Carrie Prejean and the “Tolerance Means Being Nice” Myth

Picking over the conservative brain at WCP’s City Desk:

Perhaps after watching academic leftists misuse “tolerance” to enact campus speech codes and pathologize conservative thought in the humanities and the social sciences, social conservatives felt justified turning the concept on its head to quiet those same leftists when they attacked Christians for arguing against gay marriage, stem cell research, and abortion. As a result, Prejean’s original pronouncement (whether because it was solicited or simply by the magic of conservative thinking) was neither tolerant nor intolerant–essentially a pure, value-free expression of belief–but anyone who criticized her beliefs was labeled both tolerant (pro-gay) and intolerant (derisive toward dissenters)–i.e., a hypocrite. (I tip my hat to the social conservatives on this one. Gallagher and NOM are infuriatingly calm, if a little melodramatic. They seldom stray from their core message, except to chide tolerant liberals for being intolerant, and they picked a fantastic acronym for their organization.)

[...]

Both sides, then, should forget about tolerating the other if it means diluting public discourse with hollow niceties. Social engineering, by its very nature, is an ugly business. Liberals shouldn’t be reasonable, sensible, or amicable, because homophobia and theocracy are not reasonable, sensible, or amicable concepts. Nor should social conservatives stand by while apostates, heretics, and nonbelievers adulterate God’s Happy Family formula.

Full thing here. Comments culled from various places below the jump.

Nanoman Reviewed

From my review at Washington City Paper’s City Desk blog:

Nanoman’s plot is engaging and easy to follow, and Jon Reed’s drawing is very fine: gray-scale Neo-noir pen lines played against City-of-the-Future scenery (made famous by early Judge Dredd comics). The first issue’s weaknesses–confusing panel placement in some scenes, arbitrarily emphasized words that don’t replicate real speech patterns, and the pedantic (and frequent) Arabic exchanges between the story’s Muslim terrorists (I suppose it was only a matter of time before everyday phrases like “salamalaikum” and “Allahu Akbar” made their way from stock CNN footage into the fictional terrorist’s character profile)–are easy to overlook, especially since the end of the first issue left me wanting to know what happens next.

Fixed-Gear Bikes: “Some sort of new age weight loss gimmick?”

Going after fixie/single-gear-bike riders at Washington City Paper’s City Desk blog.

‘If Everything’s Fratty, Nothing Is’

A pointless (fun) critique of writers who use “fratty” as a cover-all over at Washington City Paper’s City Desk.

Q&A: Tony Horwitz

Tony Horwitz, author, historian, humorist, and winner of the Pulitzer Prize, will speak this week at the Smithsonian in support of his latest book, A Voyage Long and Strange, which was just released in paperback. In anticipation of his visit, Washington City Paper called Horwitz and picked his brain about the future of longform journalism, history, and first contact.

You get to do the longform narrative journalist’s dream, in that you write journalistic books. On the opposite end of the spectrum are people writing, or trying to write that same kind of journalism for periodicals like alternative weeklies and magazines, and for the Web. What do you think the future holds for the kind of work you and others do?

My first books were longform journalism; I wrote them while still holding a day job as a newspaper reporter and they really grew out of my reporting. The last two books have been kind of different and more focused on the history. While I still think of myself as a reporter and always carry a reporter’s notebook, I feel I’ve drifted away from journalism.

So I don’t really know that I would lump my fate together with that of magazine or newspaper writers, though I’m frankly not very optimistic for any of us. The culture at the moment seems so infatuated with 140-character dispatches and our reading time has so many demands–whether it’s email or blogs or Facebook, you name it–that I wonder whether people will continue to have the attention span required to read a long magazine piece or a book. I hope so! I’m sure there will always be people who want longer  nonfiction, but whether there will be enough of a market to sustain a large number of writers, I just don’t know. We don’t really see layoffs among book writers; we just don’t hear about what happens. They’re not being signed up for their next book, but I think much of what’s going in newspapers and magazines is happening in a quieter fashion with book writers.

More whimper than bang for book writers?

Or simply a lot less money being paid for books. I’ve had the luxury of writing my last two books as a full-time author, and not doing it around teaching or other writing, which is the reality for most people. I think it’s very hard to do your best work when you have multiple balls in the air.

Going back to A Voyage Long and Strange being less journalistic than your previous stuff. Your older books go from one community study or character study to another–did you know you wanted to do something with your later books?

No, I don’t think it’s been conscious. I think it’s just been a gradual…an evolution, with one factor simply being age. I’m 50 now, and I have two young sons and a live-in mother-in-law. I don’t have quite the energy and freedom that I once did to disappear for weeks or even months at a time. I think the essence of journalism, or at least the kind of journalism that I used to do, is having the ability to chase a story wherever it leads and sticking with it as long as you need to. There was a time when I could do that, and it’s harder now. I think that’s one reason, also the history seems like more of a challenge to me now. Travel in journalism is a great challenge, but I’m intrigued with steering my writing more toward history and seeing what I can do with that.

The premise of A Voyage makes it seem as if you’re stepping on the toes of social studies teachers and textbook writers everywhere. Did you try to address parts of early American history that have received less attention?

For whatever reason–I’d have to get on a couch to find out why–I love debunking myths. I enjoy being irreverent. Particularly with this book, there were so many sacred cows that on close inspection don’t deserve their status; or, it turns out the history we think we know is wrong. I did take particular delight in picking apart those stories or introducing other stories that aren’t well known. As I went through the book, I would notice those oppurtunities, whether it was at the Fountain of Youth in St. Augustine or Plymouth Rock or any other nunber of places where I found that the accepted story doesn’t hold up.

A Voyage is not alarming in the way that A People’s History of the United States makes the reader want to curl up in a ball and hide under his bed. That seems to add to the pleasure of reading when you’re not worried that every turn of the page will reveal how some cushy historical event was actually a premeditated slaughter of native peoples.

There’s certainly some grim history in this book–there’s disease, dispossession, and even outright slaughter. I struggled with how to balance that with my tendency toward seeing the absurd and the humorous. And I didn’t want my own travels to undercut the history or trivialize it–I don’t know if I got the balance right. But I agree with you that if a story is unrelentingly grim, as a reader, you just shut down at some point. I felt part of the challenge was to keep the reader engaged with what is not always a pleasant historic story.

“Revisionist” history is almost always used as a perjorative–where do you see yourself in the debate over the narrative of American settlement? Do you even see yourself as a participant?

Absolutely, you can’t read the works of historians and not see the battle lines. I would say first that I’ve never understood the term “revisionist history” because all history is revision. If there’s no revision, why are you bothering? But I know what you mean, it’s come to mean “PC history” or something.

I think particularly with this subject you see a great deal of partisanship. There was an old school that extolled these explorers, whether Columbus or in some cases the Conquistadors, as knightly bearers of Christianity and civilization, and then starting roughly in the late 60s/early 70s, and pretty much ever since, the pendulum has started to swing in the opposite extreme–all these early explorers are monsters. They didn’t discover America, they destroyed it.

I didn’t want to put myself in that debate. Obviously I have my own opinions but I prefer to let readers come to their own conclusions most of the time, and in that sense I really still am a journalist: Show, don’t tell, and don’t shove ideas down people’s throats. But I think there’s a middle ground, certainly a lot of these explorers were brutal, not just by our standards but by theirs–a lot of them were put on trial, particularly the Spanish, for atrocities. But that’s not the whole story. All explorers were not like that. And in dwelling on them I think we miss other aspects of the story, one being the wonder of first contact, which wasn’t always bloody. A lot of it was, as I described in the book, very human and even comic. You have cultures that have never encountered each other trying to communicate and make sense of their situation, tasting each other’s food and doing crude show and tell. It’s a great story and one that we’ve lost because we tend to begin the story with Plymouth, where in fact the Indians had long since made contact with Europeans, and actually greeted the Pilgrims in English. The pilgrims sort of missed out on that experience and so do we.

A few months ago someone snapped a picture–I hope this wasn’t a hoax–of some indigenous people thrusting their spears at a helicopter. There was some buzz around it, mostly jokes, but I remember wondering if that was an extraterrestrial experience for that tribe.

I remember that. I don’t think it was a hoax but it was certainly overblown. It turned out that these people had seen planes before and had some minimal contact with the outside world. But it was as close as we could get in the present day to that sort of experience. We simply can’t have that experience today, and yet, in the 1500s, it was occurring all over this continent. I think it’s part of the reason we love science fiction, it recreates that collision of alien cultures. And I just can’t read enough of those accounts. In terms of the historical research, that was certainly my favorite part.

So what’s next?

I’ll be back in your neighborhood. I’m writing a book about John Brown’s raid on Harpers Ferry. This time just history, no antics. No me and no present day.

Really?

Yeah, a new challenge.

That’s a dark story.

Yeah, it’s back to the Civil War era, so at least I won’t have to start from scratch the way I did with A Voyage Long and Strange, which was very unfamiliar ground for me.

Originally posted at Washington City Paper’s City Desk blog.

Undecided? Stay Home in November

P. Diddy and the rest of Hollywood swear up and down that voting is a big deal and that everyone who’s eligible to do so should register (or, should have, seeing as we’re past the deadline). If City Paper turns out to be one of those companies that gives its employees a break midday to hit the polls, I’m going to steal around the corner to North Sea for a pack of smokes, then I’m going to find myself a nice park bench and enjoy the cold. In other words, I’m not going to vote.

I’m boycotting the election because neither John McCain nor Barack Obama comes close to representing my interests. My ideal candidate would advocate for an immediate end to the drug war, legalization of gay marriage (not civil unions), the adoption of a flat consumption tax, and the dissolution of the DoE, DoT, DoI, FCC, FDA, ATF, DEA, and the IRS; and would veto every bill, regardless of add-ons, that sought to perpetuate any of the above. And I’d also expect him or her to have a withdrawal plan ready for activation by inauguration day.

Voting for Obama or McCain while knowing that neither would touch my agenda with a 10-foot hook would be a form of self-sabotage. And praising one candidate over another means ignoring the fact that Joe Biden is a chickenhawk covered in dove shit. That Sarah Palin is an eschatologically-driven dunce. And that Obama and McCain are both arrogant ladder-climbers who treat governance like an opportunity to gleefully try out their big ideas, rather than as a distasteful obligation. (Where’s the George Washington, “Do I have to?” ethos when we need it?)

And while I believe that having McCain and Palin in the White House would be a base defilement of the office of president, I’m not going to vote for Obama and Biden simply because their presence would be less of a defilement.

Once everyone tires of chastising me for abstaining, I can lord it over them when Obama or McCain fucks up, as politicians are wont to do. And I can point out, gleefully, that this is what voters get for participating in a system that favors two bloated, inconsistent, irrational parties–and treats everyone else like a bunch o’ kooks.

Why won’t I vote for a third party candidate?

Because voting for a candidate who has no chance of getting elected–even if he or she represents my interests–suggests that I believe statement voting can affect the system. And that would be plain silly. (If Teddy Roosevelt couldn’t win with the Bull Moose party, no third party candidate–under our current system–can.)

I want a run-off. Or a nation-wide write-in system. Or to choose our presidents by dice. All of these things would be better than what we have.

In anticipation of the people who will argue that allowing McCain and Palin to get elected will lead to at least four more years of Bush-like authoritarianism, I say don’t kid yourselves. Some of the most authoritarian laws of the last couple decades we’re supported by both parties: Mandatory minimum sentencing laws, Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell, DMCA, FISA, the PATRIOT Act, and now the Bailout Bill. Each and every one made it to the president’s desk with support from both parties.

And people who say that everyone should vote often omit that they’ve been deeply dissatisfied with politics for most of their adult lives, that this isn’t the first time they thought a candidate was going to change the world, and that they vote out of fear of what would happen if the other party made it to the White House. I, and the millions of Americans who can but won’t show up at the polls, refuse to join such a disillusioned group.

Originally published @ City Desk.

Cue Radical Backlash to Religious-Themed Fiction in 5, 4, 3, 2…

One:

Late Friday night, the north London home/office of Martin Rynja, publisher of the independent UK press Gibson Square, was firebombed in what is being treated as a terrorist attack, of which police had advance warning, which is how they were able to warn Rynja to leave the premises for his own safety, stake out the building, and arrest three men shortly after the house was bombed; the small fire it created was quickly put out. (A fourth arrest was made later in the day.) Gibson Square is the UK publisher of The Jewel of Medina, Sherry Jones’s controversial novel about A’isha, one of the wives of the Islamic prophet Muhammad, which was dropped by Random House after Islamic studies professor Denise Spellberg warned the publisher the book would incite violence by Muslim extremists (after which she did everything she could to make sure those potential terrorists knew the book was coming).

Read the whole thing at GalleyCat, which has done a phenomenal job tracking the myriad trials and tribulations of historical pop lit. author Sherry Jones, who pins the blame for the violence on Denise Spellberg, a professor at UT-Austin. In her efforts to dissuade anyone from publising Jewel, Spellberg has argued that it “use[s] sex and violence to attack the Prophet and his faith,” and called it “soft core pornography.” But Jones is either naive or scrambling to deflect attention by arguing that pejorative labels are the culprit here, or that all would be well if only radicals could read her book:

“The planting of that bomb is Martin Rynja’s letterbox was not about my book,” Jones said, noting that the novel was not yet available in Britain. “It’s not about the content of my book. It’s not about the ideas in my book. It must be about the rumors and innuendos….I feel that the people who resorted to violence are responsible,” Jones emphasized. “But her use of the word ‘pornography’ has done nothing to help the situation.”

Despite her incendiary criticisms, Spellberg is a periphery figure in this case. Neither she, nor any other prominent pro-Islam critic of The Jewel of Medina (or any similar media), is responsible (or ethically liable) for an act of terrorism simply for having predicting it. While Random House may have acted differently if Spellberg had supported the book’s publication, it’s unlikely that Islamic radicals would have looked the other way simply because an American female academic gave Jewel two historically-correct thumbs up. Not that Spellberg’s retration matters. The Telegraph reports that clerics in London predict more attacks:

But the radical cleric Anjem Choudhary, who lives in Ilford, east London, said he was “not surprised at all” by the attack and warned of possible further reprisals over the book

“It is clearly stipulated in Muslim law that any kind of attack on his honour carries the death penalty,” he said.

“People should be aware of the consequences they might face when producing material like this. They should know the depth of feeling it might provoke.”

As disheartening as it may be to hear a Western academic rationalize—or even defend—terrorism in response to art, especially when radical leaders are responding with an “I-told-you-so” smugness, we shouldn’t be surprised. The reactions that followed the Jyllands-Posten cartoons established that violence, not intellectual outrage or artistic rebuttals, is the means with which extremists are most likely to react to objectionable representations of Muhammed. And we’ve known for a while, at least since 9/11, that it’s only a matter of time before some finger-wagging academic alleges that the only way to deal with said extremists is to appease them.

I’m interested to see how England’s moderate Muslims will react to this news, and whether or not this will spark a more comprehensive (and hopefully, intelligent) conversation about cultural assimilation in Western Europe. And while I’m still opposed to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, it seems about time to abandon the assertion that withdrawing American troops from the Middle East is a long-term solution to Islamic extremism.

Lastly, I bet someone at Random House breathed a great big sigh of relief after hearing this news.

Originally published at Hit & Run.

Where Have all the East Coast Intellectual Conservatives Gone?

The New York Sun, home of the hilarious and enterprising Eli Lake, will likely publish its last issue on Monday, Gawker leaked yesterday. Editor Seth Lipsky declined to comment on the news when asked for a confirmation by the New York Observer, but I’d bet my meager City Paper paycheck that the Sun sets in the next week (a little secret: I know an employee who’s out looking for a new job as I type).

And I have to say that it all makes me very sad. [Insert bitching & moaning over the state of print journalism here.]

The closing of the flamboyant Sun leaves us fiscal conservatives digging through the mechanical WSJ and the ever so prim Financial Times for our insights. But what Gawker calls “the death of East Coast intellectual conservatism” is hardly a death, or even a hibernation. Smart money musings and small government sentiments have made their way to the web quite nicely, and the ranks of readers have swelled in the wake of Paulson’s ever-so-stinky bullshit bailout bonanza. There’s even a new site for cultural “reactionaries,” which is what I call myself when I’m not gorging on Munsters-themed porn. (Haven’t you heard? Reacting is the new black!)

But the real tragedy is that a future without the Sun means one less voice–in print or on the web–arguing against the fuckwits on The Washington Post’s editorial page, all of whom recognize the “economic crisis” as an opportunity to spend other peoples’ money. (Hey, Anne O. Krueger, Trotsky called–said he wants you to return his trousers and that book of econ theory you borrowed.)

From City Desk.

Empty newsrooms

The San Jose Mercury News laid off designer Martin Gee last week. Gee used photos to document the Merc News‘ dwindling staff, here.

Copyright 2008. All rights reserved.

Marla Weech Leaving Channel 6

From the Orlando Sentinel:

Marla Weech, one of Central Florida’s best-known anchors, is losing her job at WKMG-Channel 6.

“I’m being laid off,” she told the Orlando Sentinel Friday morning. “It’s tough economic times. My position is being eliminated. My heart goes out to anyone who’s losing a job.”

Her last newscast will be at 11 tonight, and she said she will have a chance to say goodbye.

Weech spent nearly 20 years at WFTV-Channel 9, where she was a top anchor and community institution. She left WFTV in September 2005.

She had been at WKMG more than two years. She started free-lancing there in April 2006 after morning anchor Mark McEwen suffered a stroke. Weech joined the staff in August of that year. She has been anchoring at noon, 4 and 5:30 p.m.

Copyright 2008. All rights reserved.