Porcupine · Burrito

(neither of which involve cannibalism)

Awake with jet lag, I've been thinking a lot about two propositions, which I've discussed in part before, either here or in comments on various zines, but the presentation is now worked out a bit better. By the way, I agree with one of these propositions, and not so much with the other, and I'm not saying which, so please, no agreeing to disagree, OK?

First - remember Buffy St. Marie's song Universal Soldier, a minor hit for Donovan and one of the great anti-war songs? Remember the line "He's the one who gives his body as a weapon of the war and without him all this killing can't go on?" putting forth the argument that the soldier has the ultimate responsibility for pulling the trigger, because the soldier had a choice whether to be in that situation or not, and even though the orders came from someone else, he has the choice whether to follow those orders or not. Agree or not, the argument is there, and it seems to me to be a valid expression of one side of the issue. The other side of the issue, by the way, was expressed by individuals on trial for war crimes at Nuremberg, whose defense was they were following orders. As I recall, this defense did not work out so well for them.

The corporation in the USA, among other things, is the civilian form of the military hierarchy. Those at the top give orders, and those underneath follow them. Are those at the bottom ultimately responsible for their own actions, or are they excused because they were simply following orders?

The situation that came up on someone else's blog, which I'm referring to here: I was suggesting one way to tame a corporation might be to make those who do wrong under the protection of the corporate veil more accountable for their own actions. I suggested a sharing of responsibility for corporate crimes among the board, the stockholders and the employees.

The response I got, after giving a few specifics, was, well, yeah, the people at the top who give the orders, sure, but the people at the bottom, like the folks at McDonalds who sell you the cheeseburgers that clog your arteries and give you heart attacks and diabetes, well, they're not responsible, they're just doing their job.

Years ago I worked for an attorney in collections, and we had a situation where a particular insurance company wasn't paying claims when their clients were seen in our hospital's ER, citing an internal rule that outside emergencies must be reported within 24 hours - not always possible. He looked over the paperwork, and imagined filing 300 suits against the insurance company, and things dragging out for years with their corporate attorneys, running up huge expenses, and perhaps getting nowhere. He came up with a simpler solution. One day I received 300 lawsuits in a huge box, all against this insurance company's clients, and delivered them to the process server.

When the people started calling, we referred them to the claims department of the company. Darned if those claims people didn't get with us and pay every single one of those claims.

Making the people at the lowest level personally liable for the corporation's misdeeds is, in my opinion, a good way to force these companies to be honest, follow the law, and produce fewer harmful products. If I could sue the grocery stores (and the individuals who worked there) who sold my father cigarettes, for example, because he eventually died from a smoking-related illness, perhaps we could get them to stop selling cigarettes in grocery stores - or anywhere else.

That, in my opinion, would be a good thing in the case of cigarettes. Would it be as good a thing, however, to have a national ban on candy in an attempt to counteract the prevalence of diabetes? I see these, by the way, as two very different things. Candy is not addictive, and does not give off any byproducts that harm those who do not consume candy. What about the ban on peanuts at the Worldcon con suite? Does the mere presence of peanuts actually harm those who are allergic to them? Are there scientific studies that prove this? When will there be a ban on private ownership of internal combustion engines?

Are corporations necessary to keep our society running? What would it be like without them? If we made all those involved with the corporations liable for their misdeeds, would corporations go the way of the dodo bird?

Next modest proposal:
Since the time the pilgrims landed, our country has been seen by those outside it as a place of refuge for those who are subject to persecution and maltreatment in their native lands. Yes, it has in turn maltreated those who arrived prior to the pilgrims, as well as witches, individuals brought from Africa against their will, and quite a few others, but as a country we have worked hard to overcome these and make it a nation with liberty and justice for all. These are ideals that may never be entirely reached, but in my opinion they are some very fine ideals, and we should continue to reach for them. As it says on the Statue of Liberty, "Give us your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free." We now refer to such as these as economic refugees.

One principle our country has adhered to since it was founded, and I rarely if ever hear any suggestion of changing this principle, even by extreme conservatives, is that an child born on U.S. soil is an American citizen. Moving ahead to modern times, we have a situation our founders did not foresee: the bar on northward migration - and northward migration has existed since the country was founded as well, during which time many of the areas being migrated to were part of Mexico - has led to huge numbers of children who are American citizens with parents who crossed the border against the will of the immigration authorities.

That is one situation. Often these families have also had children outside the USA, and cross the border with those children before expanding their families within the USA. I commonly meet individuals who were brought across the border as infants and have grown up in our society. They speak English with no accent, and the only way I know the situation is when they produce an ID card bearing the colors of the Mexican flag.

Here is my controversial opinion: the cruelty we show to children in these families, by barring their parents from competing fairly in the job market and banishing them to working under the table in the underground economy; by targeting and deporting the wage-earning parent and effectively depriving the children of food, clothing and shelter, forcing the parents to take their children with them and effectively deporting children who are American citizens, and by refusing to offer any status to children who have grown up in the USA, attended high school here, and not allowing them to go on to a higher education - this is not what our country is supposed to be about. In 50 or 100 years, the things we are doing today will appear as unthinkable to our descendants as what a previous generation did to Japanese Americans in World War II, or separate-but-equal policies that were still around when I was born.

What I propose is, first of all, a law absolutely banning deportation of any parent or sibling of an American citizen. Next, either citizenship or legal residency with a pathway to citizenship for any child who graduates or has graduated from an American high school. Third, a pathway to citizenship for any non-citizen who has a citizen child or sibling, who has worked and lived in the USA for 5 years or longer, or can otherwise show that they are making a positive contribution to our society.

As a long term solution, it is quite apparent that instead of exploiting our neighbor to the south as an endless source of cheap labor, we need to work together with them to help improve the Mexican economy to a point where life is as good for them as it is for us.

OK, now I put my fingers in my ears and wait for the flak.

Altogether, I have to say the past 5 days have been fairly pleasant. I've been in Montreal, at Worldcon.

Here are the items I have purchased:

A Montreal Worldcon t-shirt, which I'm wearing at the moment.
Supporting memberships for the Reno Worldcon in 2011 and the Raleigh NASFiC in 2010.
A bumpersticker for my guitar case that says The Stars Are Ours.
BOOKS:
Charles Harness, An Ornament to His Profession, NESFA HB
Zenna Henderson, Ingathering, NESFA HB
Damon Knight and Kate Wilhelm, Better Than One, NESFA freebie HB
Emma Bull & Will Shetterly, Double Feature, NESFA trade PB
Peter S. Beagle, The Rhinoceros Who Quoted Nietzsche, Tachyon PB
John Clute, Canary Fever, Beccon trade PB
Heidi Lampietti, How to Start Your Own Cult for Fun & Profit, PB
CDs/DVDs:
Vixy & Tony Live From Duckon 18
Seanan McGuire Live From Duckon 18
Sassafrass: Firebrand, Eclectic 1 and Eclectic II (produced for con)

I also bought a comb to replace the one I somehow lost while travelling. Note: add "spare comb" to generic packing list.

Events I was part of (with generic reports):
Friday, noon: Guitar Workshop, with myself and Tom Jeffers. It was kind of cool getting to sit and talk to Tom and do a little jamming. I mostly talked off the top of my head; Tom had a handout on DADGAD tuning. I tried his DADGAD tune guitar and played a song. I'm pretty sure I've never played a guitar in that tuning before, but I don't think Tom believed me. I think the audience enjoyed the workshop. Here are 2 free tips for beginning and intermediate guitarists: 1. Left hand: always keep your fingertips close to the fret for added strength and cleaner playing. 2. Right hand: if you're strumming, do it in rhythm to the song, and remember there's more to right hand technique than strumming. Learn to play single notes.
Friday, 4PM: Intro to Filk, with myself and Dave Weingart. I'm going to be mildly peevish here, so if you'd like to skip to the next paragraph, please do so now. First of all, Worldcon program schedulers need to figure out how to be more adaptive to program items of varying lengths. Lately, it seems like they've been saying, OK, all panels will run at the same times so people can go from one to the next. Well, this doesn't work with things that start with "fil," like films and filking. 90 minute concerts just DO NOT work out, filkers do not require 15 minutes wasted in between concerts to get from one to the next, and listing multiple concerts as a single program item is just stupid and confusing. I have a dream that one day a Worldcon will get the filk program schedule right. SO, Dave was scheduled for a concert back to back with this panel, things were miles apart from each other, Dave had to run from his concert to this thing and be late, and, as it turned out, intro to filk was included as a part of the children's programming, an area was set up, and no one showed for it. We tried being interactive and hung out in the area making noise and talking to people, but it was a total flop. Panels in children's programming are a pretty dumb idea, and I agree about 89% with Dave's opinion that Intro to Filk panels should be abolished, since most of the people who come to them already know what filk is about. What could replace intro to filk panels? I tried Intermediate and Advanced filk panels at Denvention and I thought they went really nicely. I included specific subtopics for each panel to give the people on the panel a direction to go in.
Monday, 12:30, I somehow was assigned to a panel called Cultural Memory, Societal Resilience and Change. Description: How important is cultural memory? Does it support or hinder social change Does it matter whether it is given up voluntarily or taken away by force? Well, I have no clue how I got on such a panel, and this topic, is, I think, broad enough to drive a planet through it, so I decided to do something very much like that. My thoughts ran thusly: cultural memory is information that is passed through generations, up until recently through oral tradition including storytelling, poetry and songs, and the modern prevalence of communication technology is either disrupting or taking over the oral tradition, resulting in rampant information overload and loss of a lot of what we had before cultural memory started moving from a localized to a global phenomenon. I'm a musician and songwriter, and a song that I honestly think offers a unique prespective on that is Kathleen Sloan's "Take It Back," so I persuaded Kathleen to come in and sing it for the audience. This panel, by the way, had a pretty good crowd. Well, one of the panelists - sorry, I didn't catch his name, and I don't think he was one of the original panelists listed in the program - was having none of this and decided to leave the room. I am not going to state my opinion of that, one way or the other, although I do have a very strong opinion. Luckily, that did not become a topic of the conversation. The conversation somehow moved toward the topic of racism, with audience members going on and on on the subject of how color-blind is color-blind and whether being completely color-blind as opposed to acknowledging differences and being accepting and appreciative of cultural backgrounds other than one's own - well, blah blah blah blah - I tried to help get the discussion back to SF by steering it in a more positive direction - towards the cultural memory of the subcultures of SF fandom and readers of SF - and things pretty much stayed derailed and never went anywhere that I (or anyone else) thought they would, but I enjoyed the discussion and was very impressed by the erudition and global knowledge of fellow panelist Geoff Ryman. I'll be looking for his books.
I got some great feedback from 2 audience members after this fracas. One was saying, "You . . . are a Marxist," but in a nice way. I said, "Yes, from each according to ability and to each according to need is still a great idea, and it's too bad no one's every managed to get it working." The other was telling me about songs like "Blowing in the Wind" and "Where Have All the Flowers Gone." I'm not sure, but I think some of them got something out of it all, perhaps by accident.
Monday, 2:30, was my concert. Setlist (in the INTENDED order):
Drinks and Dinner
That Old Filk of Mine
When I Grow Up, I Want to Be Snidely Whiplash
Fractured Fairy
It's a Flat World, After All
My Asian Aquarium
My Canary Has Circles Under His Eyes
When Worlds Collide
Pluto Song (written around 1975)
I Am the Carpenter
Blues Name
The Girl In Arlo's Song
While I'm Here
Some notes: Fractured Fairy, Flat World and Aquarium were all songs I finally learned the tunes and chords for at the con. Fractured Fairy is a parody of Kathleen's Box of Fairies, and Kathleen was in the room. I got a false 5 minute warning and did my end song in mid-concert. Originally, the song in the spot for The Girl In Arlo's Song was reserved for Somebody Else, Not Me as learned from listening to Dave Van Ronk. However, I didn't want to end my concert with that one, and The Girl In Arlo's Song is in my book on the page next to Blues Name, so I thought, "Hey, that would be a good set-ender song." The concerts overall didn't get large crowds, but I was happy that my concert had more people in the room than I expected, and I was very pleased with the feedback I got at the end.

I also got great feedback on some of the t-shirts I wore at the con. The United Breaks Guitars got about 6 random people saying stuff like "Great Shirt," or "I loved that song," and maybe 2 arguing that no, it's a different airline. The sweatshirt-hoodie I wore today that says "Squirrel - It's What's For Supper" also got some interesting comments.

TOPIC CHANGE:

Also, over this weekend, I found time to comment on an LJ page or 2, made a new LJ friend, and perhaps an LJ enemy as well.

I enjoy being a devil's advocate. I enjoy arguing for positions on issues that I don't necessarily agree with. I see this as a mind-expanding activity. Unfortunately, one of the byproducts is that I run into people who most vehemently do NOT wish to have their minds expanded, who have their opinion, and who think all those who disagree with them are WRONG.

One thing that totally annoys me is when people say "Well, we can agree to disagree." I find that very insulting. It can mean a number of different things, all highly negative. My first guess, in most cases, is "I have already subscribed to a particular dumptruck that has loaded up my mind and I have no interest in talking to anyone whose mind wasn't loaded by the same dumptruck."

I do not agree to disagree with anyone, on any subject. I reserve the right to listen to them attempt to make a coherent argument in favor of their point of view. If they are unwilling to make that effort, it indicates to me that perhaps they are unable as well. I am willing to listen to others who wish to propound their preposterous notions in the forum of rational discourse, and expect to be extended that same courtesy. However, if they are not willing to listen to me and consider my thoughts, I have to wonder: how much of the rest of the world have they shut themselves off from, and how closed down are they?

If you have an opinion, how well have you considered the opposing view before concluding that your opinion is correct? Have you ever discovered that you were incorrect? Have you ever changed your mind? If so, how do you know you won't change your mind about (insert topic here)?

I will freely admit that I have changed my mind about a number of important issues. The death penalty is one. On an intellectual level, I've considered all the arguments on both sides, and am 100% opposed. However, on an emotional level, I can understand and even sympathize with the other side of the issue. Having heard Rubin "Hurricane" Carter speak, I can imagine myself an innocent man on death row, and it's quite terrifying. On the other hand, having read Ann Rule's The Stranger Beside Me, I have to wonder how many clever criminals manage to escape from prison and continue their criminal careers, and think of the lives that might have been saved had Bundy been executed before he had the opportunity to escape. In my own mind, I have more than one opinion on this issue, and can very much understand the difficulty people have with it.

If my thinking is in error, I would very much like for my friends (or others) to make me aware of it. If they attempt and fail, I am going to leave the door open for them to try again.

So, to those who wish to agree to disagree with me, I say, "No, I'm sorry, but I've changed my mind and now I agree with you. So, let me tell you where I'm wrong."

I'm sure I've asked this question before, because I like to ask it: is there a name for someone who falsely believes they have hypochondria?

Here's the answer: "Yeah. Sick."