Dyepot, Teapot

The jewelry company ads that run heavily around Christmas and Valentine’s Day are very, very wrong. The correct way to demonstrate that you think I am the coolest and most wonderful person ever is not to buy me a diamond. Diamonds are icky. No, a much better choice is to get me something both pretty and useful. Like an iPod. And a Leatherman. (I have the best boyfriend ever.)

I’m surprised to discover that I use the Notes application as much as I use the music player. This thing makes a pretty decent eBook reader. Comfortable screen, convenient interface… Not being able to bookmark where I am in a set of files is a little annoying, but doesn’t actually get in the way as much as you might expect. And it’s a good way to take advantage of the small number of recent sf novels available under Creative Commons licenses.

But now, on to the other topic. While showering a few minutes ago, I had the idea that it would be really neat to start a journal club for people like me (in this case, people who miss all the academic reading and discussion from college but have not yet made their way to graduate school. But I’d welcome grad students and advanced degree holders who just want more). I’m imagining it as a biweekly or monthly blog event, like cat blogging Fridays or all those food blog events. People would take turns selecting and presenting an article on their own blog, and then all the other participants could do their own posts with their own discussion and comments. With any luck, yet more comments on various blogs would ensue.

The only tricky part is making sure that all articles are either sufficiently accessible to people outside the particular field, or at least that they come with some sort of quick primer to help sort through the jargon. I think this would be most interesting if it were interdisciplinary. So if anyone’s interested in such a thing, let me know. Tell your friends. I think it would be a lot of fun to try.

But by the time I finished, it was already a lot warmer outside.

Protests don’t work anymore. Not rallies, not marches, not shouting and singing and sign waving. Why? It’s too easy to stop listening. We’re immune. It’s too ordinary and expected and commonplace. We can always change the channel.

Protests fail because there’s no dialogue. No conversation. No opening. Even people who were against war avoided the war protests we had in 2002, because it was self-indulgent and irrelevant and a rehash of something that worked in another era. Not now, when we can all move along elsewhere, because we’ve already heard the message and made up our minds.

I think the only thing that can work now is real conversation. About what I want and what you want and why we aren’t getting it. Partisan blathering is poisonous, it closes the ears of anyone who doesn’t already agree with that side. We don’t suffer from a lack of opinions, and I think the problem for anyone who doesn’t like the way things are going is trickier than just learning to yell louder. Personal politics are identities, and thus entrenched against the shouts of outsiders.

The news media fails here, fails to offer another kind of discussion. So much journalism is “Mr. X says this and Mr. Y says he’s wrong”, and it’s often the most critical issues that are handled this way. What we need is not only claim A and claim B, but each side’s rationale, who funds them, and what biases they may have from other personal and financial connections. Any external data is helpful, too, if it can provide context or a larger picture or specific details and outcomes. And we need real, concrete, human stories. Not exaggerated ones, no schmaltz. Writing that represents what’s happening to different people, in our country and around the world, and attempts to understand why. Because I think ultimately what we need to address can be stated as an inversion of the feminist phrase: The political is personal.

What kind of wiretap activity is so sensitive that even secret, retroactive judicial review is too restrictive? Where are the protesters, the people in the streets? If the idea that the executive government refuses to explain its actions to any court doesn’t make your skin crawl, why not? If it does, how are you able to talk about anything else?

Does the thought that it’s okay to torture even potential terrorists make you want to yell? Or cry? Both? And yet if the same happened to any nation’s soldiers or civilian bystanders, we’d be talking about war crimes and international courts. Why is “The War on Terror” not required to follow the international laws of war? Does that mean that they’ll have the right to torture the next militant homegrown cult the FBI encounters?

Lately I’ve been thinking that even Orwell might be surprised to discover this: it turns out that you don’t have to rewrite the newspapers and history books to get people to buy into the changing reasons for an amorphous war, and expanded attacks on civil liberties. You just keep telling them that everything that happens is part of your plan (even when you said you were acting for this reason and this result and something entirely different occurs). You tell them that you have their best interests at heart. That you’re only doing this to keep the country safe. And that you’ll never do these things to one of us.