Best What Now?

We're poor, poor, poor, these days.

So when we get to a bookstore, which we hardly ever do these days, I am eagerly anticipating, hungry to buy a book -- even two books if I can manage it.  I want a book!

So there I am in the new SF section, hoping against hope that, finally, Jesus, please, let there be a book I want to read, because I love science fiction, I have loved it since I found a copy of Heinlein's Have Space Suit Will Travel on the library shelf when I was eleven years old.

But no.  It's more of the same crap.  Ever since 9/11, all we get are the Armchair commandos, spinning their xenophobic warhammer fap fap fap....and the same dozen of them, may I add?  I wouldn't mind them getting published, since obviously there is a market.  Obviously plenty of adolescent-minded fellas out there eat this sort of fiction up.  They must, it keeps getting published.

But can't we have something else? Just now and then?

I pick up the Best S&FF for 2008.  Same old writers, mostly male, with the stock two or three women as always -- because no new writers exist, I guess.

Check out the Hugo list: usual suspects, usual (mainly) white males.  (Here's an essay on the topic, worth reading.)

It's not, btw, that other writers, writing other things, writing good stories, don't exist, or aren't getting published, even -- as some argue.  It's that the big publishing houses and mainstream magazines and awards, who have a lock on the mainstream market, are controlled by this coterie, and right now that's all they're publishing, this one sort of fiction.

Small presses might save us -- Perfect Circle, for instance, one of the best books I've ever read, published by Small Beer Press, and Kage Baker's first novel had to be published overseas, though now she's been picked up by Tor.

Too much to hope that the SF world would actually start thinking, I suppose: look around and learn and publish for a wider audience?

(I did not, in the end, buy anything from the SF section.  I came home and bought Verb Noire's first publication instead.)

What We Should Do Now, See...

I swear, if I hear one more Right-Wing Tool say "What we have to do now is look forward...."

Apparently it doesn't even matter what they're talking about.  Liz Cheney was talking about the moronic Birthers and spewed the line.  Trying to weasel out of having to admit that the obsession with Obama's birth certificate was looney, and rather than just say, "Yes, of course Obama was born in the USA," or, "Yes, of course people who say he's not an American citizen are focusing on the wrong thing," or even, "Yes, of course Obama is an American citizen," what does she say?

"We need to look forward now, not backward."

What in shit does that even mean in this context?

It's like they've got ten things they can say, like they're fucking wind-up dolls, and they just spit these phrases out.

God, they're tiresome.

Over Here

Ta-Nehisi Coates meditates on the Police -- specifically, the woman who called the police when she saw what she believed was two men breaking into Henry Louis Gates Jr.'s house.

He notes he would not have called the police under those circumstances, and goes on to muse on the circumstances under which he might call the police -- very few; over on Unfogged, they have a similar thread.

See, because for many of us in America, the police are not protectors, they are oppressors. It's what I was saying in the previous thread: they do not, in fact, protect "us."  They protect them, those rich (white) folk up on the hill. (Yeah, I'm white, and I'm at least tentatively middle-class, but I'm on the edge of poverty, and I drive a crappy car and come from the trailer class, and frequently get pulled over for Driving While Poor.) You don't call for the police, in this class, and you aren't pleased to see them when they show up.

This became clear to me a year or so ago, when TOLP, who comes from a very different class, had her wallet stolen.  When my wallet was stolen, about nine years ago, I shrugged it off -- well, okay, I cursed and muttered, and said bad words.  But that's all I did.  Then I went and got a new driver's license and shit.  When the folks at the state asked why I said I had lost my wallet.

TOLP called the police.  Then she pressed for an investigation.  Then she followed up on the fucker, dogging the police and shit, going down to the cop shop of her own free will, and -- shit, she made me go to the cop shop, one of the scarier moments of our relationship.  Who goes to visit the police when they ain't have to?  Bint's obviously crazy.*

I cannot think of a single circumstance under which  I would call the police -- well, maybe if I guy was breaking into my house with a chainsaw.  Maybe.  Probably even then I would just run out the front door.

What about you?

*Kidding, TOLP!

Okay, Just So I'm Clear

The father of the police officer who arrested Henry Louis Gates Jr. says his son works hard, and is not a racist; he says Obama was out of line for calling out his son.  He says everyone is making a big deal out of nothing.

I've read a ton of comments from (white) people on various liberal blogs that say something like this: Yes, Gates was innocent, but everybody knows you don't talk back to the police.  Why didn't he just put his head down and say yes, sir, of course sir, here's my ID sir?  What kind of fool is he? Or they say something like, well, your sympathies might be with Gates, but the police deal with lunatics and jerks all day long, and many of them are dangerous, and they can't afford to take chances, and the police do this for very little money, the police are there to protect us, which Gates should have realized, so--

This is the problem with these comments, as Obama knows, and those writing here do as well: Two different Americas exist.  Rich/Middle class white folk get to live in one, and maybe there the police exist to protect "us"; people of color, particularly, and to some extent poor white folk live in a different America.

Maybe you should shut up and listen to what you're getting told about that place, just one time.  How would that be?

Delagar Cooks!

New recipes up at delagar cooks.

Don't forget, y'all can send me your recipes -- drdelagar@gmail.com

Right-Wing

They ain't Racist.

Obama on Gates

Angry Black Woman has the clip of Obama talking about HLGatesJr, if you missed it. (Yes, I am still too ignorant to embed videos. Grr.)

Obama's really good, not that I'm surprised. Doesn't back up one bit. That's my President!

Right-Wing Attempts To Think

...About Health-Care Reform.

Only they aren't any better at thinking that over than at much else, apparently. This Robert Broadus argues that he should not have to be taxed for health care, see, because of the bill of rights, which he believes means he should not have to pay taxes for health care if he doesn't want to, since he has not been buying health insurance, which has been saving him (he says) $2,500/year and he's been doing fine with that.

"What if you get sick?" he is asked.

"What if you break a leg?" he is asked.

"Who pays then?"

Of course, we would -- his fellow citizens -- unless his family is filthy rich -- which, since he says earlier he's been helping to support them, I somehow doubt is the case.

So if he gets sick, his fellow taxpayers will foot the bill, because I really doubt he will just eat his gun. But that's not the point! He's a free citizen! We can't MAKE him pay for a health care system just because he might use it some day!

And J.T. Plumber and Fox News, of course, love this fella to bits.

That's what passes for bold thinking on the Right these days.

 

Here is what I keep pointing out to my students and anyone else that will listen to me:

The United States now devotes one-sixth of its economy to medicine. Divvy that up, and health care will cost the typical household roughly $15,000 this year, including the often-invisible contributions by employers. That is almost twice as much as two decades ago (adjusting for inflation). It's about $6,500 more than in other rich countries, on average.

If you think health care reform will make health care too expensive, guess what? It already is.

Gates

The Chronicle of Higher Ed reports on Henry Louis Gates Jr.'s arrest and the subsequent dropping of said bogus charges.

Appalling stream of comments from appalling commentors begins at once.

100% White Males

Rachel Maddow kicks Uncle Pat around again.

Not that he doesn't deserve it.  Hee.

Cheap Crap

Ezra Klein posts about cheap chicken, and other (apparently) cheap consumer goods over here.

This is one fight I have a dog in, living where I do, in NW Arkansas, home of both Wal-Mart and Tyson.

This bit of the world is littered with chicken ranches and Wal-Mart wealth: it makes for a schizophrenic landscape. On the one hand, appalling poverty, since the people who run the chicken farms and work in the chicken factories are, in general, stunningly poor. I'm talking missing teeth, can't make the light-bill poor -- I have their kids in my classes, from time to time, and I get essays; or I'll get a wife or a fifty year old man who can't manage the work at the chicken factory anymore (it's physically awful, just wrecks the body) who has come back to school hoping she can or he can get off disability that way.

They hate living on the state, btw.

Usually the one with jobs at Wal-Mart are just as poor, and often just as physically damaged.

On the other hand: the executives have these houses that look like small hotels, or maybe the sort of mini-castle some nine year old who had watched too much Disney would think up. "God lives there," mr. delagar likes to say, as we drive past. And these houses are right next to the rat-trap shacks and trailers the line-workers live in; Marie Antoinette drives right past the peasants, here in Arkansas, in her shiny red Beamer.

She's safe enough though I guess. Nearly every one of my freshmen is still Republican. They're all going to live in a house just like hers some day, see, and they just know when that happens they won't want anyone taxing their money away, money they earned fair and square....

Anyway, not what I started out to say.

The cost of the chicken, the cost of the tennis shoe, the cost of the teeshirt.

Wal-Mart sells teeshirts for five bucks, Tyson sells chickens for six bucks. Never mind that the teeshirts suck and the chickens taste like flavorless gum. They're cheap! So America will buy them.

Are they cheap? That's the point.

They only look cheap: that's the point being made by Ezra's post, and the book he links to.

It's also what anyone who thought for half a minute could figure out.

If Wal-Mart and Tyson (and so on) do not pay the health costs of their employees (just to take a random point) does that mean their employees do not have health costs?

If they do not pay the retirement costs of their employees does that mean those employees do not have retirement costs?

If they don't pay their employees enough to live on, does that mean their employees starve?

No: sometimes their employees have wives or husbands who get jobs; but sometimes they get earned income back in taxes. Who pays that? Why, you do!

Who pays the retirement benefits (in the form of disability pay)? Why, you do!

Who pays the health cost, since no insurance gets bought? (Can't buy it on what they're paid.) Why, you do, taxpayer!

Add all that to the price of your chicken and teeshirt, not to mention the subsidies you're already paying to the farmers that grow the cotton and the chicken feed and probably the chicken, and jeez that shirt isn't so cheap now, is it?

Wal-Mart is making a fortune on America's back. You're paying for the Disney House. Too bad they don't let you come visit.

Not Racist!

I don't know if you caught Uncle Pat on Rachel Maddow the other night, with his rant about how it was "reverse racism" to put Sotomayor on the SCOTUS, because, after all, this country was built by 100% white males, and 100% of the people who died at Gettsyburg and Vicksburg were white males, and nearly 100% (at least he said nearly that time!) 100% of the men who died on D-Day were white males, and --

It's like that bit in that stupid book by Stephen King, I forget which one it was, the one where the plague is let loose and 99.9% of the country dies, and the feminist Fannie or Frannie, I forget her name, finds a big strong Texan to protect her, and has this epiphany that feminism was just a silliness made possible by the big strong men that had created the safe modern world.  Feminists, she decides, ought to be made to cross-stitch a thank you to all the big strong men who had conquered the west and built the country, fap fap fap, which even when I was fifteen I knew was a pile of heaping steaming SHIT.

100% white males built this country?

Gah.  Tell that to Sojourner Truth, you tool.

Meanwhile, go read this.

My President

Obama speaks to the NAACP.

It's sort of long, though worth it -- the really good part starts about 18 minutes in, if you don't want to listen to the whole thing.

GOP Coming to You From...

...some other universe, apparently.

I just got done teaching Swift in WLIT II, which is one of my Summer II classes this summer (World Literature from 1650 to the Present in Five Weeks! Yowza!).  We read the bit of Gulliver where he visits the horses, and A Modest Proposal, always a joy. Getting students to understand satire, an Irish/English satire, when they don't know much about history, American politics, or their own economic situation (they all think the poor are poor because they just don't work hard enough, by golly), is enough to make me want to retire to my back stoop with my bottle of black strap rum, as I would if it weren't 106 out there most afternoons.

And if I weren't too broke to buy rum these days anyway.  Which is really sad.

Then I read about these guys.

Who think America's most pressing concern is abortion and gun control.  My ear.  My neck.  My back teeth!  Here in Pork Smith, we're running out of gas money by the second week in every month, and you're carping on about gun control and whether it's the 21st or the 22nd month that defines viability?  Jeebus Jumping Christ.

So: here's my new idea.  Swift thought we should eat the poor.  I think we should eat the rich.  A nice brick-oven BBQ.  We can start with Rich Rethuglicans.  I know they'll be bitter and tough and nasty.  But -- evolution in action!  What do you say? (/satire, obviously.)