Eccentric Flower:201010/Letter Bomb From a Birmingham Jail

[N.B. It would probably be better if you read the first half of the entry following this one before you comment on this one. -c]

First, a cautionary initial story, which is pertinent to the case at hand, Your Honor, if not quite on all fours.

Trinker posted a LiveJournal entry about one of her continual sore points: American-type people who get the Japanese wrong.

I commented there:

You're fighting a losing battle, you know that, right? As we continue our ongoing shift from European to Far Asian countries as our primary Other Cultures to absorb/rip off/badly assimilate, it's just going to get worse and worse.

And getting Americans to handle non-Roman writing systems with any degree of accuracy - Ha! Japan will switch over fully to romaji before Americans will ever be arsed to deal with those funny squiggles. Also, there will be snowball fights in hell.

The irony here - I'm sorry to say this but I believe it to be true - is that Japan is pretty much the only nation that is as half-assed as America in its language assimilations; the lack of care is (sadly) mutual.

A European learning English generally takes some pride in learning it well, partly because they don't want to look like a fool, and partly because living in close proximity to neighbors/enemies for so long has made them more aware of where they step; you don't see T-shirts in France or Germany proudly sporting some half-baked perversion of an English phrase. But Japanese and Americans both share a relative cultural and geographic isolation, and they also share a secret (or not-so-secret) belief that theirs is the Only True Way and that everyone else should dance to their beat. Thus we have half-assery on both sides.

In other news, I am extremely crabby with the general ability of people to respect other races, cultures, creeds, and so forth today and am in one of my "Nuke the entire planet from orbit and have done" moods, so here is your shaker of salt, for liberal use in conjunction with this post.

You'll be wanting a turn at that salt shaker too. Keep your eyes on it.

The thing is, I am not in any way disputing that Trinker has a right to be annoyed by people who get the Japanese wrong. [N.B. Especially since I realized later what I stupidly missed, which is that she was addressing people legitimately trying to learn Japanese, not pop-culture appropriation of Japanese.] Of course she has a right - in fact I will go beyond that and say that, personally, I feel her annoyance is entirely justified, that what's annoying her is in my opinion actually annoying and thus I sympathize with her annoyance.

But I'm also saying that I don't think her annoyance will accomplish anything; I don't think it will do any good at all, except perhaps on a very limited, local scale. That is, maybe she'll teach something to two or three people, and maybe they'll even retain it - but that's as far as that goes. And is that worth the annoyance?

I try to structure my life to keep annoyance out of it as often as possible. One of the techniques I use for that is to get rid of the annoyance here where it (ideally) can dissipate harmlessly. And when it is proven to not dissipate harmlessly, those are the times when I stop posting for a while or re-hide my journal or lose a reader or two or other consequences like that. But in the long run it's worth those consequences if it furthers my goal of living my personal life without annoyance, without frustration, without angst - because, really, I am not rewarded enough to suffer those. In my day job I have to deal with all sorts of annoyances pertinent to my job - and those I am paid to put up with. In my personal life, I'm not paid to get irritated about you or deal with your drama. I put up with annoyances from my wife and my friends, because there there are intangible rewards for dealing with their bullshit (and vice versa - I don't claim to be an easy person to get along with!); in fact, to me that's what friendship is mostly about, you put up with each other's insanity for mutual benefit and support.

But there's a whole larger world out there, and that world is full of things that want to irritate and annoy me, and there is simply no benefit to me in letting it do so. If I thought that trying to tackle those annoying things head-on would make a difference, that would be another story entirely. If I thought Trinker would change more than one or two people by griping about getting the Japanese wrong, then maybe it would be worth her time to do so. But she won't, and it isn't. (Obviously I have no say in how she chooses to spend her time. It is merely my opinion that she is wasting her time. That and five dollars will get you an overpriced coffee at Starbucks.)

Let's raise the stakes now.

I have many friends - well, no, I don't have many friends; let's try that again. I have several acquaintances who are active presences in the fantasy and science fiction community. I know writers and editors and con organizers and SMOFs and any number of Just Plain Fans.

I myself am not even on the org chart. My extremely slim CV of publication credentials includes not one SF story that has ever been published for pay, and at the rate I'm going it never will. The only SF publication I wouldn't mind having a credit in will not have me. Fandom, when taken in large doses, annoys the snot out of me, and the goal is to avoid annoyances. Every major SF con I've gone to in the past ten years, I've attended to meet people I want to see; on average at a Worldcon I attend two pieces of structured programming plus the costume tableaux, which has led me to wonder why I should bother paying Worldcon fees or getting on a plane for something that is so clearly not giving back equivalent value.

Finally - and this is the key bit for the rest of this piece - it's become pretty obvious in recent years that many of the F/SF writers I grew up loving - people who are still the mainstay of my list since I read virtually no new F/SF because 1) I no longer have recommendations I trust 2) I don't read much anymore at all 3) a typical stroll through the F/SF section of the average chain bookstore is greatly disheartening - that these older, more established writers are, frequently, not very enlightened people in some ways.

Specifically, the repeated failures of racial sensitivity - if not episodes of outright racism - over the past couple of years, including one which is happening right now this minute - have made me aware that a lot of the current old guard (the real Old Guard is now dead) do not have the greatest record on race issues. To say the least.

Here is the thing: I cannot reasonably take the position of "a pox on both their houses," because to do so would imply I agree with the positions of neither side, and that's not true. I agree with the people who are crying racism. I have read the original materials in each of these conflicts, and each time I concluded that yes, there was substance in the prosecution.

I also cannot take what is known as "the tone argument" (we agree with your position, but this is neither the time or the place for upheaval) because that argument has been proved spurious and is a privilege question moreover. (Saying "this isn't the place for that" is a power tactic; it is a luxury available only to the group in power, to be able to control the timing of the agenda.)

The Rev. King wrote in "Letter From a Birmingham Jail":

I personally feel that disagreeing with the Rev. King on matters of human rights is a sucker bet and I never do it. The man was no saint, but he saw clearly.

Unfortunately, saying that 1) I agree with the need for outcry 2) and I agree that the people in the comfortable, established positions do not get a say in the timing or nature of that outcry - both of which are true statements - leaves me personally up a tree. Because, brethren and sistren, when I read about these messes in a community I have more than a small amount of passing affection for, my gut reaction is, "Oh, my god, not this, not here." I'm very disappointed in the community, I guess that's the bottom of this. They're my people; I don't get along with them all the time, but that's traditional. I fight with my birth family a lot too. The point is, I rather like these folks and they're letting me down.

This is where we come back to the business of the first section, the Japanese section. Because, see, it's like this. If a member of my family - or one of my friends - let me down, made me disappointed and disgusted, I would try to nudge. I would try to correct. I would try to help. It's not just because of the emotional connection, but because that is a one-to-one matter, and my feeble efforts at trying to point out their folly may actually accomplish something.

But I no longer believe that any efforts I could summon up to change a larger pattern of misbehavior in a larger group of people, most of whom I don't know and who don't know me, can do the least bit of good whatsoever. I no longer see any value in adding my voice to the chorus of protest and indignation - no matter how important or how minor the topic. I have lost all faith that my voice contributes anything. And, if my voice does nothing, then why should I take on the indignation, the irritation, the disgust, the anger, the annoyance, the stomach acid? What good will it do to destroy my own composure and mood and digestion in such a case?

The first rule in being a paramedic - or in assisting in an emergency situation at all - is don't become part of the emergency. Don't jump off the bridge after the bridge jumper; likely all you will be doing is adding another person needing to be rescued - you - and thus doubling the problem. Don't try to do a rescue in dangerous territory you are not equipped to handle if it will place you in danger as well.

These days, I feel like any time I add my voice to any crisis, any situation demanding indignation or anger, any scandal, all I am doing is taking a high risk of becoming part of the emergency.

Now, if you do the math on this, if you extrapolate, you deduce something interesting. It means that not only do I not think my voice has any power, but it means that I most likely think your voice doesn't have any power either, nor yours, nor yours, nor yours .... In fact, I have come to believe that when change happens, it happens because of a very small handful of people who happen to be well-placed with respect to the matter at hand. It happens because someone with money or power relative to that particular situation decides it's a bad idea or acts on some other personal whim. It does not happen because of the mob screaming outside the door. And because of this, when change does happen, it is usually not what I personally regard as change for the better. It is generally change by the elite interest for the elite interest.

Do the math any further and you will see that, as I age, I become more and more of a danger to society. I wouldn't actually go sit in a cabin and become the Unabomber, because that's not my style and I am basically non-violent; and also because Unabomber types tend to be absolutely insane. But it does mean that, more and more, I have come to believe that incremental reform is no longer worth a bucket of warm piss - that for some of our corrupt institutions and social norms/habits, the only answer that is going to work is to throw the whole thing out, count the number of bodies on the ground after the explosion, and start over from scratch - or more likely let that particular institution expire, consigned to dust.

The problem is, that approach also is not influenced in the least by the shouters in the streets. If the shouters in the streets could actually provoke revolution, we'd have some lovely and heartening footage of Ali Khamenei's head being used as a football by now. Total overthrow is actually only accomplished by lone nuts. And lone nuts are dangerous and crazy, and tend to make even more unilateral decisions in directions you don't like than the elites do.

I do not, at this time, see any way to win.

And while you may well argue that I certainly can't win by sitting on my ass, I feel that the only meaningful thing I can do is not contribute to the problem. I grow more strongly convinced every year that the only meaningful contribution I can make to Greater Society At Large is to be invisible to it.

Meanwhile, I sure do wish my friends wouldn't fight, wouldn't do the kind of stupid things that demand a fight. It makes me ill.

Eccentric Flower talk:201010/Letter Bomb From a Birmingham Jail