Reviews of reviews, hip hip hurrah!

Hey friends! It's time for another instalment of One-Star Amazon.com Review of Books That Are Generally Considered Actually Quite Good!!!

[studio audience: yayyyy]

A Good Man is Hard to Find and Other Stories:

'Flannery O'Connor has been hailed as a great short story writer and a great Catholic writer. While it's challenging to discern her Catholicism - at least from this collection - it's exceedingly easy to spot her use of racist language. Was she putting this language in the mouths of obviously small, ignorant people, a la Norman Lear and Archie Bunker, to teach lessons against racism? I certainly do not know enough to say.  As reported by J. Bottum in the October 2000 Crisis Magazine, "the bishop of Lafayette, Louisiana, banned the racist texts of Flannery O'Connor from the schools in his diocese....A woman known in her own day for her anti-racism now placed on the forbidden list on the grounds of racism." While O'Connor was hopefully not a racist, the bishop's removal of these works strikes me as having been wise, indeed. '

Yes. Censoring language used by fictional characters in books written fifty years ago is certainly 'wise'. I'm utterly blindsided by its wisdom. In fact...wait, no, 'blindsided' isn't the word I'm looking for; I meant 'I want to fucking throw up', sorry.
Also, 'challenging to discern her Catholicism'? Are we even talking about the same Flannery O'Connor?

Book Review: A.C. Grayling's Hail-Mary pass at lasting relevance.

The Good Book: A Humanist Bible, the new ‘secular alternative to the Bible’ by the philosopher A.C. Grayling, is exactly what one might expect a book explicitly conceived of and written as a ‘secular alternative to the Bible’ to be like: Inoffensive, generic, and completely uninspired.

            There is a lot to dislike about Grayling, a professor at the University of London and fellow of St Anne’s College, Oxford, both for religious people and for irreligious people who have cultural or artistic interest in religion. With somebody like Richard Dawkins or Christopher Hitchens it is relatively easy to point to their relative (though not as extreme as sometimes made out) bitterness and rancour as reasons to, if nothing else, critique their motivations for behaving as they do while advancing their beliefs. This goes doubly for Sam ‘If I could wave a magic wand and get rid of either rape or religion, I would not hesitate to get rid of religion’ Harris. Grayling, on the other hand, is a lot harder to pin down. He is maddeningly vague about his opinions at some times and unexpectedly and inexcusably nasty at others, and when he is nasty he adopts a condescending attitude that makes one long for Dawkins and his ability to act as if he thinks that religious people are basically intelligent and normal people whether or not he actually does. I do not know why he decided to write The Good Book. I want to believe that he was acting in some form of good faith, however defined, but the contents of the book make this a little more problematic than one would like.

            The first problem with The Good Book, and one of the worse ones, is its style.

Switching to the topic of fictional villains who are just absolutely vile and who I hate through and through...

WARNING! SPOILERS FOR AOI HANA



Hanashiro Chizu, from Aoi Hana.

Chizu first appears at the beginning of the story as the main character Fumi's older cousin. When Fumi was twelve, she went over to visit Chizu at Chizu's college dorm and Chizu coaxed her into sex (Chizu was about twenty at this point). While obviously this was rape even by bizarre Japanese laws on the subject, Fumi, being both an unbelievable shrinking violet and an emotionally confused pubescent lesbian, took it as a sign of love and entered into a several-year-long sexual relationship with Chizu.

On Fumi's first day of high school, Chizu got engaged and had a party to celebrate without telling her, then barely ever spoke to her again.

This would be bad enough--it is indirectly the source of the vast majority of the conflict in the story because it's the cause of a lot of Fumi's trust issues and questionable taste in women--but Chizu makes things even worse for poor Fumi when she shows up again later in the plot, when Fumi is trying to sort out her feelings for her best friend Ah-chan. Chizu tells Fumi that she is sorry, obviously falsely because (a) she then goes on to chide Fumi for thinking that it was going to be long-term and says that it isn't her fault that 'society broke them apart' (all of which is obvious bullshit on its face, since Chizu isn't in an arranged marriage and Fumi was twelve when Chizu started having sex with her) and (b) Chizu raped a twelve-year-old girl who loved and trusted her, then strung her along for years and dumped her.

It's unclear why exactly Chizu felt the need to come back and fuck with Fumi's sense of self-worth by telling her that it was basically her fault for allowing a much older and admired relative to rape her. She does not gain anything by doing so. The simplest explanation is that Chizu is simply a sociopath and gets her kicks from Fumi's suffering, which because Fumi runs with a mostly rather awkward and alienated crowd directly drags down several other people as well.

And the worst part is that Aoi Hana's other characters include bratty jerks, tactless morons, and callous bounders, but none of them are remotely horrible enough to even comprehend whatever the fuck goes on in Chizu's head. It's as if Livia Soprano decided that she was going to make a living by using her maniuplation tricks on the cast of Mary Poppins. Nobody in Aoi Hana is even halfway dark or cynical or evil enough to even begin to understand what Chizu is doing to them.

And...I mean, just LOOK at her.

That FUCKING SMIRK.

Discriminatory Federal Law-chic

Just right now, while browsing through news stories about the repeal of Don't Ask-Don't Tell, I found this one. I'm not sure why it was in the news section but it is. Here's a quote.

And now, we can take the idea of “don’t ask, don’t tell” a little less seriously. After all, there are plenty of things we think actually deserve being put into this category. Liiiike telling us about how wasted you got last night. Or the terrible sex you had with somebody else’s boyfriend. And especially talking about the explosive diarrhea you had this morning after breakfast. So, tell us: what’s on your personal “don’t ask, don’t tell” list? 

...okay.

...okay, let's try this again.

And now, we can take the idea of “separate but equal” a little less seriously. After all, there are plenty of things we think actually deserve being put into this category. Liiiike separating us how wasted you got last night. Or how the terrible sex you had with somebody else’s boyfriend is equal to the dissipation of your life in general. And especially [I can't spin the gratuitously disgusting third example]. So, tell us: what’s on your personal “separate but equal” list? 

 Or this:

And now, we can take the idea of “enfeofed working for all” a little less seriously. After all, there are plenty of things we think actually deserve being put into this category. Liiiike...

You know what? I'm not going to go on with this. There's taking something "a little less seriously" and then there's disrespecting what it really is in every way, shape, and form. No. Please, no. 

Hi, I'm from the Family Research Council, and our Research indicates that your Family is evil.

Currently involved in America's politics are two outfits called the National Organization for Marriage and the Family Research Council. It would be natural to assume that these groups would have fairly broad bases of support for ideals relating to marriages and families. It would be natural, but it would be wrong, because of how these people's support for 'marriage' and 'family' is calibrated.

Here is a hint: Their support for such things is almost always based on their support for their marriages and their families. This is perfectly natural and even admirable, since it shows that they are to at least some extent grounded in a reality that they can perceive rather than high-flown ideologies alone. It only becomes problematic when you realise why these people like their own marriages and families.

They love their spouses and families, essentially, for the same reason that one might love a myna bird.

As long as Maggie Gallagher's marriage continues to be heterosexual and as long as Tony Perkins's family continues to be whitebread, they'll support them, and hence 'marriage' and 'family' in general, because they define marriage and family in terms of their own experience without any caring for what other people's marriages or other people's families might be like. But the second one thing goes awry--the second Maggie Gallagher interacts with a married couple who are the same sex, or of different ideologies or backgrounds, or in any other way noticeably different from her own--the mask collapses. And if Tony Perkins was suddenly in a world in which one of his children was gay, or had leftist sympathies, or was forced to drop out of high school to have her rapist's baby, then I don't doubt that he'd turn on them and everything they cared about, like Alan Keyes did with his lesbian daughter. I have seen this happen with very conservative families again and again, and in my view one of the saving graces of very conservative families, the way that you can tell that the members of a particular very conservative family really love each other, are a real family, and mean serious business with their love, is them not doing this if the situation arises. (This is, for instance, the one thing that, if anything will, could possibly lead Dick Cheney to redemption.)

I don't mean to sound alarmist or over-the-top. I genuinely think that this is how venal, self-serving, hypocritcal, and bigoted these people's reasons for supporting 'marriage' and 'family' as concepts are. I know that they outright oppose gay people's marriages and gay people's families and hate their members and want them to go away and be miserable and die. I don't doubt that many of them have similar feelings on interracial marriages--after all, one of the only interracial couples in the Bible was also lesbian--or extended families--giving a shit about anybody whose relation to you can't be easily explained with 'I had sex with X' is DANGEROUSLY CLOSE TO COMMUNISM, obviously--or anything else that forces them to remember that 'marriage' and 'family' aren't concepts that their marriages and their families have a global fucking monopoly over, that people who aren't like them exist, that other types of love exist, and that they have to share the world with other living things that have loved ones and human relationships just like they do.

It's worse than bigotry. It's a desire for outright and absolute control over what constitutes marriage, what constitutes family, and, in the end, what constitutes love.

Please, for all that's good and holy, with the love of your marriage (if you have one) and your family (we all have our family, whatever that may be), resist them. Resist them, for the good of America, and for the good of love.

What I realised

What the right wing of the Republican Party is telling Americans, and has been telling them ever since Barry Goldwater fell from grace and took whatever HONESTY was involved in American conservatism with him, is actually very simple. It's simple, and it's clear, and it's what people want to hear because we're so masochistically in love with capitalism in this country: 'You're not a person. You're not a real child of God or of America. You're just a factor to be solved for on a rabid graphing calculator.

'You're not a person. You're just the profiteer class's good little property, and we'll keep you placated with our talk of a 'freedom' that has no sense of either mercy or justice. Chaos except for the profiteer class. Sink or swim. Social Darwinism for everyone!--and by the way, the same theory applied to biology is Satanic. Tough on crime, except when it's by bankers or against women and minorities. It's perfectly fine to fool around with secretaries but if you dissemble and then apologise rather than just denying it we'll impeach you and if you're a homo we'll dehumanise you and use you as an 'issue'.

'America, America! Die for America! Only in America. An America of the banks, a kind of banking that would make Alexander Hamilton spew. America for the insurers who gamble on the right to good health. America for the people who two hundred years ago would have made it just fine in Britain or Germany or anyplace else.' What, then, exactly, is the point?

This doesn't necessarily apply to the right in other countries. Some countries, like Australia and Germany, have (vaguely) more moderate political consensus. Some, like Japan, don't even HAVE left and right, just different interest sections in the Diet. I'm not outright condemning conservatism and calling it inhuman. I'm only condemning American conservatism in the year 2010 and calling it inhuman. There is a difference, and it is chasmal in its depth and breadth and dolorous in the fate that it bespells for a perfectly acceptable word and concept that's being twisted into that special blend of radical libertarianism, I've-got-mine pillaging, and dehumanisation of the Other that, back when 'conservative' meant 'just kind of a killjoy' and 'liberal' meant 'just kind of a dick', Edmund Burke was trying to WARN us about.

Australian conservatives? Okay by me. British conservatives? Go nuts. Japanese conservatives? Fine. Mexican conservatives? Not my thing, but hey, if that's what makes you happy, go for it. American conservatives at other points in history? Probably right about some things.

Newt Gingrich, John Boehner, Glenn Beck, Sharron Angle? It's not even clear that you even like this country, guys. You're certainly not willing to pay for its upkeep, for one thing. Even if you excuse yourself with American liberty you're just fooling yourself because liberty defined in the negative is a Julianic 'no-deed'. Seriously, if you really dislike America and American justice and American mercy so much, get the fuck out.  It'll be easier on us and on you.