It does not matter what we would rather have.  I don’t like using the word “appeasement” – conservatives use it to refer specifically to the type of weakness that lets Nazis win.  And bringing Nazis into an argument is, I’m sure you know, the fastest way to lose your credibility in my eyes.

However, there is only one kind of pacifism: the one where the good guy dies.  There is no other kind.  If someone says he plans to kill you, and you say that nothing is worth fighting to the death over, you’re including your life.  It is a form of suicide, and so I cannot subscribe to it.

Admitting that I am not willing to die to prove that violence isn’t the answer forces me to accept that there is a list of people whom I would kill.

Osama bin Laden is one of those people.  If I had killed him, I would have shot him in the face, then probably thrown up or peed myself, as most first-time killers are reported to do.  Maybe I would have high-fived someone, and that would not have fixed anything.

High-fiving killing is never appropriate in real life.  I’ve done it once or twice, but it’s not something that should feel 100% good.  That twinge is our humanity, telling us that That Shit Wasn’t Very Cool.

If you have been thinking about the Osama bin Laden operation, and you

1) haven’t been seriously thinking about the true consequences of life and death struggle during this thinking, but

2) still have an opinion about it

…then please, shut up.  You are talking politics, and not in a good way.  You are probably trying to use this bit of the news cycle to stick it to someone you don’t like.

Then think about this instead:

1) Find the video where the bodies from the Twin Towers are smacking into the roof of building 7.  Watch the faces on those firefighters as they listen.  Try to be there.

2) Imagine you are about to shoot Osama bin Laden in the face.  Try to fully imagine what the burden of that killing is going to put on your soul, right or wrong.

DO NOT discuss your feelings about this exercise with anyone else, until you are certain of those feelings yourself.  Discussing unnamed feelings with others, too early, very quickly leads to other people putting feelings in for you.  When it comes to killing, your soul needs to keep its own counsel.

I know I could pull the trigger.  I have thought about it carefully for a while.  I could kill someone, but I would struggle with it afterwards.  This would not be the same thing as regret.

This would be the hollowness of knowing that the killing wouldn’t take those bodies off the roof of building 7.  Those bodies still hit the roof in my mind, whenever I think about it, and nothing makes that go away.

The most I could hope for is not having a repeat.  And that has to be enough.

If you couldn’t pull that trigger, I will not judge you, if you came to that knowledge through taking a good look inside yourself.  If you’re the sort that could pull that trigger, I urge you to resist that spirit of vengeance inside of you.

No matter what it says, nothing will make things right.

Mind you, I read and enjoyed the Harry Potter books.  But whatever grumbling guilty sensations you, as an adult, felt while reading seven lengthy young adult novels, will promptly disappear, as you experience the refreshing threat of real bad guys, potions that work like real pharmaceuticals, magic that works using an actual system of logic, and a badassed main character that can’t handle money.

I’m talking Song of Ice and Fire competitor, here.  Get on it, people.

First, good on ‘em.  I’m a firm advocate of people standing up for themselves.  I would also say that Egypt is another step in what I believe is the inevitable direction globalization + internet is taking us.  So, whether we like it or not, this is what the future is.

But my cynicism about mankind’s limits already seems to be finding ways to stick its tongue out at hope.  NPR’s coverage this morning seems to be uncovering a lot of sour grapes.  Insurgencies and revolutions ultimately center on a plausible promise: a single, simple goal that seems achievable.

But once a large group achieves the original goal, which is often negative, the movement splinters.  In Egypt’s case, 30 years of strongman rule has conditioned some of its people to seek a new strongman.  For those who want no such thing, it’s tempting to consider building a coalition politically, so that at the very least, “your side” can force its will on others.

I think the Tea Party in 2010 is the obvious recent American example.  They sure as hell seemed to hate things uniformly, but what they all turn out to want is much more heterogenous than what they did not want.  Certainly, some are hewing to their core principles…but I imagine many of them will become more old-school Republicans soon enough.  And just as certainly, the President has shifted his tone considerably away from his “reformer” persona.

I don’t necessarily consider either of these transformations as negative.  I see them as inevitable.  The people are not stupid, per se…but we do tire easily.  Whipping up a revolution takes a lot of energy, and most of us couldn’t imagine staying on top of a mayor, governor, sheriff, congresspeople and senators for their entire terms.

Rich people have this energy, because they can pay for it.  And as long as someone can pay to care more than you, they will win.  Democrat, Republican, libertarian, commie or despot, the rich will win.

If the internet somehow manages to make the world more “democratic”, it will do so at a cost: our ideas will Balkanize us, even more than they already have.  If, say, Tunisia decides to go more “old school”, and puts its women back inside the house, how does it expect to sustain economic growth in a global environment?  The only way a society could compete with an enforced 50% unemployment rate would be to change its mind…or to only play in a market where ALL the players had the same rule set.

In empires, the rulers could adjust right and wrong to serve political reality…the Ottomans were certainly masters at declaring and undeclaring jihad when it suited them. But a democratic fundamentalism is a nightmare – you have to wait until 51% of the people think God favors money from the infidel more than he favors moral purity.  And I daresay, when people’s religion is challenged in this way, they historically find infidels to kill before they accept God changing His mind.

And this moral purity concept goes beyond God.  Even more than Jesus (I apologize for this truth, my evangelical friends), America worships individual freedoms as its state religion.  Some of us think of that as freedom from oppression (down with the white male, even if he’s a nice guy!); some of us think of that as freedom from sickness or want (Obamacare is either necessary, or the blood-curse of the Antichrist); some of us think of that as freedom of action (literally speaking, the Second Amendment allows me to keep an unshielded nuclear weapon in my house, and if you’re catching my rads, you should move!).  But all of us get ornery, and damned fast, when we see someone attacking freedom…whatever the hell that is.

More liberty and individuality are the future, whether we like that or not.  Let’s hope we all keep learning how to use these powers with some sense of responsibility.  And fi maa’ Allah, ya Musriyeen.

Nineteen years.

I have outlived Charadi Colin by nineteen years.  I can barely remember what she looks like, but here she is – my bald head.

Charadi had had a crush on someone else.  I was in that guy’s driveway when I heard she had leukemia.  And yeah, I hated that guy’s guts for the briefest of instants.  But the hate wasn’t very real, and he’s married to a nice woman I took to a dance once.  So it goes.

I shaved my head for the first time in high school, while Charadi was still alive.  I wish I could tell you what that even meant.  Since then, I’ve done it occasionally, and especially as a New Year’s present to myself.  I generally don’t tell people why I do it – it’s not something that pisses off the squares anymore.

It was weird to do it back in the day, though.  It was easy for me to sell the gesture as a measure of solidarity – Charadi was still alive at that point.  Chemo.  The truth was something a bit more pathetic – I hated my hair anyway, and making an ass of myself was easier to do than admit that I was harboring a monster crush on the woman.

I’m going to stick with “woman,” though she died before she turned 18.  She looked her death in the eye.  Adult.

I couldn’t do her the favor of growing up, though.  I just showed up with flowers occasionally, like an asshole.  I was out of town when she died.  I never told her anything. Nothing serious.  Nothing important.

Her dad had a Cerwin Vega stereo system.  She liked the Cars, because her dad did.  She liked Nirvana, because that’s our time, and she died before Pearl Jam really got going with Ten.  I like to tell myself she would have liked Foo Fighters better, because I do.

But how can I know that?  I can’t.  I can’t tell you her taste in music would have improved. That she wouldn’t have gone on to date a string of bastards, because there is no other kind of interesting man. I can’t tell you that she would have lived better than I have, if our places were switched.

But the other women I’ve loved since then will have to let a little bit of cheating go: Maybe just before I shaved my head for the first time, I had engineered a team visit.  The sunken den was a day room for her.  The other boys had headed back outside.  I was saying something stupid.

She took her head rag off. I don’t remember whether it was just for me or not – it’d make a better story that way.

I reached out and touched her head. Actually felt it. Not a wussy fingertip brush, not like I was palming a ball. I don’t remember the words, but I told her it didn’t matter. I told her she was beautiful anyway.

I needed to say more. I could not say more.

And that’s the first moment of intimacy I remember.  I had kissed girls prior to that, but that was my first moment of feeling the true terror of being alive. I didn’t want her to die. I wanted a relationship that didn’t exist, and couldn’t. Everything I wanted was wrong, or uncool to talk about, or terrifying to admit.

And here is the Evidence. The True Religion Moment. The the awesome, beautiful, tragic bitch of a moment that creates faithful and atheists alike. People have these moments, they curse God or don’t, and it’s supposed to make them decide what they believe.  I have lived in this space, in some sense, forever after.

Because the truth is, I still don’t know if keeping my mouth shut – not burdening her with my feelings – was the right call. I have lived my life since then regretting my choice, though. Making calls – sometimes, pretty bad ones – specifically to spite this one. I will die, though, not really knowing whether I was right not to tell her.

It sure would be convenient if God had a checklist for all of us. A specific divine plan. Charadi – dead early, on to her reward, check. Justin bumbles on a few more decades. Gets to have his little flaming turd of a life. If she’s watching, she’s okay about it. She doesn’t get mad that I mess up my life every chance I get, but still manage to stumble into a happily marriage. Which does not include her, outside of my never getting piercings and shaving my head.

It would be less comforting, but just as convenient, if God didn’t exist at all.  Stuff just happens. She’s dead, I’m not. All the hurt, abandoned, murdered women I’ve seen since then don’t need to remind me of her. I’m just messing with myself.

My experience is somewhat more nuanced than that. The God vote is still out, and there’s no bringing that election to a close – not if we want to be honest with ourselves.

I suspect there is a God, but that He just isn’t in the habit of handing out ice cream sundaes. And any covenant we have with God – with ourselves, with the universe, however you want – isn’t about comfort. It’s about God punching us in the mouth and saying, “you’re welcome”. The beating is a gift, because the alternative is oblivion. Job and Ecclesiastes don’t go away just because you don’t get them.

I will try to keep getting happier, because I am alive, and I have not yet proven I deserve to be. So that’s what I’ll do. Prove it to her. To those I love. And one day, maybe, to myself.

Now, about that classified information.  This is the primary regulation governing what is, for the U.S. government, classified information.

FACTOIDS

• Every President writes one of these.  Barack Obama did not generate most of this text.  Near as I can tell, he strengthened the language that forces people to give up old secrets in a timely fashion, and forbids people from “unnecessary” classification – but “unnecessary” depends a lot on viewpoint.
• There are many other regulations, written by the President’s subordinates, covering this same stuff.  They only explain HOW individual parties choose to obey this order.
• Really, I mean it.  No other law supercedes this Order, on this subject.
• Section 3.1 explains when a person may officially tell a secret.  Since the current President always has maximum classification authority, he may also tell any secret he wants, whenever he wants.

THEREFORE

• Telling secrets is not, in itself, breaking the law.  Telling secrets while holding a certain job is often a crime, and telling secrets after signing a Non-Disclosure Agreement is often a crime.
• It is therefore impossible for a President, or his authorized agents, to commit treason.  We can split hairs on wording, but treason requires a Congressionally declared enemy, and an intentional act to aid that enemy.  By those lights, I was wrong to label Karl Rove a traitor years back, and President Obama was not a traitor for telling the public about the confessions of the underpants bomber.
• PFC Bradley Manning may have a treason charge coming to him.  The Taliban government is a recognized enemy, and they have publicly announced their intent to use his (alleged) leaks.  If he is on the record anywhere saying that his intent in leaking was to damage the government, he’s done.
• Do not expect this charge to ever happen, though.  The penalty for treason is death, or five years/10000 dollars.  There is no point in charging someone with treason, though, if you aren’t going to kill him.  This makes it politically impossible to convict anyone of treason without destroying the United States.

This is exactly what we’ve earned, though.  When elected officials run their mouths off whenever it suits them, and we think collectively that we don’t owe anything to our government in exchange for what it provides us, and we don’t hold people accountable for their actions on any kind of uniform standard, people are going to talk.

I had more to say, but I think I’ll stop while I’m still being informative, and save rants for another time.

*The current two-party system has several interests that are more devoted to maintaining the system than to doing anything else.

*These two parties currently “only sort of” represent the people.

In the case of Democrats, I have long held that there are too many people in the tent: working at cross purposes, the people inside the DNC have trouble conveying any clear message to the unconverted.  Further, a general consensus inside the tent prevents anyone from deciding on a message and sticking party members to it.  In the absence of consensus, the same Dems who once accused Pubs of “fear-mongering” are using “fear of a return to the Bush era” as their only coherent rallying cry.

In the case of Republicans, message unity has never been much of an issue.  However, the prevailing message defies logic: 1. Government can’t do anything right, so 2. Republicans should be in charge of everything everywhere.  On the main street of my town, two Republican signs attacking a Congresswoman seem to contradict each other: “She voted to increase spending” and “She cut X Zillion dollars from your Medicare.”  Spending is wrong unless it helps you specifically, I guess this means.  I could even get behind that.  But that’s never the message, is it?

I’m voting independent down the line this year: we have both a Green and Libertarian Party registered here in Arizona, so maybe I’ll split it down the middle.  Libertarians for pinching pennies and Greens for social issues.

I don’t expect this will do much.  But I also don’t expect that voting D or R will do much for another 4 to 8 years, either.  In an era where there are no obvious problems, one might be able to pick the lesser of evils.  But we have obvious problems, now; I want to be sure I’m trying to contribute to a solution, any solution, that might actually be tried.  I do not want to reward either party for offering me only a choice of whom to blame.

I want to make it clear, I believe that many of our problems have solutions.  However, I do not believe the American people are in enough pain to try them.  Blame will work for most of us until poor people start killing the rich.  It does sometimes make me sad that history typically waits for murder before it moves; I do not lose a lot of sleep over it, though.  People are what they are, and what they are is selfish.

This selfishness informs our opinions.  The person who drew this comic thinks he’s being funny.

I think he’s being a bit of an a##hole.  I’m not saying I can prove he’s wrong; just that I think he’s being rude.

Let’s suppose he bases his assessment on living in a place with a free press and webcomics, having enough of a working education to be an atheist or an agnostic, and believing that anyone willing or capable of thinking as hard as he can will arrive at his conclusion.  (Maybe he’s secretly a believer and I’m way off base, in which case he’s not doing a good job communicating.)

Here’s the problem: missionaries believe that they’re helping people.  In many cases, they ARE.  Specifically, they’re helping people who are suffering NOT SUFFER ANYMORE. Even if you assume every organized religion is snake oil…hey man, f*ck you. If religion didn’t have an upside, it wouldn’t have stuck around  for thousands of years.

Maybe you live in a place where you’re smart and safe. Where you don’t need God as a crutch. Congratulations.

And maybe these “low hanging fruit” you seem to disdain so readily are living in a completely f*cked environment, that no one – not even a missionary – can ever get them out of.  Where the download speed of one’s internet porn is not so important as one’s next meal.  If there IS a heaven, these poor bastards deserve a shot at it; and if there ISN’T one, maybe you should just shut up and let them hope for it.  Instead of making your snarky f*cking point, valid or not.  Even better: if the only thing that can save people is other people, Mr. Atheist, GTFO there and show the missionaries how to REALLY help those less fortunate than themselves, if you’re so concerned about the exploitation of the weak.

But I don’t think that was the point of this comic…and that’s why I think it’s relevant to politics, too.  We don’t care about helping people as much as we care about being right. Helping poor people, like the Bible says to over and over again, is hard.  Hating gay people may not be mentioned so much, but it sure is easy, and I still get to feel like I’m right.

And who cares if we’re headed into Great Depression 2?  Who cares if repealing health care is not actually a solution to rising employer health care costs?  Who cares if Chicago’s so broke, it sold its parking meters to Abu Dhabi?  I can’t fix it, but I can blame someone.  If it’s not my fault, it’s almost like the problem doesn’t even exist!

My loved ones, vote how you feel this November, and I still love you.  But please don’t be that guy who’s satisfied with being perfectly right, when you can do more right by compromising with your enemies every once in a while.  And if you think I’m wasting my vote by staying out of the blame party this year, go ahead and keep that to yourself.  I don’t know if my choice is right, but I’m trying really hard not to judge others for theirs.

To the people actually KILLING people over Quran burnings: kindly die in a fire soon.  You’re the reason that the Ground Zero Mosque is even an issue, you effing prats.

To the Phineas Priests of all religions: you are the reason I cannot 100% believe in literal interpretations of scriptures.  I will point to you when I discover my name is not in the Book of Life, and I will save you a sulphurous seat.

I was 25 when 9/11 happened.  I called in sick from work.  I wasn’t awake, and I was frankly p*ssed off to hear so many people calling my answering machine while I a:) wouldn’t have been home anyway and b:) WAS home, but was trying to sleep.

Anyway, I joined the military about a month later.  My student loans were paid off; I had a real job.  I don’t actually believe that Jesus approves of our, or anyone else’s, military.  What the hell was I thinking?

I knew that 9/11 had pretty much started World War III (turns out, more like Cold War/Vietnam II), but I joined for the dumbest reason of all: to support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic; and to bear true faith and allegiance to the same. Because like it or not, it’s better than anything we’ve yet tried.

And I knew, then and now, that there is no such thing as innocent.  Even vegans, in order to avoid wearing leather, are using fossil fuels for the plastic soles of their hemp-topped, free-trade Birkenstocks.  Face it, humanity: you’re guilty the instant you draw breath.  You’ll be killing until you die: this is the reality of Original Sin.  Killing is real, unavoidable, and far more persuasive than arguing about whether a serpent really said something to belly-buttonless humans in a garden in Basra 6000 years ago.  Our Western society, with all its problems, takes killing more seriously than any society before it ever has.  It is right for us to worry about whether we are evil; we are far less evil, though, than we fear we are.

Since then, I would say that I’ve helped kill – through my intentional actions – somewhere between 10-20 people.  More like 14-16.  I didn’t pull any triggers; I don’t see these men’s faces at night.  But I did what I did, I knew those men would end up dead, and they are dead.  I killed them.

I refuse to deny that I killed them, because that would be irresponsible, in my view.  But I don’t have pangs of regret, either: it was extreme long range and, from what information I had, those men had it coming.  Maybe that makes me wrong.  Maybe that means that I have it coming, too.  All I know is, those men – brainwashed or not, reasonable or not – truly believed, against all evidence, that they could somehow bring jihad to me and mine.  They were willing to purposefully kill civilians to get to me and mine.  And because reason was not present for comment, killing was the only communication possible between us.  I AM RIGHT, AND YOU ARE WRONG, screamed at infinite decibels, straight into the deafness of the grave.

Cordoba is a mixed symbol.  You can take the name to mean that the “Ground Zero Mosque” is deciated to a “Muslim victory”, but you can also attribute it to an historical time period where minority religious groups were tolerated and science flourished.

At the very least, Imam Rauf knows the name is controversial, he can say it means whichever thing he wants, and he is using it to improve his overall status in the religious community.  Given that his backers are paying for both him and Fox News, I suspect this mosque is about cynically profiting from controversy, and it has.  Imam Rauf understands the mechanics of communication, but he is making no real attempt to communicate; he is failing at his stated objective of actually trying to shout across the divide. So be it; leave him be.

I would also agree with the sentiment that liberals have a messaging problem.  True, Ground Zero Mosque is on private land; the 10 Commandments courthouse guy or the cross in the Mojave are on public land.  So it’s not really the same argument, even though both arguments regard the First Amendment.

But a logical argument – being right – has nothing to do with communication.  That isn’t how politics works.  Defending the CordobaThing with the word “tolerance” and disputing the cross at Mojave – when it hasn’t been hurting anyone for years – doesn’t advance logical argument.  It just p*sses zillions of Christians in America off.  Christians who are already here, who will not be impressed by a secularist’s logical argument, and who will not go away just because a secularist thinks he’s right.

Religion isn’t about logic, either.  It’s about either emotion, noumena, or both.  I’ll make no attempt to discuss noumena right now.  But if you’re going to argue against someone’s faith using logic and a reasoned discourse of scripture, then you’re being stupid, no matter how smart you normally are.  A person of faith has either been raised from birth to react violently or emotionally against persuasion…or he’s had an experience from that faith that makes your logic sound like “blah I don’t know what I’m saying blah”.

On some level, I think we all understand this.  I think secularists and agnostics know that admitting to not caring whether God exists, and wanting their religious relatives to shut up about God, is going to cause trouble.  So they reword it, say “tolerance” instead, even though that’s not quite what they mean.  I think conservatives know that only they care about America “staying Christian” (my understanding of scripture is that no human nation can be such a thing); so they reword it, say “family values” instead, even though that’s not quite what they mean.  I think religious hate groups know about and thrive off of the fear and loathing that normal people send their way; so they reword it, say “constitutional freedoms” and “inherent right to self defense” instead, even though that’s not quite what they mean.

We don’t want to have the real fights, so we have thousands of fake ones instead, with consequences that are all too real.  Millions more awkward family gatherings; millions more corpses strewn across the dirty and unforgiving corners of the earth.  And too few of us willing to walk up to our corpses and say, “Those there.  I made those.  Those are mine.”

These 14 or so here?  I made those.  Those are mine.

They were dropping mortars on civilian houses trying to get to my people.  They were setting off car bombs and loading up little girls’ faces with shrapnel in markets, just to make a point.  They were raping and torturing women, then making the women falsely confess that Americans had done it, so they could drive those women out into the desert and shoot them.

I saw them do all these things, and in all but one case, I killed those people dead.  I would kill them again.  The one I didn’t get to kill, I didn’t kill because it was against the law at the time.  We’re all of us guilty at birth; the only thing that separates us from scumbags is the why and the how.  Why and How are the cornerstones of civilization, to be defended at all costs.

If somebody comes out of CordobaMosqueThingy and says “As Salaam Alaykum,” I will say “Alaykum Salaam.”  If that same man comes out of that same place, or any other place, with a gun, screaming “Allahu Akbar,” I will kill that man right in the face.  Just as I’d kill a man charging me with a gun if he had said “Praise Jesus” or “For the Flying Spaghetti Monster!”  I refuse to stare hatefully at that place, or any other place; that’s time I could spend enjoying my life.  I also refuse to refrain from killing a man in the face when he has it coming.  That’s my line, I’m walking it.

If I have to kill that man, maybe I’ll pick him up by his shirt and talk to him.  I’ll tell him that the saddest thing about jihad is how many times I’ve seen a cowardly jihadi, about to do something he knows is patently wrong, scream “Allahu Akbar” in order to psych himself up.  I’ll tell him that seeing anyone scream out God’s name before committing murder offends everything good and holy in this universe.  I’ll tell him that when I killed him in the face, it was because I had just as much right to be alive as he did, and that it wouldn’t have been an issue if he hadn’t pushed it.  Men aren’t potatoes; I don’t need to kill them in order to keep eating.  Why couldn’t you just be cool?  Why do our little victories always have to come at someone else’s expense?

I’ll shout I WAS RIGHT, AND YOU WERE WRONG, at the top of my lungs, straight into the deafness of the grave.

Jerry Pournelle has devised an Iron Law of Bureaucracy.  I’d hesistate to call it a single law, as it’s got bits.

* A bureaucracy invariably attracts two kinds of people: those who come to advance the bureaucracy’s cause, and those who come to advance the bureaucracy itself.

* Because the former group is there for the cause, the bureaucracy becomes frustrating, and it eventually saps the strength of the true believer.

* Because the latter is getting what they came for, the bureaucrats-for-their-own-sakes thrive.

THEREFORE:  People who serve the “cause” refuse promotion or quit, because the System is against them.  People who serve the Bureaucracy get promoted, thus fulfilling the true-believers’ version of reality.  QED.

I get the impression that this Iron Law was born from contempt – that is, that Jerry Pournelle was venting his “true believer” frustration.   I actually detect two errors, where Mr. Pournelle only seems to emphasize one.  I will turn these errors, as I perceived them, into questions:

1.  If only “team players”, or other such folk, belong in any organization, how do bureaucracies get started in the first place?  (This, I believe, is the error Mr. Pournelle is trying to address.)

2.  If “mission first” types could accomplish their missions without a supporting bureaucracy, why do bureaucracies continue to appear?

I offer a conclusion based on these questions: bureaucracies are a feature of human existence, not an unfortunate nuisance.  They must therefore be accepted and understood before anyone can be successful in neutralizing them.

I further suspect at least one cause: in a universe of free beings, we cannot force another person to believe or care about the same things, to the same degree, as we do. Bureaucracy is the unfortunate result of unresolved conflict between cooperation and coercion.

An example:  America could not be constituted without some form of compromise between those who profited from slavery, and those who did not.  First order effects: 3/5ths compromise, slave and free states, and a bureaucracy to moderate between them.

The bureaucracy bloomed, as it always must.  Second-order effect:  the Civil War.  George McClellan, a Bureaucracy man all the way, did exactly what he’d done before the war:  he sat there and counted beans.  Later, he ran for President in 1864, running on no particular platform other than, “Wasn’t It Nice When the Bloated Bureaucracy Was Still Working?”  And he would have won, too, had Sherman not captured Atlanta in that same year.  (Sherman, a True Believer, probably ended the war much earlier than it might have otherwise; for his reward, he was reviled throughout the South.  He also probably created the psychic environment for the modern concept of “total war” – but now my mind is leaking more than it should.)

Third-Order Effect:  Semantic confusion.  Now, when a Southerner argues States’ Rights, he is accused of backing racism; and more insidiously, Yankees can defend constitutional offenses because they won.  In both cases, there is a Cause, and a Bureaucracy supporting that Cause.  For the South, the Cause was independence and the Bureaucracy was slavery.  For the Yankee, the Cause was “Union” – a concept which didn’t fully exist until we won – and the Bureaucracy freed the slaves out of necessity.

Is it right, today, to defend discrimination for a Cause?  And when do we abandon Bureaucracy (also called “the rule of law”)?  When it suits us?  Do we set up a Bureaucracy that tells us when the first one is about to go bad?

Bubble gum for the mind.  Just sayin’.

There certainly is a double standard, but I find myself on the “so what?” side of the equation.  An artist makes his living on whether or not he is liked.  This puts his attractiveness firmly into play as a reason why others might do so.  It may not be cool when a bad musician becomes popular because they are hot…but ultimately, the money will tell, won’t it?

I got into acting during high school and college.  In college, I learned about my odds of making that a career.  Being a middle of the road brown guy with no accent means I wouldn’t get cast for any leading role, ever (it also doesn’t help that I squinted a lot during screen tests.  Blind man can’t wear glasses on camera).

I thought about this stuff in college, and came up with my Theory of Art.

Art is ultimately a verb, not a noun.  Specifically, art is any interpretation of reality where the artist is aware of his own interpretation.  Yes, this means that walking mindfully through a park can be art, under the right circumstances.  By this definition, it is not anyone’s job to declare what art is for anyone else.

Artifact is the name I give to what most people call art.  Artists create artifacts when they want to share art with someone else.  So a guy creates, say, a movie.  He puts his heart into it, and every time he interacts with this labor of love, that’s art to him.  He then creates the artifact, gives it to others, and hopes that they experience art through that artifact.  But it isn’t the artist’s choice whether the other person decides his own experience is actually art.

So, by these lights, it’s not up to the video game industry to convince Roger Ebert that games are art, nor is it Ebert’s job to convince others that games are not art.  Instead, we can call Braid an artifact, I can truthfully say that I experienced the game as art, and Roger Ebert can go be old somewhere.  Too easy.

And to borrow from the conversation that made me remember this theory, there are also two kinds of artists:  Carpenters and Artisans.  A Carpenter makes artifacts for the masses, and the art happens by accident; an Artisan attempts to use artifacts to control the experience of art. Carpenters are more likely to make money, but are less likely to change anyone’s tastes.  Artisans are more likely to change others’ views about art, but are less likely to know where their next meal is coming from.