When the stop-motion stops

R.I.P.

Postcards from the Zeitgeist

In the decade just passed that we keep trying to forget, while the Iraq war was at its peak, an enterprising sleazeball from Florida stumbled his way into a perfect media platform for the spirit of that age. Chris Wilson of Orlando started a website at the domain nowthatsfuckedup.com. The original business model was amateur porn-swap. The novelty came when he gave access to soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan by allowing them to crowdsource new material for the site in lieu of payment (since most of the soldiers had difficulties making card payments from their overseas posts). Instead of skanky pictures of deshabillé girlfriends, the soldiers mostly contributed warporn—gruesome pictures of maimed and mangled bodies in the warzone. Creating thereby an indigenous 21st century atrocity exhibition, in which fluorescent scenes of domestic alienation and exploitation cohabited with their geopolitical shock and awe dipoles.

As soon as the national authorities got wind of this virally expanding open wound of the national psyche, they shut it down. Images of the byproducts of American daisy cutters and door-to-door terrorist hunts are strictly verboten. The County Sheriff went after Wilson on 301 counts of obscenity, and redirected his site to their own. Much of the content can still be found at various network archives, and there have been a number of fascinating critical studies of the episode, including excellent work by Italian writer Gianluigi Ricuperati.

This morning I was surprised to see, a decade later, that the next generation of warporn has found a more mainstream home. The New York Times is now curating an online compilation of intense graphic videos from the Syrian battlezone. They includes scenes of soldiers being blown up on a rooftop after signaling their surrender, child victims of an airstrike, digs through the rubble for survivors, burning bodies, executed families, burning houses, civilians scattering under gunfire, and the above video of a captured soldier (purportedly a rebel captured by government troops) being dragged behind a car through the streets of Aleppo. You used to have to troll the darknet to find this kind of material, and you still won't find video documentation of the byproducts of GWOT 2.0 on any American corporate media site, but it's an interesting development to see the Grey Lady (d)evolve into a portal for videos from the apocalyptic present posted by adrenaline-amped DIY rebels from their blood-spattered smartphones.

It makes sense. Contemporary war correspondents trying to figure out how to be the 21st century Robert Capa naturally gravitate to the romance of this material. Times correspondent C.J. Chivers maintains an excellent blog detailing the garage-built armaments of the Syrian rebels, and the Atlantic ran a photo essay on the same subject a few weeks back. The NYT video library reveals the incipient future of the life-risking war correspondent as something more like an analog to the drone pilot—documenting the apocalyptic freedom fighter variation of the maker meme from the comfort of a home office in Williamsburg.

At the same time, the establishment media struggles to get its head around the dark side of the gun control debate, and its not-so-subtextual "blood of tyrants" charge with the idea of the right of revolt. In those days after Patriots Day and before the Slip Away II, you could hear the angst about the possibility that the perpetrators of the Boston bombings were domestic rather than jihadi. Can we imagine a reality in which something like what's going on in Syria happened inside these borders? Anderson Cooper embedded with federal troops putting down the rebellion in New Orleans? Probably not. That's a copper wire no one wants to touch. The footage would drive a lot of traffic, but there'd be nothing left to buy. We can't even approach that territory close enough to make a good Hollywood movie about an invasion of America—unless it's by extraterrestrials. But when you watch the below clip of a White House takeover from current theatrical release Olympus has Fallen out of its narrative context, you have to wonder whether all these threads are trying to converge, in some unexplored part of our collective consciousness.

A message from the Department of Hobbesian Security

Sunday's New York Times shared the news that police have changed their recommendations on how citizens should respond when faced with an "active shooter" invading our place of institutional confinement (office or school) with a video game arsenal's worth of automatic weapons. Apparently acknowledging the likelihood that the shooter will have completed his mass murder by the time the police arrive, the advice is no longer to stay passive and call 911, but to take action.

[Video" "Run. Hide. Fight. Surviving an active shooter event," Ready Houston (2012)]

The article links to "Run. Hide. Fight."—a simultaneously horrific and self-parodic video from READY Houston, the regional interagency group using Department of Homeland Security funds to figure out new ways to train you to survive the many threats they from which they are largely incapable of protecting you.

"It may feel like another day at the office," opens the grim narrator, as a big dude with shaved head, wraparound shades, black T-shirt, tactical pants, overstuffed black backpack, and an expressionless face shambles down the sidewalk in front of the glass and steel high rises. "But occasionally, life feels more like an action movie than reality."

Cut to a shot of rows of cubicle dividers, one of which is decorated with a crossed pair of American flags.

"The authorities are working hard to protect you and your family," the narrator assures you unconvincingly, as the ominous music builds up over a long pause showing people going about their productive, collegial and menial office tasks. "But sometimes, bad people do bad things."

The camera follows the shooter as he steps through the glass door marked with the no firearms sign (a very Texan touch), steps into the office lobby, and begins his attack. It's some pretty intense stuff, especially for a government education film.

The video proceeds with its hierarchy of responses designed to help you survive threats that the authorities implicitly admitted they won't be able to protect you from, because by the time the SWAT team arrives it will be all, or mostly, over.

First, try to get the hell out of there, with an emphasis on self-reliance: "Encourage others to leave with you. But don't let others slow you down with indecision." And (even though you are at the office where they have you working late to try to make your mortgage and credit card payments) they remind you to "remember what's important: you, not your stuff."

If you can't run, then try to hide. Copy the woman who pushes the photocopier to block the door, turns out the lights in the room, and silences her cell phone (just like you would do at the beginning of an action movie).

Finally, when your fortification fails, like the group who used the spindly table instead of the vending machines to block the lunchroom door, your government encourages you to do things it never otherwise asks you to do (unless it is sending you off to kill people in other countries):

"As a last resort, if your life is at risk, whether you are acting alone, or working together as a group: fight. Act with aggression. Improvise weapons. Disarm him, and commit to taking the shooter down. No matter what."

What does it tell you about the health of society that the State is now training you to take violent action on your own initiative, as the only way to protect yourself when you are trapped inside the institutional structure of your office or school (structures designed to control our primitive instincts for violence)? What a dismal Hobbesian juncture. We have an epidemic of alienated individuals showing up at office, school or mall with over-the-counter arsenals unleashed on peers objectified through the dehumanized point of view of a first-person shooter. Our institutional authorities express complete bafflement at the causes of this epidemic, unable to confront the dark truths it surely reveals about the existential condition of the American self. They can't identify and address the causes, they can't cut off the means of destruction, and they can't stop the horrific incidents until they are over. So they tell us our only way to survive will be to disable the governors they have programmed into us with years of civil socialization inside schools and offices, and rely on our primate instincts of fight or flight.

We've come a long way from "Duck and Cover," the 1951 Federal Civil Defense Administration film that taught us how to use our school desks as shields from nuclear weapons.

[Video: "Duck and Cover," Federal Civil Defense Administration (1951)]

The change is evidenced in the etymological evolution from "Civil Defense" to "Homeland Security" over the course of fifty years of government-sanctioned fears. The Civil Defense authorities optimistically told you even a piece of newspaper could shield you somewhat from the effects of an atomic blast. The Homeland Security authorities tell you you are on your own against a threat they can't explain, and you better get ready to act in your own defense, turning whatever office supplies you can find nearby into primitive weapons. Fifty years ago, our "authorities" warned us about the risk of doomsday bombs being launched at us from the other side of the planet, but assured us with fantasies of cozy catastrophe survival. Today, they tell us the risk is our own dark natures, which even the highly evolved institutional control systems of our bureaucratic offices and prison architecture schools can no longer keep out.

Today, we make smart-ass bro jokes about the threat of nuclear attack by that weird kid on the other side of the planet, evading our real fear: the weird kid down the street.

Is it too heretical to examine these themes through the laboratory prism of speculative counterfactuals? It's a treacherous path for the Authorities to train us to defend ourselves from our cubicles. What if we start using those techniques to defend ourselves against the Authorities? What if the previously docile employees in the corporate headquarters of a generic Houston petrochemical conglomerate featured in "Run-Hide-Fight," trained to snap out of their programming and act instinctively in their own primitive interests to defeat the active shooter, awaken to the realization that they have the means of their own liberation? No wonder the last few minutes of the video are focused on cooperating with the paramilitary law enforcement squads when they finally show up.

"Improvise weapons." That sounds more like advice for Syrian rebels than Houston office clerks. What if the real threat to the security of the "Homeland" were the people losing patience with the Authorities, and seeking a more participatory and authentically democratic society that doesn't rely on social pyramids, institutional Panopticons, and systems of white collar serfdom? It's not hard to imagine a sequel to Run-Hide-Fight, in which some of the employees take over the office, one floor at a time.

[Pics: Images from the 2006 series "Business Reply Envelope" by Packard Jennings, conceived as an instruction manual for office workers to overthrow their office hierarchy and replace it with a tribal culture in which the work space is used for homesteading, hunting and growing crops.]

More plausibly, what if we acted on our own initiative to try to honestly examine the deep social sickness behind the active shooter epidemic, and address the causes at their roots, instead of with an Aeron chair over the head?

And how worried should we be about the revelation that the Department of Homeland Security is now focused on protecting us from us?

[Video: Actual Emergency Broadcast Systems activation during the 1992 L.A. riots.]

Extra credit: Texas State University's ALERRT (Advanced Law Enforcement Rapid Response Training), home of the "Forging Warriors" law enforcement training program for active shooter first responders, and a pretty scary research report on active shooter events from 2000 to 2010.

Abbottabad Playset Sold Separately

Courtesy of the underground network of trans-Pacific ateliers harvesting souvenirs from the dark intersections of banal pop culture and apocalyptic Zeitgeist, last night's spam brings the perfect gift for that special friend celebrating the 10th anniversary of the decapitation strike that started the Iraq War: the zombie Osama action figure.

The ZOMBEE TOY 1/6 Ozombie Walking Dead Terrorist Infected action figure comes complete with jungle camo field coat, custom AK-47 with three banana clips, weathered leather boots, and a 1/6 scale copy of Time Magazine with a picture of W. on the front and an ad for Jack Bauer's CTU on the back.

Plus, a miniature coffin with "Solid Diecast Metal Anchor Weights & Hooks" perfect for burial at sea in the Indian Ocean or the bathtub of your favorite GWOT-savvy seven-year old.

The ideal playmate for that Elite Force Aviator President George W. Bush action figure that's been gathering dust on your shelf, G.I. Joe-compatible zombie Osama even has his own promotional video.

Zombie Dick Cheney with replica general counsel's memo on enhanced interrogation techniques and functioning die-cast metal cyborg heart has not yet been released. That will be coming out at Christmas with the Saddam, Uday and Qusay boxed set with Spiderhole Command Center.

But they do have Hitler's Brain.

Handmade with pride in USA.

Zeitgeist Savings Time

What would George W. F. Hegel make of the puppy paintings of George W. Bush?

After the hack of a few weeks back, the weekend's news revealed an interview with the lady who got tapped to come to an undisclosed secure location and teach W how to more properly participate in our surreal age by slowly releasing images directly from the infantile, wounded segments of his brain.

These images arrive almost exactly a decade since U.S. troops arrived in Baghdad and found the chainmail bikini fantasy art of Rowena Morrill and others decorating the bachelor pads of Saddam Hussein.

Is it too much to imagine a reality in which a platoon of Force Recon Marines dig their way through the post-Shock and Awe rubble into the underground bunker and find Saddam's love nest decorated with nude shower self-portraits of W.?

Saddam, of course, wrote genre novels.

[Pic: Cover of Zabibah and the King, an 8th century romance novel by Saddam Hussein.]

Perhaps, with the hour that disappeared overnight, we lost an alternate time stream in which W., Hitler, Saddam, and other world historical figures who wreaked substantial havoc on the planet in the past century lived out their lives as artists rather than rulers. The threads of the sweater holding together your reality pull much more easily than you think. That's why Dennis Rodman and Kim Jong-un are laughing at you.

Do we have the courage to really examine how our popular culture shapes the frequently defective personalities of the people who govern our world? How much distance is there, really, between the outsider Magritte shower stall self-examinations of W., and the clown paintings of John Wayne Gacy?

[Pic: Georg W. F. Hegel watching how things are playing out at the nexus of art, culture, geopolitics and personality, 300 years later.]

[Extra credit: Some premonitions from 2003.]

Interregnums

Monday, April 30, 1973

Resignation day. We finished up our resignation statements this morning, I had a meeting with Bull, Parker, Larry, and Kehrli to impress upon them the need to carry on the ongoing system just as it is until a new system was worked out and ready to put into place, and urged that they not fall into the trap of any sort of internal struggle for position. And explained the importance of their holding everything tightly together during the interim period while the P would be in very tough emotional and physical shape, and so on.

Ehrlichman and I then met with the senior staff. Shultz couldn't be there because he was testifying on the Hill, but we had Ash, and Kissinger, Timmons, and Ken Cole, and told them what our decision was, and made something of the same points. John was very emotional in that session, broke down or was on the verge of it at least, several times. Everybody, I think, was genuinely shocked, and I think we successfully impressed on them also the need to deal very carefully with this interim period.

I made a number of phone calls, talked to Billy Graham. He seemed to feel it was the right thing to do, said that he didn't believe that in government he had met two finer men than Ehrlichman and me, and that we have his full support—he feels we've been caught in a web of evil that will ultimately be defeated. He has great affection and love for me as a man, that I should count him as a friend, and that what I'm doing is going to help the P.

— H.R. Haldeman, The Haldeman Diaries: Inside the Nixon White House (1994)

The above is the beginning of the final entry in H.R. "Bob" Haldeman's diaries of his years as Nixon's Chief of Staff, a tattered paperback copy of which I acquired recently while exploring the ruins of New Orleans. The resignation Haldeman refers to is his own—Nixon's would not come until a year later.

Perhaps I can blame the fact that I have been reading excerpts from Haldeman's diary for the Nixon flashback I had yesterday, as I glimpsed the images of the papal helicopter lifting off to deliver the Pope Emeritus to his Italian San Clemente.

I love interregnums. They represent the possibility of a world without kings. The idea of individual leaders seems deeply programmed into human culture, and there are few human socio-political institutions that don't rely on one, even if it is sometimes more titular that real. Whether it's the pope, or the President, or the CEO, when the Chief leaves without an immediate successor, and life goes on without any material difference, one can almost imagine a world in which our silverback programming could be hacked to remix our way toward a system based on something more harmonious than primate competition for power and dominion.

Interregnums induced by enigmatic resignations employed as a tactic to evade the transparency of justice are all the more interesting. Ritual exile can be a successful alternative to exposure of what really happens inside the institutions where the greatest repositories of human power are stored. You'll never know what these guys were really talking about. The past gets buried under the cathode ray snowfall of interregnum, and the need to keep the trains running.

Can flying robots track invisible people?

In the 2009 cyberpunk film Sleep Dealer, the U.S.-Mexico border is guarded by a machine comprised of (i) a surveillance camera, (ii) a machine gun and (iii) a robot voice interrogator, the apparent purpose of which is to keep Americans from leaving the country. Today's news reveals what appear to be plans to implement this dystopian vision—except that the real robots will be flying robots, and they won't ask questions.

"Senators Offer a Bipartisan Blueprint for Immigration"alerts The New York Times on the top of the front/landing page, coding the proposal as good news you should reflexively support. "Border Security First, Paving Way to Path to Citizenship," reads the sub-head, above the pictures of leading Democrats and Republicans sharing the podium. Keep reading. Better yet, dig into the talking points.

Short version: The border will be secured by armed flying robots. If you sneak past them, we will let you stay as a guest worker.

Some highlights from the Orwellian Senatorial PDF:

"To fulfill the basic governmental function of securing our borders, we will continue the increased efforts of the Border Patrol by providing them with the latest technology, infrastructure, and personnel needed to prevent, detect, and apprehend every unauthorized entrant.

"Additionally, our legislation will increase the number of unmanned aerial vehicles and surveillance equipment, improve radio interoperability and increase the number of agents at and between ports of entry. The purpose is to substantially lower the number of successful illegal border crossings while continuing to facilitate commerce.

"Once the enforcement measures have been completed, individuals with probationary legal status will be required to go to the back of the line of prospective immigrants, pass an additional background check, pay taxes, learn English and civics, demonstrate a history of work in the United States, and current employment, among other requirements, in order to earn the opportunity to apply for lawful permanent residency. Those individuals who successfully complete these requirements can eventually earn a green card."

[Pic: Section of the border wall in Arizona that is designed to move with the shifting sands.]

The proposal is indeed a wonderful example of our two-party system in action. Republicans get to perform new oratorical science fictions about the omniscient super force-field robot border wall. Democrats get to imagine a new underclass subservient to citizen (union) labor and so dependent on the state that each member actually has to register on the official ledger.

You saw the part about how the guest workers will have to pay taxes while they are taking the classes where they learn the Pledge of Allegiance and waiting for their background check to be completed, but won't be eligible for any government benefits? I bet the lines are already forming.

Never mind the fact that net migration trends have reversed in recent years. Or that by mid-century, our aging population and declining birth rates will probably have us paying bounties for fresh young labor to come over and man the life support maquiladoras for the Baby Boomers that never die. If you were as nutty as Alex Jones, you might think that's exactly the plan: America as labor camp for the last rich white guys to live like posthuman sultans, looking out the window at the endless green fairways behind the fence, lit up at night by the fracking flareoffs. That's the sound of Chuck Schumer giving John McCain the high five that you just heard.

[Pic: Migrant workers operate distant factory robots from an infomaquila in Tijuana—still from Alex Rivera's Sleep Dealer.]

A while back, I was kidnapped by the Tijuana Liberation Front, and they made me read this message for the hostage video, which was played back to the lanes of cars lined up to cross at San Ysidro. I tried to synthesize some of my thoughts on the border as mental and physical space, some of which are, I like to think, useful context for reading today's news:

The next generation of border fortifications will be invisible and essentially imaginary—an American exercise in state-sponsored science fiction very similar to Ronald Reagan’s “Star Wars” space-based defense against Soviet nuclear missiles, which did not have to be real to break the financial back of the Soviets trying to match it. The border wall does not actually need to work to fulfill its purpose.

In her 2010 book Walled States, Waning Sovereignty, UC-Berkeley Professor Wendy Brown makes a compelling case that the real purpose of the global boom in border fortifications is to restore the idea of the sovereign state in a world where the nation-state is diminishing in relevance and coherency. In Brown’s view, the U.S. border wall primarily exists to reinforce in the minds of American citizens the idea that the border—and the Nation—really exists...

The border wall draws the line from the map in “real” space, but as HSARPA’s call for ideas shows, it does very little to make that line “real.” ...To the extent the next generation border security systems will work, it will not be because they actually function as physical barriers. It will be because people believe in them as a representation of the idea of the country they define. Government-designed surveillance and interdiction networks, operated by the inheritors of Dr. Strangelove’s war room, only work in Hollywood reality as an accepted narrative of government power that reinforces the identity of the citizen living in a protective Panopticon.

You can read the whole thing over at the New York Review of Science Fiction.

Better yet, go browse around inside the the curious website of HSARPA—the Homeland Security Advanced Research Projects Agency, and get a vision of a future you might not have imagined.

And don't forget the gate code.

Liberty ship demolition derby

What if Cinderella's castle at Disneyland really were a castle? Filled with teenagers and dwarves ready to defend it from assault with all-American arsenals? Via the tabloid weirdness of Drudge Report, busy minting the clicks on pages full of advertisements exploiting fears of imminent gun confiscation in advance of the labor camp roundups, we learn that a group of self-styled patriots is planning to do something just like that in the "American Redoubt" of northern Idaho, building a thousand-acre fortress chartered as a right-libertarian alternative subdivision. "The Citadel" proposes to take the social isolation of the gated community, inject it with equal doses of California commune and survivalist compound, and charter an armed country club for voluntary exiles to fortify the adversarial reality they have in mind when they think of the American dream. Who knew the Ruby Ridge lifestyle could become the basis of a real estate development pitch?

"The Citadel Community will house between 3,500 and 7,000 patriotic American families who agree that being prepared for the emergencies of life and being proficient with the American icon of Liberty — the Rifle — are prudent measures. There will be no HOA. There will be no recycling police and no local ordinance enforcers from City Hall."

And from the FAQ:

"One of the primary reasons for a lease paradigm versus private property inside the walls is our desire to make the community for Patriots only.

"The model will be similar in many ways to that of Disneyland. It is walled, gated, private property with controlled access. People pay to enter and agree to the rules because they see value in doing so. It is all based on a voluntary agreement between the owners of the property and those who want to come inside."

The website for the Citadel lays out a dark, counter-utopian piece of architecture fiction—the design for a right-utopian community on a corporate model, situated in the evergreen interstices of American socio-geographic reality. The corporation would acquire the the land, and charter the rules of the community within the bounds of applicable U.S. and Idaho law. Residents would lease, rather than own, their homes (all of which, the site advises, would be made from poured concrete), and would enter into a membership agreement with a pretty intense list of the chores involved in fertilizing the orchard of liberty and keeping Thomas Jefferson's hair on fire, including:

"Two: Every able-bodied Patriot aged 13 and older governed by this Agreement shall annually demonstrate proficiency with the rifle of his/her choice by hitting a man-sized steel target at 100 yards with open sights at the Citadel range. Each Resident shall have 10 shots and must hit the target at least 7 times.

"Three: Every able-bodied Patriot aged 13 and older governed by this Agreement shall annually demonstrate proficiency with a handgun of choice by hitting a man-sized steel target at 25 yards with open sights at the Citadel range. Each Resident shall have 10 shots and must hit the target at least 7 times.

"Four: Every able-bodied Patriot of age within the Citadel will maintain one AR15 variant in 5.56mm NATO, at least 5 magazines and 1,000 rounds of ammunition. The responsibility for maintaining functional arms and ammunition levels for every member of the household shall fall to the head of household. Every able-bodied Patriot will be responsible for maintaining a Tactical Go Bag or Muster Kit to satisfy the Minuteman concept..."

And so on. Basically, an entire communal fiefdom organized around the idea of the Second Amendment as a constitution unto itself, expressing a dark, anti-communitarian, anachronistic thread of our culture that our current dysfunctional politics is only managing to stoke. But one can also wonder whether this project might portend more than the resurgence of the Bo Gritz Zeitgeist.

I've been interested for some time in speculations about how the increasing obsolescence (and literal bankruptcy) of the post-Westphalian nation state as the business model of our political reality would lead to a proliferation of experiments in micro-sovereignties—carving out private geographic space for socio-political experimentation that mirrors the way network culture cultivates such communities in virtual space. Things like the Honduran charter cities experiments and the ship-borne libertarian "seasteading" plans funded by Peter Thiel and others are examples that have gotten traction and publicity in the past year. In the pre-Civil War U.S., state governments frequently authorized experimental private communities, from the Mormon settlement of Nauvoo, which was sanctioned by the legislature as an essentially autonomous political island within the state of Illinois, to the unexpectedly strange-looking predecessors of the modern business corporation—creatures of private bills chartered for specific purposes with whatever rights they could persuade the state to give them. When you remix these kinds of precedents in the network's tumbler of political diversity, the possibilities are intriguing (and, as this example shows, potentially scary—or at least fertile territory for cranks).

By way of timely example, Drudge also links today a story from the Times of Israel that Bashar Assad is now living with his family on a warship off the Syrian coast and taking a helicopter to work, giving us a fresh new stake on the idea of seasteading. One imagines the Alawaite Baathist regime, following its imminent deposition, existing as a floating post-sovereignty, roaming the oceans with rent-a-cop Russian naval escorts until the money runs out. Shahs of Sunset meets the Love Boat with a healthy dose of Ballardian cozy catastrophe.

I just wrote a story for Rick Klaw's upcoming Texas science fiction anthology about an investment banker who is in the business of mergers and acquisitions between countries (and other political subdivisions) rather than companies. The idea, to me, has a curious plausibility in a world of emergent experiments in localized sovereignty. The network has already destabilized the old geopolitical order. It seems inevitable that it will begin trying to remake our polities in its own image—an infinitely diverse archipelago of self-invented political realities, many if not most of which will seem crazy to their neighbors. How will the social organization of network culture interact with the tactile realities of geography as the principal determinant of political identity? To what extent can we create functioning polities, founded on authentically consensual social contracts, that transcend the boundaries of the lands on which we live?

During the September 2012 attack on the U.S. Consultate in Benghazi, consular official Sean Smith was also hanging out in the smoke-filled rooms of Eve Online, where he had started an intergalactic diplomatic corps. For a decade now, Professor Ed Castronova has been documenting the emerging political economy of virtual worlds—including the exchange rates with real-world currencies. The new socio-economic realities we constitute through our screens have acquired indisputable reality. As our contemporary idea of community becomes more like a Facebook group than town meeting, surely it's just a matter of time that these disparate realms of the identity we invent and the identity we inherit figure out ways to converge? Some of them may even leave the drawbridges open.

R.I.P. Steven Utley, 1948-2013

Damn it all to hell. I was just winding down for the night when I saw the awful, wretched news that Steven Utley had passed away. Words can't express how angry this makes me. Hell, I didn't even know Steven was sick. I saw him at Armadillcon (that's a photo from a previous Armadillocon to the right--Chris Roberson's on the left, Steven is on the right) this past summer and he looked healthy and in good spirits. We passed in the hall several times on the way to different events, but promised to catch up with each other later on and chat. Of course, we never did. Now I'm kicking myself. Lawrence Person's posts sum it up:

I just received word from Jessica Reisman:

Molly let me know that Steve passed last night at about 10:40 pm, eastern. His family was with him.

I’ll miss him.

As will we all.

Utley announced to his friends that he had been diagnosed with Type 4 cancer in his intestines, liver, and lungs, and a lesion on his brain on December 27, 2012. On January 7, he sent out an email saying that he was losing his motor skills and designated Jessica as his literary executor (and hopefully she’ll be able to get some of his swell stories back in print). On the morning of January 12 he slipped into a coma and died that night.

Steven was one of the original members of the legendary Turkey City Writers Workshop. I became a fan of Steven's maybe 20 years ago at a Monkey House party in College Station, during some AggieCon or other. Perusing the bookshelves (they've got great bookshelves at the Monkey House) I came across a copy of Lone Star Universe, the anthology Steven co-edited with George W. Proctor. I was besmitten. I mean, that Texas-centric anthology spoke to me, and I vowed to put together another myself, come hell or high water. And I almost managed to pull it off a time or two, but Cross Plains Universe and now Rayguns Over Texas have pretty much taken the wind out of those sails for good. Still, I got Steven to sign my copy at Armadillocon 30 (as well as his collection Beasts of Love) so it's all good.

I first "met" Steven online, in the late 90s, on comic book message forums, believe it or not. I can't remember what we talked about, but we exchanged quite a few messages back and forth. Then I began tracking down his other fiction, having only read the magnificent "Ghost Seas" in Lone Star Universe previously. His story, "Custer's Last Jump," co-written with frequent collaborator Howard Waldrop, is as brilliant (and outrageous) an alternate history romp as ever I have read. But what is truly amazing is that during my tenure as fiction editor at RevolutionSF.com from 2002-2005, Steven became my most-frequent contributor, sending me both classic works for reprint and original pieces. This is particularly amazing, considering the fact that I paid him "all the prestige he could eat." But I made sure to assign the best illustrators to his stories, so that's something. I was fortunate enough to publish several installments of his classic Silurian cycle, including "Another Continuum Heard From!" which takes a skewed look at voting rights when they come into conflict with the technicalities of time travel. It makes for a poor memorial, but here is a comprehensive list of every Steven Utley story I published while at RevSF. It is the best that I can do:

Abaddon
The Age of Mud and Slime
Another Continuum Heard From!
Chaos and the Gods
Getting Away
Little Whalers
My Evil Twin
Pan-Galactic Swingers

The Future of the Confederacy, i.e.: Now

Seating within the gravestones

I seem to be doing a poor job of writing about the future on this blog. And let's face it, there's nothing quite as mired in the past as the Confederate States of America.

Opposing units, artillery vs. skirmishers

Regular readers might remember a post I wrote about nineteenth century Austin city marshal Ben Thompson. He was a larger than life gunfighter with a body count to rival the worst outlaw. But he was largely forgotten by history, presumably because he had a boring name and was never photographed in a cowboy hat.

If I were a journalist, I would have
asked what those gold neck sashes
were for, but I'm not,so I didn't.

I have written about him several times, mainly because he embodied the same paradoxes as Austin's current police force, in that he was apparently well-meaning and consistently charitable to others, but he was also prone to acts of state-sponsored injustice (he once arrested a woman for wearing slacks) and unchecked violence (he routinely avoided homicide charges by invoking 'self-defense').

Presumably on the strengths of my multiple posts on Ben Thompson, the organizers of the Ben Thompson grave re-dedication offered me a press pass to the event. I accepted, largely because they promised a twenty-one musket and cannon salute, but also because no one has ever offered me a press pass before and how could I turn that down? The ceremony took place at a city-owned cemetery, so I assumed it was an official event.

At that time it hadn't sunk in that the press release for the event used the word 'Confederate' six times.

Taken as a whole, the event was about 90% Confederate. Thompson's great-granddaughter spoke and she was the only one who mentioned the parts of Thompson's life that fell outside of the Civil War. The rest of the program included a notorious Republican politician praising the “military tradition” of the Confederacy, masonic Confederate rites, and a truly awesome musket/canon fusillade.

I arrived right as the ceremony began. While on my way to the event I worried that I would have trouble finding Thompson's grave in the rather large cemetery. I needn't have worried, all I had to do was follow the gay colors of four Confederate flags of various designs, a Texas flag, and, almost as an afterthought, the US flag.

This guy would be the
coolest steampunker
at the con

You would think that there was no point in having a press pass at an open event with about forty people, but I'm glad I registered because my press pass came with a swag bag. The contents included such treasures as invitations to join Confederate groups, a commemorative wooden coin from a company called Rebel Trucking, and tourist brochures for Giddings.

The master of ceremonies, a bearded officer in the gray, called the ceremony to order with a pledge of allegiance to the US flag, the Texas flag, and the array of Confederate flags. I guess that's the appropriate order. I don't know the words to the latter two, and everyone else in the crowd was mumbling so I may not have been the only one. The MC saluted the flags, but as I have never served in the military, either real or re-enacted, I merely doffed my hat. Have you ever been in a situation where you take your hat off during the pledge of allegiance to the US flag, and the next thing you know, you find yourself with your hand over your heart while everyone around you pledges their allegiance to the Confederate flag? It's awkward.

Texas Land Commissioner talks
about Military Tradition

An errant gust blows away the wreath
 and Jerry Patterson leaps instantly
into action

Politician and man of action

We'll let the opening prayer pass without comment and move straight to the speech by Texas Land Commissioner Jerry Patterson. Coincidentally, I had actually written a profile piece on the man about a year ago. I
suspect that Patterson attended the event for the explicit purpose of having his picture taken in front of the Confederate flag. For those of you not from Texas, land commissioner is a not particularly high-profile post, probably about the fifth most powerful office in the state's executive branch (governor being about third or fourth). Commissioner Patterson has earned a name for himself by taking principled stands on issues where either the CSA or firearms play a prominent role. For instance, he's the reason why there's thousands of acres of quail and varmint hunting opportunities out by Big Bend, and as a holder of the Texas public hunting lands permit, he's earned my vote for just that reason.

A widow lays her black rose while the land
commissioner watches, bemused.

Patterson arrived late, missing the opening prayer (which we will NOT comment on), but when the wind blew away Ben Thompson's wreath, he leapt off his folding chair to grab it and return it to its rightful place. That's exactly the sort of level-headed can-do attitude that one expects of a public official when chaos strikes.

The next element of the ceremony was the laying of flowers by the largely female re-enacting groups. One of the groups, called the Soiled Doves of Texas, dressed in bawdy saloon wench corsets and skirts (but as it's affirmed on their website, they are not actually prostitutes). The other group, the Order of Confederate Roses, occupied the far

A widow glides across the graveyard

opposite side of the nineteenth century continuum of womanly virtue. They dressed entirely in black, their faces obscured under a black veil. They looked like a cross between the Bene Gesserit and characters from a ghost story (you know the one, where a guy on a train wakes up in his sleeper car to find a strange woman in a rocking chair in the corner, and then it turns out that the lump she has under a shawl in her lap wasn't a child after all but her husband's severed head!). As far as I could tell, they didn't say a word the entire ceremony, just maintained their spooky silence as they proceeded one by one up to Thompson's grave and presented it with a single black rose.

The saloon wench shows her respect

The MC then performed a ceremony where he read off the names of the Confederate dead and then rang a bell in remembrance. I believe they only read the names of the ones who Thompson knew personally, which took a lot less time than I had feared it would.

Cannons!

Then we got to the part I'd been waiting for, the firing of the cannon. I guess that our local CSA regiment was never properly disarmed after The War.

Musket salute!

Now comes the part of the article where I address the elephant in the blog post: Aren't people with a lot of confederate flags horrible racists? For instance, the KKK no longer dresses in the white hoods, they cover their faces with Confederate flag bandannas  From what I saw during the Thompson event, I would say that although the Confederate re-enacters occupy the same iconographic continuum as the KKK, they don't seem like the same social group. In essence they don't appear much less dorky or guileless than the cosplayers the readers of this blog are familiar with. Think of them as steampunkers, but without the sense of whimsy.

The ringing of the bell for
the names of the Confederate dead

Commissioner Patterson made the point (in roughly so many words) that although our Texas ancestors have a lot of warts when viewed through a 21st century lens, it's not wrong to venerate the “military tradition” of the people who served.

Far be it for me to criticize someone for celebrating their ancestors. After all, my family still holds the vikings in high esteem and that's not considered distasteful (at least in Minnesota). But maybe that's because so much time has passed, or maybe it's because nobody really denies that vikings were terrifying racist murders. Certainly nobody wants the vikings to come back into power. Likewise, for all the talk of Texas secession, it seems unlikely that there's any serious attempts by the South to establish a golden circle plantation state any time in the near future.

Seriously, I wish I dressed like that every day

Maybe there's a sliding timeline of acceptable historical re-enactment? For instance, people celebrating the Germany of seventy years ago are clearly monsters. But Minnesotans celebrating the vikings of a thousand years ago (who were at least as bad as the Confederates on a sheer human suffering level) are considered cute. Flying the flag of the rebel south is probably somewhere in the middle.