – 8:56 am

You have, I’m sure, heard the news that a church in Florida plans to acquire multiple copies of the Quran and burn them. The reaction I’ve seen from the “Muslim world” ranges from “that’s how you dispose of them anyway, so knock yourself out” to “I’m going to kill you.” Possibly there’s a middle ground (“that’s how you dispose of them anyway, so I’m going to kill you”?) but I’m not terribly interested in finding it.

The reaction from the “American world” is far more interesting, encompassing everything from “that’s how you dispose of them anyway, so knock yourself out,” to “you’ll just make the people who are already trying to kill our troops in Afghanistan want to kill our troops in Afghanistan,” to “someone ought to write a Bradburyesque novel about book-burnings,” to “can’t we get the EPA to do something, like maybe make them buy carbon offsets?” to “we tried that with the Beatles and it didn’t work,” to “burning books is ‘un-American’.”

This last I find the most curious, as “American” is a surprisingly slippery adjective. Of course when you use it the old-fashioned way like “American citizen” (a citizen of America) or “American Bandstand” (the best-loved bandstand in America) or “American Idol” (that one American we’ve agreed as a society to idolize this year) it’s clear what it means.

When we start describing actions or principles as “American” or “un-American,” it’s a little bit tougher. Nonetheless, most people agree that certain basic freedoms like “freedom of speech” and “freedom of the press” and “freedom to own a semi-automatic rifle” should be rightly understood as “American,” even if we disagree on other ancillary freedoms like “freedom to prohibit speech that offends me” and “freedom to prohibit journalism that offends me” and “freedom to bring my emotional support dog into the grocery store even though it reliably craps in the frozen food aisle.”

How about book-burning? Well, the principle that “if you buy something, then it’s yours” seems pretty “American,” as does the principle “if you own something, then you’re allowed to dispose of it.” No less an “American” body than the Supreme Court seems (or seemed) to believe that symbolically burning things you own is an exercise of your First Amendment rights. These would all seem to tip the scale toward “American.”

Surely there’s a good case for “un-American,” though. For instance, the State Department spokesperson P.J. Crowley points out that “It doesn’t represent the vast majority of American views.” Of course, by this “vast majority rules” criterion, Islam itself would also count as “un-American,” so maybe it’s not the best example.

When pressed on the matter, Crowley further pointed out that the burning is “a divisive potential act of disrespect to one of the world’s great religions.”

It’s hard to know which is the “un-American” part. Perhaps it’s that it’s “divisive,” so that (for instance) a unifying act of disrespect would in fact be totally “American.” Or perhaps it’s that Islam is one of the world’s “great” religions, and that a divisive act of disrespect to a “lesser” religion would be “American.” But most likely it’s the “disrespect.”

Somewhere (but certainly not from me) people seem to have gotten the notion that treating all beliefs with respect is some sort of mark of well-manneredness or (I suppose) “American-ness.” To which I must protest. There’s nothing “American” about “respecting” beliefs you don’t find respectworthy. In fact, “South Park,” the most “American” (according to me) of all shows has as its raison d’etre mocking beliefs its creators don’t find respectworthy. If it were up to me, the First Amendment would be updated to include an explicit “Freedom to Mock,” which is one of the most important aspects of free speech but which routinely gets sacrificed on the altar of some spurious (and decidedly “un-American”) freedom from being offended.

Nonetheless, this Quran-burning debate has gotten extremely tiresome and is (in particular) distracting Drudge from covering more important topics like Al Sharpton’s insolvent nonprofit and how San Francisco street people are reacting to the elimination of the “dollar menu” at their favorite McDonalds.

So, Pastor Jones, I have a proposition for you. I know a book that’s even wickeder than the Quran, that burns quite well, and that’s available at Amazon with free super-saver shipping. Although I can’t imagine that our friends in the government would really get worked up about how “un-American” a Your Religion Is False burning is, my publisher would be totally stoked.

And if you really want to burn in bulk, I can offer you some volume discounts that are, if I may borrow your vernacular, pretty miraculous. You know how to contact me.

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Politics Religion

Catholic Iconography

September 7, 2010 – 11:27 am

My grasp of Catholic iconography apparently isn’t what it used to be, as I can’t for the life of me remember what the mop is supposed to symbolize:

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