Monsters

raphaelstmichaelIt’s okay to love a monster.  Love them with open eyes.  Love them with a wish for what they could be instead.  Don’t hope they’ll change; they won’t.  Tell them you expect them to.  Tell them you expect it because you love them.  Love is a leash we tie to the people we care about.  Remember that.  You love them. That comes with boundaries.

It’s okay to treasure your monsters.  They stand as a warning, a lesson you can learn through observation instead of practice.  Turn their claws and teeth and spines away from you, and watch them.  Pay attention.  Lessons from monsters aren’t specific. Find the patterns.  Study the systems.  Guard yourself against walking a different, parallel path. Remember, when you can, to be grateful for what you took from their example.

Remember, always, that love can go both ways.

It’s okay to accept a monster.  Embrace their strengths, their goodness.  Show them where they are strong and good.  If you can, cut them free of their patterns.  If you can’t, let it be.  Not all monsters are your monsters. Save your strength for the others. Accept the strength you get from yours.  Learn from your monster how to understand other monsters.  Remember that their wisdom may be false, but it could be a paving stone on the road to yours.

It’s okay to break bread with your monsters.  It’s okay to take the shelter they offer.  It’s okay to bleed when they do.  It’s okay to mourn them.  It’s okay to wish your leash had been stronger, or that you hadn’t needed it.  It’s okay to need them, to accept their love, to hold tight to who they might have been, if they hadn’t been a monster.

It’s okay.

But it’s not required.

Love is a leash we tie to the people we care about. You can let go of the leash and walk away.  Do, if you like.  If you must.  If you are leashed in turn, walk faster.  Pull the monster by the tether they’ve given you.

Remember that the world is kind to monsters. Remember that the world is cruel to them, too.  Remember that there are others who fight monsters and someday, they might come for yours.  Step aside, when the time comes.  You don’t have to watch.  You don’t have to help.  Step aside.  On the subject of your monsters, that will be enough.

Love your monsters.  Slay the rest.

Have fun with your family this weekend.

On the Baker’s Anniversary of Bree Newsome

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Thirteen months ago today, Bree Newsome scaled a thirty foot pole and removed the “confederate flag.”  A few days later I came across this image, created by timelordj4y.  This image disturbed me.  A lot.

I was born in Virginia.  My whole family is either from there, or has lived there so long they’ve effectively gone native.  The whole family.  On one side they were from North Carolina before they were from Virginia, and in the family history, that feels like an immigration event.  “Virginia” was my cultural and ethnic heritage so thoroughly that school assignments to make a doll dressed in the traditional costume of my country of origin were always…tricky.  We know when more or less which great great great grand whoever came over from where, but there are no ties there.  We functionally sprang up from the ground in a tiny place outside Richmond and any roots older or deeper than that don’t matter, are invisible to us.

Being Virginian means a lot, at least in my family.  For me.  It means being raised to look at Thanksgiving and mutter how they’d done this in Jamestown before a pack of ornery Calvinists decided European protestants weren’t protestant enough for them.  It means understanding that every important thing that happened in this country until the 1870’s was either instigated by a Virginian, successful because of a Virginian, or enabled by the mere presence of Virginia.  It means summers spent visiting battlefields and old mansions and getting quizzed on important historical dates at the dinner table.  History matters. It’s as thick as the air in summer.

About the time I was ten, one of my aunts dug an unexploded shell from the Civil War battle out of her tomato patch.  It’s on display in the family museum with the other artifacts we’ve dug out of that yard.  This isn’t weird.

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But it also means strangers blithely going, “Oh, so not really the South,” when I answer their follow up question about where in the South I’m from.  Then getting uncomfortable when I stare blankly and say, “Richmond was the capital of the Confederacy.  Most of the compromises in the constitution around slavery were instigated by a bunch of rich white Virginians.  Summers are hot, and the tea is mostly simple syrup. What standards are you using?”

It means people saying, “You don’t sound like you’re from Virginia,” as if it’s a compliment, then turning around and using y’all because it makes them sound folksy and quaint.

It’s that time somebody asked me if my family kept Klan hoods in their closets instead of skeletons, then acted like I was out of line when I answered with, “Sure, let’s talk about vigilante enforcement of racial disparities.  Is it okay to include sundown towns, states founded on dreams of white utopia, and how the most segregated cities in the country happen to be in the north?  Or is it only okay to talk about racism if we’re going to pretend it’s all lynchings and Jim Crow?”

It’s getting told, before leaving for college, that if you bring a black boy home it’ll kill your grandfather, and wondering whether that’s because he’s Virginian, or because he’s old.

It’s forever being part of the national scapegoat on race issues and on the one hand going, “Uhm, excuse me, but seriously?” and on the other sighing and going, “Yeah.  Yeah, I know.”

It’s seeing bumper stickers that say “The South Will Rise Again,” and for single, hopeful moment, believing it.  Then in the next moment, realizing that what rising would mean to you (education, a wide scale decline in generations of poverty, urban growth, innovation)  is not the same thing it means to somebody who’d display that bumper sticker.

It means that after you’ve spent an afternoon digging through research on the transcontinental railroad, your roommate comes home to a rant about how, if they’d chosen the proposed southern route it would have been faster and cheaper to build, and might well have saved the south.  But the war happened so they didn’t, and that fucking war ruined everything again.

Being Southern is and isn’t very much about that war. A war that my family understands as a thing we had to do, that was complicated and fraught and unnecessary and a part of our heritage.  We were taught to be proud of people on both sides for the good things they did, and critical of both sides for their hypocrisies, sins, and mistakes.  And, this is where we maybe diverge most noticeably from the typical Southern narrative (or maybe we don’t): the North didn’t win so much as the South lost, and the North didn’t beat us so much as we self destructed through stupidity and short-sightedness.  The institution of slavery as practiced in the Americas, particularly in North America, was a departure from other forms of slavery and those departures made it crueler, more divisive, and untenable from a merely pragmatic level: you cannot indefinitely enslave a majority population that has no hope of enfranchisement for itself or its future generations.  There’s no security in that setup, which renders it inherently unstable.

Slavery was idiotic and black people are people and Jim Crow was terrible but there are no black people in Grannie’s church and if I date a black man, I should probably keep it a secret.  None of that is whispered.  It’s not secret or subtle or taboo the way it is in the north.  These truths are self-evident and there is no conflict there.

I’ve been trying to write this, and abandoning it, for thirteen months.  It’s a young white woman from the South spewing a lot of words about how awkward it is to be a young white woman from the South right now.  I’m not getting shot.  I’m not even getting called names.  I can spend thirteen months thinking about a picture that bothered me and trying to find a way to explain why when all that really needs to be said is, “That lady is a badass.  Black lives matter.”

And it’s true.  Bree Newsome is a badass.  Black lives matter.  But that’s a platitude followed by a hashtag and that’s not remotely an adequate encapsulation of my thoughts.

Ieshia Evans
Ieshia Evans, also apparently a badass

That picture is distressing because it exists.  Because it’s powerful.  Because it’s a black woman pulling down a flag that shouldn’t have been flying in the first place; the bulk of its symbolic power dates to the Civil Rights movement, not the Civil War.  My dad is older than the modern trend of flying that flag, and it saw more use in 1961-1963 than it did during the war.  It went up, though.  That’s history.  Southerners don’t argue with history.  They can’t.  It’s in the air.  It’s in their blood.  It’s the conversation at the dinner table.

But an argument with history isn’t required.  Fighting is.  Respecting a fight well fought is.  The flag went up, and once it did, there was nothing we could do to change the fact that it went up.  But it didn’t have to stay.  And it didn’t have to take a black woman reacting to a legacy of dead black men and a country that won’t acknowledge a rot running through the whole of itself to bring it down.

It should have been a white woman.  Or a white man.  Somebody from the South.  Somebody with roots there so deep that they might be able to gesture toward some boat that came over back when Virginia’s border officially stretched to the Pacific stepping up one day to say, “What do y’all think, but maybe we just leave that one off today, hm?”  No fanfare.  No iconic imagery.  Just a moment where instead of repeating history, we acknowledge its power by declining to.

That’s not what happened.  More, I honestly can’t conceive of how it could happen.  Too many people have dug in their heels too far.  My idea of a risen South is not their idea.

That picture is disturbing because it’s the first time I saw a depiction of the “Confederate flag” that inspired hope.  Hope is scary.  It’s dangerous.  It shields you from pragmatic reality and insulates you against learning the lessons you need to learn.  I don’t like it.  I especially don’t like it when running across a new spark of hope reveals that I’ve been holding onto a hope for something else.  Hope that maybe for once the South will pull itself together, put its foot down, and do something that isn’t just beautiful, but bright and just.  That Southern honesty about a national disease means we can be the leaders in the cure.

But here’s the thing I’ve realized in thirteen months of thinking about that image: My premise is wrong.  Bree Newsome is from Charlotte.  The Black Lives Matter movement got its start in Mark Twain’s home state. Martin Luther King Jr. was from Atlanta and did the vast majority of his work in the South.  The South is trying to fix itself.  It’s just not wearing the faces I expect.  I’d find a picture from outside the South with only white faces odd.  In the South, it feels obvious.  That’s a lie.  The South isn’t white. It never has been.  But I’m a white woman from the South whose entire exposure to black culture and black communities came after she left.  I never went back and filled in the gaps.

That picture disturbs me because…it’s exactly what I needed to see, but I hadn’t known that.  One image, and I learned a lot about what where I was blind.

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On Marketing: Don’t.

I run across a lot of people, in my day job and in the writing community, who are stressing about how to best go about marketing.  And I run into a whole lot of other people who are doing it atrociously.  So for everybody looking for the secret to stellar marketing and networking, here it is: Don’t do it.

Don’t hand your business card to everybody you meet.  I know you’ve heard lots of people tell you to do the opposite thing.  They’re wrong.

Don’t talk about your own work on a panel at a convention or conference that isn’t about your own work.

Don’t force a conversation to go somewhere that’ll give you an opening to talk about your product.  Don’t listen to a conversation waiting for the opening where you’ll get to jump in with the thing you want to talk about.

Don’t introduce yourself to a person entirely because you’re hoping to use them for something later.

And for the love of all that is interesting and worthwhile in human interaction, take Dale Carnegie’s ABC (Always Be Closing) and toss it out the window post-haste.

If you do these things everything, including your career, whatever it is, will be better.

You have that?  Read it again.  Understood?  Better read it one more time, just in case.

That’s the 101 lesson.  Because on this topic, unlearning all the bad things everybody has been teaching for decades is actually really, really important.  In fact, go read it again.  Trust me, it’s important.

Alright.  Here’s the 201.

In professional environments, and this includes social environments where you’re marketing or networking, there are two kinds of spaces.  There are “storefronts” and “everywhere else.”  The storefront is where the customer has come to you (or asked you to come to them) and consented to you trying to sell them something.  It’s your listing appointment, or your buyer interview, or your warm body behind the dealer’s table or your website or any number of other places where the potential of a transaction is salient to all involved parties.  At the storefront, and only at the storefront, you may proceed to qualify, pitch, and close your customer.  I have opinions about how you should do that, but this is not that topic.

When you’re in the storefront, go ahead and hand people your business card.  Talk about yourself.  Talk about your product.  Everything you just read five times before getting here?  That’s not about this space.  That’s about the other space, i.e. “everywhere else.”

Your goal, your single, solitary, only goal, when interacting with people in “everywhere else,” is to get them to, happily, intentionally, seek you in a storefront.  Get them to go, “Would you talk to my nephew?  He’s thinking about buying a house.”  Or track you down in the dealer’s room, or look up your website, or whatever.

How do you do that?  You forget your product, your industry, your career, all of it, and you sell you.  You’re a good listener, an interesting conversation partner on whatever the conversation is, you’re friendly, you have a reputation for being helpful.  You show up.  You’re present when you do.  You’re a complete person with a full range of interests and you’re willing to share a part of that with people.

I don’t mean that you have to be a singing, dancing, volunteer machine who invites everybody into every aspect of their personal lives.  In fact, don’t do that unless you actually are a singing, dancing, volunteer machine in which case decorum and restraint are still awesome things you should hang onto.

What I mean is that when you’re at the grocery store and chatting with the check out clerk, ask them about their day, their job, the neighborhood, the weather.  Do not say, “Hi, I’m Anaea Lay and I sell real estate,” or, “I see there’s a magazine rack nearby.  Have you read my book?”  Rules of polite conversation mean it’s very likely they’re going to reciprocate by asking you about you.  Then you get to say, “Oh, me?  I’m in real estate,” or, “I write novels.”  Are they interested?  They’ll probably say so.  If not, ask them something else.

Here’s a secret about people; they tend to be curious.  And then tend to be responsive to genuine friendliness.  Note the use of “genuine.”  That means being friendly within the local conventions of politeness and approachability.  In Seattle that means that public, open weeping in tea shops is common enough that I have my favorites ranked by how often it happens, but you do not ever talk to somebody on the bus or street corner.  The check out clerk at the grocery store?  Might not want to talk.  Don’t make them.  They will remember you if you force them into conversation.  You will never get them to your storefront.

Yes, if you pay for your groceries and walk away without successfully starting a conversation, you have failed in getting them to your storefront.  What you’ve also done is preserve them as a future contact you can try again another time.  Maybe they’ll be more chatty next week.  Or maybe they’re shy and once you’re more familiar they’ll be more willing.  Or maybe they’ll never ever give you the time of day, but if you keep hard selling they’ll warn their co-workers about you and now nobody at the grocery store is going to your store front.  Also, now everybody at the grocery store thinks you’re a dick.  You don’t want that.  I’m friendly with the folk at my grocery store.  They’ve asked me to please do them the favor of taking peppers without paying for them.

Be the guy the grocery store wants stealing peppers from them.

When on my way to a party I didn’t want to go to (remember: show up) I once commented to a companion that it would be successful if I handed out one business card.  “That’s easy,” they said, imagining I could throw a card at the first person I saw and then flee.

“Nope,” I replied.  “I never even pull out my business cards unless somebody asks me for one.”

I have different business cards for the different careers.  I keep a few of each on me.  You’d be surprised how often an event meant for one career becomes an opportunity for a different one.

It’s not that you aren’t ever selling anything in the space that is “everywhere else.”  It’s that what you’re selling is you.  It doesn’t matter whether the person you’re talking to right that moment immediately requests a trip to a store front.  If you think it does, you’re committing the crime of being the desperate salesman.  It’s a fatal crime.  Play the long game.  The person you’re talking to is a full person who knows lots of people and even if they aren’t a viable prospect for you, they could be a source of viable prospects.  You have to be worth it to them, though.

Pushy sales people might be quick results, but they’re burning their long tail.  Modern sales environments require customer satisfaction, personal referrals, and repeat business.  The best thing you can do for your third transaction out with a client is make sure they were happy and deliberate when they wound up in your storefront.  You can repair some of the damage once they’re there, but there’s only so much you can do with that space and time; don’t constrain your opportunities by wasting it on fixing something that wouldn’t have broken if you had more patience.

As a final note, I highly recommend that you study pick-up artistry.  Then test everything you’re thinking of doing against their techniques.  If it’s something a pickup artist would nod sagely about and approve of, skip it.  The premise of pickup artistry is that you don’t want repeat business.  Consequently, their manuals are great catalogs of techniques designed to avoid it.

My Pronouns/Titles Etc.

I recently ran across a reminder that it’s helpful even when straight/cis people identify their preferences because it normalizes the practice which then makes it easier for people who have a harder time with expressing their own preferences.  Then it occurred to me that while I’m not quiet about my preferences, if you don’t know me in person there’s not really any way to know what my preferences are.  So, here they are.

My preferred pronouns are she/her.  Also acceptable: She/Her, they, They.

Miss is my preferred title. I’m not married or permanently committed, have no intention of becoming so, and I like that English lets me signal that.  Ms is acceptable.  Mrs. is slightly vexing when directed at me.

That’s for English.  I vastly prefer Señora to Señorita, possibly because I was Señorita for the first time when I was 13 and knew nothing more than how to say “blue” and count to ten.  I am significantly older/more mature than that person, and her title doesn’t feel right.  That said, I’m not married, so Señorita is technically correct and I’m not going to be upset if that’s what gets used. (Also, I have a policy of not getting upset with the native speakers of languages I’m not a native speaker of over how they use their language at me)

Ma’am and Miss are interchangeable to me.

I will be Queen of the world, not King.  I will be God of the universe, not Goddess.  I am sometimes a civilized creature, but never a lady. Or a gentleman.  When I grow up and become Anander Miaanai, I will be Lord of the Radch.  I’m the Emperor, or the Imperatrix.

I am never, ever a girl.  Or a boy. I was a child, but have thankfully escaped that state.

I am female. Also, scary, spiteful, tired, organized, smug, stubborn, reasonable, and pedantic. The second list is significantly more important.

I am a woman, but only if we must make that salient and, really, I’d rather identify as God-Emperor of the Universe and change the conversation to something interesting, like books.

I’m also straight and polyamorous.  I don’t have boyfriends. Or a husband. I’m un-fond of “significant others.”  I have acquaintances, buddies, pals, friends, good friends, very good friends, best friends, family, and my sister.  You should feel free to refer to any of these people as “Anaea’s [fill in term from previous list]” should you need to define a person based on my relationship with them.  That list is not as hierarchical as it looks and categories are not exclusive.  I will tell you whether I’m sleeping with somebody if you ask. It’s also none of your business unless you’re a person I’m sleeping with.

Also, don’t assume that just because I’m straight that anyone I’m sleeping with identifies as male.  My relationship with an individual does not constrain that individual’s presentation to the rest of the world.

I think that covers everything. Let me know if I missed something and I’ll clarify.

The War on Christmas

The War on Christmas is real, and I am its commanding general.

The move to Seattle was cover for establishing a new forward base to solidify our gains from last year’s success.  The battle has been a long one, but as we get closer to our final target at the north pole, our morale builds and our dedication remains steadfast.

Soon, not this year, but soon, I’ll have that cheery, terrifying head on a pike and display it for all the world to see, and feel safe.  No more constant surveillance, no more annual invasion, no more enforcement of a moral code formulated by the jolly, the optimistic, the naive.

I will drink Santa’s blood and rejoice.  Only then will I have the victory I crave.

“Do you ever have second thoughts?” asked my second in command, Captain-general Morse.

“Never!” I answered, my fist striking the air, my lips curling in a snarl of defiance.

“But, Christmas.  Peace on Earth, good will to men.”

“That’s the problem.  Peace bores me, and the good will thing is a lie.  Christmas is about stress, posturing, and telling other people to be cheerful or else.”

“I thought it was about American consumerism.”

“That too, and it’s spreading to infect other holidays.  It may already be too late to save my precious Halloween.”  At this I shed one, single tear out the corner of my right eye.  Halloween!  My precious, sacrosanct holiday of horror and darkness, mortality and despair.  They make inflatable lawn ornaments for you now and you, too pure and naive to defend yourself, have succumbed.

I rattled my saber, a gift from my sister on the occasion of her wedding, and issued the order for our attack.  At my command, hundreds of dog sleds bearing soldiers of the anti-yule began our charge, bearing down on an encampment of the Claus’s henchmen, his patsy scouts sent out to gather materials and supplies to support his ongoing campaign of terror and oppression.  The first moments of the engagement were bloody, with lives lost on both sides.  More on theirs.  I am a careful general, and I don’t spend my soldier’s lives frivolously.  There are so few of us left who can hold out against our pernicious foe.

Just as our victory appeared certain, reinforcements for the enemy appeared on the hill, their horns blaring across the night with the soul-chillingly mockery of triumph that is the enemy’s trademark.  A moment later I felt the searing punch of a knife sliding between my ribs.  Captain-General Morse had betrayed me.

“Why?” I gasped.

“They promised me a new iPhone.  And I really like gingerbread.”

As I lay here in the Canadian snow, my body heat leaving my body on a rush of blood, I accept that this year brings defeat.  But not final defeat.  We can never be permanently defeated.  Someday I will have the Claus man’s head, and I will free you all.

Someday.

The Rhetoric of N.K. Jemisin’s Wiscon Guest of Honor Speech

It’s no secret that I’m a huge, giant, slobbery fan of N.K. Jemisin.  I’m such a huge fan that I usually get about two sentences in to describing how much I like everything she does and want more from her before a voice that sounds distressingly like Neil Gaiman pops up in the back of my head and goes, “Now, now.  Nora Jemisin is not your bitch.”  And then I whine at the voice and go, “But she’s so good!  Surely I’m entitled to demand more of the good stuff from her.”  The voice is so very polite, and so endearingly English that I bite my tongue and whoever I was talking to wonders why I started stuttering mid-sentence. This is a thing I share so you can guess at some of what was going on in my brain when I approached her the day after her guest of honor speech to ask whether she’d be okay with me analyzing her speech at the rhetorical level.  It was important to me that I ask since 1) Analyzing the rhetoric could be seen as being dismissive of the very important and worthy content 2) I know enough writers to know they trend toward neurosis and having somebody examine how their sausage is made could in some small way contribute to her writing or arguing less which is the opposite of what I’d want and 3) It’s polite and given that she was right there, was easy to do. Things I learned from asking her if she’d mind: 1) No, she doesn’t mind 2) It’s really hard to communicate coherently when you’re having loud arguments with phantom Neil Gaiman in your brain about where the line between gushing fangirl and creepy-entitled-fan is and 3) She probably actually has no idea that I’m the person who wrote a review of her book that consisted mostly of, “I want to eat her liver.”  I’m pretty sure I’m still going to have to answer for that someday. At any rate, I have her blessing, and the rhetoric in that speech is very cool, so here goes the analysis.  The whole speech is here, and you should go there to read it.  I’m going to quote it here extensively, but it’s better if you go read the whole thing on its own, first.

I’m tempted to just stop there, drop the mic, and walk offstage, point made. Chip’s a hard act to follow.

This is the first moment of rhetorical greatness in the speech.  One, it’s a really evocative image.  She doesn’t have to literally walk of the stage to borrow the impact of doing just that, which nicely lures the audience in.  We’re invested in listening to what she says from this point, because she didn’t just walk away, point made.  She’s taking the time to share more, and we want to hear what it is.  But it’s also very generous to the audience, crediting them with knowing and understanding exactly why should could just stop there and walk off.  It’s a signal that she’s assuming we’re peers.  The subtext is very “Friends, Romans, Countrymen,” in nature.  Given where the speech goes, building this relationship with the audience is critical.

Like Chip said, this stuff has always been here. It’s just more intense, and more violent, now that the bigots feel threatened.

And it is still here. I’ve come to realize just how premature I was in calling for a reconciliation in the SFF genres last year, when I gave my Guest of Honor speech at the 9th Continuum convention in Australia.

There’s a ton going on here.  One, we’re tying the current situation back to the past, while invoking the authority of somebody external.  That gives legitimacy to the points we’re making about the current situation while bolstering the authority of the peopple we’re citing.  Then we follow that bolstering of authority up with a confession of error.  This is really neat because, set up this way, admitting the error becomes a means of reclaiming a position of strength in the rhetorical space.  You’re swapping out the current, weak position for a new one which as of this moment us unknown but untainted and therefore potentially stronger.  This is what many bad apologies try to do, and they fail becuase that’s the wrong place for this technique.  In a badass call-to-arms, however, it’s great, especially since minor admissions of error are humanizing and endearing, making the speech-giver somebody the crowd is more inclined to follow.

During the month or so that it took SFWA to figure out what it wanted to do with this guy, a SFWA officer sat on the formal complaint I’d submitted because she thought I had “sent it in anger” and that I might not be aware of the consequences of sending something like that to the Board.

The whole paragraph is a beautiful bit of summary, letting the audience know context and history in case they don’t with enough commentary that it’s not a straight-up “As you know, Bob.”  That’s important since it would undermine the assumption of peer-ness established early on and risk being patronizing.  It also does a fantastic job of drawing clear lines between the us and them.  I call out this specific sentence from the whole paragraph because it strikes me as the meatiest.  Before this sentence, the facts could be read as ones of the system working: bigot misbehaves, bigot gets punished, why are y’all upset?  This line torpedoes that possible interpretation while also drawing attention to the fact that while she’s not patronizing us, they patronized her rather ferociously.  The ironic tone taken in the whole paragraph gives “sent it in anger” an extra bite.  Of course she sent it in anger – she’s angry, and behavior like this is exactly why.  That extra bit isn’t something an audience is likely to be consciously aware of, but it gives some extra depth and stimulus for them to hang on to and keeps them engaged and listening.

But I suspect every person in this room who isn’t a straight white male has been on the receiving end of something like this — aggressions micro and macro. Concerted campaigns of “you don’t belong here”.

This is straight-up “my problems are your problems, and your problems are my problems.”  Peer-group building.  “Us” reinforcement.  She just co-opted everybody who isn’t a straight white male into her cause.  The “aggressions micor and macro” part is especially critical since it gives permission to everybody who hasn’t received death and rape threats to feel like they belong in that group.  Me, I was doing the, “Er, not really?” until that line.  After that line, well, all the stories I could share are fundamentally boring, but there are plenty.

(Incidentally: Mr. Various Diseases, Mr. Civility, and Misters and Misses Free Speech At All Costs, if you represent the civilization to which I’m supposed to aspire then I am all savage, and damned proud of it. You may collectively kiss my black ass.)

And here, gentlefolk, is the line where I went, “Oh hells yes, am I need to go blog the rhetoric in this speech RIGHT THIS VERy SECOND.”  This line is brilliance laced with crack.

1) It reclaims rhetoric used against her, turns it around, and makes it a bludgeon for counter-attack. Suddenly “half-savage” is so mincing and weak.  It’s a variant on the trick used with the admission of error earlier, but with an added layer of pulling the rung out from under the “them.”  Intead of switching positions from weak to strong, it recharacterizes the position she’s in.

2) You-my constructions reinforce the us-them dynamic she’s building.  Not all speeches need an us-them dynamic, but all calls-to-arms do, and the success of said call depends on how well the lines around us and them are drawn.

3) “Kiss my black ass,” is a cultural cliche.  Everybody, including Hollywood, knows that a mouthy, defiant black American is willing to whip out this particular invitation as needed.  It’s an ethnic middle finger.  Using it here reinforces the power of “all savage.”  It’s an assertion of the ethnic and racial tones, a claiming of ownership over them, and an aggressive declaration that they are, in fact, a strength.  And since she’s drawn her us-them lines very effectively up to here, everybody in the room gets to share in the power of that assertion, whether or not they’re in posession of a black ass to be kissed.

(I don’t even need to name a specific example of this; it’s happened too often, to too many people.)

Nice reinforcement of us-them.  It gives the audience permission to not know exactly what she’s talking about after she’s gone through a long list of things that anybody following closely could tie to this or that specific event.  It’s okay that you aren’t following closely – it’s ubiquitous, we all  know that, we’re a team, let’s move along.

Yeine, the protagonist of THE HUNDRED THOUSAND KINGDOMS, was almost a white man because I listened to some of what these people were saying.

The objective brilliance of this particular line is questionable, but it gut-punched me.  That would have ruined that book, and the thought that it nearly happened fills me with a sort of existential terror that has brain-Gaiman sighing in polite exasperation.  I suspect anybody who loves this book correctly, that is to say the way I love this book, would feel the same way.  Anybody else, this is a wasted line.  But her audience was a convention where she was Guest of Honor – it’s a pretty safe place to make a gamble like this.

For the first time in my life I was diagnosed with high blood pressure earlier this year. It’s back down to normal, now, but bigotry kills, you know.

Our second admission of weakness, a pause in the rising rhetoric of power-claiming.  We’re humanizing again, putting an intimate, tangible face on the violence and consequences of the violence referenced in summary and abstraction so far.  We’re all in this together, we’re all cheering for our speech giver, and look at the sacrifices she’s already made, the personal, specific damage already wrought.  This is critical, because it sets up the need for assistance that justifies the call to arms.

So. If they think we are a threat? Let’s give them a threat. They want to call us savages? Let’s show them exactly what that means.

And from here on we’re in a tumbling, climactic, super-empowering call-to-arms.  There’s no weakness here.  It’s all assertion and instruction. It’s a claim of ability supported by concrete guidelines for how to execute it.  This is where she cashes in on the setup of the earlier speech.  This is where she closes the loops she openened earlier, ties up her loose ends, justifies staying on the stage even though she could have just dropped the mic and walked away.

Fucking fight.

Short, sweet, to the point.  Yes, ma’am.

Review: Under the Skin

I saw this over the weekend, knowing nothing before walking in other than that it had Scarlett Johansen and wasn’t the one of her with the trailer in front of Captain America.  (Man did that movie look good until they explained the premise).  So when it opened with an extended sequence of staring into a light that slowly morphed into an eye I started surprised, then immediately adjusted to “Oh, I’m in an art movie,” mode.  Thanks gratuitous and heavy-handed light-eye imagery!

If you’re looking for a successful attack on traditional story telling technique in film, or a movie carried almost entirely by its images and performances, this is your thing.  It was very well done, and I’m very inclined to pick up the book it was based on, if only to see how that story got told in prose.  (I still haven’t looked up anything about the movie, so all I know about the alleged premise is what the people I went with explained over dinner after)

I spent a good while after the movie pondering it, and did a lot of listening to the six other people I saw it with talk about it – what they liked, what they didn’t like – and by the time I’d polished off the delightful walnut-gorgonzola-cranberry salad concoction I had for dinner, I’d come to a very solid conclusion: It was a really well done movie I did not like at all.

The brilliance of the movie is that it’s very easy to construct a narrative of what happened, and seven people who all saw it can then proceed to argue about what the actual narrative was without any of them being conclusively wrong or right.  I love successful narratives that require their audiences to do some of the heavy lifting.  But what isn’t debatable about what happened are the following: (I’m about to spoiler nearly everything that can be spoilered about the movie)

1) Scarlett Johanson’s character starts of as a non-human, gender-role swapped predator, driving around and picking men without family or connections who are out walking alone at night

2) This ends badly for the men

3) She decides to stop doing the predator thing after encountering a deformed man who is the opposite of the skeevy guys she’s been encountering all film.

4) Experiments with being “normal” or “more human” lead her to spend some time with a genuinely nice guy, but all fail and lead to her freaking out and running away.

5) A lumberjack tries to rape her, realizes she’s not human, then sets her on fire.

6) The end.

Uhm.

It’s possible I’ve never said this before, but I am completely dissatisfied with that unhappy ending.  At the metaphorical/thematic level, it’s asserting that we (maybe just women, maybe everybody) have a choice between being a predator, or being raped and set on fire, a proposition I could spend a great many words taking issue with. At the more concrete, literal level, it seems to be claiming that a creature capable of single-handedly luring men to their demise with phenomenal consistency can’t handle a randy lumberjack and just gets abused and burned alive? The only other woman in the entire movie drowns while trying to rescue her dog, so if it’s trying to present the thematic content as something to then discuss and criticize, the discussion and criticism is completely absent.

I mean, I’m all for setting people on fire as a means of problem solving, especially plot problems, and cinders are a great end point for character development. But this movie didn’t earn it.

This is a Very Silly Post

You might all recall that last March, I cut my hair.  It was waist length and straight.  It had gotten thin and ratty looking, so I hacked it off to just above my shoulders.

Four-year-old Anaea knew she wanted super long Princess Leia hair, but she also wanted hair that wasn’t flat, limp, and lifeless.  She had the latter, and set to acquiring the former.  It was still flat, limp, and lifeless two years later, and she still really wanted curly hair.  So her grandmother, always indulgent when it comes to personal vanity, took her to get a perm.  The next two years feature six perms, each with a more aggressive hair cut/layering.  The perms just wouldn’t stay.  Then came the point where the shortest layers were so short they were functionally bangs, and fell into eight-year-old Anaea’s eyes.  Child Anaea wasn’t having it (she’d taken over decisions about her hair precisely to exorcise the tyrrany of bangs from her life) and vowed she’d rather have straight hair, if it could be long and compliant, than curly hair if it meant all this constant work and annoyance.  And that was the end of the perming.

Not, however, of the curls.  That last perm fell almost immediately into a relaxed wave.  A relaxed wave that never went away.  Even when the whole head of hair went properly waist length again, it wasn’t quite perfectly straight.  And the short pieces, oh dear.  Yup.  Two years of perming had somehow granted Anaea’s childhood wish – she had curly hair.

Which brings us to March, when I’ve got to face the fact of curly hair as it applies to me for the very first time.  Twenty-four years after taking charge of my hair, and I haven’t got the first clue how to deal with it.  It’s short.  If I brush it, I look like the “Before” image from an early nineties hair gel commercial.  If I don’t brush it, or comb it, or do something, I look like got out of bed, shrugged, and gave up.  (Because I did)  I’ve had more bad hair days since March than I had in my entire life up to that point.  I used to love my hair.  Now?  We hates it, precious.

It’s very weird for me to hate my hair.  Not just because it’s a change of state, but because it’s weird for me to think about my hair more than “Oh look, the hallway is covered in my shedding again.”  My hair has gone from a thing I spent maybe two minutes of total thought on in a given day to something constantly coming to my attention.  Which days are the ones I need it to look best, and how can I time washing it to make those days line up with it?  If it’ll be too soon to wash it, do I need to get up early enough that fumbling my way into learning a French Twist or other short-hair-up-do is going to be beyond me?  Why does that guy have long, gorgeous hair like mine was when I can’t is there no justice in the world I hate everything and am going to stare like a creep now!

Something else I’ve learned?  I’m not the only person to feel persecuted by their curly hair.  In fact, as far as I can tell, it’s normal for curly-haired people to struggle this way. At WisCon I was doing the, “I’m obsessively in hate with my hair, and disturbed that I’m hung up on something as shallow as my hair to be in obsessive hate with,” and people were coming out of the woodwork to be supportive, give advice, teach me how to navigate the world as a curly-headed individual.

I own product, now.  Six years ago I didn’t even condition my hair.  I now own three kinds of conditioner.  And a special towel. And have been told that if I want my hair to look good, I need to not let people touch it anymore, ever, no matter how much I like getting head scritches.  My future life is going to be a constant balancing act between my desire to look like a put-together grown up, and to let people I like touch my head.  A constant worry that riding in the car with the windows down means I’ll have unmanageable frizz, that if the weather turns I’ll need to do my hair again part way through the day, and that people now ask me stupid, inane questions about my hair all the fricken time because they don’t have better topics for small talk and now it’s attention-grabby and prominent.

I’ve had a revelation, people.  A revelation that I, through all my years of long straight hair, have been appropriating straight privilege, closeting my true curly self, and blindly ignoring the struggles of people from other hair types.  Me, the hater of closets, a closet case so deep she didn’t even realize closeting was occurring. And, like all great, classic hypocrites, I would crawl right back into my closet in a second if it were feasible.

I’m learning some lessons here.

Like I said, this is a silly post.

It’s still true.

That Kerry Speech from Monday

I’m a sucker for good rhetoric and hot damn is it chock full of it.  So full of it that I’m going to pull it apart just to point at the pretty bits and nit-pick some.  If you don’t care – and if you’re interested writing, or politics, or rhetoric then I think you might – go ahead and skip this.  There will be pretty pictures of food tomorrow.

I’m going to quote the whole speech here, in chunks, with commentary interspersed.  I’m lifting the transcript from here.

Well, for the last several days, President Obama and his entire national security team have been reviewing the situation in Syria. And today, I want to provide an update on our efforts as we consider our response to the use of chemical weapons.

I like the Well…And construction going on here.  It’s a little casual without being dismissive.  We’re throwing down a bit of context, then diving right into the point.  It’s not a particularly graceful opening.  It certainly isn’t dramatic.  But it’s approachable and it’s direct.  Given what follows, it serves.

What we saw in Syria last week should shock the conscience of the world. It defies any code of morality.

And here we launch the first of our dramatic punches for the speech.  We’ve dropped “conscience” and “morality” into the field.  Watch these words; they’re thematic.  It also takes an extreme, uncompromising stance while staking that ground as the ground of the just and the good.  These two sentences are the foundation of the speech.

Let me be clear: The indiscriminate slaughter of civilians, the killing of women and children and innocent bystanders by chemical weapons is a moral obscenity.

This was the line that caught my ear originally and had me wanting to respond to the speech.  I’m really, really tired of the victimization of women in particular being a marked thing.  Women are not equivalent to children.  Violence against women is not the moral equivalent of violence against children.  Not in the world I’ve decided I live in.  Women have the same agency, responsibility, and consequent risk in day to day life as men.  This speech would have been much better if instead it were “the killing of children and innocent bystanders.”  Dropping women in there is a cheap rhetorical punch resting on the foundations of cultural baggage which is easily invoked, but not significantly more powerful than the alternative of saying what you actually mean, i.e. people who do not deserve to be victims are being victimized.

By any standard, it is inexcusable and — despite the excuses and equivocations that some have manufactured — it is undeniable.

 

The meaning of this attack goes beyond the conflict in Syria itself, and that conflict has already brought so much terrible suffering. This is about the large-scale, indiscriminate use of weapons that the civilized world long ago decided must never be used at all, a conviction shared even by countries that agree on little else.

There’s some fantastic us vs them and othering going on here.  “Civilized world” indeed.  This is a thematic throwback to the earlier invocation of morality, and draws a fantastically clear line in the sand.  Now it’s not just a vague good people vs bad people, but there’s imagery attached.  We’re playing off the fact that all most Americans know about Syria is that it’s in the Middle East, and therefore functionally third world (except for the very rich people who jack up our oil prices).  He doesn’t have to say it, it’s lurking lusciously in the subtext – there are barbarians at the gates.  Even the Russians have to agree with the sentiment, the last line there says.

There is a clear reason that the world has banned entirely the use of chemical weapons. There is a reason the international community has set a clear standard and why many countries have taken major steps to eradicate these weapons. There is a reason why President Obama has made it such a priority to stop the proliferation of these weapons and lock them down where they do exist. There is a reason why President Obama has made clear to the Assad regime that this international norm cannot be violated without consequences.

 

And there is a reason why, no matter what you believe about Syria, all peoples and all nations who believe in the cause of our common humanity must stand up to assure that there is accountability for the use of chemical weapons so that it never happens again.

I’m partial to constructions that use repetition to built to a point, and this is a well executed example of that technique.  A lot of ground gets developed here.  We invoke “international community” to underline and support the us vs them “civilized world” imagery carved out earlier.  We use that foundation to point at “us” as having a strong leader in a morally unassailable position.  And we end on a fabulously disingenuous “we all agree the perpetrators must be punished.”  Disingenuous because after building up the just now explicitly stated chemical weapons as unquestionably reprehensible, it handwaves past the “there are allegedly rational parties who disagree with us about the facts of the situation,” to assert an unassailable truth, that the people who did the very bad thing must be punished.

There are two audiences for this speech: the American people who couldn’t really care less about some people in a country they know nothing about having some fatal breathing problems, and the international community, significant chunks of whom are looking at American’s pointing at the Middle East and shrieking, “Bad weapons, must war!” and feeling deja vu.  This is the first part of the speech that seems to explicitly acknowledge the second audience.  The disagreements are gently referenced earlier, but this is a rhetorical somersault done to say, basically, that even if you don’t agree with us you have to be on our side because the facts of crime and criminal are indisputable.  We’ll figure out where the apply to labels of those facts later.

Last night, after speaking with foreign ministers from around the world

“I’m coalition building.”

about the gravity of this situation, I went back and I watched the videos, the videos that anybody can watch in the social media, and I watched them one more gut-wrenching time.

This is transparent and if you want to see the evidence that I’m right, go check out your friendly youtube.  Unlike the last time we were asking the world for a war in the Middle East when we just claimed, “Intelligence,” and told you to trust us.  Also, I am a moral and upright figure because I have deep emotional responses to the horrible things I’m responding to.  There’s a lot to unpack in the fact that Kerry can use that rhetorical technique – not everybody can without damaging their own credibility instead.

It is really hard to express in words the human suffering that they lay out before us.

 

As a father, I can’t get the image out of my head of a man who held up his dead child, wailing, while chaos swirled around him, the images of entire families dead in their beds without a drop of blood or even a visible wound, bodies contorting in spasms, human suffering that we can never ignore or forget.

I don’t see a woman in his position using this technique at all.  For one, since women are supposed to be protective of children, a woman’s response to this doesn’t carry the same weight as that of a presumably more objective man.  And on the second hand, she’d be inviting accusations that she’s letting her woman-ness lead her to an emotional response and invite the question of whether she’s overreacting or jumping to conclusions.  Yet, this is an extremely powerful bit of rhetoric.  It might be a net advantage even with the baggage of a female speaker, but that baggage is definitely something to think about.  You might have to completely reconstruct the speech to make it work without resting on this bit of imagery.

Anyone who could claim that an attack of this staggering scale could be contrived or fabricated needs to check their conscience and their own moral compass. What is before us today is real, and it is compelling.

This was where I completely lost it decided that I definitely had to dissect the speech.  Because this is such empty, crass, manipulative rhetoric that even though I’m inclined to agree with Kerry on the facts of the situation, it made me question whether I should.  (I’m a contrarian.  The best way to get me to change my mind is have somebody I don’t like agree with me)  But seriously.  He just said that this is so bad that any explanation of the facts not his is morally reprehensible.  No facts.  No evidence.  Just a, “How can you question my interpretation now that I’ve pointed out that there are barbarians and bad things?  Barbarians and bad things go together, duh.”  It’s an assertion that he’s right because the stakes are too high for him to be wrong.  It’s a demand for faith.  It’s icky, and it diminishes his entire case.

So I also want to underscore that while investigators are gathering additional evidence on the ground, our understanding of what has already happened in Syria is grounded in facts, informed by conscience, and guided by common sense.

And here I start breaking out in hives a bit.  We breeze right past an admission that there are still facts to be gathered, and then cite conscience and common sense as the source of our certainty.  It’s rhetorically gorgeous, and substantively equivalent to Bush’s “gut” feelings.

The reported number of victims, the reported symptoms of those who were killed or injured, the firsthand accounts from humanitarian organizations on the ground, like Doctors Without Borders and the Syria Human Rights Commission, these all strongly indicate that everything these images are already screaming at us is real, that chemical weapons were used in Syria. Moreover, we know that the Syrian regime maintains custody of these chemical weapons. We know that the Syrian regime has the capacity to do this with rockets. We know that the regime has been determined to clear the opposition from those very places where the attacks took place. And with our own eyes, we have all of us become witnesses.

And this is where he starts making me feel better.  We cite actual sources of evidence.  We cite means and motive for the people we’re accusing. And we wrap it up with a reaffirmation of the “us” built earlier, and an assertion of responsibility.  We’re not just “us” but involved, because we’ve seen what “them” did.

We have additional information about this attack, and that information is being compiled and reviewed together with our partners, and we will provide that information in the days ahead. Our sense of basic humanity is offended not only by this cowardly crime, but also by the cynical attempt to cover it up.

I always treat “more facts coming later,” from anything too large for me to offend it with a spitball as something I’ll believe when I see because, as rhetoric, it’s tact fantastic for getting your buy-in before it’s been earned.  The second sentence is just more affirmation of the rhetorical imagery we’ve already established.  Though as a cynic, I’d argue that the attempt to cover it up was more optimistic than cynical – it was such a futile effort that much cleverer misdirection or a serious hope about the incompetence of the third parties nearby has to be driving it.

At every turn, the Syrian regime has failed to cooperate with the U.N. investigation, using it only to stall and to stymie the important effort to bring to light what happened in Damascus in the dead of night. And as Ban Ki-moon said last week, the U.N. investigation will not determine who used these chemical weapons, only whether such weapons were used, a judgment that is already clear to the world.

Maybe it’s the fledgling dictator buried not so deep inside me, but I’d probably refuse to cooperate with a U.N. investigation, too.  That makes it hard for me to look at refusals to cooperate as signs of bad behavior.  This paragraph winds up boiling down to a nice dig at the U.N. and not much else.  It’s a preliminary thrust toward justifying action without U.N. approval.

I spoke on Thursday with Syrian Foreign Minister Muallem, and I made it very clear to him that if the regime, as he argued, had nothing to hide, then their response should be immediate, immediate transparency, immediate access, not shelling. Their response needed to be unrestricted and immediate access. Failure to permit that, I told him, would tell its own story.

Instead, for five days, the Syrian regime refused to allow the U.N. investigators access to the site of the attack that would allegedly exonerate them. Instead, it attacked the area further, shelling it and systemically destroying evidence. That is not the behavior of a government that has nothing to hide. That is not the action of a regime eager to prove to the world that it had not used chemical weapons.

In fact, the regime’s belated decision to allow access is too late, and it’s too late to be credible. Today’s reports of an attack on the U.N. investigators — together with the continued shelling of these very neighborhoods — only further weakens the regime’s credibility.

Again, we get into dropping reassuring facts after staking out rhetorical ground that leaves me skeptical.  We’re also establishing the “Hey, we tried to work with them, but they just wouldn’t,” defense while undermining Syria’s potential attempts to do the same.

At President Obama’s direction, I’ve spent many hours over the last few days on the phone with foreign ministers and other leaders. The administration is actively consulting with members of Congress, and we will continue to have these conversations in the days ahead. President Obama has also been in close touch with leaders of our key allies, and the president will be making an informed decision about how to respond to this indiscriminate use of chemical weapons.

Look out, we’re coalition building.

But make no mistake: President Obama believes there must be accountability for those who would use the world’s most heinous weapons against the world’s most vulnerable people. Nothing today is more serious, and nothing is receiving more serious scrutiny.

We don’t know what we’re doing yet, but we’re definitely doing something, and it’s definitely not going to be weak, so watch out.  Also, we’re shining knights against unquestionably bad people.

Thank you.

No, thank you.  I don’t often stop in my tracks while cooking dinner to make a note that rhetoric was worth commentating upon.  I need more good rhetoric in my life.

Oh, how cute! Not

I’ve noticed a thing recently and I’m going to ramble about it for a bit.  It is this: My relationship with cute is a little bit broken.

I mean specifically with cute as applied to me more than the more general cuteness – having a broken relationship with cute things in the world at large is normal enough for misanthropic people like me as to be cliche.  I’m thinking more specifically about my response when somebody calls me cute.  This is a thing that happens, and it throws me off a bit every time, even when it’s from somebody I’ve known for a long time.

When it’s a stranger, say somebody messaging me on OKC, my immediate response is to judge the person harshly.  Very harshly.  If the first comment-worthy thing you notice about me is my alleged cuteness, you’re paying attention to the wrong things on such a fundamental level I really, really have no interest in continuing to interact with you.  You’ve functionally ceased to be a worthwhile person to me.  Depending on circumstances, I might notify you that you’ve failed.

“You’re cute.  Want to get drinks some time?”

“No.”

“…that was…direct.”

I might also just wrap up the conversation, walk away, and forget about you completely.  You’ll never know I stopped thinking of you as human because, hey, lots of things aren’t human.  I don’t regularly tell my desk lamp it’s just an object to me, either.

But I don’t react well when it’s from friends or people I’ve known for a long time, either.  It’s a compliment, sure, and they mean well, (or they’re teasing me like the malicious bastards my friends tend to be.  It’s my fault for loving malicious bastards) but I still have to go through the, “They said a nice thing to you, you should respond in a gracious and accepting way, no really, stop staring blankly at them like they stopped speaking English.”

The problem, I’ve figure out, is this: Cute is not on my mental list of personal features/qualities.  I’m smart, sure.  Literate.  Efficient.  Prone to unapologetic assholery.  Helpful.  Sarcastic.  Occasionally witty.  Hilarious at karaoke.  And when we get around to listing physical features, I’ve got big tits, a waist, nice fingernails, okay hair, decent facial features, am visibly healthy, and look morbidly obese when on the west coast.  There is no overall assessment of that feature set filed away on in my mental checklist because I don’t care.  It hasn’t occurred to my mental inventory that I should tag that feature set with an evaluation.  So when somebody does apply a tag to it, it triggers a “The field you’re trying to fill in doesn’t exist,” warning.  You’ve caused my mental processes to throw an error.

Realizing this helped me suss out my discomfort with something else, i.e. a couple mentions I’ve seen in places listing me as a “female writer to note” or something similar.  When they’ve popped up my response has been remarkably similar to when friends call me cute, namely, “Hey, that’s a good thing, don’t nit-pick the packaging.  If you aren’t going to be gracious then Shut. Up.”  Making lists of notable female anything is problematic (promotes ghettoization of females, preventing them from becoming unmarked re the thing), but reliably less problematic than the alternative (outright obscurity for the females).  So, sure, I could go off on a tear about how I don’t want to be shoved in a ghetto with the wimmenz, but that’s not actually what’s bugged me about it.

What bugs me as that while “female” does make the list of features in my mental representation of myself, it’s so far down the list, so far below writer, Realtor, geek, bird-lover, misanthrope…hell, it’s below home owner.  I think being female is about as important to my identity as the fact that the first chapter book I ever read by myself was Cam Jansen: The Mystery at the Haunted House.  It’s true.  It has a massive influence on important factors in my life (I have a terrible soft spot for mysteries), I wouldn’t change it, but it’s not exactly relevant to most things, now is it?

I share this mostly because since figuring these things out, they’ve bothered me less.  Instead of a nebulous “I’m having complicated, largely negative, largely inappropriate responses to this thing,” response I can just go, “Yup, you’ve tripped an error.  This error is not one actually indicating a problem I care about.  Move along.”  It’s an improvement.  And it’s saved me a whole lot of ranting that would have gotten complicated and nuanced and then fallen apart into a mess of pointing at things and being unhappy because they weren’t perfect, even though they were trying.  Maybe I’m not the only one this sort of thing is happening to.