I just found this Washington Post column by Daniel Froomkin that quite eloquently makes many of the points I made in my last post, and simultaneously demolishes his colleague, the inimitably sour Krauthammer. (Please, someone tell me that’s a stage name. I mean, does he not have a Nazi supervillain name? Ahem—I don’t mean to imply that the resemblance goes beyond the name, of course!)
As I mentioned in my last torture post, I didn’t think that Cheney had any evidence to back up his claims that torture works. Well, it turns out that it’s even worse than that: the CIA never even tried to determine if torture works. And I don’t mean before they instituted torture; I mean while they were torturing. So in a completely rigorous sense, the Bush administration guaranteed that we cannot determine how effective torture was at its purported task.
On the other hand, as I mentioned before, there’s quite a large record on torture used by other countries during various conflicts, including China, England, and Israel. But the pro-torture crowd tends, just as the Bush administration did, to ignore empiricism and assert that torture is both effective and necessary. The most pernicious argument is, of course, the ticking time bomb.
Hypotheticals
If you’ve spent more than a nanosecond listening to/reading/watching the torture, um, debate (it still makes me cringe to think that a debate is necessary), then you’ve heard the ticking time bomb scenario: Osama bin Laden is tied to a lamppost in Times Square, and he has a nuclear device shoved up his ass. He won’t tell you the secret code to deactivate the device, and you’ve tried everything humane—chocolate, rose petals strewn on satin sheets, tickets to The Lion King, even the promised 72 grapes. Clearly, you have no choice but to attach electrodes to his genitals.
When I was in high school, this kind of thing would always happen. No, not that; what the hell is wrong with you? No, I mean people would inevitably bring up these absurd hypothetical situations to prove some ridiculous point. After all, you’re in high school, you only know hypothetical situations, particularly the extreme kind. Well, nowadays we have the internet, so everyone can pretend they’re in a high school social studies class. Okay, I shouldn’t really blame it on the internet; these kinds of silly arguments were just easier to ignore before the advent of comment threads where the first five posts are “FIRST!!!” In any case, A. tells me that she also encounters this kind of reasoning when she trains people to be counselors for rape victims. One would imagine that the audience would be about as supportive as one can get, but evidently there’s always one person who says, “But what if the girl’s drunk, and xyz so it couldn’t have been rape?” The same kind of thing used to happen with welfare; remember the welfare mother, with the gold jewelry and the Cadillac and the half dozen kids? (Digression: someone actually mentioned this stereotype to me once as a reason for abolishing welfare. I told him that my mom used to be on welfare, which allowed her to finish her Ph.D. and become a professor. He naturally just mumbled to himself and walked away.)
Now, I’m not against hypothetical scenarios; they can be quite useful. Einstein wouldn’t have come up with relativity without them. But for god’s sake, people, be careful how you use them!
Firstly, these scenarios are invariably painfully contrived. How exactly did this ticking time bomb situation arise, anyway? How is it that the interrogator has exactly the information that the danger is imminent and vast, and that prisoner X has the crucial piece of information, yet doesn’t know that crucial piece of information? And please, don’t recite the equivalent of a Tom Clancy novel. The last terrorist attack succeeded not because we didn’t torture anyone, but because the people in the Bush administration were too stupid to read and comprehend their daily intelligence briefings.
Even if these cases occur, it’s absurd to base an entire policy on rare, or even unique edge cases. That’s how you get Abu Ghraib. Of course, the conservative argument here is that these edge cases are so important, that it makes sense to distort the policy; after all, the lives of millions hang in the balance. But then why not just have legislation that says, okay, if the guy has nuclear codes, and the bombs are going off in 10 minutes, then do whatever you want!
And if we’re really going to play a game of hypotheticals, how about this: it is suspected that a pregnant woman/nun/12 year old kid/your mother has the essential ticking time bomb scenario, so we torture the shit out of them. Then it turns out we were wrong: they were innocent all along. Oops! Our bad. Our how about this: they confessed to all sorts of horrible things in the course of their torture (even if they didn’t know the critical information after all), and so obviously the torture was justified and we can throw them in jail forever. (The crazy thing is, aside from the fact that the prisoners were Muslim males, these scenarios are actually real: an innocent cab driver tortured to death in Afghanistan, that Canadian guy who was extradited to Egypt and tortured for a year because of overzealous law enforcement, the handful of people who have been released for Guantanamo without charges over the past few years, many by the Bushies themselves.)
The thing is, torture is by nature anti-empirical. As Andrew Sullivan has pointed out repeatedly, the point of torture is to elicit a confession, not information. So for example the administration gets their al Qaeda-Iraq links.
From the LA Times story linked above:
“Nobody with expertise or experience in interrogation ever took a rigorous, systematic review of the various techniques — enhanced or otherwise — to see what resulted in the best information,” said a senior U.S. intelligence official involved in overseeing the interrogation program.
…
Former Bush administration officials said the failure to conduct such an examination was part of a broader reluctance to reassess decisions made shortly after the Sept. 11 attacks.
The Defense Department, Justice Department and CIA “all insisted on sticking with their original policies and were not open to revisiting them, even as the damage of these policies became apparent,” said John B. Bellinger III, who was legal advisor to former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, referring to burgeoning international outrage.
…
The limited resources spent examining whether the interrogation measures worked were in stark contrast to the energy the CIA devoted to collecting memos declaring the program legal.
Hm. Doesn’t this just say to you that the point of the program was never to get information, but rather to assert power?
Torture, part 2, is in the pipe, but first some quick thoughts on Specter. The reaction from the right is unbelievable; namely, the number of people who say some variation of, “good riddance.” I mean, was the marginal relevance Republicans had just too stressful? There’s also a few (a very small number, from my cursory surfing) commentators on the left, notably Glenn Greenwald, who think this wasn’t a great move for Democrats, since they would’ve gotten the seat anyway in 2010, and Specter is conservative after all. Normally I admire Greenwald quite a bit, but this strikes me as stupid. First of all, a lot can happen in a year; better to have the seat for sure. Secondly, this is terrible for the image of the GOP. Thirdly, there’s quite a bit of pressure on the (2) remaining moderates, Susan Collins and Olympia Snowe; they are increasingly marginalized in their party, and perhaps will consider jumping ship as well. Fourthly, Yglesias and Silver have noted that party-switchers tend to significantly change their voting records after the switch, so chances are that Specter will end up being noticeably to the left of where he was a month ago, particularly since he now has to win a Democratic primary instead of a Republican one. And lastly, all signs point to more Democratic pick-ups in the Senate in 2010, so the potential of a more liberal Senator from Pennsylvania isn’t such a big deal.
At this point, I just don’t understand what’s going to happen to the Republican party. The real policy debates, it seems, will be taking place between the liberal and moderate sides of the Democratic party. Obama strikes me as being very good at getting the balance between the two. Republicans have, apparently, put all their hopes on Obama’s policies ending up bad for the country. But even if they are correct, that isn’t enough to win elections—they have to show that they are a better alternative. Who’s going to do that? Joe the Plumber?
Well, the shit has hit the fan. My posting hiatus as much to do with being busy as with the crazy amount of stuff that has been going on politically—mainly, the torture memos. I urge everyone to read Andrew Sullivan and Glenn Greenwald for some excellent commentary and round-ups.
For the moment, I want to restrict myself to the politics of the issue. I think at this point, the Republicans are doomed, really and truly. They’ve stumbled from one kind of foolishness to another since … well, I guess I could go to the Bush administration, but starting with Sarah Palin, they really kicked it up a notch. There’s Palin of course, then Kenneth the Page, Michael Steele and his series of gaffes, the cartoon budget, the Tea Parties (which, in my mind, were an unmitigated disaster), the disappearance of gay marriage as a wedge issue … and now torture. Aside from Palin, this has all been in the span of three months.
Why do I think Republicans are doomed on torture? On a superficial level, view it this way: Dick Cheney, one of the most unpopular politicians in recent history, a man famous for shooting an old man in the face and telling a senator to go fuck himself on the Senate floor, is defending torture. There’s some debate over whether throwing someone against a wall, water-boarding them, and putting them in a coffin-like box with an insect is torture, but it’s not serious debate: people are pretty much okay with calling it what it is, torture. (For one thing, there are records of numerous detainees dying under this kind of treatment.) And who’s on the other side? Barack Obama, mister hope, one of the most popular, and trusted, politicians in recent history.
Right now, the troops on both sides have gone to full battle-stations, so the media narrative looks a little muddier: at the moment, the debate seems to be about whether torture is effective or not. (The link is to a NY Times blog post titled, “Is Cheney winning the torture debate?”) But it’s really over. I’m confident that most Americans, eight years after 9/11, and after the outrages at Abu Ghraib, know that the moral issue is the more important one here. Even quite conservative commentators during the Abu Ghraib scandal, when one could still (albeit through some contorted reasoning) blame the torture on a “few bad apples,” pretty unequivocally condemned the prison guards. These same commentators are now having a very obviously awkward time dealing with the torture revelations; see for example Peggy Noonan’s appearance on Stephanopolous (the relevant part is 3:00-3:30—Jon Stewart recently ridiculed this as well).
But even more importantly, there’s no way Cheney can win the debate on whether torture is effective. I’m confident about this because numerous nations have arrived at the same conclusion: if the point is to get real intelligence and win a conflict, then torture is ineffective and counterproductive. The British, for example, tortured IRA prisoners for a few years, then stopped because it wasn’t working. Any intelligence or interrogation expert, with actual expertise, agrees: torture doesn’t work. The FBI, which has extensive experience with interrogation techniques, refused to take part in torture. In this article, a NY Times reporter writes that the people who advocated for and approved the use of torture never even investigated the history of the techniques: who had used it, what their legal history was, and how effective they were. They never even checked. (I mean, really, did nobody in the Bush administration know how to use Google, or Wikipedia? Really?) There was one psychologist from the SERE program—this is the military program where our own soldiers submitted to torture in order to train against its use. But the psychologist, James Mitchell, had never actually run an interrogation, and his theories were not shared by other psychologists at SERE.
Though the story is appalling both for its monstrous immorality and for its intellectual incompetence, none of this should be that surprising. The entire Bush administration was based on wishful thinking made into policy, with a generous helping of cronyism thrown in. There’s, you know, that whole Iraq mess, from the belief that there were WMD to the delusion that reconstruction would be fast, peaceful, and pay for itself. One interesting intersection of the Iraq war rationale and torture, brought to my attention by Andrew Sullivan but originally from Vanity Fair, is that one detainee, Abu Zubaydah, was forced to confess that al-Qaeda and Saddam Hussein had a working relationship. That is, torture was used to produce exactly the false intelligence that Cheney & co. wanted.
Anyway, what I’m trying to say is these guys never cared about evidence in the first place. So why should we expect the record to back them up?
Well, there is the issue of the reliability of the record. It is known that some torture records were destroyed. But I’m convinced that Cheney, Rove, etc. are doing what they’ve always done: loudly making the same claim over and over again, the evidence be damned. Already people have been pointing out fallacies in their claims: that the Library Tower (?) plot and the Padilla dirty-bomb plot were extracted from Zubaydah under torture, when the record shows that both were known and disrupted months before Zubaydah’s torture began.
There are numerous other issues arising from the release of the torture memos, which I hope to blog about at a later (well, hopefully sooner) date: prosecutions for the lawyers, prosecutions for interrogators, the future of then CIA, blow-back for Democrats who approved of torture, and so forth. But I’ll stop here for now.
I’ve been a little sick, or maybe heavily allergic: there’s been such intense rain followed by warm sunny days, repeated a few times, that the tree pollen has been insane. I was working on the laptop outside the other day, and I had to wipe off the screen every ten minutes. Gross.
I wanted to talk about Dick. I mean Dr. Strangelove, Mr. Evil, Dick Cheney himself. Actually, I wanted to go off about him. You may have seen him on Meet the Press, talking about how Obama has endangered America and emboldened terrorists. That’s not what I want to go off about. For some reason, I just didn’t care. It kind of blew my mind; not what he said specifically, just that he was so bluntly criticizing the president so early, for no good reason. And from a practical standpoint, it’s comically counterproductive: Cheney had close to single-digit favoribility last time anyone took a poll. And it’s also getting old; Cheney, Rove, et al. have been pulling this bs for a while now, and it’s lost its effectiveness. Several smart commentators, notably Andrew Sullivan (I can’t be bothered to post a link), have hypothesized that Cheney’s afraid of what will come out as documents from the Bush administration become public; specifically, war crimes charges. So he’s desperately trying to cover for himself by trying to popularize his rationale for torture.
I never found this particularly convincing. Then I read Seymour Hersh’s recent New Yorker article.
Man, that pissed me off. So the story is that in January—this past January—in the few weeks before Obama was inaugurated, his transition team contacted Israel to try to get them to chill out in Gaza; evidently, they were successful. Anyway, before the Israelis withdrew, they talked to Cheney. What did Cheney do? He said that Obama is too “pro-Palestinian” and that he’d never make it in major leagues.
That’s when I wanted to punch him in the face. Just the idea that a sitting Vice President would try to actively undermine the next president, before he even came into office, and undermined him to another country … I’m the kind of guy that thinks of patriotism as quaint, but this really made me mad. Cheney’s an American, not an Israeli. Just the idea that he’d advise a different country to play hardball against our own is unbelievably fucked up.
So yeah, I don’t think Cheney’s desperate or scared when he shows up on Meet the Press. I think he’s just an asshole.
At my graduate institution, there was a corner of lawn near my department that everyone would cut across, so that the constant pressure of feet made an unsightly bare path. The logical thing to do would be to put pavement where the path was. The administration built a fence.
I take this as a metaphor for the impending demise of the recording industry; but I’ve also been reminded of it by a recent piece by Clay Shirky. In that piece, Shirky says pretty much that newspapers are doomed: the only reason they were successful up to now was that disseminating print content used to be expensive, but with that condition removed, there’s no reason for them to survive. As he puts it,
Round and round this goes, with the people committed to saving newspapers demanding to know “If the old model is broken, what will work in its place?” To which the answer is: Nothing. Nothing will work. There is no general model for newspapers to replace the one the internet just broke.
With the old economics destroyed, organizational forms perfected for industrial production have to be replaced with structures optimized for digital data. It makes increasingly less sense even to talk about a publishing industry, because the core problem publishing solves — the incredible difficulty, complexity, and expense of making something available to the public — has stopped being a problem.
The idea of the fence, to me, is that the administration was wedded to the idea of a pristine rectangular lawn, and ended up with a really lame solution. Of course, in their case there was nothing to stop them.
Getting back to Shirky’s piece, he compares our time to the years around the invention of the Gutenberg press and points out that it is practically impossible to predict what the new institutions will be.
I bring this up in the context of Jon Stewart’s excruciating interview with Jim Cramer last week. Now, in a lot of ways it’s hard to fault Stewart, of course; he’s everyone’s favorite hero now, right? But the lesson from Shirky’s piece is that economics trumps value. As Shirky puts it
The newspaper people often note that newspapers benefit society as a whole. This is true, but irrelevant to the problem at hand; “You’re gonna miss us when we’re gone!” has never been much of a business model.
The discussion between Stewart and Cramer—and indeed, most discussions about the mainstream media—has mainly been a moral conversation: that journalists are in general failing at their moral duties, that they don’t have integrity anymore, etc. But anyone who’s been paying attention to the L.A. Times (or the last season of The Wire) knows that nowadays, there’s no percentage in integrity for newspaper reporters. That’s not quite right: there’s a percentage alright, but it’s negative. I can’t imagine it’s much better on TV. So having the conversation in a moral context is, in my mind, kind of pointless.
Instead, I believe the discussion should be directed in two ways: economics, and alternatives. Economics is always hard to talk about, at least intelligently; I heard some woman on a plane explaining how media consolidation leads to liberal bias (evidently she learned this from that tiny alternative outlet Fox News). And economics can’t be talked about without a place to talk about it! Alternatives, on the other hand, are really fun to talk about, and give me a lot of hope. There are numerous successful models of news-gathering and dissemination, blogs being the most obvious. There have been complaints that blogs parasitize newspapers, since most blogs are written about stories that appear in a handful of national papers. But that’s less so: the Chas Freeman issue, as has been pointed out numerous other places, was covered exhaustively in blogs, particularly by experts in the subject—foreign policy wonks, people in the intelligence community—while the NY Times only covered it after Freeman withdrew his candidacy. And there are many controversial scientific issues, particularly global warming, that are easier to learn about online than from newspapers.
In any case, blogs aren’t, at the moment at least, viable economic models. But we do have those too: NPR has been quite successful over the past few years, and they have great content; The New Yorker has vastly increased its circulation, and has broken an amazing number of important news stories; evidently The Nation has also been doing well, and from the little I read of it, they’ve got game.
Anyway, my bottom line is that talking about the moral obligations of newspaper/TV reporters misses the point.
The only thing that puzzles me is the influence that TV news still has. People now take for granted TV news sucks. Everyone loves to complain about it; in fiction, TV reporters are (usually female) unscrupulous fame-hungry snakes. Is it because so few people have any consciousness of the news that the “default” news source defines the national conversation? Or is it that so far, no alternative has quite hit the mainstream yet? I also think the debate on media bias has been a distracting sideline, one that’s even more pointless, from a substantive standpoint, than talking about the nonexistence of Jim Cramer’s ethics. After all, the problem with media has less to do with bias than the fact that it sucks—people from all political viewpoints agree on that! Yet when it comes down to it, people view the problem as one of “slant”.
Are the days of the macho in politics over? So much of macho expectation has sunk liberal (and probably conservative) candidates in the past: Dukakis in the tank, Kerry’s bomber jacket and “effete” ineffectuality (and also, he sucked), Gore’s aggressive posturing during the debates. Obama actively resists that attitude. As a black man, there’s a very good reason to be preternaturally calm, of course. But Obama strikes me as a real feminist leader—they say he listens very well and asks lots of great questions. (And he’s for women’s rights!) What’s great is how his less macho style is also incredibly effective in political conflicts.
Take the campaign. McCain went raging manly man: the reckless pilot, the meaty barbecues, the prisoner of war (tangent: Angela Carter notes that while women’s bodies over the past several hundred years have been hyper-sexualized in Western culture, men’s bodies went the excruciating pain route; she traces this back to Jesus. Watching Mel Gibson’s movies, and seeing how so many young men seem to respond to them, I’m inclined to believe her), even the cowboy “I’ll ride to rescue” response when the original bank bailout bill was being negotiated. Obama wasn’t like that. In fact, prior to McCain’s bailout fiasco, Obama took some heat for not being more aggressive.
I bring this up now because the same thing happened with the whole “bipartisan” dealie. Many people—primarily on the left, but also a number of mainstream commentators—observed that Obama had arithmetic on his side, both in terms of congressional votes and popular mandate, to get the stimulus bill through with marginal Republican support, namely the remaining three moderate Republican senators (Snowe, Collins, Specter). So, the complaint went, why was he appearing to bend over backwards to get Republicans on board? Why keep playing Mr. Nice Guy?
Now it seems perceptions have gone the other way: take these pieces by Bob Herbert and Hendrik Hertzberg, and a (thematically) related post by Nate Silver. Tl;dr version: Obama got pretty much what he wanted, and Republicans look like obstructionist asshats.
I don’t mean to suggest that Obama is “feminine” or “effeminate”; in fact, I think he’s quite masculine in the image he projects, just not the dick-swinging that Bush used to engage in. (Cheney-swinging? Ugh, the image is nauseating.)
I’ve always thought that American machismo has been undergoing death throes, what with the normalization of homosexuality and increasing power of women. When The Man Show was on Comedy Central, it was so over the top and ridiculous, I just had to think it signalled the end of an era. I mean, if macho were still mainstream, it would make no sense for a comedy network to do an over-the-top variety show about being macho. (Actually, on paper it looks like the kind of thing gay men would be into.)
This to me is a good sign for politics, because macho thinking has so often clouded real discussion, particularly in foreign policy. So much of foreign policy is phrased, explicitly, about projecting a militarily strong front, lately at the cost of other kinds of strength (moral and intellectual, most significantly). We’ve always got to “show that we mean business”, that opposing us “has consequences”, etc. I guess this is what people call “cowboy” foreign policy. I mean, showing that we mean business? Really?? That’s the justification for major troop buildups, increased civilian casualties, contravening the rule of law, neglecting treaty obligations, etc.? What kind of business are we in, exactly? This kind of bullshit substitutes for reasoning about actual consequences. We say, oh, if we appear weak, then other nations will walk all over us. Okay, that’s a good rule of thumb, but for that to be the end-all and be-all of our reasoning about what to do about, say, Iran’s nuclear weapons program … well, one expects a teensy bit more thought.
The terminology on foreign policy is quite telling: “hard” power versus “soft” power. Are we talking about the complex interaction of cultural, economic, diplomatic, and military influences between countries and their effects on national security, or are we talking about how our dicks feel? In my mind, economic power is waaaay more significant than military power; indeed, the latter is impossible without the former. So what makes military might, so much harder, other than, I suppose, some sort of ejaculatory glee that accompanies the launching of missiles and the smell of warm napalm in the morning? Now, evidently, the terminology has been updated with “smart power“. Other than the complete nondescriptiveness of the name, and, I suppose, the elevation of intellectual values over others, I can’t complain.
In Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged, industrialists and financiers stage a secret “strike”—they relocate to some hidden valley in order to prove that the world needs them. This being fiction, progress grinds to a halt and the world cries out for the capitalists to deliver them. In reality, the financiers hold the world hostage alright, but not quite in the way that Rand had envisioned. Instead, common citizens must fund multimillion-dollar pay packages for incompetent executives, or grandma gets it. Can’t we just exile them to their secret valley? I’d pay for that!
These bankers, huh? There’s the extravagant bonus situation, of course, but then there’s also the rationalization that if they don’t pay that much, they won’t attract the best minds. Hmm, I guess that’s why Harvard professors are so dumb compared to John Thain? And why our last president was so bad? There was also an (unintentionally) hilarious/disgusting story in the Times about how hard it would be for bankers to get by on 500K: no nanny, no vacation home, no personal trainer, no $10,000 tropical vacations. And I guess no gold-plated violin to play a heartfelt accompaniment for their sorrows! There’s also the assumption behind their system of compensation: that somehow it’s just the free market deciding. But executive compensation is about 90% cronyism, 9% ego, and 1% free market. That’s an exact measurement by the way; I’m pretty sure I read it in a Malcolm Gladwell article. (Actually, JK Galbraith wrote extensively about the fracked up system that is CEO pay: “The salary of the chief executive of the large corporation is not a market award for achievement. It is frequently in the nature of a warm personal gesture by the individual to himself.”)
The arrogance of bankers is one thing, but the systemic problem that has allowed it to flourish is another. In particular, what do we do now? Nate Silver makes the following point about the banking bailout (as opposed to the stimulus):
I’m sorry, but somewhere between 99.9% and 99.999999% of us are severely underqualified to be making policy recommendations on this particular issue. And I’m certainly in the majority on this one. My anecdotal experience for the past several months has been that the more someone knows about the economy, the more they know (or at least are willing to admit to) what they don’t know. Anyone who is professing with certainty that this or that will work — nationalizing the banks, for instance — is an idiot.
…
What I’m asking you to do is to clear the playing field. This is neither the time nor the place for mass movements — this is the time for expert opinion. Once the experts (and I’m not one of them) have reached some kind of a consensus about what the best course of action is (and they haven’t yet), then figure out who is impeding that action for political or other disingenuous reasons and tackle them — do whatever you can to remove them from the playing field.
Well, the truth is that we do live in a technocracy. And to some extent, I do agree with him. It just bothers me that the dictates of technocracy are so frequently counter to those of democracy. I mean, aren’t we supposed to strive to be informed citizens? In this case, it’s almost impossible. Normally, that’s not such a big deal: I like scientists, for example, to have the last word when it comes to, you know, science. But in this case, many of the technocrats have serious conflicts of interest, notably Geithner. I’m not saying that Geithner’s a puppet of Wall Street or anything, but he is a creature of Wall Street. That’s not necessarily a problem—but how can I tell? This is the problem: there’s no reasonable test for an ordinary person, except to wait until it’s too late. I’m not comfortable with that level of faith.
Why is it that TV science fiction has such big race and gender troubles? A. tells me that all TV has this problem; since I don’t, at the moment, watch any non-SF TV aside from 30 Rock, I’ll have to take her word for it. Also, many recent SF shows—Heroes and Battlestar Galactica in particular—have ensemble casts with many auxiliary and bit characters, so it’s much easier to pick out a pattern in how the show treats race and gender than a show that, say, has only one nonwhite character.
Heroes is the worst offender. Quite a few auxiliary female characters have suffered horrible fates through no fault of their own: there was one who was accidentally abandoned in a horrible future, which was then prevented from occurring, so I guess she just ceased existing. As far as her (main character) love interest was concerned, she really did cease existing.
The main female characters (there are two, I believe) also have serious problems with agency. Claire, for example, is a high schooler with the ability to heal from any injury, even death; furthermore, her blood can be used to heal others. But over three seasons, she’s fumbled with finding a purpose, often quite explicitly. Usually, she struggles with issues with her father, or in one season, a male love interest. The absolute worst was when she, her mother, and her birth mother were captured by a guy who had a sort of “puppeteer” power: he could control the physical actions of others. There’s the obvious grossness of it, though mitigated by the fact that Claire ends up sort of outwitting their captor, but to me most disgusting was how it epitomized the show’s treatment of women.
As for race, the show has an obvious hero character: an Asian guy named, well, Hiro. He’s an amazing actor and plays a very well-loved character—he’s probably the most popular character in the show. But he’s not the main protagonist! That role is reserved for the young white guy, Peter Petrelli, whose whininess and self-absorption rivals Luke Skywalker’s.
Hiro and an Indian male character, Suresh, also just can’t seem to have adult sexual relationships. Every time they attempt to do so, either
- the woman dies a horrible death (three times), though this seems to occur to the white males too
- they have to remain “chaste” for some reason
- they turn into an aggressive angry monster
Annalee Newitz puts it a lot better than me, but you get the point.
Battlestar Galactica isn’t as bad, but it’s a pretty macho show. It’s just that some of the macho heroes happen to be women. Two of the more reprehensible characters are also, as far as I can tell, the only two “girly” male characters in the show: Gaius Baltar and Felix Gaeta. I mean, their names are, literally, gay! Okay, not literally, just phonetically, but that doesn’t sound as good (“they were, phonetically, flaming!”). The most recent plot arc involved a coup led by Gaeta and a civilian conspirator. There’s been a ton of serious blogging about the political situation, who was right, who was wrong, etc. But politics aside, I was really shocked at the venom so many fans felt towards Gaeta. On an io9 comment thread, there was a constant refrain of “shoving Gaeta’s fake leg up his ass” before throwing him out the airlock. (I know: if you haven’t seen the show, it sounds ridiculous. Well, it’s space opera; what did you expect?) I mean, at that point it’s not really subtext anymore. And I really think it’s Gaeta’s femmieness (femme-y-ness? femmey-ness?) that gets people all riled up; that someone who isn’t masculine, in the calculus of the show, should not be asserting authority. After all, Gaeta was mainly naive, while his conspirator actually turned out to be a horrible person, but I’ve seen practically zero bile directed at the latter. I’m reminded of Ursula Leguin’s Left Hand of Darkness. In that book, the protagonist is unable to trust the person he should most trust because of gender: that person doesn’t act traditionally male to the protagonist, so the protagonist thinks their playing some sort of coy game, and this mistrust leads to tragedy.
The dynamic where the strong, righteous, and honorable characters in dramatic works are also narrowly masculine is pretty widespread. But it still surprises me in science fiction. The reason is that I don’t think fans really want it. The stereotype, of course, is that the fan base consists of teenage boys who are wannabe Will Smiths. But a lot of SF geeks also love anime, and there’s plenty of anime where the main character, male or female, is quite sensitive, even feminine: Twelve Kingdoms, Rurouni Kenshin, Last Exile, etc. And evidently there’s plenty of saccharine romantic anime that’s quite popular as well. And Joss Whedon’s shows (Buffy, Firefly) are pretty feminist, and incredibly popular. Well, Buffy was popular, at least. It’s as if cultural norms have a stranglehold on the entertainment industry, but not the fans themselves.
There’s a disjuncture on race as well: both the Earthsea series, by Leguin, and the animated series Avatar feature explicitly nonwhite protagonists. But in live-action adaptations, all the main characters are white.
I feel like marketers are at fault here. There is an argument that you want to appeal beyond your base, and one easy way to do that is to default to the accepted conventions of a story, particularly what “good guys” and “bad guys” look and act like. If the argument is false, then the situation’s outrageous; if it’s true, well, probably that’s even more outrageous. I mean, a black man’s president! Catch up!
