Moreau XVII: A Catastrophe

The first uplifted animal we encounter in The Island of Doctor Moreau is M'ling, who had accompanied Montgomery on board the Ipecacuanha on the alcoholic doctor's annual expedition to acquire more animal subjects for Moreau. He had assisted Montgomery in carrying Prendick out of the boat he had been marooned in, though Prendick had been delirious at that point and had no reliable memory of the event. Prendick first encounters him in chapter III, "The Strange Face":

He was standing on the ladder with his back to us, peering over the combing of the hatchway. He was, I could see, a misshapen man, short, broad, and clumsy, with a crooked back, a hairy neck, and a head sunk between his shoulders. He was dressed in dark-blue serge, and had peculiarly thick, coarse, black hair. I heard the unseen dogs growl furiously, and forthwith he ducked back,—coming into contact with the hand I put out to fend him off from myself. He turned with animal swiftness.

In some indefinable way the black face thus flashed upon me shocked me profoundly. It was a singularly deformed one. The facial part projected, forming something dimly suggestive of a muzzle, and the huge half-open mouth showed as big white teeth as I had ever seen in a human mouth. His eyes were blood-shot at the edges, with scarcely a rim of white round the hazel pupils. There was a curious glow of excitement in his face.

Later on in the book, Prendick describes M'ling's origins: "It was a complex trophy of Moreau's horrible skill,—a bear, tainted with dog and ox, and one of the most elaborately made of all his creatures." M'ling is Moreau's greatest success. He looks more human than any of the other uplifted animals, and lives with the humans in Moreau's compound rather than in the ramshackle village the other uplifted animals have built for themselves. Montgomery has trained M'ling to act as a servant, and he seems to be the only one of the uplifted animals with a name (or at least the only one whose name Prendick learns). He is also the only one of the uplifted animals who is allowed to carry a weapon.

The catastrophe that the title of chapter XVII refers to occurs at least eight weeks, probably more, after Prendick arrives at the island, which would put it in April or May of 1887. Prendick has risen early, eaten breakfast, and is smoking a cigarette while standing outside the open doorway of Moreau's compound. He sees --

Hang on, let's pause a moment. How does Prendick come to be smoking a cigarette? He had absolutely no possessions when he arrived on the island. Even his clothing consists of Montgomery's hand-me-downs (which don't fit well, since Montgomery is several inches taller than Prendick). Everything he consumes presumably comes from supplies that Moreau sends Montgomery to fetch on his annual excursions, except perhaps for whatever food grows on the island. If there are cigarettes on hand for Prendick to smoke, it can only be because one of the other two men is a smoker and has generously allowed Prendick to poach on his stash. Prendick doesn't seem to do anything on the island to earn his keep, even though Moreau only let him stay because of his scientific training. Prendick himself admits, "I spent an increasing proportion of my time upon the beach, looking for some liberating sail that never appeared." It's no wonder if Moreau is getting annoyed at having this freeloader mooching off of him.

Anyway, one day in late April or early May of 1887, Prendick is hanging around the entrance to the compound smoking one of the other men's cigarettes, and he sees Moreau walk by, they greet each other, and Moreau goes in and unlocks the door to his laboratory. After all this time, he's still working on a puma that Montgomery brought to the island on the Ipecacuanha. Prendick continues to stare out to sea while behind him the puma "met its persecutor with a shriek, almost exactly like that of an angry virago."

The puma has had enough of this shit. She manages to pull the chain binding her from the wall it is attached to, knocks down Moreau, and runs out of the compound, knocking Prendick out of the way as she does do. Prendick suffers a broken forearm and falls to the ground, where he watches the puma, "swathed in lint and with red-stained bandages fluttering about it," run off. Moreau, armed with a pistol, chases after the puma, and the two disappear inland into the island's foliage.

Prendick painfully regains his feet, and Montgomery appears, also armed with a pistol. Prendick explains what he saw while Montgomery sets his broken arm and puts it in a sling. Then Montgomery goes off in search of Moreau and the puma, while Prendick paces back and forth by the compound.

Several hours pass, during which Prendick hears three shots. Montgomery returns in a disheveled state, accompanied by M'ling.

“My God!” The man was panting, almost sobbing. “Go back in,” he said, taking my arm. “They're mad. They're all rushing about mad. What can have happened? I don't know. I'll tell you, when my breath comes. Where's some brandy?”

He tells Prendick that he has been unable to find Moreau or the puma. While he was searching, he was joined by M'ling, who had been out with a hatchet chopping wood. The two went to the village of the uplifted animals, and found it deserted.

Montgomery, becoming afraid, decided to return to the compound. On the way there, he encountered two uplifted swine with blood-stains around their mouths. The two uplifts attacked Montgomery and M'ling. Montgomery shot one, while M'ling grappled with the other. M'ling had his teeth in his opponent's throat when Montgomery shot it as well. When Montgomery wanted to resume the trip back to the compound, M'ling resisted for a time before agreeing to go with him. On the way, M'ling flushed an uplifted ocelot from the brush, and Montgomery shot it as well, "with a certain wantonness," as Prendick observed.

Chapter XVII ends with Prendick asking, "What does it all mean?" Montgomery can only shake his head and down some more brandy.

Clearly, all is not well on the island. It sounds as though something has happened to cause the uplifted animals to reject Moreau's Law and revert to their natural states. Moreau's hunt for the escaped puma seems like the proximate cause. Did the puma attack and injure him? And would that break the hold that Moreau exercises over them? Tune in tomorrow for chapter XVIII, "The Finding of Moreau".

The Island of Doctor Moreau: a progress report

Although he spent pretty much his entire adult life writing books, H.G. Wells is best known for half a dozen "scientific romances" he wrote in his late 20s and 30s. These books are now considered classics of the science fiction genre, and I suspect that they share the fate of all classic books: everybody has heard of them, but hardly anybody has actually read them.

I myself read The War of the Worlds in the sixth grade when Scholastic Books published a discount edition for schoolchildren in 1974. I had already seen the film version by George Pal, and I found the novel a bit of a slog and hardly anything like the movie. A few years later, in high school, I borrowed and read a classmate's copy of The Time Machine. I had not seen the Pal version at that point, so I didn't have that comparison in mind, but I did find it kind of slow and tame compared to later, more sophisticated time travel stories I had already read by that point.

And that was basically it for my Wells reading until I came upon a copy of In the Days of the Comet in a used bookstore, bought it, and eventually read it. I found it moderately interesting, but it turns out this was not so much a scientific romance as a utopian novel in which the Earth passes through a comet's tail and everybody suddenly loses their irrational beliefs and realizes that H.G. Wells was right all along.

The Island of Doctor Moreau (1896) is best known for introducing the now-common SF trope of biological uplift, the practice of raising animals to human intelligence. Modern uplift stories involve the use of genetic engineering, but almost nothing was known about genetics when Wells was writing, and his Dr. Moreau is a vivisectionist who uses brutal surgical methods to refashion animals into near-humans.

An odd, perverse impulse has led me to start reading this book at Project Gutenberg. I'm currently most of the way through chapter XVI; this blog post is by way of being a progress report on my reading of the book.

As was common with 19th century works of fantastic fiction, there is a framing story that tells how the main narrative came to be presented to the public. In the framing story, a man named Charles Edward Prendick finds a manuscript written by his late uncle, Edward Prendick, relating the story of what happened to him after he was shipwrecked in February 1887. Charles Edward states that his uncle disappeared for eleven months after the shipwreck, and after he was rescued the story he told was so strange that he was regarded as demented. He also notes that almost nothing in his uncle's story can be independently verified.

Edward Prendick is an independently wealthy man who studied biology under T.H. Huxley. After the wreck of the Lady Vain, he is marooned on one of the ship's boats until being rescued by a passing tramp freighter called the Ipecacuanha. His rescuer is a passenger on the Ipecacuanha, a disgraced alcoholic English medical doctor named Montgomery, who is overseeing the shipment of a cargo of animals to a mysterious island. The even-more-alcoholic captain of the Ipecacuanha takes a dislike to Prendick, and after dropping off Montgomery and his animals at the island, leaves Prendick marooned there.

Montgomery's boss, a vivisectionist named Moreau, is initially reluctant to allow Prendick ashore, but changes his mind after he learns about Prendick's scientific background. Prendick is deeply disturbed by the various inhabitants of the island, who are all misshapen and distinctly beastial. He initially concludes that Moreau is surgically altering people into animals, and flees into the jungle. Moreau eventually convinces Prendick that he has it backwards: Moreau is actually surgically altering animals into people.

Moreau's surgical technique is imperfect, and he is troubled by the fact that his uplifted animals invariably start backsliding as soon as he creates them. To hold off the backsliding, Moreau has instilled a religion called the Law in his uplifted animals, a series of prohibitions against reversion to animal behaviors:

 “Not to go on all-fours; that is the Law. Are we not Men?
“Not to suck up Drink; that is the Law. Are we not Men?
“Not to eat Fish or Flesh; that is the Law. Are we not Men?
“Not to claw the Bark of Trees; that is the Law. Are we not Men?
“Not to chase other Men; that is the Law. Are we not Men?”

 Trouble raises its biologically uplifted head when Prendick discovers that one of the animal people, an uplifted leopard, has killed and partially eaten a rabbit, a violation of the Law. When Moreau learns about the violation, he calls the animals to a council where he accuses the leopard, and sentences him to be returned to his laboratory (known to the uplifted as "the House of Pain") for additional surgery. The leopard flees, and is hunted by Moreau, Montgomery, Prendick, and the rest of the uplifted animals. When the leopard is finally cornered, Prendick chooses to shoot him rather than allow him to be returned to the laboratory.

“Confound you, Prendick!” said Moreau. “I wanted him.”
“I'm sorry,” said I, though I was not.

Moreau is presented as being utterly amoral. He specifically tells Prendick, "To this day I have never troubled about the ethics of the matter." He is contemptuous of humanity for its preoccupation with pain and pleasure, which he regards as an unworthy holdover from its own animal origins, and he is indifferent to the pain he inflicts on his experimental subjects. Victor Frankenstein may be the original Mad Scientist, but I'm sure Dr. Moreau gave the trope a healthy boost.
Prendick, the viewpoint character and the person Wells' audience (and likely Wells himself) would identify with, does not accept Moreau's dismissal of pain. He is unwilling to allow the uplifted leopard to be further tormented by Moreau, and he views the scientist's uplifted experimental subjects more sympathetically than their creator.

Poor brutes! I began to see the viler aspect of Moreau's cruelty. I had not thought before of the pain and trouble that came to these poor victims after they had passed from Moreau's hands. I had shivered only at the days of actual torment in the enclosure. But now that seemed to me the lesser part. Before, they had been beasts, their instincts fitly adapted to their surroundings, and happy as living things may be. Now they stumbled in the shackles of humanity, lived in a fear that never died, fretted by a law they could not understand; their mock-human existence, begun in an agony, was one long internal struggle, one long dread of Moreau—and for what? It was the wantonness of it that stirred me.

And that's where I've left off the story for now. How will the conflicting beliefs of Prendick and Moreau play out? We shall see.

Cold dead hands

Details are starting to emerge about the couple that went on a shooting spree in San Bernardino, California yesterday. One of the shooters was a quiet, devout county health inspector named Syed Rizwan Farook and the other was his domestic partner and the mother of his child wife, Tashfeen Malik. From what we know so far, Farook was apparently an honest, liberty-loving American who enjoyed exercising his Constitutional right to purchase and own firearms and create his own home-made remote-control-detonated pipe bombs.

Although much remains to be determined, it is clear that Farook was made the victim of Political Correctness at a holiday party he was attending along with his co-workers, and he courageously chose to Stand His Ground by applying a Second Amendment remedy to the matter. Malik demonstrated her womanly devotion to her man by standing by him during his time of trial and assisting him in implementing his Second Amendment remedy.

Afterward, the two were apparently betrayed by a freedom-hating statist who alerted the government to their whereabouts. This resulted in an appalling exercise of government overreach as officials confronted the couple in their home (or at any rate, a home), as far as we know without a warrant. The couple then once again courageously Stood Their Ground by exercising their Second Amendment rights, until they were killed by agents of the state. It can truly be said of Farook and Malik that the government was only able to take their guns from their cold, dead hands.

Meanwhile, as far as the shooting spree in Savannah, Georgia (remember that?) is concerned, we don't yet know the shooter's race, so we can't say for certain whether he was also a courageous American who was Standing His Ground, or a dangerous thug.

UPDATE: Latest report confirms that the two Patriot American Second Amendment Heroes in San Berdoo were an actual married couple and not just sinfully shacking up together. Blog post updated to reflect this important new information.

And counting

Two! Two shooting sprees! Ah, ah, ah!

The trouble with Joe

Media critic Jay Rosen talks about why the Trump candidacy has been so confounding for journalists. They point out that he's lying, and it doesn't matter. Not only does he refuse to admit to his lies, he keeps doubling down on them, and his constant lying does nothing to reduce his popularity. In fact, it actually makes him more popular among Republicans. The reason Trump is able to do this goes back to a technique for manipulation that is known in sports as "working the refs".

Working the refs is when a team tries to intimidate the referees by constantly challenging their decisions, accusing them of making bad calls. The idea is that if you keep it up long enough, the referees will either A) start to question their own judgment, or B) decide to take the easy way out and just do what you want. Either way, the result is the same: the referees will start shading their calls to favor your team.

In a democracy, the media are our referees. Their job is to penalize politicians who break the rules. Conservatives are basically contemptuous of democracy, and constantly seek ways to subvert it, so in the early 1980s they started working the refs hard, initiating a campaign accusing newly-elevated CBS Evening News anchorman Dan Rather of "liberal bias". From there, the campaign expanded to include every media outlet. The finishing touch was the creation in 1996 of Fox News Channel, a conservative propaganda mill that insisted that it was unbiased, and that all of the real news organizations had a liberal bias.

And it worked like a charm. The establishment media became utterly terrified of conservative accusations of "liberal media bias", and they bent over backwards to avoid it. The way they did so was to basically stop being referees. Instead of telling the truth, the new goal of journalism was to maintain the appearance of objectivity by refusing to point out when one side in a controversy (invariably the conservative side) was lying. The result was the spread of the "he said-she said" style of political reporting, which David Roberts aptly summarized this way: "Quote this one, quote that one, opinions differ, done."

Roberts notes that conservatives gave journalists an alibi for abandoning the referee role by creating an entire alternate universe of think tanks and media outlets that journalists could quote for their he said-she said stories. This gave journalists an excuse to stop passing judgment on dishonest policy claims, and focus on trivialities like "Al Gore said he invented the internet" or the minutia of John Kerry's Vietnam War record, or Hillary Clinton's remark that she once landed in Bosnia "under fire."

What Trump has done is refuse to provide journalists with any pretext for ignoring his lies. He doesn't rely on any studies, even bogus right-wing think tank studies, to back up his claims. He simply makes them, and dares journalists to call him on them. Then journalists do, and discover that nobody cares. And the reason nobody cares is that journalists have made it their business to ignore important lies; therefore, any lie they take notice of must ipso facto be unimportant.

Rosen, meanwhile, has proposed a way for journalists to start to reclaim their referee roles. They can begin, he says, by distinguishing between realities and appearances, and between facts and arguments. Rosen created the grid at the top of this post showing how news stories can be placed into one of four categories: reality-based factual stories, reality-based argument stories, appearance-based factual stories, and appearance-based argument stories.

However, there is a flaw in Rosen's proposal which he doesn't allow for, and doesn't even seem to be aware of. The flaw is that Rosen's proposal assumes that journalists are actually capable of distinguishing between facts and arguments, and between appearance and reality. But why should they be?

If this was a new situation, it would be a simple matter for journalists who were familiar with those distinctions to resume making them. But, as I've noted, this is not a new situation. This situation has been going on for over thirty years. I would argue that in that time, a whole generation of journalists has grown up for whom the ability to distinguish between appearance and reality is not only irrelevant, but actually counterproductive. After all, a journalist who doesn't know he's doing anything wrong has an advantage over one who does know, and has to fight the desire act on his knowledge.

The canonical example of this has to be Joe Klein of Time magazine. Back in November 2007, Klein wrote a column called "The Tone-Deaf Democrats" in which he claimed that a Democratic bill to reform the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act “would give terrorists the same legal protections as Americans.” It turned out that Klein had been played by GOP Representative Pete Hoekstra. Hoekstra had fed Klein a line of bullshit about the bill, and Klein gullibly took his word for it without bothering to ask any of the bill's Democratic authors if it was true. When Klein's stupidity was exposed, he notoriously insisted that "I have neither the time nor legal background to figure out who's right."

Mr. Rosen, I hope I'm wrong about this, but I think it's too late for American political journalists to start acting like political journalists again. They don't know how.

Sobel Wiki: The Modern Moses

 

In recognition of the holiday season, this month's featured article at the Sobel Wiki is on the Galloway Speech of December 25, 1922, wherein North American locomobile magnate Owen Galloway outlined his plan for averting civil war in the C.N.A. Galloway's Big Idea was that since the country was divided between two irreconcilable factions, the most sensible thing to do would be to separate the two groups by encouraging the minority faction to emigrate and establish their own society. To that end, Galloway created an endowment that would subsidize emigration within and from the C.N.A.

Initially, Sobel makes it sound as though Galloway's plan represents a triumph of private initiative, saying that "Governor-General Wagner promised cooperation, but none was asked of the government. The entire operation, the bulk of which took seven years, was handled without partisan or political involvement." Later, Sobel admits that the operation did indeed receive considerable assistance from the government: "Although there was no direct connection between the Galloway Trust and the Confederation bureaucracy, government men cooperated whenever possible with the Trust, and did more to aid in relocations than was believed at the time. Minister of Home Affairs Douglas Watson noted that more individuals relocated within the C.N.A. without Trust assistance than did so with its aid, and that only 29.7 percent of those who emigrated received more than N.A. £40 from the Trust, while 31.8 percent asked for no such aid."

Sobel also notes that the administration of Liberal Governor-General Henderson Dewey benefited politically from the Galloway Plan. He quotes from Richard Maltz's Better Than Any of Us? The Ambitious Galloway: "Since most of the emigrants were intellectuals or thought of themselves as such, and since the [[opposition People's]] Coalition was the natural home of intellectuals, Dewey was in fact exporting his political opposition. Those who relocated within the C.N.A. were more often middle-class and professional in background, likely candidates for the Liberal parties in their new homes. Aid from the Home Office oftentimes made a vacillating Coalitionist into a staunch Liberal."

Apparently the consensus within the Sobel Timeline is that Galloway's emigration scheme was the solution to the country's problems that he hoped it would be. Sobel himself states that "The Galloway Plan destroyed much of the basis for the protest movements. Pro-government critics argued that the Galloway Plan would 'shut up the anarchist units for good. Now these weepers will have to accept the Plan or show themselves the cowards they are,' while the more radical reformists welcomed the opportunity to 'denude the nation of its most precious possession, its people. Galloway has done more to destroy this corrupt society than any man in history.' Of course, both sides exaggerated, but neither could restrain their emotional outbursts." Later in the book, Sobel praises the Galloway Plan as "rational, well-considered, and on the whole, led by people with an ability to isolate a problem, find an answer, and organize to achieve results."

You have to wonder, though, whether the Galloway Plan would work as advertised. Suppose in 1968 J. Paul Getty had offered to pay for the emigration of the anti-war protesters of his day to some other country. No doubt some of the draft resisters would have been happy to take him up on his offer, but the larger anti-war protest would have continued, because opposition to the Vietnam War was motivated by larger moral concerns rather than simply being due to military-age men seeking to avoid the draft. There might have been more young men fleeing to Canada, but otherwise the anti-war protests would have continued undiminished, with all the social dislocations and political fallout that they occasioned.

No sex please, we're right-wing fundamentalist Christians

The internet has been abuzz with news that soon-to-be-former NFL quarterback and noted ostentatiously self-righteous prayerful Christian Tim Tebow and his now-former current squeeze Miss USA and Miss Universe pageant winner Olivia Culpo are calling it quits. 

Apparently, when Tebow first got a hankerin' for Miss Culpo and sent her cute love notes and won her adoration, he said to her, "Olivia, my darling, my love for you knows no bounds, but as a noted ostentatiously self-righteous prayerful Christian, I am required by my even greater devotion to my Lord and Savior Jesus Christ to remain celibate until marriage." And then Culpo answered, "Oh, Timmy, you say the most darling silly things! Now please fill me up with all your hot sticky professional-sportsball-player jizz!" And then Culpo learned to her astonishment that Tebow was totes serious about the whole no-sex thing, and after that there was nothing for it but to have their respective PR flacks send out press statements announcing that their eternal love had turned out not to be so eternal after all, and the pair was taking a road trip to Splitsville, USA.

However, I would be deficient in my duties as a guide to the behavior of my fellow white men if I failed to warn Miss Culpo that this may not be the end of it. There's a certain species of white man, particularly noted ostentatiously self-righteous prayerful Christian white men, who do not regard women as autonomous human beings. They feel that any woman who is "theirs" remains "theirs" despite anything the said woman herself might think. We call this certain species of white man "stalkers", and they have been known to hound, harrass, and even physically attack any woman who tries to remove herself from their sole possession.

Now I'm not saying that Mr. Tebow is going to continue haunting Miss Culpo's footsteps until she either succeeds in having him imprisoned, or he succeeds in murdering her. I'm just pointing out that he fits the profile like a really creepy, stalkery glove, and that if Miss Culpo has any sense she should make sure that her bodyguards are on high alert for the next, like, fifty years.

NaBloPoMo

I wasn't planning to participate in National Blog Posting Month this year. If I had been, I would have been posting to a sponsoring NaBloPoMo site such as BlogHer as well as here at my own blog. It just so happened that I posted my usual monthly Featured Article piece on the Sobel Wiki on November 1, and I also happened to post a review of Mickey Zucker Reichert's novel I, Robot: To Obey the next day, November 2.

Even that ordinarily wouldn't have been enough to get me to participate, but as I lay in bed ruminating before sleep on the evening of November 2, it occurred to me that I could do a couple of posts on the planet Trantor in response to a Facebook post by my friend Christina. At that point, I was off to a solid start without quite meaning to be, and so it seemed a shame not to try to see the thing through. It also helped that I had a new job that afforded me a lot of free time to sit and write blog posts. If you look through the last month's blog posts, you'll see a number that were posted between midnight and 8 am. Those were the ones I wrote while I was on the clock at my job. (It's no coincidence, btw, that I had a similar job back in 2009 when I first participated in NaBloPoMo.)

After the Trantor articles, my interest in national politics gave me plenty of fodder for blogging. If that failed, I could always resort to my series of prophetic utterances, or even do a quick-and-dirty embedded music video. For the most part, though, I was sustained in my quest by the crazy Republican presidential candidates, or the violent actions of my fellow white men.

Will I keep blogging every day? Probably not. My work on the Sobel Wiki has been lagging while I've been focused on blogging, and I'm going to want to get back into that groove. But now that I've got all this free time at my job, I'm pretty sure my blogging output is going to remain higher than it has been for the last year or two. I'm sure the ongoing presidential race will help there, and sadly, I'm equally sure that my fellow white men will continue committing armed atrocities for the foreseeable future. So, expect to see a new birth of freedom here at the Johnny Pez blog.

What is to be done?

It's as clear as a picture window that armed white men are a public menace. However, Donald Trump to the contrary notwithstanding, it would be both illegal and un-American to single out any particular group for pre-emptive surveillance or incarceration, even a group as dangerous to the public safety as white men. Thus, the only available option for dealing with the issue of armed white men is to disarm them.

The problem with this option is that white men believe, wrongly, that they have a Constitutional right to own guns. The IInd Amendment to the Constitution, of course, only speaks of gun ownership by a "well-regulated militia", that is, by military units, and not by individuals. However, white men, backed by wealthy and powerful arms manufacturers, have perverted the IInd Amendment into an alleged right by any individual to own any firearm up to and including military-grade automatic weapons. We can see the results of this perversion of our basic law every day in our newspapers, cable news networks, and websites: a week literally never goes by without armed white men going on mass killing-sprees.

Unfortunately, the arms manufacturers have managed to take control of one of our national political parties, and intimidated the other into silence. But I would ask the members of the Democratic Party just what their silent acquiescence to this reign of terror has gained them. President Barack Obama has always been careful to avoid any slightest hint of interest in placing any limits on the acquisition and ownership of firearms. His reward has been constant vilification by the arms industry as a "gun-grabber", a lie they routinely tell about any and all Democratic politicians for the sole purpose of frightening the sheep-like suckers who buy their product into buying more and more guns.

So. Secretary Clinton, Senator Sanders, and even you, Governor O'Malley, ought to know full well that you're going to be labelled as a gun-grabber no matter what you do. Well, if you're going to be hung with the label anyway, you might as well EARN IT. Announce to the American people that you damn well ARE a gun-grabber, and when you're elected president, you are going to grab ALL THE FUCKING GUNS. You literally couldn't be denounced any more violently by the gun nuts than you already are, and you might even persuade the 55% majority of Americans who favor stricter gun control to vote for you.

You say you're a law-abiding hunter who follows the rules of gun safety to the letter? TOO FUCKING BAD. You had your chance to restrain your fellow gun-owners, and you WIMPED OUT. NO GUNS FOR YOU. If you want to hunt, use a fucking bow and arrow. It's more sporting than guns anyway, and you're supposed to be fucking SPORTSMEN after all.

President Obama released a statement after this last armed-white-man-shooting-spree in which he said,

“This is not normal. We can’t let it become normal.” Well, guess what, Mr. President: THIS IS THE NEW NORMAL. It's going to stay normal until you and all the other Democrats stand up and say WE CAN ONLY STOP THIS BY GETTING RID OF THE GUNS.

Round up the usual suspects

Oh look, another armed white man committed another isolated act of don't-call-it-terrorism.

You know what we have to do: round up all the Syrian refugees. You know how dangerous those people are.

Recognizing reality

When I posted my obscenity-laced, spittle-flecked rant open letter to my fellow white men a few days back, I figured I'd get at least one response from a white supremacist, and I was right. The white supremacist in question was Fritz Knese, one of my girlfriend's ex-boyfriends. Fritz commented:

I am all for reading Asimov, but your concept that white guys should stop recognizing reality is BS. Like it or not, white men have made the world of today for the most part. We should not be apologizing to anyone for daring to be better. 

As Tim Gueguen subsequently noted, Fritz managed to completely miss the point of the post.

No, Fritz, I'm not asking you to apologize. I'm asking you to repent.

The phenomenon of confirmation bias is well-established in human psychology. Basically, we all believe what we want to believe, selectively editing the information we receive in order to emphasize anything that confirms what we believe, and de-emphasize anything that contradicts what we believe. Confirmation bias allows Fritz and myself to access the same pool of information and draw totally opposite conclusions about the relative abilities of different races. Fritz believes that "recognizing reality" means agreeing with him about white supremacy, and I believe that "recognizing reality" means agreeing with me about racial equality.

Does that mean that I don't think there is such a thing as objective reality? Nope. After all, objective reality is the ultimate source of the information that we both build our world-views from. The differences are entirely due to the information processing we both engage in.

Well then, does that mean that I don't think it's possible to determine which of our world-views jibes more closely with objective reality? Again, nope. We would not have been able to build up our current body of scientific knowledge unless we had a useful method for comparing different hypotheses and judging which conforms more closely with reality.

The problem is that our emotions tend to interfere with the process of judging hypotheses. Even the scientific method can be overwhelmed by the emotions of the all-too-human researchers who use it, sometimes unconsciously, and sometimes due to deliberate fraud. The more heavily invested our emotions are in a particular matter, the harder it is to keep bias from skewing the results. And you won't find a more emotionally-freighted question than that of racial superiority. It's going to be damned hard to find a way to get objective information on this topic, if it's even possible at all right now.

So let's leave to one side the question of whether Fritz or I is objectively right about race. Instead, let's look at another question: why do we believe what we believe? Given that our emotions are so heavily invested in this issue, it seems clear to me that, despite what Fritz says in his comment, "reality" has nothing to do with our beliefs. So let's look at the motivations behind white supremacy.

White supremacy is a form of social Darwinism, a zero-sum view of society that holds that one group or individual can only gain prominence by causing other groups or individuals to lose prominence. The white supremacist sees it as his duty to protect his own group, the "white race", from encroachments by other groups seeking to displace the "white race" from its paramount position in society. If a white supremacist is sufficiently anxious about the difficulties facing the "white race", he or she will resort to violence to fend off the perceived encroachments of other races, as we saw happen in Minneapolis. It isn't hard to see where this line of reasoning ultimately leads, because it has happened before. If the only way to preserve the "white race" is to subjugate or exterminate other races, then the white supremacist will do just that.

This is what I meant when I wrote that white supremacists turn themselves into monsters. By exalting their own group, they inevitably denigrate other groups, ultimately refusing to recognize the common humanity we all share. They've started walking down a particular road, and that road leads directly to the Nazi death camps. They may deny that that is their chosen destination (though plenty of white supremacists don't deny it), but that's where they're going, whether they admit it to themselves or not.

So, Fritz, you've got to ask yourself: is this where you want to go? You can deny it all you want (assuming you do in fact want to), but the logic is plain. Even if you've convinced yourself that all you're doing is "recognizing reality", you can still choose to reject it. You can say, "If reality requires that I be a monster, then I want nothing to do with reality, because it's better to be a human being than a monster."

Better yet, you can admit that your own confirmation bias may have led you astray, and that the question of racial superiority isn't as settled as you think it is. In that case, there's no need to reject reality. You can just admit that you aren't sure what the truth is, and in the absence of any certain proof one way or the other, you choose to err on the side of humanity.

Or, you can decide that, yeah, you're a monster. That's also an option.

The First Thanksgiving

Sarah Josepha Hale was for 40 years the editrix of Godey's Lady's Book, the most influential periodical in 19th century America. Hale was born in New Hampshire, and though she eventually moved to Philadelphia to edit Godey's, she remained a typical New Englander in two respects: first, she was an American nationalist; and second, she was fervently opposed to slavery.

In antebellum America, being an American nationalist meant being opposed to people who put local or sectional loyalty above loyalty to the country as a whole. This put Hale firmly in opposition to Southerners who constantly threatened to secede from the United States to protect the institution of slavery. One of the ways Hale sought to promote American nationalism was to agitate for the adoption of Thanksgiving, the traditional annual New England harvest festival, as a national holiday. At the time, there were only two uniquely American national holidays: Washington's Birthday on February 22, and Independence Day on July 4.

Hale contacted successive presidents from Zachery Taylor onwards, urging them to make Thanksgiving a national holiday, but it wasn't until 1863 that her campaign came to fruition. By then, Southern slaveowners had finally carried out their threat to secede, driving the country into civil war. President Abraham Lincoln had issued the Emancipation Proclamation at the beginning of the year, and as U.S. forces advanced into rebellious areas of the country, any slaves they encountered were automatically freed. Inevitably, by the time the slaveowners' rebellion was finally put down, slavery would be a dying institution in the United States, and the chief mainstay of sectionalism would be gone. The time was ripe for the promotion of a new national American identity, and so Lincoln accepted Hale's proposed new national holiday. On October 3, Lincoln issued a proclamation establishing a national day of Thanksgiving on the last Thursday in November. The holiday became permanently established, always by presidential proclamation, and always on the last Thursday in November.

In the late 19th century, as European immigration steadily increased, the Thanksgiving holiday was adapted to the program of assimilating the new arrivals. In an echo of Hale's New England origins, the holiday was associated with the first harvest feast given by the Pilgrim settlers in Plymouth Plantation in the fall of 1621, and that association has continued ever since. The New England setting helped ground the immigrants and their children in the early history of their new country (and also served to de-emphasize the older slave-based Jamestown settlement).

In 1939, the Thanksgiving holiday was repurposed again by President Franklin Roosevelt, who attempted to move it back one week to the next-to-the-last Thursday in November in order to lengthen the holiday shopping season, and thus act as an economic stimulus. A tug-of-war between Roosevelt and Congressional Republicans over the date of Thanksgiving went on for two years, until Congress officially established the date as the fourth Thursday of November in December 1941. Since then, Thanksgiving has combined all three functions: as a national holiday, as a commemoration of the 1621 Plymouth harvest feast, and as the start of the national end-of-the-year holiday shopping spree.

Prophecy 15

Once again the Prophecies of Johnny Pez return to disturb and amaze a world already surfeited with disturbance and amazement.

The pilgrimage to the country of scarlet men
Ends in the feast of berry, bird, and mashed tuber
The awkward uncle will embarrass all again
Then doze while athletes pirouette and maneuver

Who can tell what these mystic visions portend? We may never know ... and it may be just as well.

An open letter to my fellow white men

Seriously, what the fuck is wrong with you guys?

Here's what you need to do. You need to stop going to Reddit and 4chan and 8chan and Stormfront. Fuck, you need to quit the internet altogether.

You've turned yourselves into monsters. I mean it. Every time you consume some piece of information that tells you how hard you have it compared to black people and Hispanics and women and whatnot, you lose a piece of your humanity. Do it often enough, and what's left isn't fit to associate with decent people. You're making yourselves worse, and you're making it worse for everyone around you.

You want to become human again? Go read a fucking book. I recommend James Baldwin, but even one of Asimov's old science essay collections would be better than the shit you're shoveling into your brains now.

Fuck.

(see also this follow-up post)

The relatively moderate candidate

Amanda Marcotte worries that Donald Trump will make it easier for the eventual Republican nominee to win the presidency by making him seem moderate by comparison. Marcotte admits that her scenario assumes that Trump crashes and burns at some point, and one of the other candidates (probably Marco Rubio or Ted Cruz) wins the nomination.

Marcotte is careful to admit the possibility that Trump might not crash and burn at all, and might win the Republican nomination himself. However, I think that even if Trump doesn't win the nomination, his candidacy will make a GOP victory less likely rather than more. Over the course of Trump's campaign, I've noticed that his success in appealing to the worst instincts of the GOP base has had the effect of goading the rest of the Republican candidates into emulating him. It's reached the point where alleged moderate Ohio Governor John Kasich is now promising to create a new federal agency to promote "Judeo-Christian Western values" in the Middle East.

What this means is that even if Trump does drop out of the race at some point, the rest of the GOP field will already be so over-the-top crazy trying to keep up with him that they won't be able to stop. Trump has already established that that's the way to win, and which of his competitors will dare try to change that winning formula? By the time the Republicans hold their convention in Cleveland in July, the nominee (whether it's Trump or someone else) will be committed to a full-bore racist agenda. Everyone in the country who isn't a straight-up racist will be voting Democratic, and Barack Obama proved that there are enough Americans out there who aren't straight-up racist to ensure a Democratic victory.

An open letter to Representative Glenn Thompson (R-PA)

Dear Representative Thompson,

You have been my representative in the U.S. House since I moved to Centre County, Pennsylvania back in August. As a constituent, I would like to discuss your recent vote in favor of the American Security Against Foreign Enemies Act of 2015. While I certainly sympathize with your desire to prevent more right-wing religious fanatics from moving to the United States, I don't think this bill was the proper vehicle for doing so. For one thing, making it harder for victims of Painful Rectal Itch to immigrate seems counterproductive, since Painful Rectal Itch is itself a fanatical right-wing religious organization, and it tends to target people because it doesn't regard them as fanatically religious enough.

For another thing, even if the act succeeded in preventing members of Painful Rectal Itch from settling in the United States, that would do nothing to alleviate the many problems caused by the tens of millions of right-wing religious fanatics who already live here, such as attacks on women's reproductive health, hindering the civil rights of LGBT people, and attempts to corrupt the teaching of science in public schools. It seems to me that instead of hindering the settlement of refugees in the United States, your efforts to protect us from right-wing religious fanatics would be more productive if you voted for legislation enforcing the civil rights of sexual minorities and rolling back restrictions on reproductive health care.

I hope you will take this advice into account in your future legislative activities.

Best wishes,

Johnny Pez
Bellefonte, PA
November 2015

To Matt Groening and James L. Brooks: A modest proposal

It has become a truism that you can't do anything original on a sitcom because The Simpsons has already done everything. But there is one plot that The Simpsons hasn't done ... at least, not quite. Back in season 13, the show did an episode in which Homer was prescribed medicinal marijuana by Dr. Hibbert. It was a well-regarded episode, but that was 13 years ago. It's time for the show to revisit the theme, and this time, go big. The Simpsons needs to do an episode in which marijuana use becomes legal in Springfield.

After marijuana use is legalized in Springfield, Howard K. Duff, the owner of Duff Beer, decides to branch out into the production of marijuana cigarettes. He hires Otto Mann away from Springfield Elementary School to head Duff's marijuana subsidiary, Puff. Otto's detailed knowledge of marijuana cultivation, and his contacts among Springfield's drug community, make Puff an immediate success. Otto is soon a wealthy and respected business executive.

With Otto gone, Springfield Elementary needs a new bus driver. They hire Ned Flanders, whose Leftorium shop is going through a slow patch, and who needs the extra income to tide him over. Ned is soon leading his passengers in singalongs of "Michael Row the Boat Ashore" and "Amazing Grace", and Bart becomes desperate for Otto to return. Bart encourages Flanders to mount a campaign to repeal legalization. Flanders' campaign succeeds, Duff shuts down Puff, and Otto returns to being a bus driver.

Unlike the earlier medicinal marijuana episode, it probably won't be possible to avoid showing the characters actually smoking marijuana. However, since they are likely to be smoking manufactured Puff cigarettes rather than hand-rolled joints, the controversy will be minimized. And if marijuana use is ever legalized nationally in the United States, these issues can all be revisited in a future episode.

High on legal marijuana

Time for another embedded music video here at Johnny Pez blog. Today we bring you Halsey with "New Americana".

A tale of two countries

In the wake of the Painful Rectal Itch attacks in Paris, the governors of various American states have been falling all over themselves in their eagerness to pander to the cowardly xenophobes who make up the Republican base. As of 6:19 PM Monday night, the governors of 27 states have announced that they will not be allowing Syrian refugees to be resettled in their states. This despite the fact that state governors have no power to dictate who can and can't move to their states.

Meanwhile, back in France ... you know, the country where the terrorist attacks actually happened ... French President Francois Hollande told a gathering of French mayors that “30,000 refugees will be welcomed over the next two years. Our country has the duty to respect this commitment,” while adding that “France will remain a country of freedom" and stating that “Life should resume fully. What would France be without its museums, without its terraces, its concerts, its sports competitions? France should remain as it is. Our duty is to carry on our lives."

All of which raises the question: who are the surrender monkeys now?

Heresy!

My excellent friend Nomi Hurwitz points me to this post at the Breaking Burgh blog on a doctrinal dispute that has arisen among adherents of the Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster, also known as Pastafarianism. The Pastafarians exist to help safeguard the Constitutional separation of Church and State by demanding equal time whenever members of a Certain Other Religion try to get their doctrines taught in public schools by disguising them as science. Any public school officials who are trying to promote their religious beliefs by stealth suddenly find themselves having to explain why they're not letting His Noodliness in the schoolhouse door too. They usually get the message.

But, as Gulliver at Breaking Burgh declares, the Church of the FSM is being torn apart by the question of whether plastic collanders are acceptable Sacred Vestments, or whether only traditional metal ones are pleasing to His Noodliness. Gulliver notes that the holy war is currently confined to reddit threads, but expresses understandable concern that the dispute may spill over into physical clashes.

I admit to being of two minds about this growing controversy. As a man of peace, I abhor the thought of Pastafarians committing Magdeburg-style atrocities against each other. On the other hand, as a student of history, I can't help thinking that a brutal, destructive holy war over a pointless doctrinal dispute may be just what the Church needs to ramp up recruitment. Let's face it, a religion hasn't really made it to the big leagues until some of its members start slaughtering each other in the name of the One True Faith. Once the Pastafarians cross this vital threshold, they'll start getting the respect they deserve. They might even get invited to sneak their doctrines into science classes.