jameswharris

Can Politicians Really Help Us?

I fear the Republicans and I’m disappointed with the Democrats. Can either party help America get out its economic rut? No matter what politicians promise us to get elected, the only real work they do is to stay in office. Once elected they won’t make waves, won’t make hard decisions, won’t do what’s needed to get the job done unless it keeps them in power.

I fear the Republicans because they only have one goal – pay less taxes. Everything else about their endless soap boxing is smoke and mirrors. Republicans want to be rich and there’s nothing wrong with that, but they want to get rich at the expense of everyone else. If we followed Republican desires America would end up like India, lots of poor people and a few rich ones. Basically Republicans believe that nothing should stand in the way of getting theirs, and they don’t give a fuck about what happens to anyone else because that’s their damn problem.

Democrats want to be social engineers but they don’t want to put in the study and work it takes to help America without without causing economic hardship. Obama had a tremendous opportunity to be a historically great leader, but he won the election and then pulled back. He was given over eight hundred billion dollars to jump start the economy – that’s a lot of graft to buy favors, so why has a nearly crushed Republican party roared back to life? Because few people know how that money was spent. That would take work, and the democrats don’t seem to want to do that kind of work.

The size of the stimulus package should have had some kind of checks and balances. It should have been spent completely publically, and with public involvement. I think the essential problem with the political system is people want politicians take care of everything, to treat voters like babies, to wipe their ass, change their diaper and tell them goo-goo, ga-ga and bounce them on their knee. As long as the people are babies, politicians have all the power. They want to be the grown-ups and make all the decisions. But can so few people make wise decisions?

Obama should have told the states and cities that there was stimulus money but the mayors and governors were responsible for spending it wisely. Governors and mayors should have been required to propose projects that would have created the most jobs and offered the best long term benefits for their communities, and then held referendums and let the people decide which projects to back. Everyone should have been involved.

Instead of blaming political parties for our failures we should be blaming ourselves. We treat politics like an endless playoff game between two long-time rivals. It’s rah rah rah for my side against yours. Switching leaders every two, four or six years really doesn’t do much, has it? Isn’t it just playing Mom off against Dad, or Dad against Mom?

What we want is prosperity. That requires full employment. More Americans than ever are living in poverty. You can’t have prosperity with numbers like that. We can’t change anything by just picking which team we want to win, the Republicans or Democrats. I think we need a more participatory government where voters directly decide the issues and the spending. Let’s cut out the middlemen. Everyone needs to study the problems, and everyone needs to take responsibility to solve them.

Unless everyone is studying the problems, unless everyone is working on the solution, things are going to stay a mess because what we’re doing is shirking responsibility. Expecting politicians to do everything is crazy. How can a few thousand people make the decisions for over three hundred million people? How can two philosophies be the only solution for a reality as complex as ours.

The philosophies of lowering taxes or social engineering are as silly and simplistic as Santa Claus delivering Christmas presents in one night by a reindeer powered sled. We need a new system for processing complex economic and social problems. We need a Democracy 2.0. Power and responsibility needs to be shifted to everyone. I’d say get rid of both parties and find a way to deal with issues one at a time. We need open source politics where the source code for how everything works is open for all to inspect.

JWH – 9/19/10

The Metamorphosis Diet

Most people when they hear the word metamorphosis think about a caterpillar and butterfly. Fewer people, those with a literary bent, are reminded of Kafka’s Gregor Samsa, the dude who turned into a big bug. I need to meta-morph myself, but I’m afraid it would be too much to believe I could become young again and go the butterfly route, however if I don’t, I do see myself going down the dead bug path, flat on my back with my feet up in the air.

I’ve reached a time in my life I’ve been avoiding for thirty years – the time to diet. My doctor insists I need statins for cholesterol, but they just don’t agree with me. Since my father died of a heart attack at age 49 after having three previous heart attacks and a stroke, I am an obvious candidate for such drugs. To go without them demands dramatic changes in diet.

I’m overweight – tipping the scales at 232, at five ten and three quarters, which gives me a horrible body mass index of 32.4. Being fat hasn’t been unpleasant until I became unhealthy, so I had no incentive to diet. Feeling bad is an incentive, but then my father had many such demons driving him and he never changed his habits. Only 1 person out of 20 can diet and keep the weight off. What makes that 1 person succeed?

I also have spinal stenosis, so I want to believe weighing less would ease the pressure on my back, which is yet another incentive to put myself through some kind of metamorphosis. Now I wished I lived in the world of Harry Potter where I could buy a transformation potion, but that’s not an option. The only real choices are the same ones I’ve been hearing my whole life: diet and exercise.

But if I dieted like skinny-crazed actresses could I somehow morph myself into a new me? I found this book, Stop Inflammation Now! by Richard M. Fleming, M.D. that promises dramatic change (read the Amazon customer reviews). The trouble is Fleming’s diet is hard!!! The phase 1 diet, the prescription to get your cholesterol numbers under control, is composed of only fruits and vegetables. I’ve been a vegetarian since 1969, but I find it almost impossible to eat as many fruits and vegetables as Fleming wants me to.

I’m a lacto-ovo vegetarian, one who doesn’t eat animals, but will eat eggs and milk products. And since I’ve also discovered The Kind Diet by Alicia Silverstone after watching Food, Inc., I’ve been thinking about becoming a vegan vegetarian. But even the vegan diet is far more varied than the Fleming diet. Giving up cheese, yogurt, ice cream and scrambled eggs is scary to me, since they are great comfort foods. The Fleming diet, at least the early phase 1, doesn’t even provide salad dressing for salads – no fats allowed. Under the vegan regime, I can have rice, oils, and even mutant pasta and breads, as well as fake meats and cheese.

So in my waffling, I’m shifting toward the vegan diet, but hoping I can eventually build up the guts to do the Fleming diet for a few weeks and see if my cholesterol numbers do come down. The Fleming phase 1 diet is almost identical to many cleansing diets. When I was 26, and only weighed 155 pounds, I did a cleansing diet that had dramatic effects in two weeks. This diet was based on eating fruits one meal, and veggies the next, and the only condiments were pepper and lemon juice. The day was started with a bracing wake-up of hot water and garlic. I remember, the first thing I ate after going off this diet was scrambled eggs. I don’t think I’ve ever felt as healthy as I did after that cleansing diet.

However, dieting is hard. But after seeing Food, Inc. and many news films about the recent egg contamination scare, with all those warehouses of monster ugly chickens, I’ve decided that eggs aren’t that appealing anymore. Giving up cheese and milk is going to be much harder, no matter how badly cows are treated. But whenever I see how milk is produced, I waver. That’s why the agribusiness keeps animal production hidden.

Ultimately, the hardest part of dieting is fitting the new way of eating into my existing lifestyle. Being a normal vegetarian has made me a social outcast of sorts, and going vegan will distant me further from normal people. Going out to dinner, either at restaurants or at a friend’s house, becomes trying at best, and sometimes impossible at worst. The transformation I’m seeking will make me far from normal. And that might be the key to why diets fail.

I think I can make it to veganism, especially after reading this New York Times article on vegan cupcakes. It proves tasty food can be vegan. Also, Alicia Silverstone preaches a hell-fire sermon for vegan living. Time will tell if I can meta-morph into a better eater, and whether or not it will make me butterfly-like. Even if I got down to 199, I doubt I’d float like a butterfly. Maybe I can be Mothra. I’ll keep you posted. I will say that after making this decision I got up early the next morning and drove to the store and bought myself some soy milk for my cereal. Yuck. I have adapted that much. One step at a time, as they say in the metamorphosis business.

JWH – 9/16/10

The Fall of Robert A. Heinlein and the Fading Final Frontier

There are two concepts I want to express but I don’t know the words for them, if there are any, and I’m not creative enough to make up new words. If these two concepts do have definitions please let me know.

The first concept deals with being so close to a belief that you can’t tell how widespread it is in the population at large. The best I can come up with is the phrase “belief perspective.” For example, back in the 1960s, kids who got high thought the whole world was joining their stoned revolution.

The second concept is about experiences that belong to a particular generation that are ineffable to earlier or later generations, and as people age, that particular quality of a generation fades away as their population die off. The 1960s counter culture is a good example. Kids growing up in the last two generations have no concept of what the sixties was like, in the same way my generation, the baby boomers, have no idea what WWII and the Great Depression was like. I call this “fading generational identity.”

But these concepts don’t just apply to big beliefs or mass experiences. For example, to young people of a certain age there is a huge identification with Star Wars movies that I just don’t get. To this generation, Star Wars is huge in their belief perspective and it’s a touchstone to their language. It’s like Star Wars has infected their psyche.

Kids today might love The Beatles but they will never understand the impact of Beatles mania had on the music of 1964 and 1965, like I will never truly understand the success of Benny Goodman and Glenn Miller on their generation even though I love their music. Or look at the Beat Generation, what a tiny subculture, but their population is dying off, and the only way they will be remembered is a few books. But no matter how many times I read On the Road I can never know how Jack Kerouac felt inside his subculture.

I grew up during the counter culture sixties but I also identified with a very small group of science fiction readers of the times. In my belief perspective I thought Robert A. Heinlein was the Buddha, Gandhi, Einstein of a particular belief system dealing with space exploration. Robert Heinlein defined my 1960s like Timothy Leary defined that era for acid heads. From my perspective Heinlein was a major thinker, but my belief perspective totally distorted my worldview, because obviously he wasn’t.

Now on the Internet I’m finding other people like me, people in their fifties and sixties who have a generational identity with the same 1950s and 1960s science fiction that I have. What we’re realizing is the beliefs we embraced weren’t widely embraced by the population at large and as new generations grow up, with their own beliefs, our ideas are fading. The phrase “science fiction” means something totally different to the current generation than it did to mine.

It is sad, sometimes in a depressive way, and sometimes in a wistful accepting way, to see the ideas of your generational subculture belief system pass away. You realize they really weren’t that big, or widespread, or even significant or meaningful, they were just beliefs you had, and they made life important to you in your time and place.

I grew up believing in the final frontier as proposed by 1950s and 1960s science fiction. Like Christians or Muslims who thoroughly believe Jesus and Mohammed define their reality, not seeing that their beliefs are just ideas to believe in and not reality itself. Colonizing the Moon and Mars was our Heaven to believe in, and Heinlein was our prophet.

I’m discovering two things now that I wish I could put into perspective. I wish I knew how many people were like me that made Heinlein spiritually important to our final frontier beliefs. Second I’d like to know how many people on Earth actually dream about colonizing space. Space enthusiasts are actually separate from Heinlein, but I always tie the two together.

I have this hypothesis I’d like to test, but I don’t know how. I think a small portion of the population believe in space as a kind of Manifest Destiny, but I don’t know how big that group is, and I’m also thinking it peaked in the 1960s because of the space race and because of 1950s science fiction. I worry that in a hundred years that belief-perspective will be considered a minor 20th century fad. Except for a handful of people I meet on the net I know very few people who share my religion.

We like to think the wonderful aspects of our generation are timeless, but they aren’t. They just fade when we age. Not only is my body wearing out and getting old, but so are all the ideas I loved. That’s just another thing about getting old that we have to deal with. And I’m not sure young people see this coming. I certainly didn’t.

With the publication of the new authorized biography of Heinlein I’m afraid I’m discovering that his ideas and influence are already on the wane. But I only have a few clues to go on.

Robert A. Heinlein is the Science Fiction Writers of America first Grand Master, selected for this honor in 1975. It’s very hard to gauge the impact of Heinlein on science fiction fans of the 1940s, 1950s and 1960s, but if you search the web you can find hundreds of testimonials about how Heinlein imprinted on these writers.

With the publication of the biography I thought there would be an outpouring of reviews that would evaluate and elevate Heinlein’s literary status, but there have been damn few reviews, and most of them have been about Heinlein nostalgia. Typical is the Washington Post review, which is the only national publication I found, all the rest were essentially blog reviews, like mine.

On the net I can rustle up plenty of folks to wax nostalgic about discovering Heinlein as kids, but among my normal friends, most haven’t read the man, and nearly all of them show a vacant expression when I mention his name.

To his fans from the 1940s, 1950s and 1960s, Heinlein sold us on the future of colonizing the Moon and Mars and humanity heading out to the stars. To the children of Heinlein, we all assumed everyone thought space was mankind’s final frontier, but in the forty years since, that hasn’t turned out to be true. Most people never think about space exploration.

I’m reading Packing for Mars right now, by Mary Roach, and it’s about preparing astronauts for space flight. If I had read Packing for Mars right after I first read Have Space Suit-Will Travel in 1965 I probably wouldn’t have embraced the final frontier dream. People really aren’t designed for traveling in space, and you have to be immensely driven and a bit of a masochist to try.

I started really worrying about Heinlein’s popularity in the last few days when I did Google searches on the new biography. I typed “robert a. heinlein in dialogue with his century” on Google and found damn few major reviews. I noticed my blog review was second in the Google listing behind the publisher. Now that’s a bad sign. I mean, I like my blog, but if some tenth rate blogger gets the second slot on Google what does that say? Furthermore, I’m averaging 2 hits a day on my review, from both the great Google placement and from the link I put on Classics of Science Fiction, which usually brings me a steady stream of 40-80 hits a day to various blog essays and reviews of science fiction topics.

This leads me to believe my childhood hero Heinlein is far less popular than I ever imagined. For years now when I visit bookstores I’ve noticed that the number of Heinlein books in the SF section is shrinking. And it’s extremely rare to meet a young person that reads Heinlein.

Now I can accept that Heinlein’s fan base is shrinking, but I dread the thought that the true belief in the Manifest Destiny of Space is fading. But it might be. It’s terrible to have to become an atheist to your own belief system. And for me, I think 1950s science fiction was my religious substitute growing up in the 1960s.

So, what is the word for when you discover your belief system turns out to be minor and insignificant and is fading away as its older believers die off? Whatever that condition is called, I’ve got it. I’m not depressed. I’m just wistfully philosophical.

I used to think I’d die knowing how the future would unfold from reading science fiction, but now I realize I won’t pass away believing in those visions. But then I’ve known since I was a teen that the future is everything I never imagined it to be. I wanted to believe different but the Zen of reality taught me it didn’t give a shit about what we believe.

JWH – 9/9/10

Reading Online: Safari’s Killer Feature

I’m not a big fan of Apple. Who needs another browser after you’ve already installed IE8, Firefox and Chrome? So, I saw little point of installing Safari, Apple’s horse in the browser race. Well, it turns out Safari has a feature that other browsers lack that makes it worth the time and effort to install.

The feature is called Reader. It takes a web page that looks like this:

And makes it look like this:

If you do a lot of online reading this makes all the difference in the world. Now it doesn’t work with every web page, but it does with most, like the New York Times I’m reading here. And it’s very easy to use. If you look closely at those screen shots above, you’ll see a blue button on the right of the URL locator box, and a purple one in the Reader view. They both say “Reader.” If the button doesn’t show up, the feature is not available. That’s all there is to using it.

While in Reader there are five buttons that will appear at the bottom of the page if you hover you mouse. They do: shrink the font, enlarge the font, email the page link, print the reader view and quit Reader. I wished there was a sixth nifty button: Save for Ebook.

Reader is great for reading shorter articles online while seated at a desk, but if you find one that’s dozens of pages, it would be cool to save to my Kindle and read from my La-Z-Boy. If you have Acrobat or a clone, you can print to a .pdf file, but I’d rather have it save to a format common to most ebook reader.

I hope IE9 would add this feature, or even Chrome, because it is annoying to use four different browsers for various reasons. But as of now, when I want to read the New York Times, The New Yorker, The Atlantic Monthly Magazine, or most of my other favorite online newspapers and magazines, Safari is the go-to browser of the moment. It’s like having a special large print edition that filters out all distractions.

JWH – 9/6/10

Robert A. Heinlein – In Dialogue with His Century – 1907-1948

If there was ever a big fish in a little pond, it is Robert A. Heinlein. Science fiction is a very small pond, and despite all its success at the movies and television, written science fiction remains a tiny ghetto in the world of fiction. Robert A. Heinlein is a towering figure in the tempest-in-a-teapot world of fandom, but outside that small subculture Heinlein is little known.

William H. Patterson, Jr. has written the first half of a massive authorized biography of Heinlein called Robert A. Heinlein – In Dialogue with His Century – Volume 1 – Learning Curve – 1907-1948. The biographical narrative goes through page 473, while appendices and notes continue through page 594, and the index ends on page 622. This is a well researched biography, and as I read it, I felt I learned as much about American life from 1907-1948 as I did about Heinlein. Patterson studied the politics and social norms of the time to put Heinlein in context, and that greatly enriches the story.

Now here’s the problem. Patterson wants to make Heinlein more influential than I think he was, not an uncommon trait of biographers. However, Heinlein had some very devoted fans, who after his death have become even more fanatical about the importance of Heinlein’s work. This reminds me of Jesus and his followers after his death. Most of what is attributed to the historical Jesus was actually invented by his followers. This kind of remaking the real man into a miracle worker may be happening to Heinlein.

I’ve been following Patterson’s work on Heinlein for over a decade, first on alt.fan.heinlein newsgroup and then with his Heinlein Journal. Virginia Heinlein selected Patterson and gave him access to Heinlein’s papers. Robert and Ginny Heinlein had burned a lot of his papers after he left his second wife, but evidently there were plenty left, because this is a very detailed biography on Heinlein’s early life. I can’t wait for the second volume.

Heinlein always seemed such a secretive person that I was expecting little about his actual life and more about his fiction. Instead, Patterson’s biography is mostly about Heinlein, and surprising little about his writing. Patterson talks about Heinlein struggling to write, but mainly in relation to Heinlein needing a paycheck. The book ends just as Heinlein is starting to become more financially secure, so his story is almost one of struggling for over forty years to become a overnight success. Heinlein overcame economic hardship and a lifetime of poor health to succeed and fail at many ventures before becoming a science fiction superstar.

Any Heinlein fan should love this book. However, I think Patterson wants Heinlein to be far more important than he is. If you look closely to Patterson’s sentences, especially in his introduction, but throughout the book, he adds a strong Heinlein bias. Patterson obviously feels Heinlein is significant outside of science fiction and I have to question that. Patterson says on page 15 of his Introduction,

And even among this select group of writers-cum-culture-figures, Heinlein is unique. He galvanized not one, but four social movements of his century: science fiction, and its stepchild, the policy think tank, the counterculture, the libertarian movement, and the commercial space movement.

I’m sorry, but I just don’t buy this. When you read books about the 20th century you just don’t see Heinlein mentioned, mainly because they seldom mention science fiction. And the parenthetical statement crediting think tanks to science fiction, is bizarre itself. And frankly, Heinlein’s impact on the counter culture, libertarian and commercial space movement has got to be extremely minimal. The logic is almost equal to: powerful leaders drink whiskey, thus the twentieth century was galvanized by whiskey.

Heinlein was a substitute father figure to me growing up. I love many of his books, enough to read and reread them. I’ve read most of what he wrote at least twice. Yet, I give him very little credit as to influencing me. Heinlein was a major influence on science fiction, and strangely enough Patterson’s doesn’t show that in his biography.

Now I assume Patterson did this on purpose, knowing that so many other books have already been written about the history of science fiction, and no book has been written on the history of Heinlein the man. Heinlein, and his hardcore fans always wanted to separate his fiction from the man, claiming readers shouldn’t extrapolate ideas about Heinlein from his stories. I think this new biography will be the Rosetta Stone for decoding Heinlein inside his fiction.

Alexei Panshin’s legacy appears to be totally despised by the Heinlein fanatics because he offended the master with the first book on Heinlein, Heinlein in Dimension, back in 1968. I think its still the best quick overview of Heinlein’s fiction from 1939-1966, but that Panshin book continues to enrage the Heinlein disciples. They see it as trashing Heinlein, even though I thought it was a young man’s love letter to his hero. Panshin’s later book, The World Beyond the Hill, does explain Heinlein’s influence during the golden age of science fiction, covering the same period of Patterson’s biography. Both of these books won Hugos, although Panshin got a Hugo for fan writing while he serialized Heinlein in Dimension in fanzines.

Like I said, if you want to know Heinlein the man, read Robert A. Heinlein: In Dialogue with His Century, but if you want to know about Heinlein’s influence on SF, read Heinlein in Dimension and The World Beyond the Hill. Now I expect this will change. Because the authorized biography has finally come out, and especially after the second volume appears, I expect a new writer to put all the sources together and write a new story by story survey of Heinlein’s fiction. And if that writer is well read in science fiction, I think he or she will be the one to explain Heinlein’s influence on the genre. Oddly enough, I wonder if that could be Alexei Panshin? Boy, wouldn’t that piss off the hardcore Heinlein followers.

After you finish reading the Patterson biography, go over to The Critics Lounge and read some of Panshin’s later essays, especially “When the Quest Ended.” Which biographer do you prefer, Patterson, the authorized explorer of Heinlein, or Panshin, the shunned fan?

Heinlein’s real legacy is his impact on the little world of written science fiction. When I was growing up in the 1960s most science fiction fans considered Heinlein the top dog of the field, but today you can ask young people reading science fiction what writers they love and often Heinlein doesn’t even get listed. But that’s deceptive, because those young people often pick writers that were influenced by Heinlein. Those writers are the true disciples and children of Heinlein.

As much as Patterson would like to think that Heinlein greatly influenced the counter culture, libertarianism and commercial space companies, I just don’t think he did. Those are separate worlds and some of their members might have read and loved Heinlein’s books, but they had their own shapers and makers.

William Patterson’s biography of Robert A. Heinlein is a must read for anyone who loves Heinlein’s fiction. We finally get to know the Wizard behind the Oz Heinlein created. After finishing the biography I wanted to start with Heinlein’s first story and read them all again, till his last, and examine his writing in light of the new biography.

JWH – 9/6/10