Onward and Upward

Deep breath. I'm home. No more bagels. My headache's gone. I'm less nauseous. OK.

Thoughts from Amp:

The big mistake the Democrats, and most of the left, made was to believe that by winning elections we will change the country.

Just the opposite is true. It is only by changing the country that we will win elections.

We need to stop thinking in terms of winning elections, and start thinking about persuading more of the country to believe our ideas. If we do that, elections will follow.

What does that mean for the left? We still lack an effective left counterpart to the Heritage Foundation and the Fox News Network; by which I mean, we lack effective institutions dedicated not to pushing our candidates but instead to pushing our ideas. And that's killing us.

Family Fun

And, it appears my family has shown up in the comments section.

I love the internet.

More Perspective: From Xeni

8:15am: Four more years of a nation led by criminals. I was making coffee with one eye on CNN when the news broke, and I called my dad, a man who's spent many years fighting for good things, sometimes at great personal cost.

"Get over it," he said, "The way you feel now is exactly how I felt when Nixon won a second term -- crushed. I just couldn't believe America was that stupid. But remember what happened to Nixon that term."

And, I'm glad others are feeling just as sick as I am right now. I'm really pissed that this is such a gut bomb for me. I'm skipping kickboxing, going home early, and going to bed (early-to-bed mainly to avoid a food binge).

Nicky

Nick's got some more good stuff up. I've been eating too many bagels, and have started in on the post-Halloween candy hidden all over the office. Not a proper binge, thank god, but not morsels I should be eating. Nick's is a good reminder that they're both shitty candidates. The Lesser of the Evils shouldn't cut it.

Yea. I know. "Marriage is only between a man and woman," and "abortion is Evil and Wrong, but..." were spoken by the dem. Hitler just didn't add any "but"s.

I've been told that I'll grow more cynical as I get older. Give me until January. I'll turn 25 then. It's all downhill cynicism from there on out.

"..the elections are over, let the politics begin."

Perspective

I met a traveler from an antique land
Who said: Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whos frown,
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them and the heart that fed;

And on the pedestal these words appear:
"My name is Ozymandius, king of kings:
Look on my words, ye Mighty, and despair!"

Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.

- Percy Bysshe Shelly

Here We Go, Ladies and Gents

Just got this from NARAL Pro-Choice America. I recommend signing up for their newslist.

Help us (and yourself!) out. We've got a Supreme Court Justice not long for this world, and three more over the age of 65. Hitler's just waiting for the old guy to die, and then we're fucked. So --

Here's what you can do TODAY:

ACT. Put Bush on notice that you and all pro-choice Americans will not give up. Sign our petition to tell him that you'll firmly oppose any Supreme Court nominee who doesn't support Roe v. Wade, then spread the word to your pro-choice friends and family.

TALK ABOUT IT. You're among friends here. Join our post-election discussion by posting a comment on our blog.

STAY INFORMED. Read today's headlines about what this really election means for choice.

Thank you for all you've done over the course of the last four years.

It's the resolve of the pro-choice movement that secured a woman's right to choose in the first place. It is that resolve that will secure a woman's right to choose over the next four years and beyond.

What's that again? Oh, yea --



Don't forget it.

Post-Concession Bagels

Am currently enoying some post-concession bagels here at work. Half our office voted dem. the other half, for Hitler. So it's a mixed post-concession bagel bag.

In other worklife news, one of our two accountants left her husband and kid, left her keycard in the office, and got on a plane Friday. She hasn't come back, so our head of HR fired her, and only half-jokingly asked if I was interested in learning accounting.

Sure, why not? Give me a hardhat and a couple months training with Sarah our Construction Manager, and I'll be able to run this office all by myself.

Ha.

Jiggity-Jig

More thoughts, from Amanda. Basically, if you're a woman, poor, and/or a minority, you're fucked.

But we knew that already.

I'll be here in Chicago (hey, at least it's a blue state - our buddy Obama is headed east) until summer 2006 (I'm committed to finishing out my time as Jenn finishes her Ph.D.). I was flirting with going back to Alaska, perhaps living in Juneau, but it looks like I'll be doing a year or two overseas. London or Auckland (our company has offices in both of these locations) would be great, though Our Friendly Neighbor to the North exists for a reason as well. Terribly friendly people there --

They've been taking in disillusioned patriots like me since 1775.

Today's Mixed Bag

Because there are other things to do today.

Check out The Paper Boy for a cool list of international, national, and local papers you can browse. The "full service" member treatment is $2.95 a year, and you get all of your handy papers in one place, with a user-friendly searching tool.

Also, Vandermeer has some thoughts about America's warped failure of imagination, Nick Mamatas runs for president, World Fantasy Award winners have been up for awhile, Lithaven's got up a link to the Worst Analogies Ever Written in a High School Essay, check out Osama's War On the Red States (Expert Approved!), and if you're looking to do something worthwhile to alleviate your frustration, check out Volunteer Match and help somebody out. Of course, you could always just do this, but I think getting outta the chair might be slightly more productive.

Or so I hear.

Going Forward

Some more thoughts here.

I'll try and say not too much more about this, because I'd like to move on to covering women's rights, fantasy fiction, and health issues. All of which are likely going to be of even more importance from now on.

I think a part of me was hoping I'd be able to get off the hook a little bit, with a dem. presidency. I wouldn't have to worry so much about the repeal of Roe vs. Wade and the erosion of women's rights. It wouldn't be perfect, no, but I wouldn't have to worry about a Supreme Court packed with people who declare my body not my own once a guy's semen fuses with my egg.

I'm genuinely appalled at the results, not just that baby Hitler won the popular vote, but that the dems lost... everything. The House. The Senate. Hell, they're a minority of govenors. I can't believe Americans did this. I can't believe they bought into the Fear: Fear of terrorism, Fear of those Evil Gay People and their Evil Marriages, Fear of women having sex with men willy-nilly and getting what the men left behind scraped out of their uteruses.

Fear. This huge wave of incredible fear has carried this guy into a popular and political majority. Yes, it'd be great if Kerry won Ohio, and the vote's still out, but that doesn't change the way the other numbers have turned out, and doesn't change the popular vote. Little Hitler has his Mandate From Heaven.

I was flipping back and forth last night between CNN and The History Channel. HC was airing a show about Hitler's rise to power. They were interviewing Germans alive during Hitler's ascendence, and one woman said, "The young people now, they ask us why we didn't protest, why we didn't go out in the streets to try and change things. We didn't because we were afraid. It was a time of fear."

That one hit me in the gut.

It was the gypsies, the Jews, the handicapped, the gays (sound familiar?), who played Black Sheep to Hitler. Make everybody afraid, make everybody hate everybody else, and make everybody look back at their neighbor over their shoulder.

My grandmother lived in occupied France. My grandfather was an American GI on Body Detail, cleaning up concentration camps and burying soldiers.

I used to think that all of the Bush=Hitler rhetoric was a big leftist conspiracy, a spin show. And yea, of course it is - for now. Bush isn't as smart as Hitler, but what I'm seeing with these numbers is that people really *like* him. True Believers *believe* in him. They'll sanction wars with Iran and North Korea if he says so, because he says so. They won't stop to think about it, they'll just do it. No talking, no diplomacy, just bombing the shit out stuff.

And you know what? I'm a historian. Not only that, I'm a historian whose concentration is on war: the politics of war, the propaganda, women's roles in war, war and masculinity, etc. I've been boning up on the history of guerilla warfare, and after doing so, I can tell you this: these people have no idea what the fuck they're doing.

I have no doubt that all of my friends and family in the military - some of whom have already been to Iraq and back - are going to go back. If they die there, I'm going to be really, really pissed off.

The majority of Americans are eager to send their sons and daughters off to die in obscure desert countries to Save us from the Evil Gays, the Evil Arabs, and the Evil Welfare mothers.

I think it's fucked up.

I have no more to say about it - except that I am deeply, deeply, pissed off.

Wrap Up (abridged)

via Empire o' Dirt

And, if you're interested, here's someone else's rant.

I have work to do.

Jon Stewart is Still My Secret Boyfriend

I love The Daily Show.

This clip rocks.

You can check out more recent goodness here.

And, Just For Laughs

Well. I'm laughing.

The Good Housekeeping Way vs. The Real Woman's Way.

I Know Your Vote Will Be Evil, But..

I just e-mailed my Republican little brother:

"I know your vote will be EVIL, but have you voted yet?"

This is the first election he's been old enough to vote in.

I'll also be following atrios' blog for updates. For the more conservative, there's also L.G. Footballs, though I won't link there, as I don't want them linking back here, wrecking havoc in my comments section, and threatening to kill my first born child (you think I'm joking?).

Vote Early. And Vote Often

Hopped across the street and voted before heading to work today (for some reason I thought the polls were open from 8am to 8pm. In fact, they were open here around 6am). Linda, one of our architects, just voted in the US for the first time (she's orginally from Poland). She found it quite exciting. And a lot easier than she expected, apparently. Her first exclamation upon entering the office: "I'm so glad it's over with!"

At Washington station, there were at least six people handing out Kerry/Edwards stickers. At Cumberland, there were another four or five. I'm wondering if these are Moveon.org people.

All in all, I'm glad to be done with it. If you're not yet done with it (this means you, mom), head over to your local polling place and get it over with. Remember that electoral-vote.com is going to attempt continuous updated coverage. I'll be staying home from kickboxing tonight to prepare a Voter's Day dinner, drink a couple of beers, and see what happens.

So, as they now say in Afghanistan: Vote Early. And Vote Often.

Off To See...

I've got writing to work on. See you tomorrow.

The Guy Behind electoral-vote.com

Since I've been using it as my sounding board, here's the FAQ about the guy running electoral-vote.

Good luck, everybody.

via Simon

On Magical Negros, Helpful Slave Girls, & Other Fantastic White Creations

There's an interesting article up at Strange Horizons on the stereotype of the "Magical Negro" in fantasy fiction. Author Nnedi Okorafor-Mbachu looks at this white-written type in the novels of Stephen King (Dick Hallorann in The Shining, Mother Abigail in The Stand, John Coffey in The Green Mile, etc). There's some discussion about the problems facing lily-white genre writers (such as myself) trying to write more protagonists of color without falling into such stereotypes over at Vandermeer's discussion board.

This is something that's been bugging me for a long time in my fiction, particularly after I started reading up on my core feminist books. That's about the time I started poking my head out of the sand and looking around at all of my assumptions. Trying to break them down, in real life and in fiction, has been one of the more difficult things I've ever tried to do (and I'm not so arrogant as to believe it will ever be done - I've been raised in and embedded with cultural symbols. I can be aware of my biases, and try and squash them, but they'll always be there. I'm not stupid enough to believe they'll go away if I just stop thinking about them).

Because I'm a white woman, I haven't been as aware of the Magical Negro stereotype as I have been of the Helpful Slave Girl type in all the Conan novels. As I've mentioned before, I'm a fan of the old Howard novels because I find them so incredibly non-PC that they become ridiculously funny. The sexism and racism are overt - there aren't even any Magical Negroes. There are only Primitive Black Beasts and/or Savage Natives. The Magical Negro stereotype hadn't come into fruition.

Interestingly, the Magical Negro type (as mentioned by someone at Vandeermeer's board) sounds like an evolution of the "Uncle Tom" character. Uncle Toms, ironically, were created by people like Beecher-Stowe - they were to be sympathetic characters to convince white voters (still all men at this time) of the evils of slavery. They were to show that having black skin meant just that - having black skin, and did not negate a person's humanity. When you're trying to talk to people who've been hammered with the thinking that personhood is based on color/blood, Uncle Tom was a way of a white writer trying to show a white audience that a person's color didn't make them Evil.

Following from that, the Magical Negro (I think) is a white writer's attempt at giving a character of color a viable place in the story - that of a character instead of a set peice. What Okorafor-Mbachu didn't mention about Hallorann in The Shining was perhaps the most startling part about the actions of his character - he saves the white woman and her child. The white husband dies. The black guy runs off with the white guy's wife and kid. After I read the end of The Shining, I actually flipped back to the front and looked at the publication date (1975). I was impressed that King had gotten away with doing that (especially in 1975). Sure, there's no romance between the Magical Negro and White Woman, but hot damn, the black guy saved the day! You'll note that in the Kubrick movie version, Hallorann dies and the white woman and the child go off on their own. A reading audience may have been ready for the leap of the black-man-saves-the-day, but not a movie audience. Unfortunately, creating a "type" of character - best intentioned as it may be - can backfire, particularly after everybody else starts picking it up and using it as shorthand.

Maureen McHugh mentioned that one of the reasons she chose a gay male protagonist in China Mountain Zhang was because she was tired of seeing the "Magical gay man" character who had to be sacrificed in order to save the protagonist. The old Conan novels do great things with the Helpful Slave Girl who Suddenly Appears before Conan, and is so irristitably attracted to him that she 1) doesn't serve him the poisoned wine her master wanted to give to him 2) gives him a key to get out of his prison 3) tells him vital information about how to get out of the palace/destroy the beast/find the power center of the evil lord/magician/etc. Then she 1) runs off and is never seen again 2) asks Conan to take her with him, which he does, though she's never again seen in other books.

The Helpful Slave Girl, like the Magical Negro and Self-Sacrificing Gay Man, is/was an easy shorthand. Writers are naturally lazy. If we can get away with shorthand, we likely will.

So, it's a problem.

So, how do white writers (like me) move outside the box? I'm aware of these stereotypes, and after reading the SH article, started ticking off my recent stories and novels in my head, trying to find evidence of my guilt.

I was doing OK for awhile: particularly with Jihad, where the token White Guy is actually the only one of the gang with magic powers, but he's just one of the cronies, not even a main character (I have effectively reversed this stereotype, though he won't be sacrificing himself for anybody, and he's not really all that magical. Well, Ok, he's a low-level magic-user, but he doesn't have any great Gandolph-like knowledge). Everybody else in the book is black and brown, and none of them is particularly gifted. It's Firefly in the desert, with Islam, racial tension (between black and brown, not non-white and white) and it just so happens that yes, there's a token whitey. My biggest worry is that I'm going to get offensive on the playing-with-Islam front.

I'm likely most guilty of the Magical Negro stereotype in the fantasy saga (To the Wall being book one), where Lilihin is a too-pale scullery drudge (everybody else in the country is tawny, and the country to the north is a mix of Greek/Arab culture shared by a race that's tall and black). Unfortunately, her mentor ends up being from the Greek/Arab culture, meaning she's nearly white, and he's black.

Criteria of the Magical Negro as outlined by Okorafor-Mbachu:

1).He or she is a person of color, typically black, often Native American, in a story about predominantly white characters.

Yep. Tiernan's black. But no, the story's main characters are 2/3 tawny.

2) He or she seems to have nothing better to do than help the white protagonist, who is often a stranger to the Magical Negro at first.

Uh-oh.

3) He or she disappears, dies, or sacrifices something of great value after or while helping the white protagonist.

No, I don't think this will happen, unless his time is counted as a great sacrifice. The idea is that *he* needs *her* for something, not the other way around, though he tries to frame it that he's in he best interests.

4) He or she is uneducated, mentally handicapped, at a low position in life, or all of the above.

Uh-oh. He's an outcast.

5) He or she is wise, patient, and spiritually in touch. Closer to the earth, one might say. He or she often literally has magical powers.

Another Uh-oh.

I probably have a Magical Negro on my hands.

But. This is where things get tricky.

I'm writing a fantasy world as a white woman living in a hetero-patriarchy. I'm writing about fantasy cultures with fantasy racial characteristics, which include skin color. I'm also writing about fantasy social and sexual arrangements, fantasy customs, and including some fantasy gestures. Because I'm tied to this world, they're all coming out of this world, being shaken and stirred, and vomited back out into something a little more different.

But I think they're still going to be white.

I've done a lot of traveling, and I've tried to pick up as much as I can, but I think if somebody in another country picked up my book, they'd be able to tell I was white and American (much like someone picking up a Michael Moorcock book or a Mieville book would likely be able to tell they were from England, and had great affection for London). I don't know that I have any solution to falling into stereotypes while writing, except that you need to be aware of them... and you need to start spending a lot more time with people who are very, very different from you.

Ideally, we wouldn't have to question a character's color, a character's sexuality, as being significant at all. Yea. Right. That would be great. But we're not there yet, and until then, we've got to look closely at our subtext. Whether or not I was consciously making Tiernan a Magical Negro, I'm more aware of how he could be cast that way, and I can take steps to alter him if necessary.

I've taken to interrogating many of my female characters as well, particularly after a reader said, "I thought the subtle misogyny in that story was interesting."

Holy crap, I thought. I totally didn't mean to do that. I was caught out again when I created a completely passive female lead for the fantasy saga, and had to go back and retool her. Again, when I first concieved the character I pictured writing her as very strong-willed. Instead, she came out like a rag doll. I'm working with pre-established notions about the way a certain "type" of person acts. Yes. Me. The crazy-wacky liberal feminist hippie. We all come from our own unique blend of cultural biases. We've all got embedded shit.

I was also caught out on a sudden short-hand assumption when a first reader asked me why, in the second section of my fantasy saga one of my characters had suddenly become "a slut." Oops. It happened to be a gay male character. I had been writing quickly (about 5K-10K words a day), and went against the actual person I'd created in the first 150 pages and started to write a shorthand stereotype instead. Needless to say, I went back and rewrote those sections.

We're going to approach projects with assumptions. I've been lucky in that I have really good first readers who tag me when I'm being lazy. I've started to learn how to interrogate what I'm writing a little bit better, and I'm hoping I won't trip up as much.

But I know I'll trip up. It's a constant process writing and rereading and trolling through subtext. I won't catch everything, but dammit, I'm trying.

Is that the best we can hope for?

Some Thoughts from Nicky

Great stuff from Nick:

What happened is that most Americans are utterly incapable of conceptualizing the United States as a nation on the defensive and losing the war on terror. Yes, people will acknowledge that terror is a tactic, and then cannot be warred upon any more effectively than, say, deep frying. Yes, people can point to the quagmire of Iraq. The US can be "betrayed" by internal enemies (Bush, "liberals", whatever). But the US cannot lose. The other side can't be fighting smarter or fighting better. On this, the mainstream of the right and left are agreed.

And they are wrong.

The same confidence in America's ability to "kick ass" that is giving Bush half the vote tomorrow -- and confidence is otherwise a rare commodity among the legions of Life's Little Losers who thump their chests and declare that only "Bush has the balls" to fight the saracens -- informs the widespread liberal belief that Bush could win the war on terror and bring in bin Laden, but that he perversely refuses to do so for whatever reason. This further leads to the delusional belief that the war in Iraq will reset if Kerry gets elected, and that the US will get a "second chance" to "fix" Iraq by bombing it into the modern age with the help of French weaponry. We can't lose!

The fact is, though, that Osama bin Laden has had the initiative for years; he is leading the pace of events, he is calling the shots, and he has a far superior strategic understanding of what is going on on the ground in Central Asia and the Middle East. So he's winning. As anyone who paid attention to how, say, the American Revolution played out knows, strategic understanding trumps technological advantage, body count, or even number of tactical victories when it comes to wars fought from across the sea. Nor is this news; Stratfor noted in late 2001 that the most likely motivation for the 9/11 attack was not to attack the symbols of American militarism or a "decadent" culture -- it was to lure forces into his backyard, which he would then wear down via attrition. And this is exactly what has happened, and what continues to happen. Ultimately, Iraq doesn't even matter; the same shit would have happened in Afghanistan.

Ah, and Afghanistan, there's a funny little country. And here's a funny little thought experiment. Imagine that you are Osama bin Laden. You get fingered on 9/12/01 as a) the mastermind of the previous day's attack and as b) Public Enemy #1. Further, the US ignores the Taliban's televised plea not to be turned into Uzbekistan's glass parking lot and announces it will attack Afghanistan, with the support of its new pal, Pakistan.

Again, you're Osama bin Laden. You also have plenty of pals in Pakistan. So, do you stay in Afghanistan, the country the US said it would bomb, or do you wander over into Pakistan, which the US said it would not bomb? Clearly, the latter.

But of course, having a poor strategic understanding of what is going on, right and left in the US joined together to insist, contra common sense, that Osama must have been dug into Afghanistan. Kerry insists that Osama was "cornered" in Tora Bora, a claim he bases on intelligence of the same caliber of that which showed that Iraq was a hotbed of WMD production.

(Continued)

Here Goes

http://www.electoral-vote4.com

The regular site electoralvote.com was down, electoral-vote2.com was "unavailable" but electoral-vote4 is up and running (he's got it running on 6 servers for just this reason).

If nothing else, Kerry winning means I get to stop bitching about politics until January. Let's make sure I can take a month-long politics-bitching hiatus, OK?

After that: inauguration time, baby. And the gloves'll come off.

Taking tomorrow off from my MA class so I can get back to my polling station and vote before 8pm.

See you all there.