Whackadoodle

I mostly lurk on social media, so I don’t have a huge stake in this (yet). I want to close my Twitter account because I don’t want to support Musk and the right wing people he’s platforming. However, Twitter has been a great place for me to learn about environmental causes, and disability rights, and anti-fascist groups, etc. etc. And I don’t want to give that up. I feel like if we let the Nazis have Twitter, that gives them strength to take the next place (be it an online space or a real-life bar).

How do you think about these issues? When do we leave the bar because it’s a Nazi bar now, and when do we say no, this is our bar and we’re keeping it?

Well, the bar you wanted to save is now owned by a Nazi who is putting as many of his fellow Nazis in the spotlight as he can, as well as giving them preferential treatment inside, while he tacitly and implicitly encourages them to hurt people who had been trying to save the bar.

look at this shit

We asked Trump supporters at a Donald Trump rally in Youngstown, Ohio what would happen if Trump wasn’t elected and someone like Ted Cruz, Hillary Clinton, or Bernie Sanders was. Here’s what they said.

A serious problem faced by all religions is this: the believers, the faithful, the religious… they get far too caught up in the concept that their myth, their fairy story, their “bible” is REAL. It’s TRUE. As opposed to concentrating on the useful part: the message.

  Ultimately, does it matter if the “New Testament” is true? Does it invalidate the message if none of that stuff really happened? Or is the important part the whole “love thy neighbor” thing? I don’t mean to pick on the Christians here. I don’t think it’s terribly important that Prince Siddhartha faced down all those demons, or that Moses’ staff turned into a snake. Metaphors are beautiful, useful, instructive things.

  So here’s our first principle: how about a religion that does not insist on the truth of its fairy tale? How about a religion that insists, rather, that its stories are just that? Stories. Metaphors and allegories. Religion without supernatural faith. Faith placed in the individual’s desire to do the right thing, lead by a shining – and completely fictional – example.

  Further, I’ve been thinking about the appropriation of the date and rituals of pagan winter solstice holidays for the Christians own shindig. Why not take a page from their book?  There’s our second principle: build our new religion on the bones of older, popular faiths.

  I have celebrated “Christmas” every year of my life, but I have never once celebrated the birth of Jesus Christ. I have celebrated the redemption of Scrooge, certainly. The salvation of George Bailey, by his friends and neighbors. The message of love piercing the heart of the Grinch, enlarging it one size beyond the average. Charlie Brown’s friends learning the appreciation of the small and unloved, the meek if you will, as embodied by an ugly little Christmas tree.

  As an aside, I think the residents of Whoville are the perfect post-religious Christmas celebrators. They call it Christmas, they clearly believe it is a time of love and celebration, but I don’t recall any visible Christian iconography in their town. Also, one might mention that the Whos have antennae: they’re not even the same species as Jesus Christ.

  And let’s not forget Frank Capra’s Jesus: the false prophet John Doe aka Long John Willoughby… whose message was real, even if he was a fake, a corporate media shill. John Doe was prepared to jump off a roof to prove that the “the idea is still good."  My favorite Xmas movie; a clear-eyed depiction of how hard it is to be a messiah in the real world.  "Lighthouses, John.  Lighthouses in a foggy world.”

  Jesus Christ, as a figurehead, means almost nothing to me. But there is a great American myth, of a secular American savior. His story is every bit as fantastical and unbelievable as the New Testament, but there is no pretense of historical reality. Yet he’s a symbol of good and right and morality, truth and justice, that actually moves me and means something to me, absurd as that might be.

  The story of his nativity is one of the most re-told stories in mass media. Like John Doe he’s also a Depression-era messiah. An immigrant, an orphan raised by solid American citizens, a god who chooses to live as a man and make a better world.  It doesn’t matter one bit that he isn’t real; the message is real, “the idea is still good”, and the metaphor is beautiful and useful and instructive.

  Therefore, I would like to propose December 25th as the date Superman’s rocket crashed in Smallville, Kansas.  Why not?  It’s as good a date as any.

By now, you’ve read the story of Ahmed Mohamed - a boy who built a clock people knew wasn’t a bomb, but was treated as though it were a bomb because his name was Ahmed Mohammed.

Let’s all agree there was a point that everybody looked at this kid in his NASA t-shirt and realized they were over-reacting.  

Then chose to make it worse.

That’s fear.  And a certain type of phobia.

Of course, Ahmed was sad over this.  Who wouldn’t be?

But look what happened:  #IStandWithAhmed began trending and a nation of people who want kids to “create, to tinker, to build and dream” rallied behind Ahmed.  

Nasa reached out.  Mark Zuckerberg. The President of the United States.  

Ahmed wanted to impress his teacher.  Instead, he impressed others.

I like it.

I like it because it’s a happy ending to a sad story.  

But I also like it because of the powerful message it sends to bad players.  

That person you think won’t fight back?  That you feel you have power over?  Are you thinking of taking a cheap shot?

Word spreads.

And if it’s truly egregious, people are going to rally behind that person and reward him in ways that make you seethe.

The kid you didn’t like is now a famous kid and gets to do cool things with cool people because uncool people did uncool things.

Look: I think people are generally good.

But I think people who AREN’T good tend to be small, petty and jealous.  And they can do a lot of damage to decent hearts.

So before that damage becomes permanent, I would like the correction to be MASSIVE.

Like it was here.

So keep tinkering.  Maybe you’ll impress your teacher.  And even if you don’t, maybe you’ll meet the President or the guy who created Facebook.  Or get a ton of neat stuff from Microsoft.

You know who won’t see any of that stuff happen?  

The person who was thoughtless and cruel.

If you’re familiar with both the film FORBIDDEN PLANET and the last sixty years of Republican political strategy, it may well be that the image above (created for me by the multi-talented Todd Alcott) will put across my entire point, and render this essay unnecessary. But for the people who don’t live at the intersection of Sci-Fi Nerd and Politics Geek, an explanation. For starters, let’s talk about the id. You know your Freud, right? He split the human psyche into three parts: id, superego and ego. Here’s Sigmund talking about the id: “It is the dark, inaccessible part of our personality, what little we know of it we have learned from our study of the Dreamwork and of the construction of neurotic symptoms, and most of that is of a negative character and can be described only as a contrast to the ego. We approach the id with analogies: we call it a chaos, a cauldron full of seething excitations. … It is filled with energy reaching it from the instincts, but it has no organization, produces no collective will, but only a striving to bring about the satisfaction of the instinctual needs subject to the observance of the pleasure principle.” A collection of rage and chaos and hate with “no organization”. Does that description sound like anyone you know? Just like a human being, a country and a culture can also have an id. America has always had an id. America’s id hates losers and loves winners. America’s id is afraid of black people. America’s id is afraid of immigrants, and suspicious of the poor, disgusted by those weakened by illness and addiction.

Sometime in the late nineteen-sixties, the Republican Party realized that engaging with the American id could be a winning electoral strategy. The Democrats had chosen to embrace Civil Rights. They’d chosen a side. What’s on the other side of that struggle?  Who’s against Civil Rights? Where do we find fear of change, of the unknown?  America’s id. Formally, this was called “the Southern Strategy.”  In practice, it meant Republican candidates appealed to every prejudice, every fear, every dark impulse in the voting populace. As a general rule it was understood that one couldn’t come right out and do this directly. The idea was to engage the id on its own terms: subconsciously, with so-called “dog whistles. For example, Ronald Reagan announced his candidacy for President in Mississippi’s Neshoba County. That county is famously where three Civil Rights workers were murdered in 1964. Reagan didn’t mention those murdered men in his speech. Strange, no? He did, however, trumpet his support for State’s Rights. Did you hear the dog whistle? That’s one end of the Southern Strategy spectrum. The other is the Willie Horton commercial. Some dog whistles are louder than others. But the thing is…  you can’t invoke hatred and fear and prejudices in your “base” voters for sixty years without paying a price.  In today’s Republican Party you can see this price everywhere. Reasonable adult men forced to pretend they don’t believe in Darwinian Evolution, that they think the world is 6,000 years old, that guns aren’t a problem in American society, that they don’t quite understand how hormonal birth control works, or what Planned Parenthood actually does. Why? Because they’ve trained their voters to see the world in this narrow way, and the voters repay the favor by demanding they make it even narrower. The GOP has spent sixty years stoking the worst impulses of their voters, and now they have the ultimate expression of those impulses in one oafish millionaire without a decent human emotion in him. Worse, as Trump increasingly speaks madness, his fellow Republicans are forced to join his madness, lest they get left behind. What does all this have to do with FORBIDDEN PLANET? Glad you asked.  Spoilers for a 1956 movie to follow…

FORBIDDEN PLANET is a great movie. The template, in many ways, for the original Star Trek. A science fiction version of Shakespeare’s The Tempest. It’s a mystery, about a fallen utopian civilization – the Krell, thank you very much – which collapsed in a single apocalyptic night. How did it happen?

The Krell invented a great machine that could turn their thoughts into solid matter. Any whim, any desire… just think it up, and there it is in front of you. Paradise.

But the poor Krell forgot that even the most civilized minds have a subconscious. Freud’s id. The hates, the fears, the raging desire for violence and destruction and chaos.

So in the morning, the Krell turned on their great machine and had their every wish fulfilled. Then they went to sleep. And their nightmares came to life, and slaughtered them. Destroyed their cities, burned their civilization to the ground.  Extinction, before sunrise.