death is a drummer

Kinds of Killing, by William H. Gass

In order to prepare private citizens for the military, a humiliating and painful bullying is generally prescribed. Its aim is to inculcate obedience and create callousness. Leaders must be resolute and heartless, prepared to send any enemy “to their deaths, pitilessly and remorselessly,” as the Führer demanded. Next a campaign of denigration of the chosen opponent is undertaken. This is designed to reduce the humanity of the enemy and to prepare a social web of support for behavior that is basically cruel, immoral, and normally disapproved. It strengthens every aspect of your plans if the society that you represent brings to the project a tradition of paternal domination and abuse, reaching from the family to the Kaiser and to its final station, God. Deep feelings of injury, inferiority, and large reserves of resentment—the fresher the better—are nearly essential.

A general sense of uneasiness helps, as if you knew someone were watching where you walked, reading your mail, and overhearing you talk. This atmosphere of anxiety can be sustained when the agents of power are pitiless.

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The Nazis were down for the count, but the count was only at nine when Allied warplanes kicked dozens of towns nearly out of existence (Dresden, most infamously) and the Red Army arrived to repopulate the ruins by raping the women who remained. They brought with them destruction, pillage, theft, murder, and savage revenge. Death, it seems, was also an Allied deity.

Evans, after his usual sober and responsible account of how the end came for Hitler and Goebbels, writes: “The deaths in the bunker and the burned-out streets above were only the crest of a vast wave of suicides without precedent in modern history.” This penultimate killing was sometimes done out of an ancestral sense of honor, or from the shame and indignity of a trial that would brand them as criminals, or to avoid the mistreatment of their displayed corpses, or out of despair for Germany and the failure of their enterprises; but not often because they were wrong, not because they were guilty, not because they were moral monsters and could no longer bear the creatures of evil they had become.

Afterward, death would add still more to its roster with trials and hangings. Not just the guilty paid its price. In what was perhaps the final irony, many survivors of the camps would kill themselves because they were alive.

it's ok to suck at science (fiction)

And God Said, Let There Be Wank.  And There Was.

I can see where this is going.  It's going in the direction of "women can write science fiction just fine!  women can use hard scientific concepts just like men can!"  Which, of course, is absolutely true.  I'm not going to comment on the idea that men and women write science fiction "differently," because I don't read science fiction enough to provide evidence, but I really doubt that's true in any meaningful way.  

I just want to add that it's also ok (for boys and girls alike) to suck at science fiction.  Or to take no pleasure in science fiction.  I don't write science fiction because I am just no good at science.*  I can identify fossils, and that's about it.  I know this is terribly un-PC to say (which is part of the problem) - but I am so tired - oh, so tired - of being made to feel that science and math are the world's only worthy pursuits, and inevitably fiction's only worthy pursuits.  There was some quote I found a while ago on some blog - a woman my age saying "our mothers wanted us to know that we could do anything, but the message we took from that was 'you must do everything'." 

I grew up with a mother who refused to accept that I did not want to go into scientific endeavor.  Why?  Because like many progressive women her age, she didn't want me to "feel like I couldn't do science because I was a girl."  My mother's biggest cause isn't feminism, but she is a knee-jerk progressive in that regard, a product of an upbringing that told her the best thing she could do was marry rich, and the only jobs she could hold were secretary, nurse, and school teacher.  When I was a kid there was a big backlash against teachers - especially in science classes - who would only call on boys, and there was a lot of progressive encouragement for girls pursuing science.  I read articles about it in this little progressive-preteen-girls magazine (yes, I know), New Moon, saying "it's cool to love science!"

Well, cool.  It is.  Except my mother got all ready to march me into the school system like a little token warrior - she was fiercely defensive of my ability to do math, for instance, and continues to put Lincoln Public Schools on her blacklist because they put me in a remedial math class for a semester (I tested out of it the next semester).  I don't know if this is because she thought I had been discouraged from pursuing math and science - my worst academic memory of fourth grade is undoubtedly crying during a math test because I could not make the numbers work and was the last one to finish, but the first one to finish in the class was my best friend, a girl, and I certainly don't remember any negative associations with girls and numbers.  But anyway, my mother evidently thought I needed to believe that I could excel at science (and math), and love the fuck out of it too. 

Didn't happen that way.  What I loved, what I excelled at, was English.  I was okay with history too.  This I knew from a very, very young age.  For my mother, however, admitting this became tantamount to defeat of the entire progressive feminist cause.  Around ninth grade, it became a subtle imperative (my mother's not an imperative type of parent) that I become a scientist, apparently only to show that I could (thank God she accepted that I hated sports, or else I would be cursing my way through volleyball).  I suppose in many ways this is why I found kinship with the children of immigrant families, who were also under tremendous pressure to excel at those bastions of American knowledge and become a doctor, an engineer, or a scientist of some kind.  Part of that stereotypical Asian-American push is in the money.  Part of it's in the status.  But the part my mother can relate to is pwning the American establishment, so to speak: you told me I couldn't do it - well, just watch my daughter kick your kids' asses! 

I didn't kick anybody's ass, except at fossil identification.  I want to do something with politics, I said.  Well, you can be a scientific consultant for governments, she said.  But I don't like science, I said.  And she ignored.  I want to write, I said.  Well, you can write like Michael Crichton, she said.  But that's not what I like to write about, I said.  And she ignored. 

Believe me, many of my female classmates were good at science.  And they certainly got many more congratulatory handshakes for excelling in the oh-so-macho Domain of Men, science, then I ever got for being good at, you know, English.  Because English isn't challenging, anybody can be good at English.  English is for the weak, i.e. girls, and if you're good at English all you're proving is that you're a girrrrrrrrrl.  Which is, of course, a lie - especially in my high school's English department.  Thank God for that English department, for the teachers that told me it was fine - more than fine - to be good at writing and analysis.  For my favorite English teacher, who said that I wielded the written word like a sword.  Eventually I developed enough pride in those pursuits that my mother could stop feeling so ashamed that she did not have a scientifically-minded daughter.

So just putting that disclaimer out there: I don't write science fiction; not because I'm a girl, but because I'm not good with scientific imagination.  There are guys that suck at it too - just like there are guys that suck at fantasy and girls that suck at fantasy (Stephanie Meyer, for instance, sucks at fantasy).  So I'm not hot on the idea of being a supposedly retrograde woman because I write fantasy.  I will write you a bad-ass political fantasy.  But I will stick to magic and the paranormal - and there is nothing wrong with that.  I think the larger problem is the perceived intellectual superiority of science fiction over fantasy, and all the associations of masculinity that go with that - the whole "fantasy is for ladies and girly-men" idea.  Which is of course why everybody wants to claim science fiction and stay the fuck away from fantasy - we all want to consume symbols of power, right?  It's bullshit. 

* I actually have received an A in every science class I've ever taken, and I do have a minor in environmental science.  I also watch nature documentaries (although Werner Herzog's relatively un-science-y ones are my favorites), go to science museums, and read articles about scientific discoveries, especially regarding astronomy and biology.  In other words, I'm happy co-existing with science and enjoy it from an educated layman's perspective.  But I don't have the knowhow or interest to make plausible FTL spaceships,aliens, or even plausible weaponry.  I suspect this is because I'm lacking in the final level of science knowledge as taught by my high school chemistry teacher: application.  What I lack is  scientific imagination - and quite frankly, I'm ok with that.