Category Archives: Culture

The Man or the Bear?

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For the last couple of week social media has been roiled by the hypothetical question posed to women, if you were alone in the woods would you rather encounter a bear or a man?

When I heard this proposed I had an instant intuitive sense that most women would choose the bear. My impression of the social media fracas seems to support my guess and apparently there have been more than a few men flummoxed by the answer.

Photo Credit: Robert Mitchell Evans

There is no doubt that a bear is a dangerous omnivorous predator with many species presenting as quite territorial. Mauled by a bear is a very painful way to depart this sad world and I do not think for a moment that the women electing ‘bear’ are ignorant of the facts of these animals.

I know of no statistically valid way to produce an off the cuff probability of threat between a random bear and a random man, but I suspect that even if the odds were more dangerous with the bear that would remain the most likely election.

I think most men have little conception of what life is like for most women. The truth be told most people have little conception of what life is like for anyone other than themselves. The ability to project an empathic understanding of another person’s viewpoint and emotional state is a quite rare gift. But what makes the choice so often bear? Why are so many women, fully aware of the dangerous of a large predator, still willing to say ‘bear’ over men?

I think it is the subtle difference between terror and horror.

Bears can be terrifying, but people can be horrifying. A bear presenting a serious risk of injury or harm is much like a tornado. Terrifying to consider but also simply a force of nature. A bear, or a tiger, or a flood simply is without any moral qualification.

People, and men in this hypothetical, are not simply forces of nature and certain their action are bound by moral qualifications.

If a bear mauls you, it does so without volition it is simply following millions of years of evolutionary programming. A man who assaults you does so because he has made a choice. A man is someone capable of understanding the consequences of his actions and has made the calculus that his victims pain, suffering, and trauma are of no consideration. Or worse to be valued and enjoyed. The man knows what harm he causes and elects to cause it. That is true horror in a manner that is not produced by a bear or a flood or a tornado. All of which can cause grievous bodily harm or death but only the man wants to cause it.

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On Fictional Cursing

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Recently on the social media sites where writers congregate there has been a small discussion on the subject of invented curses. Should a writer just use the curses that everyone uses and is familiar with or invent new one for their fantasy and far-future settings.

Invented cursing like artificial slang is a very touchy thing to pull off. Those of us geeks old enough to remember the original run of Battlestar Galactica recall the programs invented curse words like ‘frak’ and ‘feldercarb.’ (I am not cure of the spelling of that last one.) Which were one-for-one replacements for ‘fuck’ and ‘bullshit.’

This ‘just replace it with an invented word’ style of fictional cursing misses the point and understanding of cursing. Cursing is transgressive.

Cursing is about violating the ‘good taste’ and decorum of your culture. It is shocking and emotionally powerful because it is breaking norms and rules. If all you do is change ‘fuck’ to ‘frak’ then in effect you are saying that this alien culture thousands, maybe tens of thousands, of years in our history is just the same as ours today. Possessing the same values the same taboos and therefore the same sense of what is proper and polite.

That’s just lazy.

Plus, it misses the chances the golden opportunity for the writer to show us something about the new culture without stopping for exposition.

A culture with a lot of religion on its history or its current make up will have curse derived from that sense of religion.  No culture that doesn’t have some belief in torturous punishment through damnation is going to have the curse ‘damn you.’ If a culture places no important on familial bloodlines and lineages, then they are not going to use ‘bastard’ as an insult.

Star Trek’s Vulcan are a fiction race that prides itself on total control of their emotional reaction to the point that they insist that they have no emotions. Displaying and suggesting a Vulcan has displayed emotion would be an insult and transgressive. While they are not given to angry outbursts, I could see a Vulcan character calmly looking upon an enemy and saying,’ I have no doubt that gives you,” then with a pause for emphasis ‘joy.’ A stinging insult and rebuke delivered with a flat affectation.

So, think about the cultures your create and then ponder deep on what they consider transgressive and there you will find you curses and insults.

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The Word ‘Enemy’ is Dangerous

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A friend retweeted a Twitter posting where a conservative supposedly defined ‘woke.’ The tweet contained nothing that any linguist would consider a ‘definition’ but rather a word-salad screed about what they considered the dangerous aspects of ‘woke’ including unsupported assertions of ‘death cult’ and the like. My friend commented in his retweeting that it is was important to know ‘the enemy.’

Now, I am not going to get into the futile and unproductive argument over what is ‘woke.’ In my opinion that term is used as carelessly as ‘fascist’ was deployed by many for decades prior to our current social political crisis.

What I am fascinated with is the term ‘enemy.’ An enemy is someone or faction that you cannot reasonably work with without degrading or corrupting your own standards. The overuse of ‘enemy’ in domestic political terms leads to a breakdown of governance.

If you want to tax high income people at a greater rate than others, that doesn’t make you an enemy. Policy, in general, isn’t the basis for enmity but rather disagreement. It is possible to have serious, vigorous, and even heated debates and arguments over policy without being enemies.

However, when you describe your political opponents as wanting to ‘destroy civilization’ and ‘end the nation’ then you make it impossible to work with them. Your very language has placed them beyond the pale of acceptability and that chains your own actions.

Look at the war in Europe. Many people on both the left and the right see the vital importance in assisting a democratic and free nation in defending itself against a brutal, savage war launched by its dictatorial neighbor. And yet that assistance to held captive and withheld because to actually do the work to get it out requires working with the ‘enemy.’

On a less critical issue, keeping an insurrectionist out of the presidency, political aid is coming from those who served with the insurrection in his previous administration. I have no love for Pence. I know that given the chance he would harm those I care about with his deluded sense of morality, but I will not label him an ‘enemy’ making it impossible to work with him.  I will accept his assistance but never forget what it is he is and what he would want to achieve.

The word ‘enemy’ is dangerous and should be applied quite carefully.

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Peer Pressure Isn’t Just Teenagers

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We tend to think of ‘peer pressure’ as something that is a trouble for teenagers. A scene in a badly scripted After School movie where the bad kid Tommy tells the good kid Jimmy that if he wants to be cool Jimmy needs to take a drag on the joint. Of course, it doesn’t work like that in real life at all. It’s not so much as pressure from one or two people as much as it is the Fear of Missing Out. People are doing something, having fun, being social. It’s rare that anyone verbally chastises someone into participating but rather the need to maintain the social life, to be accepted, to be with the group instead of outside it that sweeps people along. It’s far less ‘pressure’ as it is a swift river’s current. it can be fought but it is so much easier to flow with the waters.

This applies to adult as much as it applies to teenagers. It is a major component of why so many rational normal Republicans now move with Trump.

Oh, there are the true Trumpists, authoritarians and neo-fascists for whom the dream of state power is a one that frightens the rest of us, but I do believe that they are the minority. The trouble is that to maintain their social lives, their social contacts, and to avoid being ostracized by their friends and peers far too many simply swim with the current. They have lived their entire adult lives with the concept that the Democrats are not just wrong but evil. It’s beyond their imagination and conception that they are now the anti-Americans. So, despite their criticisms of Bill Clinton for dodging the draft, breaking the law, or unproved accusations of sexual assault and grifty financial dealings, or their charges that Obama was an unready novice with over inflated ego, they have wedded themselves to Trump. The hypocrisy of their support is unseen they are drowned in the swift river of the need to be accepted by their peers and our nation is worse off because of their weakness.

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The Multi-Factor Hypocrisy of the GOP

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Back in the 1980s I can clearly recall several of my conservative/libertarian friends asserting with utter confidence that the people who voted for liberal parties only did so out of self-interest. That the goodies distributed by the liberal essentially ‘bought’ the votes of their supporter while the conservative electorate were motivated by principals and devotion to constitutional order.

As Luke Skywalker has said, ‘Every word of that is wrong.’

The GOP has been exposed as hypocrites on every vector of their supposed principals.

As the party lines up behind a candidate that scoffs at the law and the constitution it is clear that the only thing that motivates them is the desire to get what they personally want. Principals are for suckers.

Tax cuts for the wealthy.

Deregulation of the industrialists.

Oppression of minorities for the authoritarians.

And guns for the enthusiasts.

All other considerations secondary. Constitution expendable.

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A Party of Quislings

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Saturday marked the 3rd anniversary of the violent attempt to overthrow the results of the 2020 US Presidential election. For a moment, and only a fleeting moment, many elected Republicans saw clearly that their party’s leader was a criminal desperate to retain power that had been duly, legally, and properly removed from his grasp. The moment passed and now the entire rotten party is as corrupt as depraved and as unworthy of the American people as their mentally addled and emotionally stunted leader.

Of course, they do not see it that way. It has been illuminating to watch ‘conservatives’ online twist, distorted and invert the traits and characteristics of their political opponents. In their projection it is Joe Biden that is the corrupt criminal, trading political access for cash. It is Joe Biden twisted and warped with anger. It is Joe Biden that is that violates the constitution and that strips the rights away from the people. Each of these imagined ‘charges’ is of course the reality of Donald Trump but the dissonance between what they want, their own selfish policies and the vehicle that must lash themselves to in order to get it breaks their minds and forces the funhouse mirror interpretation of reality, one where all their crimes are neatly placed on the shoulders of others leaving their hands clean and their morality unblemished.

But the truth remains.

It is the Republican party that has an utter disregard for the rule of law.

It is the Republican Party that strips people of their rights.

It is the Republican Party that has contempt for our two centuries of democratic rule.

It is th Republican Party that capitulates and appeases out enemies and the enemies of freedom around the globe.

They are a party of Quislings.

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Quick Hit Review: Frybread Face and me

REI Co-Op Studios

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Currently streaming on Netflix Frybread Face and Me is a coming-of-age fil about a young Navajo boy, Bennie, (Keir Tallman) sent from his home in San Diego to live with his grandmother on the reservation for a summer as his parents address their martial troubles. At his grandmother’s home Bennie is introduced to aspect of Navajo culture that were alien to him, his extended family including his cousin Dawn (Charley Hogan) nicknamed Frybread Face.

Absent from the film is any grand climatic emotional scene but rather Bennie’s changes are built from more grounded simple elements of his life on the reservation. Executive Produced by Taika Waititi, Frybread Face and Me isn’t part of that filmmaker’s usual chaotic style but reflects writer/Director’s Billy Luther heartfelt connection with his people.

I really enjoy watching film from cultures different from my own and this one was no different. An aspect of Navajo culture that I had been unaware of that this story taught me is the ‘Baby’s first laugh’ custom. The Navajo celebrate an infant first laugh or giggle with food and gifts. Technically the baby hosts the celebration but as infant rarely have the faculties for such an endeavor at about three months old the duties are actually performed by the person who induced the laughter.

The film doesn’t shy away from the poverty faced by those living on the reservation but that aspect of life is simply that, another element of living while the focus of the story and of Bennie’s growth is the reality and love of family.

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An Unimaginable Future

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I was born in the early 1960s making be part of the tail-end of that massive generation the Baby Boomers. Bright beckoning futures such as Star Trek filled my childhood while the ever-present threat of nuclear annihilation hovered over our heads. For decades the go-to and standby baddies of most fiction was the menacing duplicitous and seemingly everywhere conspiracy of International Communism as exported to ever trouble spot around the globe by the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, but we just called it Russia.

The United States led the ‘Free World’ against the spreading, infecting, and corrupting influence, and subversion of freedom by Russia. Our allies, while not always endeared to out ways and over-sized personalities, stood shoulder to shoulder with us in that fight, united in the belief that freedom was a universal good. Even if we, and I mean all of the allies, more often than we’d ever admit, fell short of that lofty ideal. The striving for that goal, for a more perfect realization of freedom for humanity, for the rights of self-determination, is what stood as apart from the vast police states of Russia and her brood of puppet nations.

Throughout the 1980s I had friends across the American Political spectrum and my conservative ones were steadfast in the belief that Russia posed a threat to democracy and freedom. That Russian intelligence services infiltrated and manipulated groups in our open society creating conflict and divisions that weakened the ‘free world.’ They were right. After the fall of the USSR so much came to light about their massive operations attempting to exploit both our divisions and our freedoms against us. My conservative friends crowed in being proved right.

And now I live in a future that would have been unimaginable to all of us in the 1980s. I don’t mean the power computers we carry about in our pockets like so many dimes, nor do I mean the fantastic imagery we created with keystrokes, or that we can now launch and land rockets as we envisioned in the SF movies of the 1950s.

No, I mean that those same conservatives who crowed so loudly about their correct detection of the threats to our freedoms have so willingly, so enthusiastically wedded themselves to the very same threat. That violations of the constitutional order and attempts to steal power from legitimate free and fair elections are swept away as mere distraction of ‘personality.’

Back in the 1980s a common criticism of the left from my conservative friends was that the people on the left were only voting for their own selfish interests, free food, and money from the teat of the government. It is clear now that this charge is quite accurate to the conservatives. All professed dedication to the ideals of democracy and the ‘free world’ are casually overthrown for the party that promises to keep delivering the goodies you want. Maybe those goodies are tax cuts and commerce unrestrained by the public good. Maybe it’s the power to compel people to live by your own hypocritical ethics. Or perhaps it’s the promise to not encumber your choice in firearms. Whatever the ‘goodie’ it is clear that the ideals of Freedom are disposable when weight against that selfish interest.

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The Thematic Failure of ‘The Savage Curtain’

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If you know anything of the original Star Trek series episode The Savage Curtain, it’s that it is the one with Abraham Lincoln sitting in space.

Of course, it’s not the real Lincoln but one created by aliens from Kirk vision of Lincoln. Soon Kirk, Spock, and a couple of ‘good’ historical characters are engaged fighting with ‘evil’ historical characters, some from real history as with Lincoln and some from Star Trek’s future history. The aliens are curious about ‘good’ and ‘evil’ and has created this contest to learn about these concepts. (Really, a forced pit fight is a terrible experiment, but we’ll let that slide for the moment.) After some loses Kirk and Spock win the fight and the baddies run for the hills with the aliens drawing the conclusion that ‘evil’ when forcefully confronted runs away.

Really Star Trek? That’s you conception of evil, that it is something that is cowardly at heart? Was that the result when the fascists were fought tooth and nail over every damn kilometer of Europe? That when ‘forcefully confronted’ that fled?

This is back in my head because as I am writing a novel populated with evil werewolves instead of the more popular sexy ones it has gotten me thinking about the nature of evil.

It is not that evil is more cowardly. I think one of the defining aspects of evil is that it is inherently selfish. It considers its own wants and desire above all else. it considers others as resources to be used, exploited, and discarded not as people in their own right.

In my novel this has raised its head among the pack of werewolves and it’s something to consider when viewing tragic, evil events in our all too real world.

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Season 3 Reservation Dogs & Native Media

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My sweetie-wife and I finished watching season 3 of FX’s Reservation Dogs a dramedy set on a Native American reservation in modern day rural Oklahoma as it follows s collection of teens, their less-than-legal antics, their interpersonal events, and the lives of the larger community around them. The series, a first with American television, with all the creatives coming from Native American backgrounds explores the lives of its characters while both simultaneous·ly honoring culture and religious belief and avoid the ‘noble savage’ stereotype. These characters feel real and continue to feel real even as they encounter spirits of their ancestors, vengeful mythical beings from their heritage, and possibly even extraterrestrial encounters. The mystical never comes off as either jammed in to make the story standout from wider American culture nor overly praised for being native but simply another part of the tapestry of the story’s world.

Our interest in the show when it premiered in 2021 came from the fact that Kiwi creative Taika Waititi served as the series executive producer, but the series has very little of Taika’s erratic chaotic energy and much more the product of its showrunner Sterlin Harjo, a creative whose career I shall watch closely.

There appears to be a little boomlet in Native media and it is one I welcome. In addition to Reservation Dogs there has been the excellent Predator prequel Prey set among the Comanche during the 18th century which also presented as a viewing option the ability to watch the film with an audio track entirely in the Comanche language. A sequel to Prey is already in the works,

 

 

 

The series Resident Alien about an extraterrestrial who mission to slaughter humanity is derailed by his interaction with the Earth’s population also utilizes Native Americans among it cast and world building avoiding simple tropes and cliche presenting its native characters as actual characters.

 

 

 

 

From north of the American border came Blood Quantum a Canadian zombie apocalypse movie with much of its cast and characters coming from First Nation peoples. (The Canadian equivalent to the phrase ‘native American.’)

It is quite a privilege to watch so much media that rejects the racist or adoring portrayals of native peoples in favor of more complex, emotionally interesting, and culturally engaging fare that is now finally becoming available.

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