Unrealized Aristocrat: Harry Potter and Evil Difference in The Deathly Hallows

One attraction of the Harry Potter series is the unlikely hero/prince in disguise emerging from obscurity to battle the forces of evil, and (as the latest installment quite specifically asserts) if you just believe in yourself, have talent, and persevere, you will prevail, an attractive premise for awkward individuals in a challenging world, and an easy message to associate with Rowling from her single-mom, financially-challenged-to-mega-billionaire perspective. I haven’t seen her whole story, or how exactly she picked up an agent, and I suspect, like the character she created, she had more resources available in the manner of connections, in spite of her financial challenges, than are readily apparent.

As I never tire of remarking, The first Harry Potter novel amused me. I only got through half of the second one before the humor wore out and I concluded it was going nowhere. After that, there was nothing left but the movies, an endless procession of gaping snakes and sentimental conversations. The other part of it, that hundreds of millions of people don’t agree with me, is merely an unfortunate phenomenon of the emperor’s new clothes.

What the latest movie emphasizes, as for the Lion King, Avatar, and other commercially-crafted, sentimentalized fantasies, is not just an unrealistic opportunism that depends on aristocratic empowerment in the Western Tradition, but ultimately on a restatement of the determination that real evil resides in difference. Another attraction of Harry Potter as narrative has been the apparent variation of the relative forms in which good and evil are represented, such as diminutive elves or a tyrannical minister of magic in the character of a 50s soap-opera Mom, but these are misleading. Unfortunately, ultimate evil in the character of Voldemort still adopts the traditional darkness and deformation invested by reptilian knock-offs. Everything else becomes comic relief. The essential struggle depends on the traditional powers of darkness, represented by Voldemort and his corrupted ministry, against the rebellious keepers of the light, in contention for control of the source (the wand and wizardry), but the rebellion itself is an ironic one, because Harry Potter is the real heir of exclusion.

The powers of good, as the realm of Hogwarts perceives good, reside in the obligatory fair-skinned anglo adventurers of the North. I don’t know that Rowling ever specifically designates the racial and cultural origins of the characters aside from nationality and cultural connections, but the culture of the English boarding school is a little difficult to overlook or escape. The imperial colonial heritage that implies also creates a somewhat paradoxical and perplexing issue in terms of Potter’s popularity. Is Harry Potter a celebration of English Imperial High Culture (to which even oppressed colonial subjects apparently aspire, or at least the subaltern), or is it really an ironic indictment, or both, or something else? And does it matter? Perhaps it matters if Potter’s popularity represents an uninformed acceptance of cultural oppression, as for Edward Said. The giant snake, for instance, is not only a creature out of mythology, but a creature out of the mysterious colonial African and Oriental realms.

Colonial imperialism was not all bad. At the very least it provided an opportunity for the indigenous inhabitants of conquered cultures to study their oppressors from a privileged observation point, not necessarily a pleasant and inspirational view, but sometimes a pragmatically productive one. Europeans investigated the world and inadvertently displayed themselves for what they were in various contexts, opening themselves up to degrees of retaliatory appropriation. That however is fundamentally another argument. Whether to the effect of domination or to the opposite effect of opportunity for resistance, the Harry Potter character remains closely associated with the normative imperial conventions of the English boarding school culture.

I am not a great advocate for alternate lifestyles, but I would think that anyone in that position would be looking skeptically at Harry Potter, whether for the sake of disability, sexual orientation, or any number of various unique personal attributes. In the main characters, there are neither deformities, nor failures. These are the perfected champions of the aristocratic tradition, with the possible exception of impaired vision, although spectacles themselves indicate a kind of symbolically ironic intellectual affirmation, the need for spectacles suggesting keen vision of another kind. Doubt and adversity are permissible. Failure is never an option, quite consciously. That Harry, Hermione, and Ron may get tired of trying and make mistakes is expected. That they could fail isn’t even really contemplated. This is the conventional escape from reality in which skillful manipulation of a conventional quest engages a hopeful audience, yet distracts them from the more subtle stereotypes of power and domination. If the characters represented a rag-tag bunch of morally challenged individuals, there would be an element of aspiration to diversity, but what they represent in their conceptual form is an Anglo-European heritage of conventional hetero-sexual and political relationships, good-hearted, loyal devotion to each other and to an orderly society, however magically endowed the society may be, and disturbed, if at all, only by the acceptable dimensions of competition for sexual pairing. Even the introduction of jealousy and revenge, while conflicted, only emphasiszes the conventionality of the relationships. There is nothing fundamentally deviant or diverse in these characters. Only their opponents represent any inclination to resistance, and resistance only privileges evil. Hagrid, the one prominent, sympathetic character who sometimes seems to hover unarguably at the fringe of resistance, has been relegated to a kind of exile on the Hogwarts frontier, a somewhat tragic, yet cautionary condition.

True evil, whether greed, power, or only self-indulgence, results from failure to recognize that individual interests have detrimentally impacted social considerations, a denial of personal enlightenment and a threat to every stable relationship, personal or social. An authentic representation of such evil often reflects the mode of Rutger Hauer, evil disguised as beauty, or evil closely connected to beauty, but Harry Potter represents a simplified version, an older, more traditional narrative mode, the dark mode of primeval fear established in the Western tradition and the literature of colonial imperialism. Harry Potter validates that evil in the name of, not even sacrifice, but in the name of determined performance. Dobby the elf, for instance, sacrifices freedom and life for the sake of Harry Potter and his quest, but is only a subordinate, and therefore expendable. Harry accords the subordinate a noble ceremony, but the nobility is not the recognition of equals, for that cannot be. It is only a generous gesture to what is after all just an inferior creature that sacrificed itself in a noble gesture of its own, noble gesture for noble gesture. Why isn’t the undefineable Dobby himself (it/herself?) pursuing the dark, snake-like character of Voldemort? Because Dobby is just a free elf, not an aristocrat, and free or not, can never be an aristocrat in Harry Potter’s world. Narratively the primary characters with whom the reader identifies cannot be sacrificed, but in addition, Dobby is an inferior, only worthy to rubber stamp a cause incurred by the aristocratic knight-er(r)ants. The opposition to muggles and mud-bloods associated with Voldemort’s camp isn’t really an issue as much as it is a reflection of Harry’s own awkward unrealized aristocrat status and a distraction from the true nature of the relationship. Harry is the endowed aristocrat. The opposition’s preoccupation with mudbloods does not reflect an authentic fear of contamination. It reflects a fear of reflexive exclusion. Who is the real aristocrat?

It would not do for a true commoner to invest the cause of the quest. Perhaps the unrealized attraction of Harry Potter is appeal of the aristocrat in disguise (and that we all secretly want to be aristocrats, a kind of sceptre envy). Aspirations to social consciousness and benign self-enlightenment are only pretense. Unfortunately for the aristocratic urge and regardless of the appeal, aristocracy depends on the permanent subjugation of the majority and is therefore both inherently unstable and inherently tyrannical, which is like saying aristocracy begets evil. Everybody should have the opportunity to be aristocrats some of the time, also part of the Potter appeal (vicariously identifying with the aristocrat), but as a matter of enlightened self-interest and social justice, nobody should have a permanent endowment of aristocracy. That is where Harry Potter fundamentally fails as a contemporary moral allegory. It appeals to an aristocratic imperial nostalgia that is both lost and impossible, and through the stereotypes it invokes, likewise potentially destructive.

Voldemort’s reason for being is ultimate power/supremacy, a somewhat ironic representation of death (as for the vaguely ethnic Tale of the Three Brothers within the tale). The language of the name suggests something ambiguously Eastern European, perhaps including a casual leer at the Dutch, a traditional English opponent, with linguistic connections to desolate moors and the grotesque, shadowy growths associated with decay, distinct from the cheery Dickensian irony of Dumbledore, Umbrage, Weasley, and Potter, or even the quasi-mythical Western-European and agrarian-fertility connections of Hermione Granger. In spite of the nod to the quest for supreme power, the implication is that the capacity for evil is not a force inspired strictly by human involvement, but a force derived from the momentum of a mysterious and mythical antiquity. Evil exists in the world as an independent force, perhaps residing in corruption for the sake of bad choices, but otherwise independent of human intervention. Not just any old derelict champion will do. Only chosen human beings, invested by light, perfected by the mythical gift of wizardry, who meet the demanding standards of tradition, are called worthy to contend with the dark forces of difference, and those representatives of the aristocratic heritage are not complicated or hampered by the “imperfections” of diversity.

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Iffy

Edjukshun Is Hilee Over8ed LOL

Ther is a big hipe on edjukshun. Oh, I no they got numbers that U will get a fansy job if U get colege, but truly U dont need no edjukshun 2 mak a lots of mony. I am entrepenur on thu net, & mak lots of mony. If U want lots of mony & get chances, pick U family good. U don’t need no edjukshun. I quit out of hiskul cuz thu net dont need no edjukshun.

Thu way I mak mony is on thu net & I subsckrib 4 X porno & slezy net skuls, all legul. If you want to mak mony on edjukshun, do verts & soshul netwerk 4 net skuls but I got sumbody to writ 4 me cuz sumbody sed that wuz not real cuz the writing wuz stoopid. They R stoopid. My frends all stick with me when I git thum stuff and do there stuff with thum that is fun 2. That taks no edjukshun.

My freind sed it wuz not thu sam. Thu kids that wuz on thu net all thu time new much as big shots. Now it not so E-Z cuz it got mor complik8d all laws & siense & such. Now all taks colege. Not tru. I writ on thu koments of thu net all thu tim. Read on the koments of the net sumtim. U wil see me ther. That dont need no edjukshun. My freind is stoopid.

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Iffy

The Devil Take the Hindmost

In a way I feel bad for Obama, not because his approval ratings are down, that goes with the territory, or even because McChrystal couldn’t remember what he was doing in Afghanistan, or even because the Russians don’t like chili dogs, but because, like Arnie in California, the job is impossible. Like I said before the election, the Rove/Cheney/Bush abyss may be too vast for any mortal human being to span in one lifetime. It is a no-win job that the republicans should have had responsibility for fixing as much as for breaking. But Arnie has only managed to confirm that the republicans can’t fix anything except their wallets. In spite of good intentions, Arnie gets hit from every direction. (http://politics.newsvine.com/_news/2010/06/26/4566213-gop-schwarzenegger-a-great-disappointment

Obama was the only hope, and I hate to see him go down in a thankless, impossible job, but he asked for it, so he gets the credit for not fixing it just as much as the Dubya Posse gets credit for breaking it. The opportunity to rise above the occasion for Dubya was exceeded only by the opportunity to screw it up, and so he did, leaving a legacy that even a sincere republican like Arnie can’t touch.

As for comparing Deepwater Horizon with Katrina, all Bush had to do to be a hero in New Orleans was to evacuate the sports dome and the hospital in two days. That’s all it would have taken. They would have forgiven everything else over time, but the pressure on law enforcement and resources in the city with no place for people to go turned into a spectacle that we’ll remember for a lifetime.

Military trucks, vessels, and aircraft a hundred miles away never moved, and the final irony was that the airport was still operational. That’s what really pissed people off, and likewise intensified resentment of every other perceived inadequacy of the response. After that, it was prove you can do better than New Orleans, instead of we are so glad to have some help.

As for fixing Deepwater Horizon, what in the hell was Obama supposed to do? This was not a regularly occurring natural disaster like a hurricane. The only domes involved are a mile under water, and there isn’t any known device in existence to manage the results. All he could do was stand on the beach and jump up and down. The Navy doesn’t have a huge stock of oil containment equipment. Yeah, somebody should have been ready to deal with this kind of problem. We know blowouts happen. We know BOPs can fail. We know working a mile under water is tricky, but republicans and other conservatives are always whining about big government and free enterprise. Nobody wanted to put responsibility for another expensive project on the government when they already had so much invested in cozy regulatory relationships. Does this remind you of anything, like the SEC? The industry could have cooperated on joint development of equipment and planning for contingency protection, but that would have been a quasi-government function. Chalk another one up for free enterprise, and let the devil take the hindmost. Only problem is, the hindmost is us.

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Iffy

Insecticide: How a Failure of Diplomacy Wiped Out an Entire Community

In the spring when I was cleaning the yard, I kicked up a low-lying wasp nest out behind the shed without realizing it at first. The wasps came in around my ankles, and I got stung pretty good (or pretty bad, or badly). Wasp stings can be so intense that the impact is first sort of incomprehensible, like suddenly running into an electrified barb-wire fence that was never there before. “This can’t be happening,” I say to myself, and then, ouch, yes it is happening, and I am doing the tribal dance of pain. I have some sensitivity to wasp stings as well. For several days my ankles swell into a painful imitation of exercise weights. I was seriously annoyed, but the truth was they were just doing what wasps do, and they weren’t really a problem otherwise. I wasn’t planning on going back there anytime soon, so I slathered on hydrocortisone and left them alone. After a couple of weeks, I could again walk like a human being instead of a two-legged pogo stick, and my outrage subsided into a comforting haze of live-and-let-live magnanimity.

This summer I had to work on the fence across the back, which wasn’t really in the range of the nest, but I had to walk within a couple feet of the wasps to get around them. I was a little apprehensive at first, but apparently I wasn’t a threat, and they left me alone. When I was almost done with the fence, however, I was picking up where I had been working, and suddenly the agonizing combination of sensations like sharpened lightning bolts hit me from behind. After days of ignoring me, apparently the capo wasp had suddenly decided to put out a hit on me, and without warning, the enforcers targeted the backs of my legs. This apparently unprovoked and unreasonable attack infuriated me. I had left them alone and given them their space, but they attacked me without mercy, the vicious little buzzards. I did what people do when they collide with the impersonal aggression of nature. I pulled out a can of insecticide and blasted the colony into oblivion.

Perhaps the wasps had legitimate concerns, at least in wasp terms. Perhaps in another reality we could have been sitting down with a couple of beers under a big umbrella, amiably chatting up our unjustified mutual paranoia. Perhaps we could have reached an accommodating agreement regarding our space and our right of way. Perhaps we would have found that our basic motivation was not so different, and that we shared fundamental ambivalence about our competing relationships with the unfamiliar and the unique.

Unfortunately, wasps are short on diplomacy and long on attack skills. While their needs may be uncomplicated and fundamental, their triggers are irrevocable and somewhat mysterious. As far as I can tell, they have little patience or appreciation for negotiation, and so for all intents and purposes, they quite decisively and carelessly commit themselves to heroic annihilation, and the truth is that I have a hard time feeling thoroughly bad about it.

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Iffy

Perfect Business

Conservative republicans accused President Obama of opposition to business. What does opposition to business mean? Does it mean Bernie Madoff and AIG, no accountability, no enforcement, and no regulation? If so, then Obama opposes business. Does it mean uncontrolled pollution and collapsing bridges? If so, then Obama opposes business. Does it mean dangerous food, inadequate disaster response, and discrimination? If so, then Obama opposes business. Does it mean all the resources and all the income are controlled by a few people? If so, then Obama opposes business.

The conservatives accused another President of opposing business. His name was Theodore Roosevelt, and the business was Standard Oil. No doubt that ruined the country. By now we could have a government operated for profit by one corporation, like Idi Amin in Uganda. Wouldn’t that be perfect?

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Iffy

Full Ride

Shanna McLaughlin got a lot of exposure in a UCF locker room and subsequently on the internet, as the images went from less than outlandish
http://bleacherreport.com/articles/432879-shanna-mclaughlin-pics-the-playboy-playmate-and-ucf-fan-causes-a-stir#page/7

to borderline pornography as reported by some kind of illiterate scribblealazzi.
http://www.allvoices.com/contributed-news/6487262-shanna-mclaughlin-shot-nude-in-university-of-central-florida

One entertaining thing about the internet is just how much the information can be lost in translation, or even just transfer. Apparently the mere attempt to repeat information is too much for some reporters. Female nudity in college football locker rooms makes interesting headlines, but in this case it’s also misunderstanding at best and sheer fantasy otherwise.

But Shanna McLaughlin in the locker room doesn’t bother me. The more blessings we can find to celebrate the better as far as I’m concerned. What does bother me is that anyone employed by the university would think it was okay to provide access to university facilities without consulting the legions of bureaucrats we employ to administer such things, alum or no alum. Do you have any idea what kind of hoops a business has to jump through to get approved for operating on campus? The university athletic department wouldn't even dignify a polite inquiry from Iffy with a reply, but a publication connected to adult entertainment can walk in and somebody hands them the key.

I’m not complaining. I just want to make sure we understand who really runs this parking-lot carnival.

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Iffy

The Wages of Sin is Wages

Mark Hurd bailed out of Hewlitt Packard after some kind of sexual harassment suit landed in their laps.
http://enews.earthlink.net/article/top?guid=20100806/7ff465f1-26ff-485d-a021-cf6229cbd0e8

What exactly Hurd did to qualify for the shakedown is very unclear. Hurd himself and the company he is credited with revitalizing by cutting about a thousand jobs seem to be saying there was no sex and no harassment, only some kind of misinterpretation. For this minor carelessness they canned his ass, and he settled with his adversary for an undisclosed amount. Do you suppose she got forty dollars and a tee-shirt?

A pillow stuffed with about 30 million cushioned Hurd’s fall from grace. I don’t think you could call it a parachute. I don’t think there’s any way to make 30 million buoyant. Where do I sign up for harassment?

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Iffy

Gramatikly Speaking

For a long time, I thought hassle was spelled hastle. Funny how the rules work when you're not paying attention, and I was critical of Michael Zerbe because the introduction to his book insisted that the contributions of his colleagues could not be "underestimated." Speaking of which (if this can be considered speaking) is refudiating really a word, or is Marilyn Standard-Pseudonym just goofing on me? (cryptic Facebook reference) But on the other hand, why not?

I also thought the level of grammatical consistency in national publications was declining because of electronic communciations, but when I went back and started looking at publications from the Seventies, Twenties, and before 1900, I came to the conclusion that there have always been a lot of typos in all kinds of publications, in spite of pedantic ranting about excellence and accuracy in writing.

Experts like Bennett are probably some of the worst offenders. Not only do they make mistakes, but they claim to set the standards. So is the question really whether the message gets across or not?

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Iffy

This Is Not What It Says. Read the Article.

A Fox news headline accuses the Obama administration of approving the Libyan bomber release.

"U.S. Backed Freedom, Not Prison, for Bomber"



What the article really says is that the administration wanted the bomber kept in Scotland if he had to be released at all.

http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2010/07/25/obama-administration-reportedly-backed-lockerbie-release-transfer-libyan-prison/

The real title of the article:
"White House Reportedly Preferred Scotland to Libya for Released Lockerbie Bomber"

"The Obama administration told Scottish officials last August that, although it opposed any release of the Lockerbie bomber, it would rather see him released in Scotland than transferred to a Libyan prison..."

Did Fox News think for a minute that sending the bomber to prison in Libya was better than keeping him in Scotland?

No, Fox News wanted to run a headline critical of the Obama administration.

There's fair and balanced journalism at its best.

And reading comprehension.

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Iffy

The Obligations of New Media

Beyond basic questions of technical capacity and design, the interesting aspect of New Media is the dimensions of communication that have been drawn in or reconfigured. DuGay referred to “marketing to the imaginary self” in the design of technology. Identity, personal politics, and the imaginary self are all interested parties in the determination of style. Liu describes how knowledge workers express resistance to the demands of the knowledge economy, the industrial production of information.

To some extent, perhaps by virtue of merging work and leisure, everyone participating in electronic knowledge exchange is a knowledge worker, and everyone has an interest in style. Liu goes on to suggest that the color of a cellphone becomes, not just an expression of personal preference, but resistance to an economy of knowledge work that wants cellphones to be black or silver, for instance. This choice represents a complex dialectic or discourse of Horkheimer and Adorno’s equality replaced by conformity, where as Hebdige suggests, style, an expression of resistance, is adopted by the economy as a standard of conformity. In a sense then, new media offers the opportunity, or at least the appearance of opportunity, to choose between style and conformity.

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Iffy

Nehru's Dam

I opened the UCF main page and there was a survey that wanted to know if I found what I wanted and how to make the site easier to use. WTF? I should have saved a screen capture. I told them to wait until after I used the site to ask about using the site. Don’t ask me if it works before I use it. That’s sort of typical IT mentality. Craft a superb online survey that works brilliantly and doesn’t measure anything. Awesome.

I shouldn’t be so cynical. It was probably set up by some poor aspiring graduate student for an intersnship project. On the other hand, maybe not. You would think with all the hulabaloo about technical savvy around here that the standards would be pretty high. That’s one of the hazards of the internet. In a post about global economic development, I once accused Nehru of building the Aswan dam. Same problem, wrong dam. The worst thing was that nodobdy ever nailed me on it. Maybe nobody ever looked at it. I like to think they don’t have that problem with the UCF main page.

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Iffy

Hey Sailor, Throw an Aussie on the Barbie

Here’s a revoltin’ development. The father of California sailor girl, Abhy Sunderland, and the Australian government have caught some flack for the hundreds of thousands of dollars spent for rescue when her boat lost its mast in bad weather a long, long way from land. Some people wanted to know why a sixteen-year-old girl was out sailing around the world by herself in the first place when a lot of sixteen-year-old girls can’t even jog around the local park safely. Her father’s reply was something to the effect that kids today are over-protected.

http://enews.earthlink.net/article/us?guid=20100617/00fe1425-8be1-4018-a694-338278951050

Okay. I’ll give you that sailing around the world is a more constructive activity for a teenager than prostitution or dealing drugs, but hey, wait a minute. I have to wonder a little bit about how many teenagers could get entertainment or job training or even food and cancer treatment for those hundreds of thousands of dollars, and if spending hundreds of thousands of dollars for call-in isn’t a kind of over-protection, then I’ve got an oil spill I’d like you to finance. What planet does this guy live on?

There was a time when sailing was a little more essential for personal transportation, and that’s where the expectations of international assistance came from. If Abby got her start sailing as a cabin boy on the Cutty Sark, that might have been a little different culture, but I don’t think that happened. Even then, the only sixteen-year-olds out sailing around the world on their own were probably shipwrecked.

If Abby flipped burgers for the local fast food emporium until she was twenty-one to save up for her yacht, okay. I’d prefer that the Australians used their money for something more productive than intervening with predictably suicidal extremes, but we sort of make that allowance in the case of consenting adults, and I have no problem with sailing for fun and profit, but sailing is like horses and mountain climbing. As casual recreation and motivation for personal conditioning, they’re great, but the practical value is otherwise small in the real world, and heavy involvement with them is a kind of culture of the aristocracy. I’m okay with horses and sailing and climbing. I just have no use for aristocrats.

My personal opinion is that the youngest sailor or the youngest climber or the youngest rider to jump a Clydesdale over the Grand Canyon is just a couple of more jackasses in the world, their parents, and I’m talking extremes here, mind you. These are not accomplishments that inspire the human spirit to the height of achievement. These are accomplishments that point up the impossible gulf between the haves and the have-nots, a gulf that has not been bridged since the days of sailing ships, in spite of our great advances in engineering.

In fairness, of course, it wasn’t an issue until it went wrong. The young Australian who made the record also made a big splash in the press, most likely accounting for some of the Aussie inclination to sympathetic support, but, like Deepwater Horizon, that doesn’t mean the problem wasn’t there. The inevitable is also the nature of risk, but I’m inclined to say that if the California Dreamers want to sail around the world solo, let them wait until they hit twenty-one, or let them swim.

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Iffy

The Next to the Last Remake of Robin Hood

Yeah, yeah. I know. Robin Hood already went down to "Sex and the City" and "Prince of Persia," but I did this and forgot to post it. Some responsible blogger I be. The Gulf will be cleaned up before I get around to ridiculing any more BP executives for their crude comments, har har. Free oil for all. Bring your bucket and scoop as much as you can carry. I see they sucked up a thousand barrels with their latest hat trick. Damn, you got to give those guys credit for trying.

Russell Crowe does a more convincing accent than Kevin Costner, but he still sounds to me, less English than the CEO for a herd of Leprechauns. If Robin Hood gets any older, they’re gonna have to haul him off to Sherwood Forest in a Senior tour bus. Maybe he can swing by Stonehenge on the way.

English history seems fairly well resigned to the idea that Richard Lion Heart was only one of a nominally dedicated and more or less despotically inclined tribe of tyrants strewn across northern France by the careless proclivities of Henry the Second, an inconvenient truth for the fairytale version that put Robin Hood in the forests of Nottingham to resist the depredations of evil King John and his spineless lackey, the Sheriff of Nottingham, anticipating the return of noble Richard from the crusades to put everything right.

The truth more likely seems to be that Richard was no more noble or concerned than any of his immediate friends or relations, if he ever returned to England at all. Beyond this somewhat isolated and perplexing concession to the historical validity of Richard’s probable rottenness, Ridley Scott’s narrative plays just as fast and loose with events as any fairytale, condensing decades following Richard’s crusade into a matter of weeks, and eliminating another inconvenient gap between his return and messy demise from gangrene several years later.

One flagrant irony of the fairytale version is that the occasion for imposition of oppressive taxes by heartless King John was the ransom of Richard from the Austrians, who were royally (so to speak) pissed off after Richard steamrollered a couple of their allies on his way to the crusade. The crusade was largely a PR effort to get past some youthful exuberance that eventually antagonized most of Europe, including his father, although, as the Austrians soon realized, his behavior in the course of the penitentiary expedition left something to be desired also, including the execution of two thousand Muslim prisoners who got to be inconvenient.

In the end, there didn’t seem to be much joy about the prospect of Richard’s return, and why the English bothered to pay the ransom at all is somewhat unclear except that unlike California, at the time it was sort of a national insult to have an Austrian calling the shots. I’m still not sure I want California enough to pay Arnie for it either. Maybe we have moved beyond that mentality, or maybe we should just let the Austrians have California, but nobody in England seemed much inclined to pay for the return of Richard, which explains why they resented John’s taxes, although Richard did repay their generosity later by taking over half of France.

After an opportunistic adolescent crossbowman skewered Richard from the ramparts of a recalcitrant French castle under siege while he was in the middle of an inspection tour, infection finally eliminated the Lion heart a couple of weeks later, and things got back to more normal feudal despotism. The king’s commander of mercenary guards hanged the garrison of the castle, flayed the marksman alive, and the oppressive taxes went back where they usually go, to support oppression.
Ridley Scott, however, dispensed with the whole ransom business and took out Richard in the course of a dramatic charge to the castle gate on his way back from the crusade. What he wanted the castle for wasn’t clear, and I sort of got confused at that point. Robin and his band of Merry Men were under arrest for an excess of merry, and the death of the king gave them an opportunity to split.

Meanwhile, back at Le Ranche, King Phillipe of France plots with Godfrey, another opportunistic royal connection of some sort, against the English Crown and loyal Chancellor Marshall, another throw-ahead to twenty years later, when Pillipe actually intervened in English civil wars until Willikin of the Weald whipped his ass, but those guys are pretty much a whole new operation. From there it gets kind of complicated.

In any case, Phillipe contracts with Godfrey to take down Richard on his way out of Dodge (France), not realizing Richard has already bought the farm. Richard’s outfit, packing the King’s crown as confirmation of the event, shows up on schedule, and Godfrey’s sword slingers ambush them at the passe. From the mortally wounded Robert Locksley, Godfrey learns the news about Richard, but at that point Robin Longstride and his Merry Men on the lambe turn up to wrecke the party. The English archers massacre the French hit-squad and recover the King’s crowne. Godfrey runs for his life, barely escaping back to England with a gash across his face from Robin’s parting shot.

Robin finds Robert Locksley, still dying, and reluctantly promises to carry Robert’s sword back to his father in Nottingham to reconcile their family feud. Robert finally gives up the ghost, and the Merry Men decide the only way to get Richard’s crown back to London without getting hanged for their trouble is for Robin to assume Robert’s identity. I didn’t totally follow that one. Something to do with the crown. Robin manages to ditch the crown with the queen mother, and the now unopposed King John replaces Loyal Chancellor Marshall with the scheming Godfrey to put down the restless barons in the north.

Meanwhile, back at the Manse, Locksley’s wife Marion dodges tax collectors and unsympathetic catholic clergy while Robert gallivants around the world on Richard’s mission of mayhem. The ineffectual (as usual), Sheriff of Nottingham appears briefly. Things look up a bit when the laid-back Friar Tuck takes over the local church gig with a bee-keeping business and mead-brewing on the side, a happy combination. Eventually, Robin comes around with the sword, and Robert’s father wants to go ahead with the scam to help protect the estate. Marion isn’t too keen on shacking up with the impostor, but Robin sleeps on the floor with the dog, so it works out. Probably one of the best scenes in the movie, maybe because it’s so predictable, is Robin instructing the Merry Men to call him Sir Robert. It turns out that Walter Locksley was tight with Robin’s rebellious father back when cantankerous King Henry infringed on everybody’s rights, so Robin is really the heir of the struggle for truth and justice, for whatever that’s worth. I’d rather have the castle.

Are you still with me? Phillipe sends a French posse to help Godfrey stir things up by extracting John’s exorbitant taxes from the barons, hoping they can capitalize on the conflict to invade England. The French posse attacks the Locksley estate, trapping everybody in burning buildings and preparing the usual indignity for Marion. Godfrey executes the valiant Walter Locksley, but Marion proves more problematic, and with the help of the poachers holds off Godfrey and the French until Robin arrives at the last minute, leading the barons‘ cavalry.

King John realizes Godfrey is in cahoots with Phillipe and agrees to lay off the barons. The united English ride to meet the French invasion at the beachy margent of the sea. Marion slips into a comfortable suit of armor and gets in a couple of whacks at Godfrey before Phillipe decides things are going badly and calls off the invasion. John however, burns the agreement with the barons as soon as the threat is over, and Robin, as a rebel baron, is now an outlaw.

Guess where the Senior Center bus is headed? You guessed it, Sherwood Forest. Do you smell a sequel, or does Kevin Costner just take over here?

Phillipe tried to intervene a couple of times in English civil wars. Willikin of the Weald actually defeated the French invasion that turned back from England twenty years later. As a real guerilla leader in the forests of Southern England, Willikin may be a more intriguing character than Robin Hood. Nobody seems to know what degree of reality Robin Hood involves. Maybe that’s the attraction in an age of electronic identity. How authentic does it have to be?

After the casual adaptation of history for the film, I hardly care about the authenticity of a lot of details though. The characters had accents. What kind of accents they had, I could not tell you for sure. They could have been Canadian for all I know. Nobody pulled their arrows with their thumbs as far as I could see. I don’t know how hard it is to climb on a horse in a suit of chain mail, so that didn’t bother me.

The buildings had a kind of Elizabethan Faire quality about them, suitably rustic although somehow sanitized. There was some nice photography of interiors, like Dutch Romanesque (assuming there is such a thing) painting, although I wouldn’t characterize the filming as just gorgeous. I had some doubts about whether the landing craft for the amphibious invasion would have really gotten anywhere propelled by oars with that kind of draft, but on the other hand, what do I know about rowing a boat load of horses over the English Channel in the Middle Ages? I’ll suspend some disbelief in the interests of free enterprise. What the hell? It works for BP and Bank of America.

I wouldn’t call any of the performances brilliant either. Russell Crowe has an artful ability to understate lines, although that sometimes combines with conservative physical motion to create a sense of plodding momentum. In the scenes with Marion, for instance, she reinforces her reactions with indecisive movements. Crowe either transitions predictably from one required state to the next, or remains relatively static. Much of the action depends on inference from effects of the camera, as in the ambush scene with Godfrey's raiders, or later when the French invasion force reaches the shore.

King John is annoying, not because the character has annoying qualities, but because he is played with a kind of mysterious antagonism that never really goes anywhere. Yes, he is something of a self-interested manipulator, but so are we all. Why the apparent insinuation that there is something going on in his head we don’t understand? The French Princess is a promising character, but nominal. My favorite character as usual was the intractable villain, Godfrey, who is evil for no other apparent reason than ambition, which makes him rather one-dimensional, but it is at least a joyful one-dimensionality.

There are enough swords and sieges to give the film a respectable violence quotient, but this isn’t really an adolescent action fantasy. Another thing Crowe can do is look sad and weary. As a middle-aged romance, the characters of Marion and Robin are played for what they could have been, a pair of fatigued survivors with histories in a world of unpredictable loyalties and demands, what to an extent could be characterized in Clint Eastwood, baby-boomer terms as the Castles of Nottingham County. Is it worth a sequel? Ask Clint Eastwood, but maybe what the real target audience wants to see is one more complicated, redemptive romance.

Fisher Price Drill and Spill

Where did they do this survey (http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/37116587/ns/politics-more_politics/) about offshore drilling that shows “overwhelming” support, and what exactly was the question? Why don’t we get that part of the story? I would believe that an overwhelming majority of Americans are concerned about economic benefit, but I find it hard to believe that spewing oil over half of the U.S. coast will ultimately prove economically beneficial. Perhaps BP can contribute to the economy by employing the homeless to scrub sea shells with toothbrushes, or maybe ocean currents will simply divert the disaster to France.


On NPR, BP’s Irish Guy compared Deepwater Horizon to Apollo Thirteen or fatal aircraft accidents. The argument, I gather, is that we don’t stop doing what we’re doing because things don’t go quite as planned, although even a BP executive with normal intelligence (for a BP executive), might think that the situations aren’t completely equivalent. What was the potential for environmental damage from Apollo Thirteen? Maybe we could speculate that debris from Apollo Thirteen might have eventually hit the sun, causing an uncontrolled solar flare resulting in a burst of energy that might conceivably have penetrated the earth’s atmosphere through a hole in the ozone layer and coincidentally singed off a BP oil executive's eyebrows.


Oh wait a minute. Apollo Thirteen made it back to earth without spilling anything more hazardous than a little oxygen in deep space. No doubt the Irish Guy got the assignment based on the well-documented Celtic ability to keep things in perspective and resist the temptation to immoderate hyperbolation. Regarding aircraft accidents, however, he’s got us there. The North American continent is littered with the remains of hazardous things falling carelessly from the sky, including Russian space stations and Buddy Holly. So far, we haven't stopped breathing to allow for acid rain, although perhaps we should consider it. I’m sure the environmental effect is an indisputable argument to continue deep water drilling unabated, well, pretty sure.

Here's Thinking for You.
Iffy

Hell Boy

Here's Thinking for You
Iffy

Double Exposure

So I been out to lunch, or at least out to conference in Pasadena. EdTech 2010, a compact and energetic academic enterprise. Probably I obsessed, and KISS (Keep It Simple Stupid) didn't entirely apply, but education should be a learning experience.



The quest for blogistic legitimacy goes on. I connected with the academic blog of Amit Rai at FSU,
http://www.english.fsu.edu/faculty/arai.htm
who seems to share some common interests (or at least the effects of imperial and colonial modernity interest me) and concern for information fluency, but my brilliant critical comments aren't showing up anymore. I don't know what that means, whether I am technically incapable of posting, or whether I'm just annoying, but it occurred to me that I can put them on my own blog. In cyberspace there's no escape from the critically inconsequential or inadequate. Like George Bush and Al Queda, the intellectual proletariat will hunt you down and find you.

We are neither post-colonial nor postmodern. Neither the colonial nor the modern are ready to concede power or accept responsibility. There are dangerous misconceptions in the implication that we have gotten past either one. Liscensing and the game world are extensions of Fordist factory mentality, incorporation of the individual into the enterprise. According to Donna Haraway, the problem with organic concepts of technology and relations to the body, of becoming, is that integration, or the lack of duality, requires acknowledgement of responsibility, of power-sharing. Duality is necessary to assign responsibility for technology somewhere else. In Benjamin’s case, to something resembling the “inauthentic” or “mechanically reproduced” artifact. In Nietszche’s case, to the rational man, the inherent subordinate to the natural or intuitive man. Perhaps a definitive example, like Don Quixote and the windmill, Heidigger wanted to distinguish technology from more personal industry, invoking an existence for technology independent of individual industry, for the simple reason that accepting the equivalence of technology and personal industry cripples the critical social distinction between the individual and the machine and robs the intellectual activist of the cause. We cannot resist the machine with conviction that transcends human banality if we are the machine. In that case we have to account for our own limitations in the machine. Essentially, technology derives from the personal in the same way Nietszche’s leaves derive from the particular, and like Haraway, we should desire reconciliation with technology, not mastery. We are cyborg, although that also does not mean there is no enemy. The enemy is capital, the mentality that converts a perceived lack of resistance into domination, the mentality that converts needs into subordination, the mentality that appropriates the body as a component of industrial production (Google, for example), and capital is not us. We participate to a nominal extent allowed for purposes of propaganda, but there is no real universal participation in capital. It is an exclusive community. Modernity lives.

Consider Train to Virar, first in the sense of underlying Western European enlightenment language that determines both the hierarchy and programming of the “top” of the page. What it represents to me, is merged views of a train track and a passenger car interior. Which is on “top” isn’t totally apparent, although there is some sense from the intensity of forms that the car interior is probably in the foreground. Eisenstein, Barthes, Burnett, and Manovich suggest that the power of combining images is such that it cannot be ignored, that we will attempt to make connections between images in proximity, so that making meaning without reference to sources is essentially impossible. To that extent, Stengers’ irrelevance of production is in itself irrelevant, and that's that.

Here's Thinking for You
Iffy

Senatorial Surveytista

http://lemieux.senate.gov/public/?p=NewsReleases&ContentRecord_id=e71996f7-d15c-47bd-9399-f0fb9c3fe489

Not to put too fine a point upon it, Senator Lemieux’s recent survey regarding health care sucks. The results of the survey do not give any clue to the reasons for opposition to health care legislations, and are contradictory considering that the legislation addresses every concern included in the survey. Does 80% opposition make sense if the opponents understood that the legislation addresses the concerns? How does legislation that basically doesn’t go into effect for another four years qualify as a rush job? Does anybody seriously think we won’t be picking at it with tweezers and a magnifying glass for the next four years? How long are we supposed to wait to start doing something? Until everybody agrees on everything? That could be even longer than four years. Or is opposition simply a knee-jerk response to proposals that seem to change existing conditions for people who already feel they have advantages that they are entitled to? If Democrats are ramming this down Republican throats, that seems to suggest that Republicans aren’t willing to open their mouths, even a little bit.

Would somebody please explain to me what insurance it is that is not already regulated, and what insurance premiums are not already increasing? A government program extending availability of insurance coverage to a wider range of individuals will cost money, just as interstate highway systems or missile defense systems cost money to insure increased access and security. Why is that only a good idea if it means I don’t pay?

Like roads and defense, insurance is by nature a socialist project. Insurance pools resources to prevent any one individual from being completely destroyed by circumstances beyond their control. It’s hard to believe anyone who understands the fundamental nature of insurance or realizes that the cost will increase regardless would categorically oppose changes. I don’t particularly see Obama health care as a solution to the problems, but the survey simply invites opposition, it does not reflect the resolution of any issues. What would happen if the survey asked how health care costs should be contained, or how insurance coverage should be extended, for instance, and gave alternatives from Democratic and Republican proposals as the response? I’m not a Democrat, but I suspect Senator Lemieux would be afraid to find out the answers to those questions. The survey seems to say what people want is bi-partisan cooperation, and the Democrats won’t. Who opposes malpractice reform? The Democrats? Think again. Yeah, doctors want to limit recovery for malpractice. Guess who doesn’t? Right, the trial lawyer lobby.

Lemieux’s “predictive modeling” is a study in the ludicrous. Predictive modeling means don’t give credit to someone who probably can’t pay for it. So I have to agree with him there. If people who don’t have insurance don’t get health care, there will be less opportunity for fraud. We already have predictive modeling in the insurance industry. It’s called pre-existing condition exclusions. It means that people with a high risk of need have no resources, but that’s the breaks, right?

Likewise, Lemieux’s video comments make only a superficial kind of sense. He reminds me of Glenn Beck. He has the earnest face of a toddler, and he can speak in coherent sentences without stuttering to repeat the phrase, “money we can’t afford,” which should endear him to any conservative mentality, but his health-care debate “myth-busting” is largely based on restating the obvious as if it somehow means something else, such as increased costs in the Massachusetts health care system. Yes, costs increased, but not as much as other places. Massachusetts residents overwhelmingly approve of the state system, but they’re the wrong color, right? (On the electoral map, that is).

In the end, I can’t argue with Mr. Lemieux. The survey indicates conclusively that 80% of the people opposed to Obama health care legislation are opposed to it. The other 20% are undecided, or obviously misguided and irrelevant. Even I received a copy of the survey, which I did not complete, because I don’t like surveys in the first place, and this one seemed especially misleading. Now I wonder if the reason for sending me a survey was simply that I expressed concern about the timing of the legislation, and might therefore conceivably have been opposed to it, which would explain a lot of things.

Here's Thinking for You
Iffy

Death of the Book?

Dying and furniture have been the dominant themes in my life for the last couple of weeks, but furniture hasn't really spoken to me yet, so I'm going the other way.

Just like places, people need things. The alternative is a Matrix kind of identity connected to an electronic reality, but the accessibility and convenience of electronic documents that inspire optimistic predictions of inevitable replacement for paper and ink may underestimate the sensual value of physical things glued together in a discrete unit.

For one thing, books provide a sense of physical engagement in a way that interface with electronic files does not. Keyboards and touch-screens, even voice commands, are plaintive kinds of requests for cooperation that we can never be completely confident will produce the desired response. Although a book represents a universe of politics, economics, psychology, and industry, a book also has a distinct separation from the powers of its production. Just considering cookies, for instance, (the electronic kind), illustrates that in most cases, the connections involved with electronic files are transparent but mysteriously unknown levels of programming, machine language, and marketing interests. We like to think they are benign or at least innocuous, but we don’t even know that for sure.

For books, there is at least a sense that the hidden effects of culture and enterprise are contained within the covers. The multivariant connections of the electronic are limitless and unknown for practical purposes. Every connection to an electronic file is an act of faith in very real ways, yet the book seems to define self-contained limits to intrusion from the outside. Pick up a book, and you have a container of information that you can consider at your convenience and by the most suitable means. A book depends on you. Electronic communication has a life of its own, but a book needs you.

Literature, printing, and even binding speak with subtle marketing rhetorics of design and persuasion, but for books, there is at least a sense of meeting them on our own terms, sort of figuratively (or even literally) curling up in the fat chair and making them ours, our space, our things. A Kindle-kind of electronic unit can replace text, maybe even a place in a fat chair, but that doesn’t replace a fast riff through the crisp pages of a new book or even the soft and slightly slippery pages of an old one.

Here's Thinking for You
Iffy

Progress Report

I’m disappointed with Obama’s first year, but not necessarily with Obama. It’s not the same thing. The economy is such a complex and formidable problem, that the most capable leadership in history may not be sufficient to cope with it over an entire decade, never mind a year. As I complained before the election, and will not get over, my biggest fear then and now is that the legacy of the Bush administration will be insurmountable. Obama, however, took on that challenge willingly, and for better or worse, if he fails to deliver recovery, or at least the perception of it, then he gets the credit. Bush got out from under it with a few boos at the inauguration ceremony. Historic, but pretty cheap as far as I’m concerned, considering what he didn’t do for the nation.

A new book confirms another one of my favorite peeves, that the Republicans played into the terrorist trap by distracting us with the enormous expenditure of resources and effort invested in assassinating Bill Clinton’s presidency. How can any sane person think that was somehow a good idea? Where is the evidence? As the economy has demonstrated, the benefit quite clearly accrued to captains of defense, drug, and petroleum industries, and somebody had to pay the price. There is an argument for goating of the banks and automotive industry, but as usual, the costs will trickle down, and the true victims are us. If, like the NRA and Tea Party politics, you are happy to sacrifice for the sake of General Dynamics, Merck, and Exxon, maybe that will work for you, but don’t kid yourself that General Dynamics are us.

Also as usual, Obama’s big failure is probably as much perceptual as performance. The stalling of the health care initiative affects virtually nothing in a practical way. Those with health insurance still have provider networks. Those without health insurance still have the emergency room. That’s a system of sorts, and it helps keep costs high, but once again, the economic benefits accrue to a select management, insurance, and investment group. Maybe we should consider under-insurance to be the real force behind our emergency services system. With health insurance, routine medical treatment would be returned to relatively low-cost routine medical facilities. All those around-the-clock, publicly financed, flu and sprain centers could be scaled back to trauma and life-threatening conditions. Would that solve the crisis of health care costs? Probably not, but we need some token concessions to common sense.

No, the problem with the Obama health care initiative is just what a lot of people other than me are thinking, that the time is not right. Health care is a concern. It’s a huge concern, and we see what he was thinking. Going in with a lot of momentum from the election. Get health care through on the momentum, then build economic activity around the health care initiative. It makes sense, and only those same insane exceptions could consider universal health care a bad thing, except that we neither see health care as being closely related to the economy, or as the foremost issue. The economy is the scary thing. Health care was too complicated and too vague and too esoteric. What would the health care bill have done for me? To tell you the honest to gawd truth, aside from the simple principle of caring for each other, I have no idea.

What I do know, is that housing values are still precarious. Construction is still down. The red-hot jobs market isn’t. The stock market got a little juke and has been creeping up since then, but the emphasis seems to be on creep, and the banks are siphoning off the benefit of any general improvement. The market highs of the housing bubble are charred hulks after a forest fire, an awe-inspiring tribute to a fertile past, now only pathetic, remote, and mythical. The priority, therefore, in the disturbed minds of the voters who put Obama so firmly into office, was not health care. It was economics. Reagan and the Bush boys succeeded in totally derailing us from any social course of fiscal responsibility determined by the Great Depression and returned us to the Jurassic economy of the deregulated free market (redundant?). There seems to be little dispute of that, even from the most conservative, Bill-O’Reilly-variety of financial critics, because the train wreck is sort of hard to ignore. The only question is how to shift the blame to Obama, and if he helps them enough by investing too much time and effort in health care issues that are important but nobody understands, they may be able to pull it off.

Here's Thinking for You,

Iffy

What Educators Do Best

One of the obvious joys of blogging is the opportunity to be an expert on everything, even if only in my own mind, and in my case, that's where my joy has been pretty much confined to. Playing with what I can only consider to be an educational blog (because it has no other apparent useful value), I started thinking that I might eventually want to actually connect with some kind of audience. Originally I took it that making connections would depend on assigning the right key words to insure attention from like-minded intellectuals searching for information. Eventually I determined that perhaps there were no such key words, or no such intellectuals, at least who would admit it, or that what I was producing didn’t qualify as intellectual, or maybe even as information.

Based on this positive attitude, by trial and error I eventually came up with the idea that perhaps I could more productively apply the effort to looking at some blogs and blogging strategy instead of thinking I knew how online searching worked. After skimming through a few educational blogs, however, I quickly realized something else. There are numerous suggestions for great ideas, resources, and connections, but probably 95% of posted material, like blogs for a lot of subjects, either repeats what has been posted other places or rediscovers things that have been produced by somebody else, adding captions to screen captures from Second Life as cartoon graphics, for instance.

Some of the responses make sarcastic comments about redundancy, some attribute social networking to political conspiracy or alien intervention, and some include links to Pamela Anderson's latest sex tape (...which is really about animal rights. How would I know? Research.) but the authors are not discouraged, and in the end, does it matter? Blogging communities are more insular than global information access seems to suggest, and we spend a lot of time chasing our own tails, but is that really any different than talking to somebody you know about something cool you found out about on the internet? Probably not, neither.

And does that mean blogging for education is a bad idea? No, it just means that the problem isn’t information. The problem is access. Educators spend a lot of time reinventing the wheel, but then, maybe that’s what they do best.

Here's Thinking for You

Iffy

Google Does Right

If nothing else, the relationship of Google and China illustrates that neoliberal global capitalism has not conclusively marginalized the effects of national identity and national sovereignty. Despite global economic involvement by China, the Chinese have not been effectively reduced to the ideological status of an obedient citizen in an economically unified global nation. The Chinese have their own agenda, and it does not necessarily conform to capitalist economic expectations.

To an extent, the results are unsurprising. Google sold itself by making concessions to Chinese demands for accommodations in operating policy and restrictions. For some people Google’s concessions suggested an immediate conflict of interest, but that in itself is normal or at least not unusual in a market economy and is not necessarily evil. Consider it a variation of luring customers with a low-price introductory offer. Perhaps Google failed to appreciate the Chinese Government’s perception of the transaction, however.

The world has labeled China as the most promising and lucrative market on the planet. The Chinese have been encouraged to consider their economy as a desirable commodity in many respects. Having purchased Google with access to their markets, Google is, in the Chinese view, bought and paid for, a product they own. By what authority did Google restrict Chinese government access to information? Apparently Google agreed to restrict access for government opposition activists. Why would the Chinese government think using Google for additional surveillance would be a violation of their right to possession? Did they want anybody else to know what they were doing? Of course not. Does the CIA post notification of every attempt they make to infiltrate a terrorist group? I hope not.

I’m not suggesting that the Chinese government rightfully went into the control levels of Google’s systems and took protected information, but I am suggesting that Google dealt with China as if China was merely a typical business customer in a capitalist supply and demand economy, so why should Google be surprised that the Chinese government behaved as a typical capitalist customer and considered the purchased product to be used for whatever purposes suited them? One of the popular platitudes of technology is that people will find ways to use it that nobody anticipated. Google’s relationship with China seems at best naïve, and at worst blindly opportunistic, a technological attempt to colonize a foreign culture that backfired.

What Google should have sold the Chinese government was not a product tailored to meet the demands of their ideology by applying restrictions to content, but a product with functionality limited to the absolute minimum necessary to meet that content level. There are different ways to configure a trial version. Would the Chinese have refused to consider Google without access to personalization that includes confidential information? Maybe they would have refused, and maybe that would have told Google something either way. What would have happened if Chinese users themselves demanded that functionality? Would Google have been in a better position to negotiate the security of the information?

Let’s say Google took a chance thinking there wasn’t anything to lose if it didn’t work out. Maybe they are right, and they can simply start over from a better informed negotiating position. On the other hand, what they may have confirmed is the ability of the Chinese government to control both the technology and the application, to use it as it suits them. In a competitive market, the ideology of the technology then becomes a factor in successful adoption. Not only does Google have to compete on a functional level, but the competition becomes one of the nations and political systems from which the technology has been derived. The search capability of the Chinese state then becomes competitive, and the comparison extends to national origin. In the interests of global reconciliation, I hope Google is right, at least partly.

Here's Thinking for You.

Iffy

A Regulated Madness, Part One

When my mother had a heart attack, I became intimately acquainted with the intensive care unit of the hospital and the perception of people as regulated combinations of information, so I did some thinking about what that means as a reflection of the contemporary information industry and knowledge work and the effects of modernity. If you are easily discouraged by academic commentary, you might be more interested in prior comments about Avatar.

Modernity is the time and the mentality of industry and rational science. Characteristics and consequences of Modernity include manufacturing, scientific study and development, colonial imperialism and exploitation, modern and surrealist art, and Disneyland.

The characteristics and consequences are reflexive. Modernity is itself a consequence of the Renaissance, the printing press, and rationality, an Aristotelian idea of knowable, predictable, and reliable cause and effect. Somewhat paradoxically, Aristotle has been both an obstacle to rational progress as a theologically approved intellectual standard conceptualization of the universe with the earth at the center, (the Galileo problem, and probably not what Aristotle himself originally envisioned), and as the inspiration for an intellectually curious and systematic investigation of nature (probably more along the lines of Aristotle's objectives).

Essentially, the effect of modernity is “valorization” of Western European ideas of knowledge accumulation and application established through adoption of Greek and Roman intellectual culture, partly as an effect of Christianity and partly as an effect of technology as an intellectual enterprise (distinguished from the more personal or mundane as art, craft, and individual functions, a mentality that inspires attitudes of cultural superiority inherited rhetorically from such notable predecessors as Homer, Alexander, Herodotus, and Julius Ceasar, as well as the intellectual heritage of Plato and Socrates). The exact intellectual or social process of technological development and advance is not completely understood. For Auguste Le Comte, John Stuart Mill, and others involved in the initiation of European science, it was an accumulation of knowledge necessary to answer the challenging questions posed by nature. For Thomas Kuhn, it is a series of revisions in paradigms, changes in fundamental ways of thinking about essential concepts brought about by recognition of irreconcilable exceptions, with intervening periods of methodically integrating information into existing concepts. For others, such as Donna Haraway, it is a competition between paradigms as well, or it depends on the contributions of exceptionally capable individuals, on the coincidence or condensation of essential information, or simply on the exclusive ability to ask the right questions. As Kuhn proposes, probably all of these are reflexive and none completely correct, including his.

John Misa describes instances of intellectual technology that are generally acknowledged to represent an acceleration or triumph of progress, production, and the way information has been applied and utilized, such as the advent of the printing press and the steam engine. The printing press contributed, not just to the proliferation of literature, but to religious conflicts, establishment of modern nations, capitalist economics, and the systematic investigation of nature, all depending on efficient and standardized exchange of information. The steam engine brought about both modification in the ways human labor applies to production and in the mobility of individuals through the availability of improved propulsion that ultimately affected a variety of transportation modes on the sea, on the land, and even in the air, when the project of self-contained engines that steam represented progressed to the point of internal combustion.

Electricity affected a wider variety of technical applications than any energy source in history since raw sunlight and fire, including everything from interpersonal communication to giant transportation vehicles. The transistor and the internet concentrated the application of electrical energy in an equally diffusive repurposing for comprehensive communication. In this way, intellectual technology has achieved the potential to involve every human being in direct ways, although the direct effects remain vastly under-developed and elusive.

Day of the Shoshone

In Riverton, Wyoming, about 1962, I think, I must have been in the sixth or seventh grade. My father was a mining engineer at Lucky Mac in the Gas Hills. Riverton was sort of a low-budget ranch town in a sagging wash on the verge of the Wind River Indian reservation. Cold-War uranium mining put some post-agricultural life in the local economy, and eventually the money inspired erratic aspirations to culture and civilization, such as art guilds and French lessons, that eventually seem to overtake established communities in the West, Telluride, Denver, and Laramie, as examples, but Riverton was maybe a hundred years behind.

The kids of the ranchers were those hardy, independent cowboy types with good-hearted but incorrigible contempt for anything exotic and anybody they suspected of intellectual attitudes. I read an article in The Ranger that referred to homosexuals in the state prison. I didn't know what a homosexual was, so I asked my friend if he thought that was a problem. He never spoke to me again. That was Riverton in 1962.

The reservation was a separate economic class for reasons I later learned had to do with the peculiar legal status of the native peoples, oddly echoing the language of segregation, a separate but protected nation. Since they couldn't legally mortgage property, the Shoshone and Arapahoe had no way to borrow for improvements or to finance any kind of enterprise. If you want to understand the social effects of corruption in federal government combined with restricted credit, consider the history of the reservations. At the time, the Shoshone and Arapahoe lived pretty much on a subsistence level with an old car or pickup truck parked outside a tar-paper shack. That was my take on the economic image of the reservation. The Shoshone kids who lived off the reservation were respectful, quiet, and kept to themselves. They didn't mess with the cowboy kids much, or the miners.

I was in Piggly Wiggly one day with my mother, picking up the week's provisions I guess. That was the only way I would have been in the store for any length of time. Occasionally a few of us would walk over there to buy Sugar Babies, but we weren't allowed to hang around on our own. I would have been waiting up front to ring through a pretty good load of groceries. That was probably how I happened to notice an old Shoshone woman walking slowly past the dog food in the space across from the cash registers.

You could always tell the Shoshone because they dressed almost hyper-Western style with pearl button shirts, turquoise bolos, and black Stetsons with silver conchas on the bands. I never understood if that was an expression of a kind of desperate desire to belong, or a kind of irreverent parody of cowboy culture.

Maybe both, maybe neither, but I noticed the old woman because she wasn't wearing cowboy jeans and a corduroy shirt like the younger women with her. She had on a traditional head-dress and Navaho blankets with a big Mexican skirt that spread out four or five feet and hung to the ground, like you saw more in the Southwest, but hardly ever around Riverton. Her face was like the dark shiny old knots on the Pinion Pines, and completely fixed, without an expression, like she really was wood.

She moved slowly, as if she was very tired, a step at a time, but with a kind of dignity that even a junior high school kid could notice, until she got to an empty corner on the other side of the dog food where she could stop and turn around and lean back to brace herself against the wall. Then she pulled her blankets around her and closed her eyes. She moved around a little, a sleeper maybe dreaming under her blankets about life on a lost frontier, but otherwise she squatted there in the corner, completely motionless, while her companions shopped and rung out a few things.

There was some kind of problem with them ringing out, and it took the whole time that me and Mom rung through our own big buggies and got them loaded up again. That was before barcodes and scanners. A price-check or an ID could be terminal.

About the time Mom finished writing her check, the old woman finally opened her eyes, hitched up her colorful Mexican skirt, and waddled in her slow but dignified way out the door after the rest of her family. When we got to the door, my buggy hung up on the edge of the dog food rack, so I walked around the side of the buggy to push it loose, and I was facing the same corner where the old Shoshone woman had waited patiently, maybe dreaming about a proud and mythical past. Spread out there on the gray linoleum floor, in the space that the wide skirt had covered, was a huge shining puddle of bright yellow liquid.

Sometimes I wonder if it was a cultural thing.

Here's Thinking for You
Iffy

Revisiting Avatar

The range of reactions to Avatar has been instructive, including racism, feminism, disabilities, religion, economics, technology, and a variety of environmental issues.
http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/news/willheaven/100020706/avatar-james-cameron-deserves-the-worst-lefty-award-2009/

I'll comment on a few of the more prevalent that I kind of have answers for.
Regardless of white savior syndrome, the planet and the native culture are part of their own technologically superior bio-computer that ultimately appropriates the white imperialists for its own protection. An attractive take from an environmental perspective, although why bio-technological superiority would tolerate interference in the first place is a little perplexing. Maybe Wounded Knee and ultimate supremacy, through casino construction, were all part of the Indian (Native American) spiritual bio-computer plan.

If you don't like the racial and imperialist tones, don't watch it. Well, maybe you have to watch it once to have some idea of whether the arguments apply, besides which, it's worth watching anyway as a visual experience. The problem there is the nature of art as Trojan virus, a seductive vampire that sucks out your brain, or as stealth delivery vehicle for bad ideas. If you aren't aware of the argument, you may be affected indirectly, so you should at least consider the less obvious messages. Otherwise, a science fiction fantasy that “barely” qualifies for an R rating (based I suppose on the hint of unconcealed alien female breasts and a couple of carefully staged expletives), suggests little concern for offensive content in the way that X-rated material or something from a source that regularly provokes controversy might. To make the don't-watch-it argument valid, you need some kind of reliable cause for both anticipating offensive content and accepting the classification, like complaining that The Simpson's makes fun of religion, duh (or d'oh).

Likewise, the argument that "It's just a movie. Get over it," depends on the same kind of myopia. Just a movie that may pull in an audience of half the country. Accepting destructive messages because they come in artful packages serves the purpose of propaganda, regardless of intent. Spending 300 million dollars could conceivably produce something spectacular whether or not political messages were meant to be included. Essentially we need to at least discuss that. (Consider Caligula.)

Here's Thinking for You
Iffy