Mags Blast iPad’s No-Nipples Policy

Apple’s no-nipples policy means fashion mags are censoring their iPad editions

I’m not sure what I think.

• I always appreciate somebody standing up for what they believe in.
• I hate censorship.
• I admit, I’ve got some anti-porn feelings. I do draw a line between depictions of sex in creative endeavors that require live humans and ones that don’t, i.e. in a book, painting, sculpture or even a realistic animation? Get graphic with your kinky self. In a movie,  internet video or photograph with actors/models doing these things for money? I get squiggy about that. From what I’ve read, I don’t like the way the porn industry treats its actors, particularly its women. Nobody’s looking out for them; I mean you don’t get voted into office as the politician who wants to “supervise porn.” But big business needs monitoring, and porn is huge business.  So, yeah, I tentatively appreciate somebody taking an anti-porn stand. (Note: I’m not talking about videos made by couples for sex therapy or sexual enhancement – people copulating on camera who would be doing it anyway doesn’t bother me, and though potentially titillating, those videos are not something I consider porn.)
• Just because something depicts body parts does not mean it’s porn, and America needs to lighten up about boobs (I gotta agree what the first writer says about breastfeeding).

It also gets into the question of if you develop a device, can you control the way it’s used? I’m tempted to say yes – it’s your invention – but if asked the same question about some practical items already in existence, I’d say no. Can Alexander Graham Bell set rules (yeah, from the grave) about what I can say on the telephone? Can the inventor of the television tell us what we can put on it? The inventor of digital cameras tell us what movies can be made? Does Al Gore get to decide what goes on the internet (just kidding!)?

The 20th and 21st century are all about communication – how we communicate, how quickly, from where to where – and it continues to raise some interesting questions about control.  True, a lot of communicators do not possess the same values I do, and that can lead to encountering things I would rather not see (and that I’d certainly rather my mythical children not see). On the other hand, a lot of controllers do not possess the same values I do, and as an artist, it terrifies me that they would stop me from communicating my ideas to the world. The fact that I know that the words I write would be censored in different places around the world for different reasons, in my mind, justifies my fear.

My verdict? And maybe this isn’t for the right reasons, but I’m OK with Steve Jobs outlawing porn aps on his iPad (and again, it’s not the sex. With the stories I write I have no business telling somebody else they can’t depict sex in their, uh, “artwork”). But I’m not OK with him censoring art/fashion photography in magazines. Maybe there’s a little inconsistency in that, but frankly, I’m still working out where, why, and how I draw my censorship line, because as much as we say “anything goes” on the internet, the reality is, I’ve never met anyone who still  meant that when you drag it down to the lowest depravities of human behavior (snuff? pedophilia? non-consensual sadism? is that really okay on the web?), and that means there is a line.

Though I must defend one of the names, Cash, as something that I have used for a character in a novel. But in my book, it’s the nickname of someone who’s real name is Cassius (a Latin name pronounced CASH-us (or CASS-ee-us in old, old Latin, but most people use the medieval Latin pronunciation now)), not a name in it’s own right. And if my name was Cassius, I might shorten it, too.

Otherwise… I’m finally at work on my epic fantasy of Heaven and Hell whose name I’m not telling the general public because I’m so dern excited about it. (I usually am lukewarm on my titles, but this one was so obvious and perfect… and I keep checking Amazon because I’m frankly shocked that it’s not already the title of a book.) Anywho, I was having a rough time because in the story there’s this initial brouhaha that happens… and then there’s a loooong time where stuff happens which is important, but the enormity of the stakes aren’t yet evident. And as any writer knows, stakes are key. But, thanks to my spate of fantasy reading, I’ve figured it out. Multiple plot threads. Der… I’ve been reading too many urban fantasies and romances where the plot necessarily centers on one or two people, and really, that’s not gonna work for this story. So now I have the plot line that’s going on in Heaven (the original one) and the plot line that’s going on in Hell (the new one that’s got very obvious stakes)… and eventually they are going to come together at the magical twisty moment in which the intensity of the stakes for all concerned get ratcheted up to epic.

I think I’d been worried that I wasn’t capable of balancing multiple plot lines (I almost wrote plot loins… I must be in RWA), but now that I’ve accepted the challenge, it’s really exciting and words are just flowing onto each new blank page. I’ve found that I need to work on one story and then open a new document and write another one, and then I’ll start putting them together. But I LOVE characters. I love their diversity and their strengths and weaknesses. I love bad guys with bits of good and good guys who fail. I love how viewpoint often determines who’s the hero and who’s the villain. And in a story about betrayal and forgiveness, having multiple viewpoints is exactly what I needed to add facets and shadings to questions of what is good and what is evil.

So… I’ve started on a blurb already, and here it is (and, OK, nobody reads my blog, so I’ll include the title):

The Judas Club is an epic fantasy of Heaven and Hell where angels, demons, the damned and the blessed struggle for identity and meaning after the worths of their souls have been judged – and the story of the Black Angels who straddle both worlds, braving Hell to offer the lost a second chance at salvation. (Here I need to figure out how to sum up in one or two sentences what the main characters’ GMCs (goal/motivation/conflicts) are (and there’re six of them – two Black Angels, a soul in Heaven, a soul in Hell, a demon and an angel). I’ll likely have to pick a couple and leave out the rest.) Until Jeshua of Bethlehem brings them all together to once again turn the establishment on its head – and dare the most dangerous rescue mission in the history of Heaven or Hell.

Wanna read it? I know I want to write it! It’s my fourth novel, and I’m drafting it now!!

Then I got to the section titled “Can One Rely on the Bible?” and its evidence was, well, completely inaccurate about what historians do and say. Now, I’m not trying to say that you can’t rely on the Bible. If that’s your religious text, there’s a lot of great stuff in there. I’ve read it multiple times and I feel enlightened by it. However, I get (I believe reasonably) frustrated when people try to pass off the book as literal truth using bad scholarship, especially as what the bulletin said sounded relatively reasonable, and if people didn’t realize it wasn’t accurate well, somebody could feel this bulletin had a good argument. The idea was basically that: “we can verify the Bible by comparing its manuscripts and translations. In fact, there are far more serious discrepancies among other works than among Bible manuscripts.” And it went on to compare the Bible to other historical works of dubious age and veracity, claim that historians took these other books as facts, and imply that academics were somehow prejudiced against the Bible because they won’t take it at face value.

Examples…

* The first comparison was to Caesar’s Commentaries on the Gallic Wars, which I read and studied in my Latin II class in college. The bulletin goes through the dates (“composed about 58-50 B.C…. oldest known manuscript dating to about A.D. 850… only ten manuscripts of the history are known.”) and then they get to the hugely misleading part, “Yet all scholars accept these as reliable history.” OK. In my Latin class when we read this, my teacher did say that this was Caesar’s personal account of a war he was actually in, so it’s about true events. He also said that Caesar wrote this to make himself look good and justify an expensive war, so don’t believe everything in it. It’s a piece of propaganda written by the winner, so take that into consideration when reading.

So if I take the Bible as literally as my scholarship has taught me to take Caesar’s Gallic War, I will see the Bible as a piece of propaganda written by the winners, and take its truth as such.

* Next comes the Roman History of Livy, which the paper claims “is accepted without question.” Well, that’s not really true, either. A historian will tell you that our current version of Ab Urbe Condita is based on a recension (a manuscript compiled by editors from current sources to make what they think is the truest version of the text – I would guess all texts from pre-Gutenberg days are going to be recensions) commissioned by Symmachus in 391 AD (the manuscript was composed between 27 and 25 BC). The book was popular enough that’s it’s probably reasonably accurate (more copies = easier to figure out what’s accurate because more texts state it that way)… but reasonably accurate still doesn’t mean that every word should not be set into stone as the direct word of Livy.

Second part regarding Livy… while there is reasonable acceptance of the text (again, NO historian takes a pre-print book’s text as 100% error free; and there’s even room for debate in post-print work)… the events described therein are not taken as being accurate. Livy was writing a history that started with Aeneas – a mythological hero who escaped from Troy as it burned (a war that historians aren’t even positive happened, much less know who was actually in it), and led a grand adventure in Carthage with Dido before landing in modern-day Italy and founding Rome.  And then there’s that OTHER version of the founding of Rome with Romulus and Remus, the fratricidal twins sired by Mars and raised by a she-wolf… but that’s a different version of  Roman “history”. Livy was writing about things that happened hundreds of years before he was born and relying on tradition for his “facts.” Because it was written in an old book, doesn’t mean it happened. Historians disregard as accurate ANY pieces of a text that include supernatural influence, and we always take into account the distance of the historian to the events that happened, his access to reliable resources, his potential biases… while the accuracy of the text to what the author has written can be documented, the historical accuracy of the events contained therein are always questioned.

So… if I treat the Bible like a treat Livy’s Roman History, I treat it as a text that is mostly intact from what the original authors wrote, but unreliable in its record of history, particularly the parts dealing with supernatural events.

* The bulletin goes on to compare the textual accuracy with Thucydides and Herodotus, two Greek historians considered the fathers of modern history for their use of primary sources, eye-witness accounts, and attempts to take the gods and other supernatural events out of history.  I won’t get into it, but basically the exact same things I said above apply here, no ancient text is 100% accurate and events (even from these two who tried very hard to do the research) are not accepted as 100% accurate (or, occasionally, even vaguely accurate).

* Finally it ends with a comparison to Shakespeare in saying that due to the comparative number of ancient copies in existence, we are assured of a “more accurate text for the New Testament, than there is of any text of Shakespeare.” I don’t even know how they justify this. Any Shakespeare scholar will tell you that there are 2+ versions of several of Shakespeare’s plays – the First Folio, and the original quarto (or, I believe some of them have several quartos, making multiple versions). The First Folio was the original compendium of Shakespeare’s plays, brought to a printer several years after Shakespeare’s death by his friends and colleagues at the King’s Men. They had texts for most of the plays, either previously published or rehearsal copies used in the theater, but it’s possible (even likely) that missing pieces were recalled by the actors who performed the roles and then written down for publication.

The problems with accuracy and Shakespeare are manifold and question, even, what is meant by an “accurate” text. Shakespeare wrote for the theater, and he didn’t necessarily think his plays would still be performed centuries later. Actors would occasionally rewrite lines, epilogues were frequently not composed by the playwright, Shakespeare would rewrite scenes for a revival (and which one is the “accurate” text then, the original or the one influenced by popular opinion?), people would write together and not necessarily note that, the whole idea of copyright wasn’t the same,  and anybody who’s even done a modicum of Shakespearean research knows that there are a jillion theories about Shakespeare’s authorship, from his plays were written by the (dead) Christopher Marlowe to they were written by a woman to Shakespeare wrote other plays that were accredited to somebody else to… It’s a hot mess.

And this is the accuracy in transcription of a popular author’s work by his friends and co-workers within ten years of his death when his works were still being performed and the printing press allowed multiple identical copies to be created at once. (We still have 228 of the supposed 1000 originally printed FFs!)

And nobody’s claiming ANYTHING Shakespeare wrote to be accurate history.

So… to sum up, anybody claiming the Bible is the literal word of God is making a leap of faith. And that’s cool – all religion eventually comes down to what an individual man (or woman!) can believe, and what what a man can’t believe. But to try to use history and science to prove that a document that old, (often) composed decades to centuries after the events it’s describing, written by people with a mission, compiled by people with a social and political agenda, and translated into your language is 100% accurate in text, meaning, and historical account? That doesn’t stand up to scrutiny. Can I still find the text inspiring without it being 100% the literal word of God? Sure I can. Just as I can find inspiration in a variety of world religious texts and histories, none of which, from a scientific and historical perspective, can possibly be 100% accurate in text, meaning, and historical account. It does make hard to justify condemning somebody using an ancient text as “gospel truth” (or “Qur’an truth” or “Gita truth” or “Tao truth” or…) Heck, if you want “accurate” as a measure of religious validity, Hubbard’s Dianetics, Anton LeVey’s Satanic Bible, and Alistair Crowley’s Holy Books of Thelema are 100% accurate to author intention…  but I’m not recommending any of those as a way to live your life.

Faith can be a beautiful and powerful thing when used to strengthen character and help make the world a better place. I have no problem with that kind of faith, even if it isn’t justified by history or science. That’s what faith is, a “leap from the lion’s head” (to quote one of my favorite characters) into something greater than the five senses can touch and facts can justify, a leap that some people can’t make and that springs in a variety of directions for those who do choose to take it. I condemn no one for their belief or lack thereof because spirituality is a journey for which we are all equipped and trained differently – how could we all choose the same path? As long as people are using their faith (in divinity, science, or humanity) to bring joy, strength, peace, and frith into a world that can use a lot more of those, let’s celebrate the faithful for making that leap.

According to the Catholic Encyclopedia, there were three martyrs named Valentine, two of whom died in the 3rd century (maybe) and one of whom died in Africa at an unknown date. None of them seem to have anything to do with love. But that’s where we get the name from.

Though there are many debates as to why the mid-February date (some claiming it has to do with when one of those Valentines was buried), mid-February is also the date for the ancient Roman Lupercalia, a fertility festival that was celebrated on the Ides of February (Feb 15). This festival, according to…. somebody at the University of Chicago (there’s like 3 names on the site, and I’m not sure who actually wrote the article)… involved sacrificing goats and puppies in front of a cave, then two virile young men (called the Luperci) approached the altar, painted each other’s foreheads with the sacrificial blood, wiped it off with milk, and then had to start laughing (which I’m guessing wasn’t hard, provided the sacrificing puppies didn’t get you down too much). Then everybody ate, got drunk, and the Luperci then ran through the town dressed in goat skins and spanked people (particularly women who wanted to get pregnant) with mini-whips made of more goat-skin.

Now that’s a Valentine’s party for you – two drunken, nubile men running around town in loincloths spanking women.

A Catholic legend (according to history.com), which tells why we send cards on Valentine’s Day, says that one of those martyred Valentines fell in love with the jailer’s daughter while he was in prison (some say for marrying couples against the Emperor’s orders). Before he was executed, he left a note for her signed, “From your Valentine.”

During the Middle Ages, Chaucer made a reference to Valentines Day and love in a poem (potentially the first connection between the two) when he wrote:

Though why birds would be choosing their mates in February is anybody’s guess (and, according to wikipedia.org, he in fact wrote this for the engagement of two 15 year old royals, an agreement that was arranged on May 2, 1381)

Shakespeare includes a reference to Valentine’s Day during one of Ophelia’s rants… and the part of the play where (most people interpret) we find out that a lot of her crazy comes from Hamlet rejecting her after she, uh, gave it up:

To-morrow is Saint Valentine’s day,
All in the morning betime,
And I a maid at your window,
To be your Valentine.
Then up he rose, and donn’d his clothes,
And dupp’d the chamber-door;
Let in the maid, that out a maid
Never departed more.

So, I’m going to go with pretty clearly, Halmark did not, in fact, invent Valentine’s Day. So no matter how you choose to celebrate it – cards and chocolates, deflowering innocent virgins, marrying off teenagers, a good old fashioned spanking (and I do mean old fashioned), or taking the new wave train of finding a way to say “I love you!” to yourself – I hope you have a good one!

It doesn’t matter how good or bad the product is, the fact is that people don’t read anymore. Forty percent of the people in the U.S. read one book or less last year. The whole conception is flawed at the top because people don’t read anymore.

I didn’t realize that I didn’t read anymore.  But now I’ve been reading about the iPad (and I’m really going to resist commenting on the name, other than this aside in which I remind everyone that the name is infinitely commentable) and the pricing wars between Amazon and Mcmillan, and have decided that the modern world of book publishing, particularly in regards to the e-book market, is all fascinating and somewhat confusing and frustrating.

I own a Kindle. I love it muchly; it’s easy to use, carries more books than even I can read on vacation, is lightweight and very portable, and I was shocked by how much I just didn’t miss trying to read paper books in which the type was so close to the spine I had to practically rebreak the cover every time I turned a page. If, on the Kindle, I could organize my books into digital bookshelves (like I do at home – I have my own whacked out system that they will not come up with on their own), loan the books to friends, flip to other pages easily, and see the covers (and no, Nook’s “if I squint I can almost tell what that is” inch tall cover display doesn’t count), it would be perfect. Oh, and if I didn’t have this sense of impending doom that eventually I won’t be using a Kindle anymore (either because of tech envy or Kindle just goes the way of the 8track) and I will have lost a few hundred books that can only be read on an obsolete device. But, in the meantime, my bookshelves are staying at a comfortably groaning stasis, which makes my marriage a far better place to be. So the Kindle will stay.

Who knew? Technology and literature together make a powder keg. Oh. Wait. They always have by themselves; why would conjoining them make a difference?

Interesting article on an issue near and dear to my heart: misogyny within the storytelling community. Baggott touches on the side of the issue that I find the most disturbing, that recognized books “are not only written by men but also have male themes, overwhelmingly… war, boyhood, adventure.” As if writing about childbirth, love, community, and other “women’s issues” are somehow unworthy of praise.  Not to say that women don’t go to war and men don’t fall in love, but I am sick of living in a world in which to be considered equal, I have to live up to a man’s definition of strength – be physically strong, fight well (kick-ass heroines anyone?… which, don’t get me wrong, I LOVE them, but that’s not the only way to be a strong female character), earn a lot of money, be a CEO…. If I’m strong because I’m mystical, compassionate, and good at working with people instead of mowing them down, clearly I’m not a feminist, or at least not equal to somebody logical, authoritarian, and violent.

James Cameron Hates America – by Tom Shone

Dude, the man who wrote Rambo and Titanic? Did you know he’s a Kanuck?? Yup. And he hates America. At least according to extreme right wing sites such as Movieguide (which I’ll get to in a moment. This might be my new favorite website to mock). I haven’t seen Avatar yet, but so far I’ve heard that while it’s stunning fabulousity is earning bajillions of dollars, it is a desecration of all known human values for its (a) America hating, people hating, God hating, capitalism hating left-wing madness and its (b) white-messiah-complex same old right-wing-racist-in-liberal-clothing storyline. Dude. I totally need to see this movie for myself. How can that many people possibly be offended all at once and it not be a South Park episode?

Movieguide

Umm… Let me start this by saying that I don’t agree with the way movies are currently rated, including items like two uses of “fuck” isn’t, in my opinion, less appropriate for children than decapitated heads being tossed over a castle wall (see http://www.mpaa.org/Ratings_Rules.pdf pg 8 for ruling on cuss words; see LOTR: Return of the King for a PG-13 movie with decapitated heads being catapulted over a wall) and how is it possible that Cassanova and Inglourious Basterds have the same rating? And how is Hostel not NC-17… while Clerks had to appeal their original NC-17 designation to get an R?

So… a new rating system would, in my opinion, not be inappropriate.

However.

Movieguide has a very special rating system for people who want to know if watching this movie may torpedo their chances at heaven. Again, I’m actually cool with this (I certainly wouldn’t mind if somebody put together a pagan movieguide to help me decide what to see and what’s going to just make me angry). What I don’t understand is, why in their Christian guide, they felt the need to warn people if the movies have themes that are: communist, environmentalist, feminist, internationalist, politically correct, and/or socialist. Does Christ hate the environment and love capitalism? I don’t remember that part of the Bible where Jesus said “you’re welcome for the healing; that’ll be $200.”

But what I really love about this site is the rating system they use, a shorthand involving 29 different elements like ‘O’ for “Occult worldview, occult elements or Satanism”, all of which can be increased by adding Os, so “OOO” means it REALLY ups the Occult, as opposed to O which has some occult and OO which is… fair to midlin’ occult? So you can have a movie with a rating that looks like: PaPaPa, PCPC, EE, FRFR, CoCo, AcapAcapAcap, C, B, O, LLL, VVV, S, NN, A, DD, MM (yes, that’s an actual rating… for Avatar) which translates as:

Unfortunately, Avatar doesn’t have my favorite shorthand designation, which is Ho for “homosexual worldview or homosexuality (incl. sodomy & lesbianism)”. I’d really love to see a movie with a HoHoHo rating; that would totally make my day.

I was reading an article the other day about my state’s revamping of history curriculum (which, I think curriculum should be regularly looked at and revamped. I’m good with this so far), and two of the committee chairs are pushing for a history curriculum that teaches the importance of Christianity in shaping America, and how, according to them, our founding fathers wanted a Christian nation. *head to desk* This new wtfery is beyond me.  But some politicians see a lot of power in the religious right and are going to wield it like a club, apparently and, well, maybe somebody actually believes that the people who wrote “freedom of religion” meant “right-wing theocracy”.

Just goes to show that everybody truly does believe their views are the center from which all others are judged.

Anywho, I am jaded enough to know this sort of madness will regularly come from politicians, and feel confident that the majority of the committee will turn down their truthiness version of history. What always bugs me more than politicians, is the people that post comments on them. Somebody actually said something to the effect of  ”Christians help people with Habitat for Humanity and Salvation Army; atheists do nothing.”

You know what? As a religious person, I am regularly shamed by the atheists and the agnostics that I am friends with. They are some of the most ethical, fun-loving, least hypocritical people on the planet, and every good act they do has no fear of hell behind it. They are good people… because it’s the right thing to do. I admire them.  (Those screaming people with bad hygiene that you see on TV are about as typical of an atheist as Jerry Falwell is of a Christian)

And so, back to the song, I love it, because it reminds us that the celebration of family and the turning of the seasons is not a religious thing, but a human thing. I can love carols even as I don’t agree with all the words, and this doesn’t make me a bad person… it just makes me a person. Celebrating people, all people, our traditions, our faiths (even if that’s faith in humanity, or just faith that you and your friends can make a difference), this is a human party. And what better season to have one, than the end of the year when so many different cultures from all over the world have found a reason to gather? Christmas, a celebration established from many religions that came before it, is for everyone.

Why ‘The People Speak’ and the Zinn Education Project May Be Illegal in Public Schools

OK. So… you ever like what somebody’s trying to say and hate the way they’re saying it?

• Education needs serious reform: check!
• History class can (and should) be used as a call to social action: check!
• All history – what we did right as well as what we seriously screwed the pooch on, all the often twisted roads to how we got where we are now – should be taught: check!
• There is no such thing as a non-biased history lesson, so we might as well come right out and say “hey, this is biased”: check!
• Students should be taught to question everything: check!

These are the stated goals of the Zinn project, and I believe with my whole heart that these are incredibly admirable goals. Then I read the lesson plan that’s posted in the article, and while I disagree with nothing in there… well… I guess in my mind there’s such a thing as too biased.

“Unity” – what does that mean? As humans, we are naturally social and we group ourselves.  It’s how we survived as a hunter-gatherer culture whose enemies had better eyesight, bigger claws and thicker skin: we made tribes.

In modern American society, we don’t have the hunter-gatherer collective defending the tribe from panthers, but we have our facsimile standing under the Friday Night Lights watching the local boys defend the home field from the Neighbor HS Panthers. We want a group to root for, to love on, to defend. Take two people who normally wouldn’t say two words to each other, stick ‘em in a stadium, and they’re suddenly wearing similar dress, carrying the same symbols, chanting in unison, and then moshing in the same pit when a field goal sneaks through the uprights to win the game.

We do the same thing with countries that we do with high school football teams: we have symbols and pennants, colors and mottoes, and these things are used to promote tribe unity… and here’s where the idealogical divide seems to split apart, because the same things that are used to promote unity in the form of pride and loyalty (what conservatives typically emphasize, and two things I think are great) are also used to promote conformity and what I’ll call a tribal psychopathy (what liberals tend to emphasize, and two things that I have a huge problem with – and I’ll get to what I mean by tribal psychopathy in a minute).

I will stand by pride and loyalty as good things, provided they don’t swing to an extreme. Pride gives us the confidence to challenge ourselves and dare things that we otherwise wouldn’t. (“We’re going to contest and we’re taking on the bigger, richer schools of Houston – and we’re going to look GOOD doing it! ‘Cause we’re MHS Theater, and we’re awesome!”) And loyalty makes us give people a second chance when they screw up – and we all will screw up. We need loyalty.

On the other side…

Conformity is a mistreatment of members of your own tribe, and I don’t think I need to proselytize on why required (or even encouraged) group-think is bad anywhere outside of a mammoth-hunting party, a sports stadium, or a group artistic endeavor (good actors and techies know that the good of the play is more important than the good of the single performer – you don’t suddenly decide to do your own thing on opening night, no matter how good your idea is).  (Just like pride and loyalty can have their bad sides, conformity, used judiciously and thoughtfully, as much as it pains me to say, does have a good side).

So what is tribal psychopathy?

A psychopath is someone who is incapable of feeling empathy for other people or remorse for their actions against them. According to an article in the New Yorker, pyschopathy could affect up to 1% of American men (women are much less likely to utterly lack empathy… go figure), so it’s much more prevalent than people think and doesn’t usually result in serial killers. It does result in that ass who doesn’t care who gets hurt, as long as he gets what he wants. Problem is, with a psychopath, this guy’s not ignoring the feelings of others or somehow squashing his guilt, like most of us tend to assume… it never occurred to his brain to have those feelings. Psychopaths will sometimes seek out useful people to make “friends” with, but when it comes down to it, their tribes only ever have one person in it.

For the rest of us, though, somewhere along the way of developing our natural tribe mentality, we realize that if there is an “us”, then there must be a “them.” And those other tribes are competing with us for the world’s limited resources, like good hunting grounds… and oil. (And while there might be enough to go around for now, our children’s children’s children are going to have a problem, so we should be forward thinking and start staking claims to provide for our children’s futures.) And while, again, it’s very natural to look out for your own tribe, a tribal psychopath is someone who, while likely caring and loyal to people within his/her tribe, feels no empathy towards any other tribes and no guilt for any actions performed against them.

I think tribal psychopathy is not only a lot more common than regular psychopathy (and if you know 100 men, according to some psychologists, you know a psychopath. As a schoolteacher who averaged 100 new students per year, every two years, I taught a psychopath. So…. it wasn’t me! It was them!) but tribal psychopathy is, to an extent at least, socially accepted. Certainly a lot more accepted than the Tribe Me form of psychopathy.

So… back to the article that you probably forgot about since I haven’t mentioned it in ten years… it seems to me, that Zinn is trying to get rid of tribal psychopathy (which is a bad thing that we should get rid of) by getting rid of tribalism. “Imagine all the people, living life as one…” and all that.

I don’t think it’s going to work. I think rejecting tribe goes against the core of human nature, because everyone but psychopaths have a tribe. (Showtime even gave Dexter tribal vestiges so audiences would like him. Imagine Dexter without his confusion over his wife, father, sister, and adopted kids. Yeah. Suddenly he ain’t so cool.) Some people might say they have no tribe, but if you study them, they’ve redirected their tribal loyalties onto an idealogical clique. For example, “I’m an artist/scientist/member of ‘x’ religious group/etc., not beholden to country but to mankind… and my fellow artists/scientists/members of ‘x’ religious group/etc.” Surprisingly, I sometimes find ideological tribes to be the most hateful of others because they (a) often don’t realize that’s a tribe, (b) justify rejecting people whose tribes are anything but ideological in nature as unenlightened or uneducated, and (c) can get the hate on in a spectacular fashion for tribes who are ideologically not aligned with their own – a difference in geography is nothing compared to a difference of opinion on gun control. My favorite true life quote ever of this type was, “I hate Republicans because Republicans hate people.” Seriously? Would you listen to what you just said?

Anyway, everyone has a tribe – probably multiple tribes – and it isn’t all of humanity.  Tribalism is an inherent part of human nature. Tribal psychopathy, however, isn’t inherent to all humanity – a lot of people love their tribe without forgetting the sovereignty and potential efficacy of other tribes – which means we can combat tribal psychopathy. But we need to work with human nature instead of trying to change human nature. Don’t tell people not to group; you’ll fail. Make it not acceptable inside your group to hate other groups. That I’ve seen be successful. Wave that flag… and make sure it stands for something worthwhile. That’s the way to a better humanity.

This was really interesting to me, because I had a sort of epiphany. We always talk about “killing our darlings” as in getting rid of scenes that don’t work or whatever, as if we have this feeling like each word from our brains is gold… but that’s not really true. Most writers I know don’t think that their words are all golden. Most writers I know seem to think most of their words are crap (even when they’re not), so why the trouble cutting?

Reminds me of my high schoolers, and sometimes with their writing it would be three pages long, but it would take two pages to get to a point, and I’d be like, “You need to cut the first two pages; they’re brainstorming. They have no meaning,” and I’d get these horrified looks like, “But I did that work! I should get credit for it! How will people know how much work I did if I only show them 1/3 of it??” I think a lot of our reluctance to let go is not that we’re so in love with everything we put down, but that we want ‘E’s for effort; a “what I lack in quality I make up for in quantity” sort of thing. And a lot of the world growing up seems to work that way – from the simple: show your work in math – to the more morally complicated: we don’t ask where the money comes from, we just know that more is better.

But that isn’t the case anymore. As artists, we need to so enjoy what we do that we create without the need for credit. Then every scene we excise, every doodle that ends up in the recycle bin, every camera shot that gets erased was a fun day that we had with our craft, and that is sufficient to satisfy. A little sacrifice to the muses, if you prefer to think of it that way. I realize that that must be damn hard when you’re on a deadline, but I think the principle is sound.

My second creative love after writing, the art of theater, is very frustrating and fascinating at the same time because by it’s very nature, the act of communicating your art is the act of deleting it. Once a performance is done, it will never again happen just that way. Once a show closes, that piece art is gone from the world, and no recording can ever bring it back with it’s true creative magic. (Food and wine are another one of these art forms, though I think mentally easier to deal with the “consumption” thereof). I think those of us that concretize  our work in its creation (by committing it to paper or clay or whatever your medium) have a harder time letting go because we don’t have to. But an actor would scoff at the idea of holding onto a rehearsal. How do you do that? And if you did, what would be the point? All the effort of actors, directors, scene designers, etc. produce a product that is an insane reduction of all the work that went into it. Two hours in the viewing from months of labor by tens to hundreds of people… and then the product is lost to oblivion. But theater artists revel in that ephemeral nature. That “if you weren’t there, you can’t have it.” And I think all of us can learn from that attitude.

Most of the shots Michael Jordan made in his lifetime were not during a game. But each one he made alone, outside of an audience, helped him be the man we loved to watch on the court. And so shall I learn from his example.

And now for something (funny) that demonstrates the importance of letting go of some of those ideas… How to create a weapon that is devastating and unstoppable, from Basic Instructions.

(And I somehow managed to get writing, teaching, theater, basketball, and Star Wars all into one post!!! Hmm… what is missing…. VAMPIRES, VAMPIRES, VAMPIRES!!!… OK, now I think I have all the topics my life revolves around. )

Steve Faber from his article in Script Magazine called Mining for Real Comedy in a Techno-Virtual Lexicon Pit:

Arlie Hochschild from his article in The New York Times called The State of Families, Class and Culture:

In survey after survey, Americans show up as valuing marriage more than people almost anywhere else. Yet at the same time we have the highest divorce — and romantic breakup — rate in the world… Children born of married parents in America face a higher risk of seeing them break up than children born of unmarried parents in Sweden… The culprit is not the absence of family values, I believe, but a continual state of unconscious immersion in a market turnover culture. It is this that sets us apart from a more stable Europe.

Not a quote, but if you’ve got a little under and hour and want to see something really cool and hopeful, Rick Steves goes to Iran.

And in case you want to see something less hopeful… you know it’s bad when John Stewart can’t make it all funny: Rape-Nuts.

A totally random new book technology thing called Vook that I’d dying to try. And for $6.99? I guess that’s cheaper than death.

And finally, save Dollhouse! Catch up on hulu.com and keep tuning in!