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REBLOG: Why I Am Not Charlie

January 9, 2015January 9, 2015 Luther M. Siler5 Comments

I am trying to avoid having something to say about this, because I really don’t much want to. In lieu of my own thoughts, though, this ain’t bad at all.

a paper bird

There is no “but” about what happened at Charlie Hebdo yesterday. Some people published some cartoons, and some other people killed them for it. Words and pictures can be beautiful or vile, pleasing or enraging, inspiring or offensive; but they exist on a different plane from physical violence, whether you want to call that plane spirit or imagination or culture, and to meet them with violence is an offense against the spirit and imagination and culture that distinguish humans. Nothing mitigates this monstrosity. There will be time to analyze why the killers did it, time to parse their backgrounds, their ideologies, their beliefs, time for sociologists and psychologists to add to understanding. There will be explanations, and the explanations will be important, but explanations aren’t the same as excuses. Words don’t kill, they must not be met by killing, and they will not make the killers’ culpability go away.

To abhor what was done to the victims, though, is not…

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Last Patrick McLaw update

September 12, 2014September 11, 2014 Luther M. Siler

So, one more thing, because I just noticed it– if you go to the article I linked the other day, and you actually play the video, which I almost never do on news articles, they actually show two shots of the letter itself that got him noticed by law enforcement– apparently because some of the people he sent it to turned it in. The first picture is insanely blurry but you can read bits of it in motion and, I dunno, maybe some of you are graphics wizards and can sharpen this or something:

The second shot is from the last page, and is much clearer, and gives just enough detail to make it clear why people read the letter and called the cops. Weird thing about suicide letters: saying “This is not a suicide letter!” is actually not very convincing.

Definitely a case of shitty initial reporting here, folks.

Well, so much for that, I guess.

September 2, 2014September 2, 2014 Luther M. Siler15 Comments

You may have heard a story that broke nationwide over the weekend about Patrick McLaw, a middle school teacher in Maryland who was supposedly basically disappeared by the authorities for writing a pair of novels under a pen name that involved a school shooting. A school shooting in the 2900s. Nine hundred years into the future.

Maybe you’ve noticed: I’m a middle school teacher who writes novels under a pen name. Now, granted, none of my books have ever involved a school shooting, but… yeah, this kinda hit close to home, and early mental drafts of this post involved some reflection on the Columbine shooting; as someone who spent large chunks of high school and college in a black trench coat, I could identify with those kids too.

Long story short: I could write the hell out of a school shooting story if I wanted to, guys. For any number of reasons. I get alienation. I get violent thoughts. And while I was never close to a Klebold/Harris type kid in high school, a big part of the horror of the Columbine massacre, to me, was the “there but for the grace of God go I” aspect of the whole thing.

But anyway. I didn’t get the post written yesterday because the story was too insane. I couldn’t find any information that was useful beyond the horrifyingly badly-written and borderline libelous local news article about it, and that article was clearly written by a fearmongering moron. There had to be more to the story.

Well… yep. I’d seen a single comment on one article alluding to some sort of letter he’d sent to school authorities that had attracted their notice, but it hadn’t been picked up or followed up on anywhere else. My wife pointed out that, at 23, he was at exactly the age where (and it should be made perfectly clear that this is pure speculation) issues with schizophrenia tend to manifest themselves. And while the article doesn’t use that word, that’s certainly what it feels like.

It is decidedly odd to be relieved that someone has turned out to be schizophrenic, but… fuck, I’m not prepared to deal with a world where your boss can get you locked up for having written a book, three years ago, where you describe a fictional bad thing happening nine hundred years in the future. I was begging for there to be more to this story and for it just to be insanely shitty journalism. I’m not glad I’m right, but I’m glad I’m right, if you know what I mean.

The lack of genuine government insanity also makes it a bit easier to say this: I didn’t buy his books, because $14.95 for an ebook is more than I’m willing to spend, but I did download a sample chapter. And I’ll be honest even though it makes me an asshole: I said right away that I thought the dude wrote like someone with mental issues. Here’s the first few paragraphs, from the Amazon viewer:

This transcends bad writing, guys. Also, the book is supposedly set in the 2900s but the kids are described as watching televisions a few pages later. Is it okay that I don’t want someone this bad at writing to be a poster child for free speech?

This one has some bad words in it

September 5, 2013September 5, 2013 Luther M. Siler15 Comments

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(First things first: if you need context on the picture, go here. This post is gonna be sorta grab-baggy; it should make sense by the time I get to the end.)

Let’s start by griping about nonsense. Y’all know the song OPP, right? If you don’t we can’t be friends anymore. One of hiphop’s classic anthems; it came out when I was a sophomore in high school and therefore I will have it memorized until I die. The whole song is about infidelity, but because it doesn’t have any bad words in it and the writing is clever it got played at high school dances all the time. Combine that with the call-and-response and what you end up with is hundreds of teenagers hollering about penises and pussies in public with none of the adults noticing what’s going on. It’s wonderful. It contains this verse:

As for the ladies, OPP means something gifted
The first two letters are the same but the last is something different
It’s the longest, loveliest, lean– I call it the leanest
It’s another five letter word rhymin’ with cleanest and meanest
I won’t get into that, I’ll do it…ah…sorta properly
I say the last P…hmmm…stands for property

It doesn’t stand for property.

I was listening to the radio on the way home from school when I encountered a picture-perfect example of why I bloody fucking hate terrestrial radio: they played OPP, and they bleeped out cleanest and meanest.

They bleeped two words that rhyme with the actual name of a human body part that half of the human race has, in a song that is entirely about infidelity.

This makes sense on no levels at all, and makes me want to punch the shit out of everyone involved– like, “hit you until my hands break off at the wrists” level of pummeling. I goddamn hate bleeped songs. I feel like if you think as a corporate entity that you need to bleep part of a song you shouldn’t be playing it at all. Ideas are more dangerous than words, you stupid dumbasses. But this is a new level of stupid– even if I was willing to entertain the suggestion that the word “penis” needed to be sanitized from the airwaves, the suggestion that words that rhyme with penis should also be sanitized is so damn dumb that I’m literally in pain right now while I’m complaining about it.

Stop making me use italics, U93. I fucking hate you.

New item! I bring in the mail when I got home, and there was a flyer from our new wingnut Congresscritter in it. Jackie Walorski is enough of a discredit to humanity that I’m not even terribly interested in describing why; she won her last election largely on the backs of 1) redistricting; 2) the incumbent deciding to run (successfully) for the Senate; and 3) disgusting, pathetic accusations of carpetbagging against her opponent, who grew up here (I went to high school with him) and then moved from the area to go fight in Iraq and start a veteran’s charity in DC. It was literally true that he hadn’t lived in the area for several years, but his family still lived here and he spent the majority of his time gone on active duty and fighting in a foreign country. Even if I wasn’t against her politics– and believe me, I am– I’d think she was scum for that.

Which made it interesting to me that most of the flyer– the bit that wasn’t a slanted short questionnaire– was all about trumpeting her bill extending whistleblower protections to sexual assault victims in the military. Protecting rape victims isn’t generally something that Republicans are big on. Crowing about having done so isn’t either. Which leaves me to wonder if a) she’s trying to moderate herself a bit; b) she actually is more moderate than I’d thought; c) she’s just trying to look more moderate; or d) this is an interesting bit of microtargeting– since the flyer in question was addressed to my wife, and there wasn’t one in the mail for me. Generally when we get these sorts of things (and they come frequently enough) there’s either one of them for each of us or it’s just addressed to the household and not to either of us specifically. This one just had my wife’s name on it.

Hmmm.

Last but not least: I just got into an interesting discussion on Facebook about Mike Krahulik’s latest bit of dumbassery. (Be aware: if you don’t know who Mike Krahulik is, you probably ought not to read this part, as I don’t intend to provide a lot of context.) The person who started the thread was saying that he was done with Penny Arcade on account of not being able to support Mike’s actions any longer, and while I agree with him that the man has gotten incredibly tiresome in a lot of ways I’m not able to pull the trigger on that just yet. Which got me wondering about exactly what gets me to cut something I enjoyed out of my life on account of not agreeing with its behavior. I can think of four examples: Mel Gibson, Orson Scott Card, Dan Simmons, and Chik-Fil-A. In each of the four cases, I have previously really enjoyed their work (or their chicken; I hate Chik-Fil-A as a corporation but I will fight you if you denigrate their chicken. We can hate them for their politics but let’s not get stupid here) and am no longer willing to support them in any way because of their beliefs and/or behaviors. I kinda want to include Tom Cruise in here, too, but I was never really a fan of his so it’s not quite the same thing.

I guess the difference is hatred. Mel Gibson hates everybody. Card and Simmons and Chik-Fil-A are open in their hatred of gay people. I don’t think Mike Krahulik hates anybody. I just think he’s a sheltered geek with a short fuse, and spouting his mouth off about shit he knows nothing about frequently gets him in trouble– but I don’t think he hates anybody and I don’t think he’s trying to be an asshole most of the time. My Facebook friend made a good point that once you’re past a certain age you either need to get better about things or own your own bullshit, and he’s right about that– but at the same time I’ve fucked up in my own personal feminism in who knows how many different ways, so I’m not always inclined to jump down the throat of somebody who seems to be trying to get better about sexuality and gender issues. I’m just not sure how much more slack I’m willing to cut the guy if he’s not smart enough to figure out that “never talk about this shit extemporaneously, and have someone smarter than me read over my shoulder whenever I talk about it in print” is a sound policy.

Within minutes, a link to this article appears in my inbox. For those of you too lazy to click, it’s about how Not Intending To Do That appears to be a magical fucking power that not only insulates the Unintender from owning the negative results of their actions but causes others to defend them as well. It’s… right. It also includes the word “kyriarchy,” which means something bad, which is sad, because it’s a fun-sounding word and I’d like opportunities to use it in public.

Thinking about this more: the bit of me that wants to defend Mike is related to the bit of me that refuses to give up on certain kids (I can’t honestly say all of them) in my classes who are for one reason or another generally assholes but seem saveable to me. I think Mike’s saveable. I might be wrong, and he’s a grown-ass man with a long, long cultural reach and not a fourteen-year-old, but I think that’s another part of the difference here as to why I’m not willing to lock the door on PA just yet.