I went to a concert the other day – The Two Funerals – and the lead singer introduced the most of the songs in this fashion:

“This song’s about how fucked up racism and sexism is.” *feedback* *feedback* *powerchord* *scream*

I feel… elated.

But that’s where it became… odd. According to this organization’s ideas, ‘retard’ is the most offensive thing anyone could ever say, and in a larger sense they believe that discrimination against ID people is worse by far than discrimination against any other group. At some point it was even said that insulting a Black person wasn’t so bad – after all, a Black person can more easily punch you in the face! Yeah….

Now don’t get me wrong – I’m certainly against using the word ‘retard’. I’m glad they’re trying to draw attention to the offensiveness of it. And the argument for discrimination against ID persons being the worst possible makes some sense on the surface.

BUT. I’m fairly certain that as an able-bodied, reasonably privileged white person, I’m in no position to judge the relative degree of someone else’s oppression – even given the amount of oppression I have endured. I’m just as certain that the (mostly WASP male) leaders in this organization aren’t in such a position either. It all comes across as a minor variation on “We’re the great white heroes, we know what your problems are and how to fix ‘em!”

I mean, really – is ‘retard’ really worse than ‘lame’, worse than ‘gay’ (as used in modern youth culture), worse than ‘bitch’ or ’slut’? If one really is worse, how could it possibly matter?

All oppression is related.

Now, I’m the sort of person who tends to be very harsh on the kitten-blogging crowd.. Or I used to, anyway.

The way I see it, here you are. You have the most powerful communication system ever created. Do you use it to do something unique and worthwhile? No! You post pictures of kittens. Kittens! And not just the occasional kitten – kittens every day. What a waste.

I’m just a big hypocrite, of course. I’ve spent plenty of time writing about TV shows and movies, etc. While some of it is honest cultural analysis, plenty is just pointlessness. Kittens are no different.

But I think I understand more now. Kitten pictures, you see, are perhaps the purest form of escapism imaginable. A real kitten isn’t – you have to take care of a real kitten. But when you look at a picture of a kitten, you see a kind of distilled combination of cuteness, wonder, and innocence all rolled up in one ball of fur. People don’t like kitten blogs because of the kittens per se, they like them for the distraction from reality, for the wonder of the animal world without the animal. Other escapist media shrinks before the power of the tiny kitten.

Or something.

So I disappeared again, real life exploded on me, blah, blah, blah. I could go on and on about why, or why not, but not only does nobody care, it wouldn’t even really be true. The truth is, I got a bit fed up with the Internet, blogging, everything computer-related (rather ironic for someone whose future career relies almost entirely on computers…). I burnt out without the excuse of having burning sufficiently beforehand.

About three months ago, I even made a blogging schedule – one day I was going to write about technology, one day politics, one day crosspost from Fourth Wave. It lasted for one day. Lovely. General weirdness/fights across teh interwebs only made things worse, first with a bunch of feminist blogs shutting down or going on hiatus (I know, I know…), and secondly the weirdness surrounding the lesbianish web-sphere (someday I’ll put all my feelings on Afterellen vs. Shewired vs. Autostraddle vs. the world down, but not now…)

I still haven’t completely gotten over it all, either, but I also miss writing rather badly. So here I am.

At the risk of setting myself up for failure, I’m going to set a goal – write something, anything, every day. Just to do it. I think the problem with my previous schedule was that it was too complex to make a habit of it (it involved rotating weekly schedules!). Perhaps I’ll do better if I just go for regularity. Or not. But I’m going to try. (Aviva – if you’re still subscribed to this, I’m going to get something up on fwf soon too, I promise…) I’ve got a ton of more-to-less interesting ideas, as usual. I just need to put them to work.

So in the interest of putting something in this post not completely introverted: I think one of the big fears I have about writing on the web is, well, sounding stupid. It’s not as silly as it sounds – I think a good deal of the failed attempts, the blogs with 30 posts, the video blogs with two episodes, the podcasts that last all of a week, are caused, not by a lack of time, but by the author’s suddenly realizing that there’s a dozen people on the internet, working on the same subject. Except, they’re an order of magnitude more intelligent, interesting, and so on. It’s enough to make anyone want to spend all their free time staring at the ceiling.

Actually, this is true of everything everywhere. I even ran across it in local volunteering of all places. You’d think a small non-profit, in need of endless amounts of help, would welcome anybody and anyone. Not so much. Instead, the two or three highly competent people unintentionally make everyone else feel useless. Now the organization is nearly gone from a lack of help.

According to lots of people, the antidote for all this is to specialize, to make sure you’re so good at what you do that you stop feeling so inadequate. But then, you end up looking stupid unintentionally. Worse yet, you don’t know it – you’re the expert, after all. Take ‘Joel on Software’, one of my my favorite examples. Joel’s blog was a big deal – it still is, for that matter. But I, and thousands of other people, won’t touch it with a very long stick. His various dogmas and strange ideas built up over the years make him impossible to take seriously, even if he is some sort of software expert. This isn’t new or special, of course. The story of Einstein’s various errors (and failure to see them) while working on a unified theory of physics is well known. And on and on it goes. The lesson, I suppose, is rather nihilist – the wise person really is the person who realizes they know nothing.

Not that it makes me feel and better about my own personal failings, of course.

I was going to end this by working collectivist cultural theory into it (less judgment! less stress! more productive!), but I’m just rambling anyway. More coherence tomorrow.

Needless to say, the ‘most wanted’ one is boring and derived. But the ‘least wanted’ song is actually quite fun. It’s a sort of random hodgepodge – sopranos, tubas, and children advertising the holidays at Wal-Mart. In other words, it’s completely postmodern. In all honesty, if they had layered it a bit, made it a bit more dissonant, and fixed the structure (at the moment it’s more like three or four songs placed end to end than one complete work) it might pass as a serious modern classical work. As it is, it’s a fascinating commentary on musical opinion.

Which just goes to show – true art is weird. This was, of course, the artist’s intent (Wired Magazine completely missed the point here).

But I can’t help but think the composer was being unfair – they obviously made the ‘most wanted’ song annoying, and the ‘most unwanted’ interesting, if non-standard. What if they had honestly tried (within the given guidelines) to write a really good song for the most wanted one? It seems to me that would have been far more enlightening…

I won’t pretend to understand the issue completely (I got bored and stopped following it closely a long time ago). But if the summaries are correct, (and the CBO is accurate, which seems reasonable), we’ll get a moderate reduction in the deficit, some new taxes for the rich and people who use tanning salons, some decent subsidy expansions for low-income people, and some mild tweaks to medicaid and medicare. All quite undramatic, really.

All of which makes the protests quite bewildering.

However you look at it, this is not a new health care system. It’s certainly not a single-payer universal coverage system. It’s not going to allow the government to regulate the industry tightly, and it’s not abolishing medicare/caid.

For that matter, the bill barely even falls under the reform category. I daresay what most feminists wanted (behind expanded reproductive coverage, which we couldn’t possibly have gotten) was to ensure that single mothers, children, etc. were guaranteed health care – we didn’t really even get that. The improvements we did get still filtersthrough the current (read, insanely complicated) system, which is doing a mediocre job at best. Hardly a dramatic victory.

Is it better? Probably. Will it hurt anybody? Probably not. And yet, the protests continue – “the worst piece of legislation ever presented to Congress!” as one radio program I overheard recently trumpeted.

I know a young man – twenty-something years old – who is the stereotype of the teabagger. He’s white, decently educated, from a middle class background, rather (if unconsciously) racist, slightly sexist (openly), and republican as they come. He hates health care reform. Thinks it’s going to give medicine to all the damn illegals (what a tragedy….) And everyone else needs to earn their own health care, dammit!

Except – he doesn’t have insurance worth speaking of. He doesn’t make much, his employer doesn’t provide a decent plan. And if his girlfriend gets pregnant, she be in the system with the rest of them. All of which seems entirely lost on the man in question.

This doesn’t prove anything, of course, but I suspect that there are thousands more just like that. They’re protesting, not because the health care reform will actually hurt them, or the economy, or anything else, but just to be protesting – their lack of continued dominance over society, perhaps. Or simple racism, sexism, obsession with traditional family values. Something.

I’m not sure what, exactly (general fear – probably). But it’s very strange, and rather frightening.

(Crossposted at Fourth Wave Feminism)

Then, of course, I learned about textual analysis, and the whole concept that each reader constructs their own reading of each work, only truly applying to them. Fine. But still – fan-fiction’s different, right?

Not so much. On the off chance that you still can’t stand it (or want to convince someone else), here are some thoughts:

1. Fanfiction is very similar to interpretive commentary – but instead of writing about a work, it rewrites the work.
2. In works with multiple authors (many books and plays and musicals, every TV show and movie ever) often the only difference between the fanfic author and the ‘real’ author is money, and possible (but not guaranteed) review by the ‘original’ author.
3. Fanfic was around long before the Internet (For example, Alice in Wonderland was extensively reinterpreted, and it was hardly the first).
4. Plenty of well-known modern works are nothing more than popular fanfic. (Ever hear of Wicked?)
5. Fanfiction is essentially modern communal storytelling/mythmaking – one person makes up a story, others retell it, others make up more stories with the same characters, still others use the same characters in identical situations, and a few put themselves in the story to make themselves look good!
6. If that’s not enough think about this: Shakespeare was a fanfiction author. He took existing historical characters, stole the plot partly from history, partly from preceding plays, and made what’s widely considered the greatest English literature to date.

So anyway, I’ve managed to be convince enough to try writing some myself – hopefully it’ll be easier than writing original fiction (which I’ve mostly failed at before now), and be decent writing practice to boot.

Or not. But fanfic’s fun, anyway!

I could say that in reality, the disaster is far from over, that we still need to support Haitians, etc. And it would be true – at least to a point.

But in all honesty, Haiti will be okay – as much as it can be. The damage is already done. Hundreds of thousands are dead, and the country destroyed. The humanitarian groups are finally in place, and all the rich foreign governments are involved. The disaster relief machinery is in place, it’s all downhill (or is that uphill?) from here.

And it’s too late to really do anything, because this disaster wasn’t really caused by the earthquake.

Haiti is the poorest country in the Western Hemisphere. It had a terrible infrastructure. The government was inefficient, corrupt, had no resources, and was completely incapable of dealing with a disaster. And on and on it goes.

Haiti needed ‘disaster relief’ long before the earthquake. And if something had been done, the effect of the quake would have been much, much reduced.

That’s how it always happens, though. A part of the world, a people group, some other division has a problem. It could be poverty, potential war or genocide, or just simple racism, sexism, classism. Something happens, the conditions finally become intolerable, and then people (hopefully) do something. If it’s obvious enough (earthquake, hurricane), we do quite a lot. If it’s more subtle, we don’t do as much.

Regardless, by that point all that can be done is clean up. That’s the real disaster.

Something needs to be done before the earthquakes, not after.

And no, I’m not dead, just busy. I’ll hopefully start posting semi-regularly again soon!

But hey… how else are you going to sell spam-based products?