The Other McCain

"One should either write ruthlessly what one believes to be the truth, or else shut up." — Arthur Koestler

The Queering of Feminism: Why Does ‘Equality’ Require Promoting Perversion?

Posted on | October 30, 2015 | 53 Comments

 

Boston University’s Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies Program “fosters interdisciplinary research and teaching related to the intersections of gender, sexuality, race, nationality, and other categories of identity that organize and disorganize our lives.” The director of the program, Associate Professor Carrie Preston, describes her “research and teaching interests include modernist literature, performance, and dance, feminist and queer theory, and transnational and postcolonial studies.” Boston University’s annual tuition is $48,436. Their web site outlines the Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies Program’s history:

Our program began in the 1970s and emerged in the 1980s as the Boston University Women’s Studies Program, a site of intellectual inquiry and feminist consciousness-raising concerning women’s lives. . . .
Scholars began to problematize the very notion of sex as a biological given or social reality and focused concern on topics in sexuality that could not be reduced to concerns with gender. Current scholarship in the field examines the extent to which sexuality and gender have been linked together historically (through the recruitment of sexuality as the “performance” or “proof” of gender, for instance) as well as aspects of sexuality that are distinct from gender.

To “problematize the very notion of sex as a biological given,” you see, is what feminist theory requires. Part of the “interdisciplinary” exploration of gender, sexuality and identity is the annual Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick Memorial Lecture, a tribute to one of the early leaders of Boston University’s program, whose 1990 book Epistemology of the Closet is “widely considered a founding text of queer theory.”

How do Boston University students get their $48,436 of queer theory?

Faculty moderators held two workshops for undergraduate and graduate students on Sedgwick’s 1991 essay “How to Bring Your Kids Up Gay: The War on Effeminate Boys.” This short, accessible text focused attention on the alarming rate of suicide among gay and gender non-conforming youth, and critiqued the failure of psychotherapists in the US to address this crisis with queer-affirmative interventions.

Anyone may read the “short, accessible text” named:

I am especially interested in revisionist psychoanalysis including ego-psychology, and in influential developments following on the American Psychiatric Association’s much-publicized 1973 decision to drop the pathologizing diagnosis of homosexuality from the succeeding Diagnostic and Statistical Manual (DSM-III). What is likely to be the fate of children brought under the influence of psychoanalysis and psychiatry today, post-DSM-III, on account of anxieties about their sexuality? . . .
That one woman, as a woman, might desire another; that one man, as a man, might desire another: the indispensable need to make these powerful, subversive assertions has seemed, perhaps, to require a relative de-emphasis of the links between gay adults and gender-nonconforming children. To begin to theorize gender and sexuality as distinct though intimately entangled axes of analysis has been, indeed, a great advance of recent lesbian and gay thought.
There is a danger, however, that that advance may leave the effeminate boy once more in the position of the haunting abject — this time the haunting abject of gay thought itself.

You may read the whole thing, and note that Sedgwick assumes as her premise that any psychiatric problems (including suicide) experienced by homosexual or “gender-nonconforming children” can only be explained by society’s homophobia. According to Sedgwick, the psychiatric community’s “pathologizing diagnosis” of homosexuality as a mental disorder prior to 1973 was nothing but an expression of anti-gay bigotry and, in 1991, Sedgwick perceived a “danger” that psychiatry might continue to view “the effeminate boy” in this way.

Is there a direct cause-and-effect relationship between homophobia and teen suicide? No. Most homosexuals do not commit suicide, and most people who commit suicide are not homosexual. Furthermore, we cannot simply discard as obsolete (or “regressive”) the basic psychological insight that views homosexuality as a tendency arising from childhood problems often associated with family dysfunction. You don’t have to be a bigot or an advocate of “reparative therapy” to interpret homosexuality as a matter of psychosocial development. The same issues correlated with homosexuality are also correlated with problems like drug abuse and depression. Trying to make “homophobia” a simple cause-and-effect explanation for the gay teenager’s suicide is an error of logic, even if it is the suicidal teen who offers this explanation. (To climb up on the cross of martyrdom — to blame “society” for your personal problems — can be a temptation for anyone with a disposition to self-pity, and troubled teenagers are unusually prone to self-pity.)

More to the point, we must recognize how Sedgwick’s “queer theory” employed a sort of radical jiu-jitsu that reversed the entire purpose of psychotherapy. Whatever the troubled young person’s problem, psychology traditionally sought to locate the cause of the problem in order to help the patient successfully adjust to adult life. This emphasis on adjustment — being able to complete school, become gainfully employed, form healthy relationships with others, etc. — is rejected by radicals, who say that instead of helping the patient adjust to society, we should change society for the benefit of the patient.

This is why, when we look at feminism today, it so often seems as if the inmates are running the asylum. Disgruntled kooks and perverse weirdos flock to the feminist banner because it offers them a political rationalization of their personal problems, and gives them a platform from which to express their alienation from mainstream society.

Adjusting society to enable misfits to feel “accepted” — letting little Johnny wear a hairbow and a lacy skirt to school and teaching the other kids that this is perfectly normal — is one of the logical consequences of feminist theory that seeks to “problematize the very notion of sex as a biological given.” Rather than trying to teach little Johnny how to fit in with the other boys, Sedgwick’s “queer theory” rejects as invalid the categorization of children as boys and girls, and condemns as “homophobia” any expectation (by parents, especially) that children should grow up to be normal.

“The view that heterosexuality is a key site of male power is widely accepted within feminism. Within most feminist accounts, heterosexuality is seen not as an individual preference, something we are born like or gradually develop into, but as a socially constructed institution which structures and maintains male domination, in particular through the way it channels women into marriage and motherhood.”
— Diane Richardson, “Theorizing Heterosexuality,” in Rethinking Sexuality (2000)

“If we accept that gender is constructed and that it is not in any way ‘naturally’ or inevitably connected to sex, then the distinction between sex and gender comes to seem increasingly unstable. In that case, gender is radically independent of sex, ‘a free-floating artifice’ as [Professor Judith] Butler puts it, raising the question as to whether ‘sex’ is as culturally constructed as gender; indeed, perhaps sex was always already gender, so that the sex/gender distinction is not actually a distinction at all. Butler dispenses with the idea that either gender or sex is an ‘abiding substance’ by arguing that a heterosexual, heterosexist culture establishes the coherence of these categories in order to perpetuate and maintain what the feminist poet and critic Adrienne Rich has called ‘compulsory heterosexuality’ — the dominant order in which men and women are required or even forced to be heterosexual.”
— Sara Salih, Judith Butler (2002)

Until I started studying radical feminism, I never thought of “normal” as an achievement, but Feminism Is Queer, as Professor Mimi Marinucci has explained. Feminist theory condemns heterosexuality as “the ideology of male supremacy,” and denies that behaviorial differences between men and women are natural. Any apparent differences between men and women are socially constructed by the gender binary within the heterosexual matrix (see Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity, 1990). Feminism seeks to abolish gender in order to achieve “equality” by establishing an androgynous society in which the categories “male” and “female” cease to have any significance. A radical ideology which denies that there is any such thing as “human nature,” feminism requires us to celebrate Bruce “Caitlyn” Jenner as Glamour magazine’s “Woman of the Year.”

These bizarre manifestations of radical perversity do not occur spontaneously. They are expressions of a belief system promoted by the academic Feminist-Industrial Complex, the taxpayer-subsidized institutions in which professors indoctrinate students through “feminist consciousness-raising” and train them as activists committed to changing society. Because feminism condemns heterosexuality as “a socially constructed institution which . . . maintains male domination,” feminists encourage homosexuality in order to prevent “male power” from “channel[ing] women into marriage and motherhood.” Feminists therefore “problematize the very notion of sex as a biological given,” promoting the belief that “gender is radically independent of sex,” in order to destroy “the dominant order” of “heterosexist culture.”

What feminists mean by “equality” is “the end of civilization as we know it” (to quote lesbian feminists Sidney Abbott and Barbara Love) and this radical ideology exercises such hegemonic authority in academia that no one is permitted to criticize or oppose feminism on the 21st-century university campus. This is why feminists rant about “rape culture,” in order to demonize heterosexual male students, inciting young women to irrational fear by portraying young men as violent sexual predators.

To do what I have done — to quote what feminists say, to show what feminists believe, to explain what feminism is — would be condemned as a hate crime by the intellectual totalitarians who now control American universities. Opposing viewpoints are prohibited, so that the authority of feminism and “queer theory” goes unchallenged on college campuses.

“Spanking and Poetry”: A Conference
on Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick
Annual English Student Association Conference
February 25-26, 2010
The Graduate Center
The City University of New York
365 Fifth Avenue
New York, New York 10016

This two-day conference seeks to extend the work of Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick by bringing together junior and senior scholars to examine her critical, literary, and artistic work.

That conference, “Spanking and Poetry,” incidentally, derived its title from a paper Sedgwick presented at a 1986 conference “Feminism, Sexuality, and Power,” at Mount Holyoke College, which erupted into a controversy over the issue of lesbian sadomasochism (see Gayle Rubin, Deviations, p. 213 and p. 399, note 72). So, what sort of topics do you suppose are discussed at a conference devoted to the legacy of Eve Sedgwick? Would you believe “queer theory in Classical studies”?

Michael Broder discussed the (almost non-existent) state of queer theory in Classical studies, arguing that despite brilliant foundational work by David Halperin and Amy Richlin, classicists have become curiously resistant to queer theory. And who doesn’t like hearing about Priapus, the Roman god of gardens who’d fuck any intruder, man or woman, in any available orifice?

Who, you may wonder, is Michael Broder?

My name is Michael Broder and I am The Queer Classicist, a freelance writer with a PhD in Classics from the City University of New York and an MFA in Creative Writing from NYU. I write about sex, gender, and kinship from my own perspective as a same-sex married gay man but also informed by perspectives including queer theory, feminism, and cultural materialism (this list is representative, not exhaustive). That means I’m going to write a lot about tops and bottoms, butches and fems, poz and neg, cis and trans, porn, hustlers, drag queens, divas, and queer fads and fashions of all sorts, including theater, film, television, music, and art. You may also find me writing about other aspects of culture and society including race, class, age, ability, religion, and more. I live in Bed-Stuy, Brooklyn with my poet husband and too many feral and domestic cats.

You need a Ph.D. to write about that stuff, obviously.

Feminism’s ironclad grip on academia means that parents who pay $48,436 a year to send their sons and daughters to Boston University can be certain that their children will never be exposed to any perspective on “sexuality and gender” that contradicts the “feminist and queer theory” advocated by Professor Carrie Preston.

Professors at Boston University, like practically every other university and college in American, reject “the very notion of sex as a biological given.” No American university student is ever exposed to any cogent analysis of human behavior based on the premise that males are naturally masculine and females are naturally feminine, and that family formation on the natural basis of heterosexual pair-bonding serves any legitimate or useful social purpose. Achieving feminism’s goal of “equality” means that “How to Bring Your Kids Up Gay” is now the essential task of parents who want to abolish the “socially constructed institution” of heterosexuality that “maintains male domination.”

Thank God, I can’t afford $48,436 a year. Maintaining “male domination” isn’t always easy, but it’s a lot cheaper than “equality.”

(Hat-tip: Wagner Clemente Soto on Twitter.)

+ + + + +

Unlike feminist professors, whose salaries are subsidized by taxpayers in the name of “education,” this blog is an exercise in shameless capitalism. My research into radical feminism is funded by readers in response to the Five Most Important Words in the English Language:

HIT THE FREAKING TIP JAR!

It’s been a rough month and my wife expects me to do my patriarchal duty by paying the electricity bill, so whatever you give — $5, $10, $20 — would be most sincerely appreciated.




 

Category: Sex Trouble

‘Medical’ Marijuana: There Must Be an Epidemic of Glaucoma in the ‘Hood

Posted on | October 30, 2015 | 156 Comments

Want to read something laugh-out-loud funny? This woman’s account of a guy who bummed a ride home after her local college class is worth a read if you enjoy, uh, authentic urban dialect.

The highlight of the story — which occurs in Los Angeles, we can gather — is a visit to a legal “medical marijuana” vendor “off Crenshaw somewhere.” Da Tech Guy points out how this story shows the way in which California’s legalization of marijuana for “medical” purposes has basically allowed the state to gain tax revenue from a hitherto illegal market. It is obvious from the woman’s story that “medical” marijuana is being sold to people whose only disease is a desire to get high. Otherwise, we would have to imagine that there has been an epidemic of glaucoma in, uh, low-income urban communities.

 

Category: Crime

Santorum Says Immigration ‘Flooding This Country’ With Low-Wage Workers

Posted on | October 30, 2015 | 14 Comments

Allan Wall calls attention to an exchange in Wednesday’s “undercard” debate in which Rick Santorum discussed the economic impact of immigration on America’s working class:

[W]e have the lowest labor participation rate in 50 years and we also have the slowest growth in wages in the history of our country, any 20-year period. In fact, the last quarter had the lowest wage growth ever recorded.
And so you look at the fact that we’ve brought in 35 million — 35 million legal and illegal immigrants over the last 20 years, more than any period in American history, we have low wages, low participation [rates]. . . .
We have an immigration policy that Senator Graham supported that brings in even more low wage workers into this country. He says he wants to solve problems, that’s great. But you’re not solving problems for American wage earners. You’re not solving problems for workers in America who have seen their wages flat line and have been disaffected enough to leave the workplace.
We need to get better training and better skills, including vocational education and . . . community colleges. But the bottom line is, we have to make sure that we are not flooding this country with competition for low wage workers.

This is important to understand. Arguments over immigration policy are always about numbers. The accusations of “hate” and “racism” flung around by advocates of unlimited immigration (e.g., Lindsey Graham) ignore the basic question of numbers. The United States is a nation of 320 million people and we could, with little difficult, absorb and assimilate 200,000 immigrants annually. But between legal and illegal immigration, we have had at least three times that number every year for the past 20 years. It is this excess immigration — especially what Santorum rightly describes as a flood of illegals from Mexico — that is the source of controversy. For the sake of having a clear policy debate, we may leave aside any questions surrounding the language and customs of immigrants and focus simply on this issue of numbers. Santorum is correct that the downward pressure on working-class wages is a major consequence of our immigration policy (or lack thereof). Economics is always about numbers, and it is important to stress this point.

Unless and until we are willing to talk about immigration in terms of a target number for annual immigration (and, as I say, 200,000 a year would seem entirely reasonable), then we will continue to be distracted by irrelevant objections. The accusation of “racism” is such a distraction. Liberals always racism everywhere in America and, because they know Americans don’t like being called racists, these accusations are used by liberals to intimidate their opponents into silence.




 

Category: Immigration, Rick Santorum

Friday Fiction: 100 Word Challenge

Posted on | October 30, 2015 | 4 Comments

by Smitty

One last dip in the road separated Korban and his troops from Korbill Tower, highlighted by the moon on the hill.
They were far enough up a side valley from River Myzods that the rolling countryside was untouched by disaster.
As they passed a copse on the right side of the road, a bat-like thing took flight, briefly highlighted against the moon.
That was no native bird. They knew.
So much for time to rest and heal. Hopefully Zygiell’d had survived and would rally here. The kingdom was broken, and he had no plan beyond “Kill orcs.” Which was insufficient.

via Darleen

Category: Friday Fiction

‘Rape Culture’ Rhetoric as Bad Poetry

Posted on | October 29, 2015 | 89 Comments

Alleged poet Rupi Kaur (@rupikaur_)

Just when you think feminism cannot possibly become more absurd, they always manage to push beyond the limits of imagination.

sex takes the consent of two
if one person is lying there not doing anything
cause they are not ready
or not in the mood
or simply don’t want to
yet the other is having sex
with their body it’s not love
is is rape

That is a “poem” by Rupi Kaur, a young Toronto-based feminist whose work has been celebrated by the Huffington Post:

Rupi Kaur’s first book, Milk and Honey is the poetry collection every woman needs on her nightstand or coffee table. Accompanied by her own sketches, the beautifully honest poems read like the everyday, collective experiences of today’s modern woman. She experiences love, loss, pain and healing in different chapters of her life. Sometimes she feels as though she has shattered in a million pieces but eventually, she finds strength after picking up the pieces and ultimately survives. Reading the book, is like getting the hug you need on a rainy day, the catharsis you crave after a tragedy.

Just kill me now, please. I’ve seen too much.

If you were to subject this to the kind of mockery it deserves, you would certainly be denounced as a misogynist. But why must such insipid expressions of mundane emotion be treated as if Rupi Kaur has said something profound? What is it about feminism that makes it function as a force-field protecting this kind of mediocre dreck from criticism and ridicule? Surely, there have been excellent women poets in history, and there must be genuinely talented women poets alive in the world today. Rupi Kaur is not one of them, however, and it is an insult to women to expect them to pretend that Rupi Kaur has real talent.

Permit me to observe that Rupi Kaur is saying less, and saying it much less persuasively, than any good pop song would say. Back when I was a kid, we didn’t need feminism — or any kind of campus orientation lecture about “affirmative consent” — to make sense of our feelings about love and sex. We had rock-and-roll and soul music written and sung by some of the greatest lyric poets in the history of the English language.

There’s a rose in the fisted glove
And the eagle flies with the dove,
And if you can’t be with the one you love,
Honey, love the one you’re with.

OK, so it’s not Shakespeare or Longfellow, but neither of those guys ever had a Top 40 hit. Here’s another classic:

Well, I’m running down the road,
Trying to loosen my load.
Got seven women on my mind:
Four that want to own me,
Two that want to stone me,
One says she’s a friend of mine.
Take it easy.

Hey, you may not think that’s profound, but when I was 17 years old, I could totally relate to that. Here’s another one:

Always and forever,
Each moment with you
Is just like a dream for me
That somehow came true.
And I know tomorrow
Will still be the same,
‘Cause we’ve got a life of love
That won’t ever change.

You’re never gonna get something like that from Rupi Kaur. No feminist is ever going to write the kind of poetry that you want to put to a slow jazzy six-eight beat, so couples can hold each other close and sway together under the magic sparkling light of a rotating mirror ball.

Back in the day, our romantic expectations were expressed through a shared musical vocabulary. You could ask a girl, “What kind of music do you like?” And her answers would tell you a lot about her. When I was a teenage boy learning to play guitar, I sang a lot of Beatles songs — “In My Life” was one — and eventually figured out that old Sam Cooke tunes had a special magic. Elvis, Buddy Holly, the Everly Brothers, the Beach Boys — you could learn a lot about love from the classics of rock-and-roll, lessons you’ll never get from the grim ideologues of feminism, who expect us to believe Rupi Kaur is a poetic genius.

Nah, sweetheart. You don’t know nothing about poetry.

Tonight you’re mine completely.
You give your love so sweetly.
Tonight the light of love is in your eyes.
Will you still love me tomorrow? . . .

Tonight with words unspoken.
You tell me I’m the only one.
But will my heart be broken
When the night meets the morning sun?

That, my friends, is poetry. Rupi Kaur has never written anything nearly as true or beautiful as that, and I doubt she ever will.

(Hat-tip: @DateOffCampus on Twitter.)

UPDATE: Charles Hill wrote about the moral aspects of that 1961 Shirelles classic — co-written by the immortal Carole King — more than a decade ago. Time flies in the blogosphere!




 

Category: Sex Trouble

In The Mailbox: 10.29.15

Posted on | October 29, 2015 | Comments Off on In The Mailbox: 10.29.15

— compiled by Wombat-socho


OVER THE TRANSOM
Proof Positive: Waiting For The Donald
EBL: CNBC Debate
Michelle Malkin: A Closetful Of Hillary Clinton’s Immigration Costumes
Twitchy: Haven’t Had Enough Of John Harwood’s Bias, You Say?


RIPPED FROM THE HEADLINES
American Power: Far-Left CNBC Moderators Lose Control Of Third GOP Debate
American Thinker: Thirteen Reasons We Shouldn’t Admit Muslim “Refugees”
Conservatives4Palin: Governor Palin Talks About Her Political Future
Don Surber: Carson’s Manager – “We Don’t Need To Be Led Around Like Prize Steers”
Jammie Wearing Fools: CNBC Hacks Whine After Disastrous Debate Performance
Joe For America: Why Are Veterans Mad At Hillary?
JustOneMinute: Debate Night!
Pamela Geller: INVASION – FIVE MILLION Muslims March On Europe – “We Cannot Guarantee The Public Safety Any More”
Shot In The Dark: How Bad Were The CNBC Moderators?
STUMP: Public Pension Follies – Divestment! Divest From All The Dirty Things!
The Gateway Pundit: Hannity On CNBC Debate – “This Is Going To Go Down In History As A REALLY BAD Night For The Media”
The Jawa Report: Fatwa This! Islamic State! Danger! Romance!
The Lonely Conservative:
This Ain’t Hell: 18th Century Technology Baffles Navy, Military
Weasel Zippers: Two More Police Unions Join In Call For Boycott Of Tarantino Films
Megan McArdle: Some Dumb Questions And Some Smart Answers
Mark Steyn: He Was Just Seventeen. You Know What I Mean.


Shop Amazon Holiday Home & Garden Gift Guide – Gifted Gardener

Category: Linkagery

Rubio Knocks Out Jeb Bush in Debate

Posted on | October 29, 2015 | 24 Comments

 

The general consensus, and also my own personal opinion, is that Marco Rubio was the big winner of Wednesday’s Republican presidential debate on CNBC. Polls have shown Rubio stuck in the second tier behind the two “outsider” candidates who are the current front-runners, Donald Trump and Ben Carson. Rubio is young, smart and articulate, but his role in the 2013 “Gang of Eight” amnesty plan has hurt him with the GOP’s conservative grassroots. Wednesday night, however, when Rubio was criticized for missing Senate votes while campaigning for president, he counter-attacked sharply:

“In 2008, Barack Obama missed 60 or 70% of his votes and the same newspaper endorsed him again. This is another example of the double standard that exists in this country, between the mainstream media and the conservatives.”

Turning the question around to focus on the pro-Democrat double standard of the “mainstream media” was a smart move. Rubio then got a surprise bonus when Jeb Bush called on him to resign, giving Rubio an opening for this brutal jab:

“Jeb, let me tell you, I don’t remember you ever complaining about John McCain’s vote record. The only reason you’re doing it now is because we’re running for the same position. Someone convinced you attacking me is going to help you.”

Boom! Bush’s campaign had been on the ropes and if he thought he could make a comeback by attacking Rubio, he thought wrong. This move was both “strategically ill-conceived and tactically incompetent,” to quote Jonathan Last of the Weekly Standard.

Now, what does this mean? To make clear my own preference, I support any candidate not named “Hillary Clinton.” After eight years of Obama’s presidency, it is crucial for America’s future that the Democrats not get a third term, and I will be willing to back whoever gets the GOP nomination. Trump, Carson, Ted Cruz, Carly Fiorina, Rand Paul, whoever. Everybody knows my longstanding support for Rick Santorum, and I do not rule out the possibility that Rick might yet pull off another Iowa miracle like he did in 2012. However, the main thing — the Big Picture — is that all of the Republican candidates are better than Hillary and, in a few weeks, voters in Iowa are going to reduce the oversized GOP field down to four or maybe five viable candidates.

Marco Rubio could be one of those. Jeb Bush certainly will not.

Bush is done. He is over, doomed, kaput, finito. If the Republican Establishment big money boys can’t see that, they’re even dumber than I previously thought they were, and I have always thought Stupid Guys With Too Much Money were the root cause of the GOP’s electoral and political problems. Their hopes for a restoration of the Bush dynasty — because this is what Stupid Guys With Too Much Money dream of, like a 12-year-old girl dreams of dating Harry Styles — are now at an end. It’s time to wake up and smell the futility.

So a half-dozen GOP Establishment consultants will soon be unemployed after Jeb gives his “spend more time with my family” speech, and this is good news for America. We will be spared another Bush, and can now focus our attention on avoiding another Clinton.

There is still hope for the future. Thank God.





 

Category: Debates, Election, Jeb Bush, Marco Rubio, Republicans

The Man In The High Castle

Posted on | October 28, 2015 | 18 Comments

— by Wombat-socho


Apologies for the lack of book posts, but last week was pretty much eaten by work leading up to the October 15 extension deadline, medical appointments, and other craziness. This week I want to talk a little bit about The Man In The High Castle, originally a book by Philip K. Dick, and now a TV series by Ridley Scott and Frank Spotnitz for Amazon Prime Video. The book won the Hugo for Best Novel of 1963, back when Hugos actually meant something, and is an alternate history set fifteen years after the United States lost World War II in 1947. Most of the former United States are part of the Greater German Reich; the three Pacific states plus Nevada, Arizona, and parts of New Mexico, Idaho, and Utah belong to a Japanese puppet state, the Pacific States of America; and the remaining pieces of the country between are a neutral zone, sometimes called the Rocky Mountain States or more often, the Neutral Zone. I last read Dick’s book decades ago, and I have to say after watching the first two episodes of the TV series, Scott and Spotnitz have produced something better than the original book. The subversive novel The Grasshopper Lies Heavy is now a series of “newsreels” distributed by the Resistance, there have been some changes in the cast of characters, but above all, Scott and Spotnitz have introduced a sense of hallucinatory, paranoid surrealism that didn’t exist in the original book, which was a fairly straightforward alternate history along the lines of one of its inspirations, Ward Moore’s Bring the Jubilee – which itself is worth reading, for its depiction of the Union as a Third World backwater in the wake of a Civil War defeat, if nothing else. Getting back to the series…what struck me most is that it has a cast full of unreliable narrators. Nothing the characters say can be taken on faith as correct, there is reason to believe that “past” is not what it is claimed to be, and there are strong implications that the “newsreels” are not homemade movies, but rather leaks from our timeline. Can’t wait for the next eight episodes to come out next month!


One of the only other science-fictional things I’ve been reading is Edward P. Hughes’ Masters of the Fist, a post-apocalyptic tale about a small village in Ireland facing a number of problems, security and the infertility of the local menfolk being the two most pressing. Enter Sergeant O’Meara of the Grenadier Guards and his stolen Challenger MBT…like the first reviewer, I came across some of the stories in this fix-up novel by way of Jerry Pournelle’s There Will Be War anthologies, and appreciated the sometimes dark, sometimes madcap humor in these tales. Decent brain candy.


The other is Stark’s War, the first in a trilogy written by John Hemry before he took up writing The Lost Fleet novels and went with his birth name of John Campbell. Stark’s War was somewhat of a nightmare for a veteran NCO like me; the picture it paints of a military so isolated from its country that someone in the ranks who was born civilian and not mil is a very rare bird indeed, and an officer corps so addicted to micromanagement and apple-polishing that it no longer recognizes the realities of combat are just two of the many unsettling plot elements of this novel about an American hyperpower as it exists in the mind of the Loony Left: so dominant in terms of economic and military power that no nation or alliance of nations on Earth can stand up to it – which is why Sergeant Stark and his troops of the First Division are raiding foreign installations on the Moon. Good book, perhaps because of the premise and not in spite of it; now available for the Kindle, which is good.


Worth noting: John C. Wright’s “My Elves Are Different”, a meditation on the generation gap in fantasy readers, which was inspired by Jeffro’s Appendix N Survey. Also, a fisking of that gigantic retard Steve Davidson, who runs the Amazing Stories site, by a fellow named Dystopic, who dealt with Davidson’s criticism of an LJ post of mine on the social history of fandom so I didn’t have to.


And what have you been reading in this week before Halloween?





Category: Books, Linkagery, Video
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