Perpetually Pessimistic Optimist

Privilege

I've been exposed as of late to a lot of discussions of privileged places in society - i.e. those who are privileged and those who aren't.  The hierarchy is complex: white before minority, male before female, heterosexual before homosexual, and so forth, and so forth...for example, minority-female-homosexual is the theoretical lowest (on that three-point axis.)

I'm not disputing that social strata exist.  The reality is that there are "haves" and "have-nots," those whose path has been smoothed and those whose path has been rocky.  Where wrongs have been committed, redress is warranted.  No, I'm going to explore the concept of privilege itself, and how membership in a particular strata has its own myopia.

I'm a child of privilege; my father was a Cardiologist, with income which placed my family well within the top layer (I'm not sure of the specifics, but I wouldn't be surprised if we rated somewhere around the top 2%.)  Furthermore, I am an only child, a privileged strata within a privileged strata, and never wanted for anything essential or even frivolous.   I always had my own room, filled with material possessions of every practical form, had a computer when they were still a luxury product, a sports car when I was 16, had no real responsibilities and a generous allowance.  My personal experience is the definition of the pampered scion of the elite.  My parents funded my undergraduate collegiate education, again in circumstances far beyond the norm, in an apartment all to myself (let's not bandy words about, it was a luxury apartment with an excellent view of San Francisco Bay, straight out past Alcatraz and the Golden Gate Bridge to the Pacific Ocean beyond.)

Still...it didn't feel like privilege.  I was the "rich kid" in my social group, but I didn't feel rich.  There were others who were better off; I had a Camaro, they had a BMW.  People compare themselves upward, not downward.  They don't look at what they have and go "wow, compared to X I'm very well off," they look at what Y has - a younger wife, a better car, a bigger house, a Plasma TV - and feel less privileged.

Again, my race, sex, and orientation place me squarely in the privileged category.  White, heterosexual, male.  In no way am I ever to run against serious restrictions in what I can choose to do with my life.  Employment?  No problem.  Education? Never had an issue.  I'm never going to face implicit or explicit prejudice - I'm not even going to get into the reactionary farce which is resentment over minority recruitment policies and equal employment opportunity legislation.  In fact, in the nature of full disclosure, I've often said that I don't have a tenured position with a University is due to the fact that the nature of History Departments has changed; i.e. the growth of ethnic and women's studies programs meant fewer chairs for Western European specialists.  That's true, and that coincides with what I know from others, but I never resented it; I know that I had decided to make real sacrifices - poor pay, nomadic "lecturer" status, and so forth - I could have found a position eventually, and that my choice to specialize in such an esoteric field (the military and bureaucratic history of Germany in the Second World War) narrowed my scope.  I have never railed against women or minorities for "taking my job" or any such nonsense; it was my choice to take the path I did, even if it didn't lead to a tenure-track professorship.

So in every essential way I am the poster child for privilege.  Highly educated, with a middle-class job, a house in the suburbs, a car, and a house filled with more material things than I can ever reasonably use.  Yet...I don't feel privileged.  I have student loan debt, the house needs a new refrigerator, I could use a second car...I see someone on the freeway driving the redesigned Ford Mustang and think, "wow, I wish I could have one of those."  I don't drive through the lower-income areas of town and see a '88 Toyota Celica with rust spots on the door-frame and think, "wow, I have it good."

In an elliptical way my own experience encapsulates the problem that society in general has in discussing privilege and social hierarchy.  The members of the privileged group don't perceive themselves as privileged, and therefore attacks against them are difficult to comprehend.  They go about their daily lives seeing the flaws and injustices they suffer - the State Patrolman who pulled their Lexus over for going 70 in a 55 zone - and reflect instead on how some other individual or group "has it so easy."  Redresses of social issues are greeted with incomprehension and resentment; welfare recipients are "lazy," women suffering all of the subtle pressures and slights of the workplace are "humorless bitches," minority students in Universities are "taking away smart white kid's place in line."

Those who do think and see these inequities fall, for the most part, into two camps; those who over-empathize, children of privilege living sackcloth-and-ashes lives of guilt, often indulging in activities which have no real impact, or those who rationalize their privilege - they "worked harder," they "stopped complaining and just forged ahead," or they "faced just as many challenges and didn't bellyache about it."  Neither reaction is particularly constructive.

Another aspect of privilege is entitlement.  If you're on top, well, you deserve to be there.  Obstacles you overcame are exaggerated, the difficulties others face are minimized.  Even more poisonous is the belief that you were destined to be where you are due to some divine favor or inherent superiority.

Obfuscating the issue is that the humility of origin is often real; my ancestors weren't among the social elite, but rather a melange of immigrants from a dozen European nations, peasants and farmers, from non-WASP cultures.  My grandparents were the first in their families to attend college; my parents, aunts, and uncles the first to obtain professional degrees.  My family moved from the lower class to the upper class in two generations, not being inheritors of long elite traditions.  Still, if they were Polish, Russian, Norwegian, or German, they were white...and by that second generation who could tell the difference between a WASP and a Norskie-Polack-Kraut-Russkie mutt anyway?  I am that odd creature, an American, with real cultural ties only to my Midwest Heimat.  The upward mobility of my family is something within memory, and the feeling of membership in the upper class tenuous and new.

Still, sober thought informs me that I am, indeed, privileged.  I am male; I have never been sexually harassed in the workplace, never been told my clothing was "slutty," never advised to avoid walking after nightfall.  I am white; I have never been pulled over and searched when driving through a city, never been denied employment because I might steal the pencils, never been subject to suspicious glances from shopkeepers.  I am middle-class; I live better than the majority of humanity has ever lived, and better than the majority of humanity still lives, a member of a society where the basics of life are so abundant that lack of exercise and obesity are serious health issues.  I am heterosexual; I have never had to hide myself from public scrutiny, deny an essential part of myself from anyone, suffer through indecision and self-hatred.

But, and here's the essential point, I can empathize with those who are not "me or like me."  I can be outraged by sexual discrimination.  I can defend the right of any consenting adult to form a romantic or sexual attachment with whatever other consenting adult they want - and it's no business of mine what they do in the privacy of their own lives.  I can acknowledge that a member of a minority suffered a thousand small and large slights and hindrances to their lives, and strive to set aside my own acculturation and greet them as equally valuable human beings.

What I should never do is assume any of my experiences are analogous to what others in those groups have suffered.  I can cheer from the sidelines, support with words and deeds, offer acknowledgment and understanding, but never claim the kinship of suffering or to truly, viscerally, understand their experiences.  All someone who comes from privilege can do is support change, support equity, and to stay the hell out of the way of those who need to effect real societal redress.

I do like my stuff, though.  Can I keep it?

Lines

Today I was pondering lines during my lunch break.  By "lines" I specifically mean those you cross...the line between teasing and ridiculing; the line between play and obsession; the line between banter and verbal abuse; the line between romance and stalking.

Let's take the last one first.  There's a common image in, say, romantic comedies that standing under your beloved's window at midnight and sighing is romantic; sending him or her notes, calling him or her at all hours, singing under his or her window, all of those are iconic images of romantic love.  Romance is about focus on another, centering oneself in orbit around another person.  You think about your beloved constantly.  You think of ways to please him or her.  You plan out future scenarios - dates, weddings, trips, etc.   Another romantic staple is the unrequited or unknown love interest - the shy boy or girl who worships from afar,  waiting for the perfect moment or for the other to realize "X" is a jerk and dump him or her so that you can swoop in and save your love object.

When does all this become stalking?  Where is, indeed, the line?  In our constant search for how-to guides, FAQs, quick lists, the ultimate guide to life, we tend to look for a concrete universal definition.  What is to distinguish an ardent suitor from a stalker?  It's actually deceptively simple - the line is not defined by the pursuer but the pursued.  If a person is comfortable with the attention, then it is romantic.  If it causes anxiety, uncertainty, even unease, then the behavior is not romantic, but transitioning to stalking.

The important point here is that the line is not defined by society in toto, or by the pursuer.  What, you say, about someone who's overly sensitive?  What about someone who cries "Stalker" over a perfectly innocent encounter or a single phone call?  Anyone can draw up a nightmarish scenario of someone being accused of a crime he or she did not commit, but how likely is that, really?  Certainly if someone went to the police and said "I'm being stalked!" and the recording officer found out that the individual only had one or two contacts with the victim the situation would be treated with the seriousness it deserved.

It's simple; if the person you're contacting says "stop, go away" you have one option - stop and go away.  If it's a misunderstanding, and they truly don't want you to go away, well, they can open up communication later on. 

What about the line between harmless jokes and expressions of prejudice?  Again, the line is defined for each person differently.  If you tell a joke, and someone gets offended, isn't it easier to just say "I'm sorry, I didn't know that bothered you" than to launch into a defensive rant about "loosening up" and "stop being oversensitive?"  Most reasonable people would accept an apology and move on.  Yes, there will be someone who gets too upset to accept an apology, there might even be an occasion when the joke is taken as an actionable insult - harassment, racism, what have you - and consequences may result.  But if you can say "I apologized, I meant no offense" who do you think will have the most sympathetic audience?  Certainly not someone who, in simple terms, says "X has no sense of humor."

It's common sense.  Someone is offended by what offends them.  You'll find, however, that people are usually a lot more forgiving than not. 

So each of us has our own lines.  We trip over others' lines, as they trip over ours.  It's a challenge to all of us to watch out for those invisible social boundaries and respect the lines of others as we would wish them to respect ours.  Just think; if someone crossed over my line, would I want to hear, "What's your problem? You're a wimp.  You're too sensitive.  You should loosen up.  You're unreasonable."  No.  I'd want to be taken seriously and treated with respect.

Friday Afternoon Randomness

I'm making a valiant attempt to maintaining a Friday schedule for some sort of post, no matter how erratic or irrelevant.  Mind you, at this point I'm just talking to myself...

1) Bionic Woman: Not a bad new show, all things considered.  First, the bad: the military-trained "prototype" bionic woman, of course, turns out to be a nutball.  It's up to the slacker/bartender to be the "good" bionic woman.  Why did the writers make her pregnant?  Was it to add a little frisson of angst to the crash - as if getting one's limbs bisected wasn't enough?  Finally, you find out your boyfriend - with whom you've just gotten pregnant by the way - is actually a Mad Scientist whose experimented on you, and your first reaction is...to sleep with him again!  Hmm.   Second, the good: Nice effects.  Good fight scene.  Characterizations might be a little sketchy, but there's not much one can do in a 45-minute pilot.  Finally, most importantly, she doesn't fold up and become a whiny "why me" dishrag, but rather gets a bit of an attitude.

2)  Writing.  It's tough.  Maybe it's because I see things so clearly in my head and am constantly frustrated by the inability of language to depict them the way I see them.  It's hard work.

3) My certain doom, in the form of a 4-year-old girl.  Reams of paper have been written about nature versus nurture, but I can state without fear of contradiction that I feel myself sliding into yielding to my daughter's slightest whims, much like a hapless asteroid being pulled into the crushing gravity well of a black hole.  The latest trick in her quiver is for her to come up to me immediately after I come back from work, tilt her head, widen her eyes, and turn down the corners of her mouth in a irresistibly heart-breaking pout.  "I'm sad," she announces, in a subdued voice.  "Why?" asks her father (read: helpless patsy.) "Because Dada didn't give me a hug."  A hug is promptly provided, at which point said daughter goes back to her ordinary schedule of activities (5:30 pm - 7:00 pm, giggling piercingly and chasing the cat around.)  I'm dreading the point in time when the full power of the Pout is harnessed to more sinister objectives, i.e. "I'm sad because Daddy didn't buy me a ice cream cone."  "I'm sad because Daddy won't let me invite all of my friends over for a sleepover."  "I'm sad because Daddy didn't buy me a car."  I'm just hopeful that my wife will be around to counter the force of such Evil Cuteness.  Again, I'm not sure if it's a father-daughter dynamic which might be evolutionary or learned behavior, but I'm not going to survive it.

4) Men and Women.  Speaking of nature versus nurture...I self-identify as a geek.  I took my fascination with history to the ultimate level of geekiness by getting a doctorate - and still read history books for fun; I have collected comics; I play video and computer games; and, of course, my badge of ultimate geekiness is the fact that I saw the original Star Wars (before it was called "the New Hope") around 13 times in the theater.  Fortunately for me, I managed to fall in love (and, more amazingly, obtain reciprocal love) with a woman just as geeky in her own way as I am.  While my "flavor" is of the history-military-war movie-sci-fi type, hers is more the manga-anime-mystery novel type; we have common ground in our unhealthy obsession with certain computer games and a broad range of taste in the same sort of movies.  She's trapped at home with the above referenced 4-year-old and spends a lot of time online, participating in the broad debates over women in fandom.  She is unabashedly and unapologetically feminist - and I'm about as feminist as you can get and still be burdened with a Y chromosome.   The particular debate of the moment concerns, of course, the Black Canary/Green Arrow Wedding Special, ending with the Perforation of Ollie (which, by the way, sounds like a really interesting band name, to borrow from Dave Barry.)

We both read this issue.  I'll not list all of the outrages perpetrated in the book - Black Canary not defending herself, the triteness of the "horror of the wedding night" plot twist, etc.  I'll just say that the whole issue was...boring.  Let's list the sit-com tropes; Montage of people reacting to wedding news? CHECK! Last-minute argument? CHECK! Bad-guys-attack-the-wedding? CHECK!  Oddly enough, the most interesting thing that could have happened was nothing...maybe everyone attending looking around with paranoid twitches, waiting for the shoe to drop - which it never does.  But, to the ending...has this not been done to death?  Oh! The tragedy! Oh! The horror! Forced to stab her beloved on their VERY WEDDING BED!  Yawn.  It trivializes tragedy by making it so ordinary.  She becomes an object, reactive instead of active.  We're supposed to feel sympathy, feel pain for her tragic choice, but instead the very passivity of her response and the unoriginal "twist" leave us non-plussed.

I've been writing for some time now - a few years - and the struggle is constantly to reach for something which is "real," i.e. the way that a given person would really react in the presented situation, and not to fall back on cliche and trope.  Boiling the last scene down to its essence, one would think an experienced Super like Black Canary would have run across dozens of parallel situations, i.e. "attacked by someone who's a friend" and would have a range of appropriate responses.  She wasn't tied down, incapacitated, or drugged (thank God those cliches were avoided.)  She's a f***ing powerful Super, experienced, a veteran of countless battles - certainly she knows hundreds of non-lethal techniques.  Ollie's not a Super - he's a highly-trained normal of the Batman variety.  But no...let's slip into comfortable trope and have her stab him.  Yep, notch another one up on the list of laziness and let's clock out for the day.

In more depth, why make the whole issue a series of boring and lazy nods to every Wedding sitcom or soap opera ever produced?  There's twists out there that would be interesting, or at least untried.  Put them in a situation where they're arguing about something substantive and real.  Real couples argue about money, about relatives, about decision-making, about careers.  Real couples argue about romantic rivals, old flames, jealousy and misunderstandings.  Real grooms get nervous about "losing" independence, be it real or illusory, financial uncertainties, whether or not they are ready to be fathers...real brides worry about losing closeness, worry about money as well, worry about their identities being subsumed by becoming a "wife"...There's a twist for you, Green Arrow wakes up and realizes he's not ready to be a father, and they fight about it.

It's lazy writing, and it's boring.  I don't know how much outrage I can pack into a yawn...and it certainly doesn't leave me really all that interested in running out and grabbing whatever issue of whatever comic will "resolve" the "twist."

Well...there you are, for now.  More later...

Heathens versus the Righteous

Generations are conveniently split - chopped - into sections...Boomers, Generation X, Generation Y...and generalizations made about them.  As for me, I'm too young to be a Boomer and on the fringe of being too old to be an "X-er."  Why is this relevant, and what in the name of Corn Flakes does it have to do with the title?  Well...everything and nothing. 

I was born and grew up in a very secular household - everything abhorrent to the Right Wing - liberal, secular-humanist, the rest.  I watched PBS as a child, never went to any Church except to take pictures of Cathedrals, was brought up with a belief in rationality, science, evolution - all of that.  My personal morality is based on the common good, the English Enlightenment theorists such as Locke and Adam Smith, a faith based on "enlightened self-interest" and the ultimate value of common sense.

I'll admit in my teenage years - the epoch of Reagan - I was a Republican.  Odd, that, considering I attended Berkeley and then UW-Madison...both bastions of, shall we say, non-Conservative thinking.  But...I was, if you will, a liberalist Republican even then.  I supported (and still do) a strong national defense, the free market, the non-interference of Government in the lives of its citizens.  But what happened?  The Republican Party became the party of social as well as fiscal conservatism, and veered into territory which boggled me.  Where in the Party of Lincoln and Teddy Roosevelt is there a necessity to house those who wish to peek into bedrooms and regulate the use of sex toys, to probe library records with the mentality of a gossipy tsk-tsking auntie?  Why is abortion not a Party Plank but a Party Beam?

Thus began my sojourn in the wilderness.  I am of a Libertarian bent, but not of the hands-off-everything category.  My basic values - faith that there is no difference between men and women that deserves inequality, there is no difference between races which merits any discrimination, that private lives should remain private as long as no-one is harmed, that intrusions of the arms of Government into one's lives should be viewed with suspicion - remain unchanged.  My hobbies - comics, RPGs, MMORPGs, computer games - are pleasures, not seething pits of depravity, and those who don't understand them can just back the hell off and return to good old-fashioned Football violence.

So...I'm a Heathen.  Not a Liberal, whatever that is...a Secular Humanist, perhaps, in some definition of the term.   I am possessed of the unfashionable conviction that my wife's rights have just as much validity as my own, and that my daughter's  life choices should be as open as my white-hetero-male's were and are.  I am a patriot, but one informed of the notion that the United States is imperfect but is, perhaps, still the best country in which to be born or live, that it is not the new Jerusalem but a construct of compromises and decisions made by flawed mortals, and it is not its current state but its potential for change, for equality and justice, which is the most important feature.  I believe in a strong military, one sufficient to protect justifiable American interests at home and abroad, to support allies and commitments, but it is not a mindless support of any usage of that military machine; Afghanistan? Yes!  Iraq? Why the hell?

Thus I am, indeed, a Heathen.  I worship the pagan idols of humanity, rationality, science, and common sense.  For that I am barred from membership among the Elect...but I have a feeling I'm not alone in my damnation.

Against All Military Logic

Sometimes it's necessary to jump straight into the controversy.  My academic credentials allow me to speak with some authority on some topics - military history being the foremost - although my personal credentials (a thoroughgoing civilian with a voyeur's fascination with all things warlike) do not have the visceral quality of having "been there."  Nonetheless, skipping across military history like a stone across a pond, I can make some observations about - what else - the current situation in Iraq.

It may be called "peacekeeping," "occupation," "stabilization," or any of a variety of terms, but the bald fact is that military occupation of the territory of a foreign power is conquest.  The conquest may be benign, like the Liberation of France in 1944, or atrocious - as in "filled with atrocity" - such as the Germans in the Soviet Union from 1941-1944 (or, for that matter, the Red Army's entry into Germany in 1945.)  Common threads exist throughout the history of conquest, but put baldly an army of occupation needs:

• Enough troops, or an unassailable advantage (moral, technological, or through superior training.)
• A clear set of goals.  These may be as simple as "subdue and rule" or as complex as MacArthur's plans for Japan in the late 1940s (Constitution, civil self-government, and the destruction of the militaristic culture.)
• Consistent leadership.

So what is the situation in Iraq?  We have insufficient troops and no unassailable advantage.  Unlike the British in the Sudan in the late 1880s, we aren't the only ones with machine-guns.  Our technology offers us marginal advantages (better communications, body armor) and global advantages such as real-time information exchange but not specific advantages over partisans (make no mistake, the comparison is apt.)  Our initial goal was clear enough - topple Saddam, destroy the WMDs - but the long-term goal was unclear.

One can argue the necessity of invading Iraq in the first place.  I'll set that basket of snakes aside for the moment and focus on the reality as it exists now; in essence, we are faced with two real choices.

The first is withdrawal.  It is a defining characteristic of humans (and human institutions such as governments) that walking away from a sticky situation is difficult.  We stubbornly try to justify previous pain by seeking a decision, justify the casualties on both sides by stressing a bit more effort, but to what end?  The prestige of the United States will recover defeat in Iraq in time.  We certainly don't face any immediate military threat that our posture of perceived weakness will encourage.  The costs of withdrawal are incalculable - civil war in the Middle East, etc. - but extending our involvement might not prevent the worst-case-scenario from occurring in any event.

The second choice is to truly commit to the occupation.  This requires blunt speaking from our leadership, sacrifices beyond what is politically tolerable.  It requires an army of draftees, expenditures which make our current costs look like a down-payment, and an extension of our possible involvement into a decade or more.

Those are the choices we should be debating.  It is unrealistic to continue our policy of half-measures and war on the cheap; we're extending the tours of our volunteer army beyond the breaking point, fraying our military support infrastructure, and still not seeing any notable progress.

Although the Viet Nam analogies have been done to death, I think it much more illustrative to look at the occupation of the Philippines instead.  Read this and ponder it quite carefully.

Is this thing on?

So what is a blog?  Is it an exercise in projective communication, or ultimately an ego boost?  Do people read these things, or merely link to others in hope of building an artificial sense of belonging?

What, indeed, is the point?

Oh.  Never mind.  It exists so I can talk about myself.  That makes me feel better.

Mandatory First Post

So...in order to see the work in progress, it's required that a post exist.  So much for "test...then publish."