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Given the amount of SF I’ve been consuming lately (“not that there’s anything wrong with that”), I’ve decided to embark on one of the many “reading challenges” that circulate in the blogosphere.
Largely because I first learned of it about the time of my post on foreign literature, I’m going to pursue The Armchair Traveler Reading Challenge that began July 1. Theoretically, I’m supposed to list the six books I intend to read between now and year end. At this point, though, I plan on simply listing “candidates” for the challenge since the rules allow participants to switch out books throughout the challenge. I will simply update the list here as books are completed (two as of this initial post) or added to the list of selections.
Completed:
Future Candidates:
CHALLENGE COMPLETED: October 7, 2007
Paths that lead to the most profound destinations, to moments of illumination or change, have nothing to do with actual travel, but rather negotiate a mental geography.
Lucius Shepard, Life During Wartime
As I noted upon my return from Readercon, Jim and Kathy Morrow graciously inscribed and gave me their copy of their recent anthology of European SF after I’d forgotten mine at home. I promised to send my copy to replace theirs.
I e-mailed Jim after I returned to get a mailing address. I hadn’t heard back and wondering if my e-mail got caught up somewhere, e-mailed him again Thursday. His and Kathy’s response? Pass my copy on to another SF fan or the local library.
My copy will be going to Siouxland Libraries as it does not have the book and in the hopes it will get more readers that way. I will also see if the library will note that the donation is courtesy of the Morrows.
For me, thinking and feeling are inextricably intermixed.
Jim Morrow, December 2001 interview
Inside the silence is a symphony
“Radio Song,” Joe Walsh, Got Any Gum?
It’s one of the sound bites that seems to have continuing resonance: Democrats, particularly liberals, love to “tax and spend.” Yet as reflected in Daniel Brook’s The Trap, the kernel of truth that lies in the epithet is that what liberals really advocate is fair taxation with spending tailored to needs that benefit the nation and its citizens.
Subtitled Selling Out to Stay Afloat in Winner-Take-All America, the book seeks to provide a somewhat unique take on the impact of the increasing economic gap in America. While Brook recites plenty of statistics indicating how the country’s tax policies over the last decades have benefited the wealthy at the expense of the middle class, that is not his focus. Rather, using vignettes involving specific individuals, The Trap examines how such policies have not only impacted middle class America, but also education and public service.
As Brook points out, despite America’s wealth and its ever increasing number of millionaires and billionaires, there seems to be more and more so-called “working poor.” Yet The Trap goes beyond that. It looks at how costs for education have skyrocketed while which federal financial aid was cut and shifted from grants to loans. As a result, many top notch students have difficulty affording post-secondary education and even those who can often come out with debt that far exceeds what they can reasonably expect to earn. When you take into consideration housing costs in the six figures and the skyrocketing cost of health care, insurance and the like, chances are that many young adults face an almost futile effort to achieve the same comparative economic status as their parents.
The European stereotype is that Americans are greedy; older Americans stereotype younger ones as a mercenary generation out to get rich quick. What neither the Europeans nor the senior citizens understand is that young Americans want more money because they need more money. Even if they don’t covet mansions and luxury cars, they need big bucks for housing, health care and education. In the 1980s, young people sold out to enjoy a life of luxury; now they sell out to stay afloat.
It is the “selling out” that concerns Brook the most. He makes a cogent and harrowing argument that this transformation of America precludes most college graduates from considering comparatively low-paying public service and public interest jobs. A prime example may be teachers, who not only have difficulty earning enough to pay school loans, they frequently may not be able to afford to live in the school districts in which they teach. As Brook notes, “In 1970, when starting teachers in New York City made just $2,000 less than starting Wall Street lawyers, people who wanted to teach taught. Today, when starting teachers make $100,000 less than starting corporate lawyers and have been priced out of the region’s homeownership market, the considerations are very different.”
For Brook, a journalist and Yale graduate, this also means a threat to activism and public interest work. Even though some college graduates may have deeply held social, political or economic views at odds with certain policies or approaches of corporate America, they have no choice but to go to work there in order to make a “living wage.” Thus, more and more of the best and brightest forgo spending part or all of their career working in areas addressing basic social issues and the benefits such work can bring to American culture and society. Likewise, the risks of self-employment in the pursuit of an idea or innovation are increasingly great, serving as a disincentive to young entrepreneurship.
Brook fully lays the blame for this at the door of Reaganomics. At the same time, he is adamant that the Democrats are equally complicit. He says the success of the right in reordering economic and social policy to elevate the interests of the wealthy and corporations has resulted in large part from “the acquiescence of the Left.” The Left, according to Brook, “took its eyes off the prize of building a more egalitarian society and instead worked, often quite successfully, to integrate the elite.”
The Trap postulates that the way to rebuild middle class democracy in America is through public funding of higher education, equalizing primary and secondary school funding to provide equal high quality education to all, eliminating the salary gap that has grown between the public and private sector, and instituting a public funded universal single payer health care system. All this, of course, takes money. Brook contends the United States needs to adopt a true progressive tax system, one in which those with more pay more and those with less pay less. That, he asserts, would help fund these goals, particularly higher education and health care. Brook apparently believes simply restructuring the federal income tax is sufficient as he does not discuss such items as a national sales or value added tax as an alternative or partial replacement.
Brook certainly is not alone in bemoaning the growing inequality in American society. His approach is somewhat different in that he focuses on what used to be considered the upper middle class and exploring the more intangible effects on public service and public interest work. Unfortunately, the strength of the right in making “tax and spend” an unqualified and damning shibboleth and the fear, refusal or inability of Democrats to more strongly champion the egalitarian concerns Brook raises, means his may be another voice lost in the wind.
[E]nsuring that every public school district has the funds it needs to offer high-quality education should be beyond debate in any rich nation that calls itself a democracy.
Daniel Brook, The Trap
There’s been a variety of talk about post-9/11 literature in the U.S. Several novels, most recently Don DeLillo’s Falling Man, have explored the territory. Still, two recent releases by British SF authors Brian Aldiss and Ken MacLeod made me realize they seem to be most directly addressing and questioning the impact of 9/11 and the so-called war on terror on civil liberties.
Scottish author MacLeod’s The Execution Channel is a near future tale where the war on terror continues and Great Britain is suffering a series of terrorist (or was it?) attacks. MacLeod’s main focus is on a particular family in a post-9/11 world — ubiquitous surveillance, the blogosphere as a vehicle for disseminating information and psych ops propaganda, the role of government intelligence agencies, and seemingly irrational free rein as a response to fears and acts of terror. Yet at least two plot lines in the book explore not only the detention of individuals on the grounds of suspicion alone, but takes us inside a “black site” detention center using abusive interrogation techniques and torture.
In the former, it is fairly plain that citizens can be held largely on speculation, conjecture and guilt by association with virtually no legal protections, such as a right to counsel or bail. The latter paints a horrifying picture of what, for all we know, has occurred in the network of covert prisons and detention units the war on terror has apparently generated. If there is a failing in the book from a political perspective, it is that MacLeod throws in a plot twist that makes this a story of alternate history. Granted, this move raises interesting issues and allows MacLeod to satirize contemporary politics. Yet placing the events in a future that can never be rather than in a predictive future based on actual history tends to have the commentary taken a notable step back.
In HARM, the latest work by the almost 82-year-old Aldiss, brutal interrogation is a centerpiece of the story. The title is the acronym of a government agency, the Hostile Activities Research Ministry. It has detained a British born Muslim author, Paul Fadhil Abbas Ali, and is ruthlessly interrogating and torturing him because of one passage in a work of fiction he wrote. The unpleasant descriptions of the interrogation mix with an allegorical tale of Ali living on another planet humans colonized because things became too bad on Earth. Yet even on this new planet, humanity struggles with and founders over questions of religion, racism, politics and democracy.
Aldiss’s exploration of Ali’s detention and interrogation — and the racism and speculation on which it is based — is hard hitting and leaves no doubt of his views on the subject. Unlike MacLeod, Aldiss does not couch this in terms of alternate history. In fact, but for the story line arising from the main character escaping in his mind to the other planet, this need not be a story of the future. It could be a tale set today.
Notably, while American interrogators play significant roles in both stories, neither work is set in the United States. In fact, British author Aldiss leaves open for much of the story where the interrogation takes place and whether Ali has been the subject of extraordinary rendition. While we thus have two British SF authors exploring the impact of the war on terror on British citizens and their civil liberties, I am unaware of any work of notable American authors, whether in the SF genre or otherwise, that has done so from an American perspective. I’m not saying the American publishing industry is cowed by the political environment of the last several years and perhaps I am simply unaware of recent fictional works addressing these issues. Still, the apparent lack of fiction exploring these topics seems a sad commentary on a society that has prided itself on affording and protecting civil liberties and human rights.
UPDATE: In fairness to U.S. publishers, I note that a Strange Horizons review of HARM points out that the book was first published in the U.S. because, according to Aldiss, “English publishers are funking taking on the novel.” It is now set to be released in the U.K. on August 21, some three months after its U.S. release.
Certain liberties had to be curtailed — such as foolishness and satire and freedom of speech. They belonged to a bygone epoch.
Brian Aldiss, HARM
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