The Death of Imagination

Sooner or later, I'm going to get banned from the language forum I'm most active on these days. It's not that I'm trying to, it's just that they have one of the most insanely restrictive moderation regimes I've ever seen. It's forbidden to make any open reference to moderator actions, so it's not even possible to discuss the issue with other forum members. My latest run in with a mod came from simply suggesting to another poster that we move our discussion of Ferguson to a more appropriate thread; for this I was publicly censured for "backseat modding" and told I should've reported the comments as off-topic instead.

I'm beginning to wonder if there's a basic underlying cultural conflict. Most all of the mods are Western Europeans (although the one I've had the most trouble with is Francophone Canadian), which might help explain why what seems insultingly paternalistic to me strikes them as perfectly reasonable. (Why on earth would I "report" someone for a minor issue we're capable of working out civilly on our own?) I'm not disputing that, at the end of the day, it's their sandbox to run as they please, but still I'm used to mods (and I am one, on LJ and elsewhere) acting more like primi inter pares and less like tinpot dictators. Strange how little authority it takes to bring out the authoritarian in all of us.

So, as of right now, I've been married for a year already, even though I woke up today a mere partner in a civil union. Confused? Well, that's where a lot of fighting over semantics and artful legal compromises designed to please no one gets you. But at least that's all behind us now in Illinois (and two thirds of the country, at last count).

The conversion was smooth and would've been the work of a moment if not for the fact that the clerk we got had never done one before and had to be walked through Every. Little. Step. by her colleague. She was none too quick on the uptake either; she couldn't seem to grasp, for instance, that the whole point of a conversion is that we didn't have to pay another fee. On the other hand, a sharper cookie might've spotted that my passport had expired, something pointed out to me by a TSA agent last month when I flew back from St Louis. (As I told her, the agents at Midway never seem to catch these things.)

I have to say, the whole bureaucracy around personal IDs has only gotten more ridiculous over time. They're now required for more things than ever (last time I saw my doctor, they asked to see one) and I'm presently caught in catch-22 where, in order to get my passport renewed, I have to send it in, but if I do that, I'm unable to entre a bar or get on an airplane for six to eight weeks until the replacement arrives. (As the agent explained, the TSA accepts expired passports for up to a year, but of course what's fine for the Feds is no go for the great minds of the State of Illinois.) What irks me the most is, of course, all I really need an ID for most of the time is to establish my date of birth and that hasn't changed. What does it matter if I can't leave the country with that passport? Exactly what kind of fraud are they ostensibly trying to prevent here?

Meanwhile, I'm trying to get a State ID as a backup. Last time I was in the office, they refused to renew it and are making me reapply from scratch, which means (since they won't accept an "invalid" passport) I need to dig out my birth certificate. I've searched high and low and my last hope is that it's in my safe deposit box which I haven't checked in years--and the key to which I only managed to find last night. I'd honestly given up on finding it again when it turned up unexpectedly on top of the dresser. My relief at not having to pay an exorbitant drill-out fee utterly compensates for the fact that I'll have to make another trip to the DMV to complete the application. Also, the supervisor officially confirmed that they'll accept my notarised letter from the SSA as proof of my social security number (but not my DOB even though it establishes both--again, Illinois, outjobsworthing than the Feds!), so that's one more tedious errand I've been spared.

Over our post-conversion celebration at Lavazza, I drew monshu's attention to the fact that, since this is an entirely novel rite-of-passage in our society, we're allowed to make up our own rules for commemorating it. I suggested that, rather than getting new appliances (as we would for a wedding), we're only allowed to get our existing ones refurbished. Like fixing the toaster, or getting a new door for the fridge that's actually stainless steel rather than this cheap aluminium. And, at the reception, I guess everyone buys their own food and we just pay to supersize it?

I think the most depressing thing about the events in Ferguson is the complete predictability of the response, from the police rolling up to peaceful demonstrations more heavily armoured than battalions in Iraq to the focus on everything else but the issue at hand. I am seeing a lot of informed and angry dissent from the dominant narrative this time around, but I suspect that's more a product of the composition of my flist and the fact that I rely increasingly on alternative news sources. Whenever I check in with the mainstream media, it's the same sterile privileging of the "official" version.

If there was any question about what's being repeated outside of my echo chambers, it was settled yesterday by an exchange with my sister where she reveals herself completely ignorant of the existence of racism. You know what I mean: She equates it with bigotry and, while she recognises that injustice exists, she doesn't view it as systematic or institutionalised. Fortunately, Buzzfeed put together a clear and simple graphic of the racially-biased policing that goes on in Ferguson which seems to have gotten her attention. She's not dumb or indifferent to abuse, she's just--in her own words--"naïve".

Of course, that only depresses me more. Whereas my high school had more Buddhists than Black people (it was run by a Catholic religious order, mind), hers was reasonably diverse. She bought her house in a suburb with a 50% White population (the one we grew up in was 80-90% White) and insists on sending her children to the local public schools, in part so that they'll be exposed to a broader selection of humanity than we were at that age. In spite of that, she doesn't actually seem to have any Black friends--or at least none who would feel comfortable discussing the deep disparities in their experiences. She's passionate about fighting injustice--when several firefighters got a raw deal from the city council last year, she was rallying people to their cause--but she can't fight what she hasn't learned to see.

Yesterday I passed seminude protesters on campus bearing signs which said, "CONSENT IS NOT AN OUTFIT". I wanted to express my approval, but found it hard to come up with something snappy that didn't sound patronising or creepy in the few seconds before I was out of earshot. I still struggle with issues of consent. I like to think I have a thorough understanding of the concept at this point, but there's always that gap between notional and experiential knowledge. Just how wide that gap still is for me was brought home a couple months ago at Touché.

For those of you who don't know the bar, there are two larger rooms linked by a pair of bare hallways. One of these leads from the main room to the restrooms. A tricky threshold divides it from s smaller corridor at a 90° angle which links the emergency with the back bar. The conjunction is a nice place to stand if your back can take it since it's better lit than the rest of the space and everyone has to pass through at some point or another. (Plus the hazardous junction easily identifies the real drunks.) Of course, it also makes you super conspicuous.

At some point, a large pudgy man who I don't recall ever meeting or seeing before came directly up to us, said something lascivious about us being set out for him, and pressed his whole body up against mine. He wasn't bad looking, but I was put off by the too-direct approach and strained to find some way of expressing this without seeming rude. I basically just remained rigid, held my head away from his, and gave noncommittal answers until he got miffed and walked off.

When I write this down, it sounds odd, doesn't it? In essence, I was being sexually assaulted and my response was to try to let the guy down easy. But it's such an odd, unnatural context. The back bar is also a backroom. Twenty steps away, there is a space screened off only by chain link and tires and where men were having full-on sex at the time. It's not an unreasonable assumption that someone standing where I was was looking for someone to take him back there. Also, I'm very conscious of how difficult it is to come up to someone you don't know and initiate a conversation. Having been brutally shot down myself in the past, I didn't want to come across as That Guy.

That wasn't the only incident that night. Not much later, another man I'd never met and hadn't even made eye contact with turned to me on the way to the back and said, "Do you want a blowjob?" When I politely answered, "No", he immediately responded with, "Why not?" And I was momentarily flummoxed. I didn't find the guy at all attractive and I didn't want to be put in the position of having to state this outright. I can't remember exactly what I said, perhaps "Because I don't want one" and after ogling me a while longer, he gave up and left.

That brought to mind something a friend of a friend told us last year about nearly being raped at a con. When she tried to express to her friends her discomfort about how this man had been pressuring her for sex (culminating in a rape attempt at his hotel room), she got little in the way of sympathy. As she told it, there reaction was more, well, what good reason do you have for turning him down? And she couldn't understand why she needed a reason beyond "Because I don't want to!"

She didn't, and I didn't either. But no one had ever put it to us in those terms. (My parents never once addressed the issue of consent during my entire adolscence.) I mean, we both learned "No means no", but it's another step to translate that into "'I don't want to' is reason enough and anyone who won't accept that is a jerk whose behaviour should be stigmatised by society." Men are socialised to be entitled. A lot has been said about how women are socialised to accommodate this behaviour--which is how it should be, because they definitely bear the brunt of it. It's harder to recognise how I, despite being a man (and being no stranger to entitlement myself), have been socialised to accommodate it as well.

If the situation had been more threatening, I would've known how to react. I've told people in no uncertain terms to get their hands off of me and leave me alone before. But there's a lot of gray zone before you cross that line. If the first guy had stopped a foot farther away and exchanged a few more words with me before attempting a grope, it would've been an entirely different dynamic. But a location isn't consent any more than an outfit is and there are worse things to suffer than being thought an asshole by a complete stranger.

I'm still trying to sort out a debate I stumbled into the other day over "homophobia". It concerned a blowhard celebrity, which is bad enough. And it took place on Facebook, which is worse. I suppose YouTube is a less suitable place to attempt any sort of reasonable discussion, but not by much. I'm still not sure I understand the core of the disagreement but today another possibility occurred to me. It would certainly help to explain why we all got so worked up about what is ultimately a rather trivial matter.

Some people have summed up the difference between liberalism and conservatism as whether you think people are basically good or basically evil. Liberals, so the common wisdom goes, think most people (with the exception of some truly hopeless cases with severe untreatable disorders) would be good if given the chance. Their poor choices are the consequence of a lack of opportunity and a deficit of skills. Address these deficits and they'll be free to live up to their full natural potential. Conservatives, on the other hand, believe in the concept of Original Sin (even if the non-Christians among them aren't comfortable with that terminology). People are born subject to evil desires which, unless ring-fenced with an objective morality, will ultimately overpower them and lead society to ruin.

(I expect proponents of both philosophies are bristling at what could fairly be called an oversimplification bordering on caricature. But just wait.)

There's another split, however, which I think cuts across this divide, and that concerns the degree of control we have in this situation. In its most negative form, it manifests as theistic fatalism (on the conservative side) or social determinism (on the liberal side). More positively, it's the philosophy of self-actualisation bzw. Objectivism. The reason I think it spans the divide is because it's linked to privilege. Studies show that those who have experienced less discrimination often overestimate the degree to which they are responsible for their own achievements. On the conservative side, this is the smugness of the person born on third base who thinks they've hit a triple. On the liberal, it's the smugness of the Good Liberal who's done such an outstanding job of raising their consciousness.

So here's where I'm going with this: Just as those born with less privilege are cynical about the role ability rather than luck plays in getting ahead, they also tend to be cynical about how well people have really overcome their own prejudices. They take as a given that our society is racist, sexist, homophobic, classist, ablist, etc. and thus we, as products of this society, are steeped in these prejudices to the point where it's a lifelong struggle to overcome them. That's why they're not shocked when someone prominent is outed as having said or done horribly bigoted things in private; they assume it's generally the case and most people simply don't get caught out.

Since my homosexuality is the chief (and practically only) source of my own privilege deficit, it's here where my cynicism shows itself most plainly. I'm genuinely pleased at how much LGBTQ acceptance has advanced over the course of my lifetime; we're farther along than I ever hoped when I first came out. But as with any sweeping trend, not everyone's commitment is comparable and the latest (and often most vocal) converts are often the most superficial as well. I see this all the time in supposedly "pro-gay" humour (such as many of the images and videoclips circulated on the occasional of the Sochi Olympics) that makes use of every camp stereotype and queer trope in the playbook--the same fag jokes I grew up with, just repackaged and relabeled.

So that's why when a famous actor (or whoever) who's been outspoken in his support of same-sex marriage is revealed to have used homophobic slurs like "cocksucking faggot", I'm not especially surprised or shocked. And if some pundits call him a "homophobic bigot" on account of that, I don't have much of a problem with it. And when ordinary people (who just happen to be straight) object to this label and denounce the unfairness and inaccuracy of it (even while protesting too much that they're by no means defending his "un-PC" remarks, mind you), I find myself questioning their motives. Well, not so much questioning, as I feel I know what their ulterior purpose is: To preserve the acceptability of this sort of low-level homophobia in their own milieux. Their reaction would be much the same (in kind, although not necessarily in degree) if someone they liked had said something bigoted against people of a particular gender or race or class or what have you.

And it's bullshit. If you spent as much time combatting your imbibed homophobia (or racism or sexism or classism) as you did fighting the suggestion that you're as subject to it as the rest of us (yes, even us homos--that's why internalised homophobia is a thing), just imagine how much further along we'd be. And if those who are dedicated to fighting these biases didn't have to expend so much energy reassuring supposed allies that, yes, we know, you're one of the good ones, not like those awful bigots (in Russia or the South or Downstate--you know, wherever is far enough to be a comfortable distance away)--well, the mind just boggles.

So the next time you find yourself in the position of defending someone who's made comments even you admit are offensive, ask yourself: Why am I doing this? Do I know what concerning trolling looks like and am I willing to admit when I'm indulging in it? And the next time I'm confronted with this, hopefully I'll have a better notion of which buttons of mine are being pushed and why and make more intelligent decisions about how many spoons I'm willing to lay down.

This article lamenting how urban Chinatowns are becoming "playgrounds for the wealthy" annoys me, and this is why:

"Chinatowns are turning into a sanitised ethnic playground for the rich to satisfy their exotic appetite for a dim sum and fortune cookie fix," says Andrew Leong, one of the authors of a recent report that charted gentrification in New York, Boston and Philadelphia's Chinatowns.

Notice anything wrong with that last sentence? "Chinatown" can be used broadly to refer to any part of town with a high concentration of Chinese businesses and organisations or narrowly to refer to specific neighbourhood with an extended history of hosting such businesses and organisations. Guess which definition the report used. Depending on how you count them, there are as many as nine Chinatowns in and around NYC, six of them within the Five Boroughs. Out-of-towners, of course, are generally only aware of the one in Manhattan. Is it really surprising that the one all the tourists go to is becoming too touristy? Moreover, everyone without a six-figure income is being priced out of Manhattan (and, increasingly, Brooklyn and Queens as well), so why should they Chinese be any different?

Talking about some of the newly-emerged and -emerging Chinatowns would've added some nice balance to the article: It's not that Chinese aren't coming here or are instantly assimilating when they step off the plane, it's just that they're settling elsewhere. This isn't a new phenomenon either: IIRC, Chicago's Chinatown relocated twice before it ended up established at Wentworth and Cermak. (It's still flourishing, btw, since property prices on the South Side can't even touch those of the Outer Boroughs, much less Lower Manhattan.) St Louis didn't have anything resembling a traditional Chinatown when I was growing up. (It got bulldozed to make way for Busch Stadium right around the time that the Hart-Cellar Act eliminated national quotas, spawning the new wave of Asian immigration.) It does now, along Olive Boulevard in U City. So do Sun Belt cities like Austin and Orlando--places which never had a critical mass of Asian immigrants before.

And when I say "added balance", I mean "made it interesting to read". Instead, it's the same old article about gentrification vs poor immigrants, Disneyfication of ethnic enclaves, blah blah blah that I've read dozens of times by now. Of course, who would really expect a BBC reporter with a plum posting in Manhattan to want to take more than a thousand steps from their hotel if it's all the same to their editors?

Speaking of names, a FB Friend (and RL friend) linked to this affecting first-person essay about growing up in the USA with an "ethnic" name. As someone with an extremely rare surname (less than ten bearers in the entire country), I can relate. There's not a sound in mine that isn't a part of any English-speaker's repertoire and the spelling is a close to "phonetic" as anything ever comes in English orthography, yet people mangle it constantly.

Of course, as a linguist, I simply couldn't overlook this part:

On the radio I hear a story about a tribe in some remote, rural place that has no name for the color blue. They do not know what the color blue is. It has no name so it does not exist. It does not exist because it has no name.

I presume here she's talking about the Himba of Namibia. The reason I presume this is that if you Google "tribe can't see blue" you get lots of hits for references to Debi Roberson's pioneering longitudinal study which not only subjected colour perception among the Himba to a series of the tests but repeated these tests regularly among a cohort of children as they grew up and some began attending school, comparing the results to those of a control group back home in England. As a result, we now have data which demonstrate not only that colour perception is language-dependent but that the two are learned in tandem.

Tasbeeh Herwees' claim about them "not know[ing] what the color blue is" is, of course, bullshit. You don't need to have a specific word for "the colour of a cloudless daytime sky" to recognise that it is not the same colour as a fresh acacia leaf any more than you need to have a specific word for the taste of a young coconut to know that it isn't the same as the taste of a ripe mango. The Himba have two basic terms, zoozu and burou (both referring to cool dark colours), which encompass those shades which we would label "blue". But these are not the only words they have at their disposal when it comes to describing the colour of something, just as we're not limited to calling something only "blue", "green", or "purple".

When I pointed this out in the ensuing discussion, I was told it didn't have anything to do with her point. I disagree. I can't be the only one who sees some irony in illustrating a plaint about thoughtless people not getting your name right with a reference to "a tribe in some remote, rural place" and not mentioning their name. Yeah, she only heard it on the radio in passing. But I've just illustrated how trivial it would've been to look it up. But then other readers could've done what I have and looked up the reference to find how she'd badly misrepresented the situation to add punch to a poignant observation. Her emotional truth is more important than the lived experiences of actual people.

Are Bert and Ernie gay? And what does it matter?

This wasn't a question I was expecting to deal with today, but then the New Yorker had to go and grace its current issue with a cover depicting the pair snuggling on a couch before a television set bearing an image of the SCOTUS. Nuphy forwarded me a picture of it when it first came out and my reaction was, "You would like that." Personally I found it pretty banal. I must sound like an insufferable hipster for pointing out that a German weekly (the Magazin am Wochenende published by the Berliner Zeitung, unless I miss my guess--Nuphy and I both kept copies) did the same sort of cover back in 1997, to much less hubbub.

Some commentators (I'm really struggling not to use the pejorative label "mommy bloggers") seem pretty exercised about the way the image "sexualises children". It's a charge I have trouble wrapping my mind around, for two reasons: (1) the automatic equation of "marriage" (or "gay"?) with "sex" and (2) the identification of Bert and Ernie as "children". Apparently, they are "developmentally modeled on seven year-olds" according to Sesame Workshop (the successor to CTW). But growing up I never saw them that way. It was obvious that Sesame Street worked very different from the quasi-suburban neighbourhoods I ran around, but even so two seven year-olds sharing their own apartment? Children live with their parents; if you live on your own with no parents around, you must be an adult of some kind, even if you act pretty childish.

But even those who aren't prone to moral panic about adolescents are asking why we have to "make every relationship between two men sexual". I more amenable to this one, because I do think it's a shame how little room there is left for homosociality in our culture. Except that qwrrty went on to make a brilliant argument about how identifying two wholesome puppets on a popular children's show as queers was a subversive act of claiming some space for ourselves at a time when healthy depictions of gay male couples were all but absent in mainstream media. Though it may have begun as schoolyard sniggering, it ended up being an affirmation to thousands of us who came out in the 80s and 90s.

So, as it turns out, I actually do have a bit of a stake in asserting the acceptability or reading them as gay. Not the necessity; the great thing about popular characters (whether from literature or television or whatever) is that you can reinterpret them to serve your needs. If you're privileged enough not to have ever felt the need to bolster your self-esteem by identifying with a foam head draped over someone's arm, well bully for you. You probably benefited from a wealth of alternatives. But I took my role models where I could find them and one of those places was Sesame Street.

On one of my most frequently visited fora, someone is trying yet again to come up with an "objective" definition of "a language". I've seen this discussion so many times at this point I've got my canned arguments all ready to go: "languages" are just high-order abstractions; judgments of "similarity" are hopelessly subjective; lexical comparisons depend on a series of increasingly arbitrary definitions (e.g. which terms you choose to compare, how you measure vocabulary size, what definition of "word" you're using). But it never seems to matter: people seem to feel very strongly that "languages" are concrete things rather than convenient social fictions and, therefore, can be defined scientifically.

Of course, the real problem is that most people don't understand what that word means. Someone linked to this laundry list of intelligibility studies and asked if we thought it was "accurate". How could anybody tell? There's no methodology given at all, so we haven't the faintest idea what the researchers actually measured. It's like asking, "Is it true that when you're embarrassed you're also 27% angry?" Yeah, sure: choose the appropriate criteria for defining "embarrassment" and "anger" and the appropriate method for quantifying the data and you can get that percentage. Does that make it "scientific"? No.

But present your results in numerical form and most people will simply accept them. The first response to that blogpost begins, "I don’t dispute the scientific validity of those findings, but..." Well, then, you're a fool. Worse, you're a cargo cultist who believes the mere presence of numerical data is evidence of "science". For all you know, someone just banged out those percentages on a pub table over a beer or two. Or maybe they abstracted them from a single reading comprehension test. Who cares? One way or another, they don't tell you what you think they're telling you.

Looks like my doctor's office isn't yet finished wowing me with the depths of their incompetence. Yesterday, I complained until they gave me the extension for the office manager. She told me she'd look into the matter and call me back this morning; she didn't and the extension I was given didn't work. So I called her myself only to find that want to me to come in tomorrow and give them yet another sample because they failed to perform the test requested by the physician AGAIN.

I'd already decided that, once they've finished treating this condition, I would move on and find another doctor. Now I'm questioning the wisdom of that. I've got duplicate hard copies of the results from the other tests already performed, so I wouldn't have to rely on them sending them over--which, judging from past performance, they would inevitably find some way to cock up.

I'm tired. Something in the new regime I'm on to control the reflux isn't working and I had two vicious attacks this week, meaning my sleep schedule has been trashed. I was really really looking forward to sleeping in tomorrow, but I guess that's not going to happen because their office is only open in the morning and heaven only knows what the el is going to be like tomorrow.