April 2009 Archives

Between books on education, my ongoing course reading, I took a quick break to peruse an Arabic-English dictionary. I want a vocabulary of alien-sounding names and places for the upcoming RPG campaign, and I especially wanted to avoid anything too overtly Greek-sounding. The campaign is set in a low fantasy bronze age, and thanks to Homer, with some biblical influences, Americans almost reflexively associate the bronze age with Greece, especially if you toss a bit of fantasy into the mix. But this culture (only one culture inhabits the archipelago where the adventures take place) are meant to be Phoenician-Arabic in flavor, the romance of traders taking the place of the glory of warriors, so, although some degree of Greek creep is probably inevitable, I hope to minimize it through such tricks as Arabic phonemes. (Not Arabic names themselves, which are easily recognizable from front-page news these days—just the phonemes.) So I grabbed the dictionary from the reference shelves and copied out some choice words.

As it happens, I also passed another book between the carrel where I was studying and the bathroom with potential use in the campaign, so I snagged it, too. This is a conspiracy setting, trying to catch some of the excitement of titles like Three Days of the Condor,The 39 Steps, The Manchurian Candidate, The X-Files, and even—God help me—The Da Vinci Code and The Matrix: thrillers where a powerful, ruthless, and virtually omnipresent conspiracy is up to No Good, and it’s up to the heroes to stop their Nefarious Plan, despite the fact that everyone they trust quickly proves to be part of the Conspiracy or an easily-snuffed target. The book was a historical study of the Assassins, an Isma’ili sect hoping to spread their version of Islam beyond Persia at about the time of the crusades. They employed assassination and terror as weapons, and, when they began offing crusader princes as well as recalcitrant Shi’a rulers, their reputation as a powerful, ruthless, and practically omnipresent conspiracy bloomed among credulous crusaders, and spread through Europe. You can see how this would be useful: by taking the rumors at face value, and discounting the historical facts as deliberate deceptions spread by the Assassins to conceal their true nature (a common tactic of conspiracy theorists), I hoped to have something to use as a model for the campaign, probably the enforcement arm of the Conspiracy.

My selections had an unfortunate side effect, though: b the time I had to pack up and head to my last class for the day, I had a book on reinforcing social identity through education, an Arabic-English dictionary, a book of Arabic grammar, and a book on Islamic killers known for three things: their ability to get anyone, anywhere; their fanatical devotion to a single, cult-like leader, and working themselves into ecstatic states through drugs. (The word “assassin” is linked to “hashish,” although there’s some argument over whether this is a proper derivation or a later conflation, like “copper” and “Cyrpus.”) Together, the books looked like the selections of some nut-job xenophobe, possibly looking for links between the Assassins and modern terrorists, possibly looking for signs that they had invaded our schools, possibly hoping to use the schools to teach our kids to fear Arabs and Muslims.

Had I realized this earlier, I would have set aside an extra minute or two to reshelve the books myself, but I didn’t; I had gone back to educational theory and continued studying up to the last minute, and had to get to class. So I dumped all the books together on one of the stands meant for that purpose, leaving some library staffer to discover my reading list and jump to the wrong conclusion. Even if nobody saw me drop those books off and thought the worst of me personally, I can still picture this combination of books offending someone. Although, judging by the graffiti around here, a lot of my fellow students wouldn’t be much upset at all.

Poor baby.

It’s hard to know whether this was written as satire or in seriousness. I mean, Anonymous writes, “I get it that I may not win much sympathy,” but that’s exactly what she’s shooting for: she’s complaining to those of us who aren’t filthy rich that being filthy rich doesn’t mean she can have everything she wants. She admits, “We still live in relative luxury”--relative?—“can still afford almost everything we need…” Presumably she just needs more than the rest of us do. And she blames people like Alan Greenspan for encouraging people like her husband with loose monetary policy, but complains in the same voice about the regulative bills flooding out of Congress and how hard they make life for her family. And the investors themselves, of course. Mustn’t forget to blame the investors. She’s an equal opportunity blamer, so she’s probably got you on her list as well. How dare you enable people like her husband? She flies commercial now—not because they can’t afford first class, but for fear someone might recognize her husband in first class and resent it. Or by “we fly commercial,” does she mean “as opposed to a private jet”?

I dunno. The complaint is so laden with doublethink that it ought to be satire. Sadly, I’ve heard too many real, live, non-anonymous top executives expressing the same limitless sense of entitlement, and the same complete ignorance of the proper use of words like “need,” “normal,” “average,” “budget,” and the like to believe this is, in fact, satire, even though she wraps up a crabby complaint that the crooks deserve some sympathy from their victims by, incredibly, rubbing our faces in the fact that her losses are a brief inconvenience: “The good news is that Americans have short attention spans. Before long, some other group will come along to absorb all the frustration and anger.” And Anonymous, happily, will be off the hook and back to skimming off the American economy.

Poor baby. Poor, spoiled, spoiled baby.

4/29/09

Senator Arlen Specter of Pennsylvania has hopped the fence: no longer a Republican, he has announced his intent to join the Democratic party, and been accepted. As reason compelling him to the separation, he cites his discovery of philosophical differences with Republicans:

Which gives me pause.

When the Republican party was busily transforming our tax policy into a regressive engine, he had no philosophical differences. That was okay. When the Republican party was busily torturing hapless Muslims, Specter had no philosophical differences with that, either. He even derided Democrats with objections to torture as soft on terror. When the Republican party was busily yanking support from under institutions meant to police our financial system, Specter saw no philosophical differences on that count. When the Bush administration claimed sweeping powers for itself to violate basic constitutional freedoms, and called for formal Congressional approval for the same, Specter voiced some objections…but decided his philosophical differences weren’t so great that he couldn’t actually vote to approve them.

Now Specter is facing a tough election. General dissatisfaction with Republicans is turning out the Democratic base, and the Republican party is cleaving so sharply between moderates and reactionaries that it seems Republican candidates can only enjoy the support of half their own party. The political bean-counters figure Specter to lose as a Republican.

And, lo, his eyes have been opened, and he has discovered irreconcilable philosophical differences with that party. Mirabile dictu.

To celebrate his conversion, his first act is to push legislation curbing the power of the president—specifically, reversing powers claimed for the presidency under the Bush administration—a measure Specter didn’t feel was necessary when a president with whom he has philosophical differences was actually claiming and employing those powers.

The Democratic party is glad to take any Senator it can get, no matter how immediately he wishes to sabotage actual Democratic legislation. Democrats would really like a filibuster-proof majority in the Senate, although I don’t imagine that power would amount to much, given regular Blue Dog flouting of the party line, and given that Republicans would likely find firm filibusters politically untenable if they were actually forced to employ filibusters, instead of simply getting their way by threatening one. Lyndon Johnson once explained his tolerance of J. Edgar Hoover, saying he’d rather have Hoover inside the tent pissing out than outside the tent pissing in. So eager are the Democrats for that magical number sixty, no matter how nominal, that they’re happy to have Specter in the tent, pissing in.

It’s a lovely day again today; the full joy of spring (as opposed to the wet and muddy days of early spring) is upon us. And that means dragging out the grill to see what kind of shape it’s in and celebrating with some steaks, or perhaps barbecue.

We inherited our grill from the downstairs neighbors when they moved out. Technically, it’s a gas grill, but it sat so long in the leaky garage that acts as our storage shed that it had rusted in several places, including the physical grill itself, the rack on which you cook the meat. Between its weight and its state of disrepair, the Lorenzes decided they’d rather not haul it with them to their new home, and it became ours. I didn’t feel safe using it, either, at least not with gas: the corrosion might well have created a dangerous leak somewhere in the system, or rendered some vital safety cut-off inoperative. But it worked just fine as a charcoal receptacle. After hours of scouring the grill rack to remove as much rust as I could, I now use this moderately fancy piece of equipment like you would a cheap Weber drum grill. It works for us.

I only have two problems with this system. First, lighting the charcoal, and to some extent cooking, is a smoky, chokey business. I could do without my hair smelling of smoke for the rest of the evening, especially after last year. Second, the combination of heavy steel casing and an inability to turn the heat off instantly means the grill remains quite hot for hours after cooking—too hot for me to clean it that evening. That means cleaning the grill gets put off to another day, almost invariably the day I next want to use it. The messiness of the cleaning congealed, rancid grease from the grill is almost enough to prevent me from using it at all, some days.

Almost. It’s hard to turn your nose up at barbecue, even if it means filthy scrubbing beforehand.

How do these people live with themselves?

Dick Cheney, possibly beginning to worry that some kind of prosecution might be in the works after all, has begun offering a fantasy that torture—not that he would use that exact word, no—yielded “valuable information” and “saved thousands of lives.” (We can be confident it is a fantasy. As Lawrence O’Donnel observed, if there were any solid evidence at all that torture had saved thousands of lives during the Bush administration, the White House, desperate to shore up plummeting popularity for its military adventures, would have trumpeted it to every news service in the world, security concerns or no.) Perhaps Cheney worries that he has miscalculated: while correctly predicting Congress wouldn’t have the balls to prosecute torturers on principle, it’s beginning to look like there is a chance they will also lack the balls to stand up to a desire to pin the embarrassment of torture on someone specific, so that the nation doesn’t have to feel guilty about its general acquiescence. And Cheney might, just might, find some of the blame pinned on him. Perhaps he’s telling us fantasies as a way of rationalizing his guilt to himself. Even Dick must have some kind of image of his own morality, withered from neglect though it may be, and might be starting to sense he hasn’t lived up even to that low bar. Or perhaps he’s simply entertaining himself since leaving office in the right-wing pastime of re-writing history because people fall for it.

You’d think the former vice president would show a little more imagination in his flight of fantasy. As long as he’s counting imaginary deaths, why not make it millions? Billions, even. Torturing hapless Muslims snatched semi-randomly from the streets of Baghdad saved every human life on earth, not to mention those yet unborn! And puppies!

In harmony with this effort to measure right-wing crimes against imaginary yardsticks is Congressman Peter King’s (R-NY) demands that Pelosi, et al., attend the funerals of Americans yet to die as a direct result of deciding not to torture innocents, and that they explain “Your son was disintegrated because we didn’t feel like pouring water on someone for thirty seconds.” The absence of actual dead Americans in this scenario hasn’t dissuaded him from getting a jump on making sure people are held accountable for every last one of them. No doubt the Congressman has been very, very busy since 2003, attending the funerals of hundreds of thousands of very real dead Iraqi civilians and explaining to their families, “Your son was blasted to smithereens because we didn’t feel like paying so much for oil.” Surely he must have done this. At the very least, he must have attended the funerals of thousands of American soldiers to explain “Your son died in a needless war because I didn’t feel like building my re-election campaign on real national issues.” ‘Cause otherwise he’d be some kind of creepy hypocrite who thinks moral responsibility is only for other people. Bleeding heart liberals, for example. Only a bleeding heart liberal would feel guilty for directly contributing to thousands of pointless deaths. And as any real he-men conservative knows, taking responsibility for your own actions is for pussies.

And pussy is for real men. A WhitneyBrown places the “Hey, it works for us” defense in the proper context.

I’m lunching in the student center, across from a bulletin board laden with student activity flyers. Among them are flyers for ChibiCon 2009, a school-sponsored cosplay convention.

For those who don’t know, cosplay, short for “costume play” is a hobby revolving around dressing up like distinctive characters from movies, cartoons, and video games. It’s the Japanese equivalent of dressing up like Mr. Spock or Darth Vader, and ranks quite low on the geek pecking order of which nerds look down upon others as even nerdier than themselves.

As a geek myself somewhere in the middle of the pecking order (RPG fan still playing at 40), I instinctively look down on cosplayers, too, but really, it’s all of a type, just a matter of degree. I’m actually a little pleased as well as surprised that Montclair State University has enough openly nerdy students to support a geek convention—presuming it can, and the efforts aren’t just ambitious dreaming. There aren’t enough Japanese students to fill it out, unless they all hide in their dorm rooms where I can’t see them, so the con-goers must be proper, home-grown geeks, and if there’s enough to hold a small cosplay con, there must surely be enough to support an active gaming community—RPGs less freakish in the general public’s eye, and therefore more likely to attract the almost-normal.

Only…

I’ve only seen one flyer, ever, for any kind of gaming at all, and that was for what amounted to an open LAN party, where FPS junkies could hook up and gun one another down with virtual Uzis and sniper rifles. It makes me feel old, and a little sad, to see my preferred form of geekdom absorbed into the much larger pool of computer gamers, especially as computer games are too scripted to act as a proper outlet for real geekdom, and operate so remotely as to offer little real community for geeks seeking their own kind. My rank of the geek hierarchy is a dying breed; eventually, we’ll be replaced entirely by a form of geekdom yet to be conceived.

Tonight we got word of the breaking Harman (D-CA) scandal. The story so far is that anonymous sources leaked results of a wiretap of the congresswoman agreeing to a bit of unseemly quid pro quo: lobbying to release suspected Israeli spies in exchange for a threat to withdraw campaign contributions from officials unwilling to support her future ambitions.

As we listened to her NPR interview on the matter, I was put off by her blatant refusal to answer repeated questions as to whether she had actually agreed to such a thing, attempting to turn the story into an expose of the abuse of wiretaps regarding a major elected official. On the other hand, I was considerably mollified by her repeated insistence that she wanted the transcript of the conversation released to the public—or rather, to her first, and she would release it to the public. This might be a stalling tactic: perhaps she hopes to hold onto the transcript and release it under cover of a major breaking news story, should she be lucky enough to get such cover, or perhaps she merely wants the first look at the record, the better to prepare her defense in the media and in court. But as long as she makes good on that promise, I’m prepared to give her the benefit of the doubt. Allegations of improper use of influence deserve a full airing, and demanding that the transcript, and not merely the record of the wiretap itself, be made public doesn’t sound like weaseling. I said as much to Eileene.

In the meantime, the wiretap itself deserves a complete airing, too. The Bush administration claimed, among many other shady and dangerous powers, the power to authorize wiretaps of American citizens speaking with foreign persons on the president’s sole authority. No court supervision, not even the approval of a hand-picked, friendly judge. No official record that the surveillance was executed. No revelation of that surveillance, immediate or subsequent, to the individual under surveillance or to any supervisory authority. And now—surprise, surprise!—it seems some officials abused that authority to spy on American citizens without just cause. More amazingly still, many of those American citizens turned out to belong to the political opposition. And further, potentially embarrassing information revealed in that surveillance somehow gets released, illegally and anonymously, to the public. Who could have seen that coming?

Not Congresswoman Harman, apparently. She is shocked, yes shocked that the authority could be so abused. Especially after she worked so hard to put it in place.

I did a little background reading on Congresswoman Harman, and it turns out that in her role as a committee member on Homeland Security, she was an outspoken advocate of that very same authority to spy on American citizens without a warrant, one of the most vocal Democratic supporters of a very anti-democratic policy. I guess I’ll have to revise my willingness to award her the benefit of the doubt. Her outrage that she should fall victim to shady surveillance ethics can have no basis in principle; if it is real at all, and not feigned in a desperate attempt to turn the story into an attack on her accusers, her outrage can only lie in the fact that she was subject to the same abuses she approved for the rest of us. A powerful collaborator in undermining our vital civil liberties is about to turn into one of our staunchest defenders, albeit purely out of self interest. Watching her attempt to rationalize her about face on the issue should be highly entertaining.

None of this excuses either politically motivated spying on an elected official or leaking that information to the public. Nevertheless, poetic justice can be a beautiful thing.

Ah, how fleeting the fame of a meme. This past weekend’s Wait, Wait, Don’t Tell Me! included in the fill-in-the-blank lightning round a note that a Quantas flight was canceled last week “because there were ______ on the plane.”

I, of course, immediately shouted “Snakes!” but poor Tom Bodett was stumped, wasting valuable seconds thinking aloud before missing with a wild shot about kangaroos. Figuring that Tom may have missed that particular flash in the pan of public awareness, I took the question to Eileene, who also came up blank, and I know full well she was aware of the “Snakes on a Plane” movie and, more to the point, aware of the eruption of silly pre-release parodies which ultimately proved much more entertaining than the movie itself, with or without Samuel L. Motherfucking Jackson. The humor behind such parodies rested on the fundamental assumption that the title tells you everything you need to know about the movie, an assumption that proved entirely correct.

One of the earliest and best parodies, audio only, can still be found on the internet; click the “audio trailer” link at the top of the list. It’s still pretty funny, even after the hysteria has died out, a victim of the movie itself.

Goodness, but it’s a lovely day today. I’m between classes, usually time for me to keep up with reading assignments, or write for the journal. But dang it, this is the first really nice day of the year, and I’m going outside. Since my laptop only holds about four minutes’ charge, and because electrical outlets are in short supply on grassy quads, this is necessarily the end of today’s entry.

Enjoy your first really nice day of the year, when it comes.

Sometimes I miss commercials for Fruit of the Loom underwear. They gave me some of my earliest exposure to surrealist humor, well before I’d heard of Monty Python. I mean, think about it: guys in weird suits, like objects with inappropriate faces and tiny arms and legs, are an old and familiar staple of advertising, but what would Franz Kafka or Albert Camus do with that kind of material?

Kafka: What is this? Little fruit-shaped people in my laundry basket?
[sound effect: Boing!]
Fruit: Hi, Franz!
Kafka: Aaaaaa! There is no space for us all in this tiny room! I am being crushed by giant speaking fruits! How horrible!
Green Grapes: Looks like your laundry room could use the same kind of super-stretch our elastic band offers!
Apple: Enough with the fat jokes, already.
Kafka: Who are you? What do you want? I believe I am going mad.
Token Minority Grapes: No, Franz, the durability of our briefs is real, a note of permanence in an impermanent existence.
Kafka: Yes, this must be it: I am mad. This explains why the butter should talk to me every morning, repeating only one word. I do not understand! I try to hold a civil conversation with it, but always it says the same thing, trapping me in a hell of repetition. I would drown myself in the toilet, but a little man in there made the water all blue. I ask you, is that a natural color for water?
Bunch of Leaves: Look, is this an awkward time? We could come back later.

Not exactly mass market appeal, I agree, but it would get the product attention. And really, that’s about all the ads could hope for. What is there to say about underwear that hasn’t already been said?

I watched maybe ten or twelve westerns this past year—that’s a lot for me—as a kind of research into how to set up a final showdown in an RPG. One of these was The Man from Laramie. It’s a fine vehicle for Jimmy Stewart’s folksy everyman (“Oh, yeah, yeah. I, uh, don’t mind helpin’ a fella up when he’s down, but I kinda object if he kicks my teeth in when I do, ya see.”), but otherwise hasn’t much to recommend it. I suspect it suffers from being based on a magazine serial, more a series of related short stories than a single, coherent one; the movie drifts rather aimlessly between recovering cattle, breaking up an operation to smuggle guns to the Indians, wooing the pretty store clerk, exposing and/or redeeming the heartless businessman who runs the town, and negotiating the triangular relationship between the businessman, dimwitted son, and ambitious henchman, all the while flinging Jimmy into fights despite his determination to get along with everyone.

The theme song reflects this odd schizophrenia, unable to decide whether to extol the hero’s social virtues or his martial virtues. A chorus of cowboys introduces us to

“The man from Laa-ra-mieeee…

And it continues for several verses after that, explaining that danger is the man from Laramie’s middle name, and he has lots of notches on his gun, and everyone knows not to mess with him, because he’s so kind and gentle and peaceable. The song sticks with me, after a fashion. I can’t remember how the tune goes, partly because the lyrics don’t scan rhythmically, but that strange mixture of virtuous example and power fantasy is just so weird. For days afterward, I found myself making up new lines. They didn’t match the tune, obviously, since I couldn’t remember it clearly, nor did they match the rhythm, such as it was, and I’d insert the chorus pretty much at random. But whenever something brings the film to mind, I end up singing silently to myself:

The man from Laa-ra-mieeee…
He was brave and strong and handsome
And he always ate his vegetables
And wrote home to his mother every Sunday.

And he was tall and kind and honest
And he helped old ladies cross the street.
We don’t know how he got all those notches on his pistol.
Maybe that’s how he kept track of the puppies he’d raised,
The man from Laa-ra-mieee…

You can keep that up pretty well all day, until you get tired or run out of flattering adjectives.

Yesterday evening, NPR had an article on a recent CD, featuring 55 minutes of solo performance by Cajun folk musician Christine Balfa…entirely on the triangle.

The musical samples they shared were unbelievably boring, consisting of about four minutes of a song with a title like “Down-Home Delta Blues,” which sounded like tikka-ting, tikka-ting, tikka-ting, tikka-ting, tikka-ting, tikka-ting, tikka-ting, tikka-ting... over and over and over, followed by “Sweet Jesus Rollin’,” which sounded like tinga-tikka-tinga-tikka-tinga-tikka-tinga-tikka..., followed by “Bayou Waltz,” which also sounded like tinga-tikka-tinga-tikka-tinga-tikka-tinga-tikka…, but faster. In a couple places, the performer, overcome by the emotion of the music, wailed tunelessly. It was dreadful.

The host clearly realized this, but her guest Chas Justus, who produced the album, didn’t seem to. Maybe the joke’s on me—maybe everyone, triangle player included, were engaged in a sly chuckle, but I don’t think so. It seemed like Melissa Block had invited a hapless fan of Cajun music on air to be laughed at by the East Coast intellectual crowd for seriously praising the “nuances” of tikka-ting, tikka-ting… etc.

It left a bad taste in my mouth. I expect NPR to show more sensitivity than I do towards harmless but ridiculous people. If it wants to mock people publicly, let it start with dangerous but ridiculous people like Newt Gingrich, perhaps to grill him about his teabagging initiative, rather than inviting him on as a sage and trustworthy analyst of government policy.

I found an article on video games lying to players interesting, largely due to its resonance with techniques RPGs use to lie to players. Like the video games cited, primarily Half Life and Halo, RPGs are presumed to place the storyline in the players’ (that is, the audience’s) hands: if players make foolish decisions, or miss vital clues, or in some particularly brutal games even if they fail to design their characters’ abilities to a sufficient degree of buffness, the PCs fail, and the evil warlock’s minions sweep over the pastoral pseudo-medieval kingdom (or some similar horrible fate befalls). But like the video games cited, RPGs seek to create a satisfying narrative, as well, which means they can’t help but steal some of the conveniences of narrative forms where the audience doesn’t control the narrative, and the author has the luxury of arranging events to his own satisfaction.

As a result, in all but the most strictly objectivist RPGs, the PC heroes always arrive in town at just the right time, when doom is evident but not yet inevitable, no matter how long they might dawdle in roadside inns beforehand. The enemies they face will be conveniently almost, but not quite, skillful enough to defeat them. And if the PCs are defeated anyway, the bad guys will unaccountably make a mistake and give them a second chance. If the PCs need a boat/spaceship/exclusive invitation to reach the next adventure, someone will happily provide one without requiring collateral. If the PCs run out of supplies, a caravan will pass by before they perish in the wastes, and if the PCs run out of clues, someone will materialize to explain things to them, even if “things” is a super-secret conspiracy.

To some degree, events like this are natural. If Indiana Jones can enjoy fortuitous coincidences, so can the PCs of a less polished adventure story. Arranging events to the needs of the narrative, though, can interfere with the story if it’s carried far enough to break a sense of immersion, and especially if players begin exploiting the expectation of such fortuitous coincidences: “No, don’t use those grenades yet; I think the GM gave them to us for the big boss fight.” (Players: beware a spiteful GM who might punish you for being too blatant about it. “It turns out you didn’t have two days to spare for shopping for equipment, because the goblin horde didn’t wait until you showed up to begin its final assault. The castle is now a burning ruin. There! Happy now?”)

The balance between narrative control and immersion is an unstable point, accelerating toward ever more narrative control. Historically, RPGs evolved out of war games, and began grounded in a presumption that the world was fixed in an objective reality: there were so many bad guys of such-and-such strength in so-and-so locations, and drinking from this magic pool has this effect, while drinking from that one has that effect. But as GMs and players alike began to bore of anticlimax (“You die of dysentery on the way to save the world. Tough luck.”), GMs began to fudging a bit, using the secrecy of the GM screen to hide their subterfuge. But players began to pick up on the habit anyway, especially as they read the same articles in RPG magazines suggesting that a bit of fudging was okay…and, later, that a whole lot of fudging was okay. Paradoxically, GMs often found they had to fudge even more—sometimes to the PCs’ benefit, sometimes to their detriment—to conceal it, to make things seem like that’s just how the fictional world operated, because both random and fixed objective events can sometimes seem suspiciously fudged to simulate drama. And, at every new point of temporary equilibrium, GMs would always be tempted to fudge a bit in ways they expected players might not spot. I don’t know where it might end; perhaps it’s already ended, in a jaded willingness among players to pretend not to notice everything is staged, and that their choices produce no long-term repercussions, only short-term inconvenience, all the while winking at the process, just as we watch action movies knowing the hero will never be fatally shot, no matter how many bullets whiz past.

Console games may be heading towards the same cynical dead end. Certainly some players are already aware they’re being played, as proved by the very existence of the article linked above, or by Yahtzee’s complaints about “Press X not to die” sequences in his vicious but hilarious Zero Punctuation reviews. And, once the brighter, more skeptical players realize it, word gets around.

It’s a post-Nixon world. Presidents lie to start wars, scientists lie to sell cigarettes, newspapers lie to boost their owners’ investments outside the newspaper, popes lie to conceal pederasty. Now games lie to reassure us that we’re better players than we really are. And I suspect we’re going to react with a shrug. “Yeah, so what else is new? At least it was fun watching stuff blow up in this one, and the controls were pretty good.”

(Last night, Eileene and I attended our first Seder. Our friend Jen converted recently, and invited several gentile friends to participate in the Passover celebration. The digressions into comparative religion reminded me of something I should have written about earlier.)

A couple weeks ago, driving not far from our house, but off our usual routes, we passed an Episcopalian church with a large rainbow banner hanging outside. I’ve grown used to seeing them outside UCC churches; the UCC tends to fairly liberal sentiments, and recently mounted a national gay-friendly campaign with the slogan “Jesus didn’t turn people away. Neither do we.” This was the first I’d seen from Episcopalians.

But not the first I’d heard. A few seconds after we drove past, I asked Eileene, “Wait. Isn’t the Episcopal church the one…” (“Yeah,” she said, anticipating the question.) “…in the throes of a schism over ordaining gay ministers?” The battle lines are drawn, and this particular congregation wasn’t shy about which side it had chosen. Good for them. Good for the Iowa Supreme Court. Good for the Vermont legislature. Good for DC, and may the approval required from Congress for its laws make a lot of Republican bigots, and a lot of Democratic apologists for Republican bigots, uncomfortable.

People are people, and they deserve to be treated like people. The battle lines are drawn in our community at large, too, in big fat rainbow stripes, and I’m not shy about which side I’m on, either. One side reminds us “Jesus didn’t turn people away. Neither do we.” The other, struggling to overcome its language handicap, warns that a certain kind of love is an abomination in the eyes of God.

Which side are you on?

Now let me see if I’ve got this straight: the current fiscal crisis is not a matter of being broke; it’s a matter of being stuck. Constipated rather than starving. The material assets we used to have are still out there. A lot of assets have suddenly vanished, but those assets never existed. They were just assets inflated up out of the ether to take advantage of unwary speculators, and whoever issued them in the first place got rich, while whoever is stuck with those particular pieces of paper when the music stops loses. The real assets are still out there. Most investment opportunities are still as good as they ever were. But—and this is the catch—so long as the bad investments, the fictional assets, are out there waiting to catch the unwary, nobody is willing to invest in anything at all, for fear that potential borrowers are holding (and hiding) bad debt, and new investment will vanish in covering that bad debt, with nothing to show for it.

Clearly, nothing is going to get moving again until those bad debts are exposed and evaluated so investors can feel safe once again. Nothing cools investment faster than uncertainty. Two groups have the power to expose and evaluate them: those speculators who hold the bad debts and the government.

Understandably, speculators holding those bad debts are reluctant to cooperate in such an exposure and evaluation. Even if they aren’t broke by their bad investments, the mere news of unexpected losses can lead to a death spiral of less enthusiasm for future investment. Plus there’s still some possibility the government can be conned into buying those assets at face value—far, far above their real value, which is near zero—at taxpayer expense. As long as that hope remains, ain’t nobody exposin’ nothin’.

Less understandably, the government is reluctant to get down to exposure and evaluation. Perhaps some of this can be blamed on appointive officials like Paulson and Geithner who are watching their own backs and their friends’. Above and beyond financial losses, there is the possibility of criminal proceedings for fraud, depending on the details of what when down, when, where, and to whom, and depending on how eager the feds are for a scapegoat. More likely, elected officials are refusing to examine the records because they don’t want to know the answer. At a minimum, some major campaign contributors are going to vanish in a puff of their own lousy gambling, but a market freefall is possible.

So the banks continue to hide their shortfalls, and government continues to let them.

I thought a complex market reaction, with the ups and downs and an increased volume of trading that are symptoms of a healthy economy, is just what we wanted. Especially since the only simple market reaction in the offing, with or without accountability, is a complete meltdown. And if the Fed isn’t going to act on any of its vaunted “stress tests,” what was the point of holding them in the first place?

Putting off the day of reckoning isn’t going to make it any better. Apart from maintaining the economy in the doldrums, all that putting it off accomplishes is to buy time for the financially savvy to repackage the toxic assets and unload them on some other poor sucker, namely, you and me and grandma’s pension fund.

We need the reckoning now. Actually, we needed a reckoning long ago; regulation of our financial institutions should be perpetual. But a generation of national leadership has joined the Cult of the Free Market, selling our worldly possessions and donating them to the memory of Saint Ronnie in preparation of a Rapture that hasn’t arrived, and the repeated calendar revisions are wearing thin.

Occam's Razor is a pretty good rule of thumb. Given a choice of explanations for a set of conditions, the simplest is likely to be the correct one. There are limits to that rule of thumb, however. New evidence might upset what looked like a good theory, and someone really interested in the truth should actively seek such evidence. (That search makes science work as well as it does.) Some fields, like history and human psychology, are so complex that simple solutions are likely to be gross oversimplifications.

High finance, for example, is baroque far beyond my understanding. Economics is full of unintended consequences and counterintuitive results. When you add the twists of legalese in the fine print, things get even more difficult to fathom. And when the fine print is deliberately intended to deceive, as it seems to have been in a lot of the financial meltdowns of the past generation--Milken and Enron, too, not just the latest horrors of AIG and friends--simple explanations are downright suspect.

Nevertheless, when the simple explanation explains pretty much everything, without the need for special cases and other fine tuning, that's where to start, until a refutation can be found. As hesitant as I am of simple explanations in economics and other social fields, this simple explanation seems a terrific place to start.

If it gets around widely enough, we might even compel the suspected fraudsters to refute it with hard evidence, as opposed to their current defense, which is "This is all very complicated, and we experts can't be called upon to explain it to ignorant schmucks like you." But I'm not holding my breath. For starters, exposing all that suspected nothing will hit the economy hard in the short term, which politicians fear more than just about anything else. And no one but our elected officials have the authority to compel anyone to shine any light in those dark vaults.

The Ted Stevens debacle confuses the lines of what many, myself included, perceive as a deliberate attempt on the part of Republican loyalists to politicize the Justice Department, specifically (though by no means limited to) the agents who investigate and prosecute prominent officials like governors, congressmen, and cabinet members. Note that I don't say "blurs the lines"--the morality of the situation remains clear--but confusion is definitely apt.

Over the past decade, we did see a spectacular rise in federal investigations of Democrats, and an even more precipitous drop in investigations of Republicans during the same period, including the abrupt termination of promising ongoing investigations begun before 2000. And those who were caught red-handed (e.g., Vitter) were not prosecuted with anything like the same vigor as Democrats caught red-handed (e.g., Spitzer), if they were prosecuted at all. So exactly where the Stevens case fits on this continuum is something of an anomaly.

He was a sitting Republican, very popular in his state before his indictment on bribery charges--so popular that he lost by a recount whisker after the indictment. But the indictment did, after all, come out, and at a time very inconvenient for a senator seeking re-election, which is entirely out of character for federal prosecutors pursuing other Republicans under the Bush regime. And Stevens did, ultimately, lose, in an election year where every candidate is important, because the party division of the Senate now hovers on the edge of a filibuster-proof majority. And Stevens was, ultimately, convicted, also out of character for the period.

But now we learn that the prosecution muffed the job, despite securing a conviction. On the grounds that prosecutors illegally held evidence from the defense at Stevens's trial, his conviction has been reversed and his reputation effectively cleared as far as it ever will be. (Not that he isn't guilty in fact, or that the court of public opinion has reversed itself, but, in the absence of a valid conviction, he is now presumed not guilty in law.)

This reversal may be cause for suspicion, as well. Maybe. The argument goes that the prosecutors, Republican appointees operating under a Republican administration, deliberately decided to screw up, so as to secure Stevens's de jure innocence.

But I don't buy that. While it's distantly conceivable that the evidence against him was so damning that there was no possibility of a verdict of innocence in a fair trial, and blowing the prosecution was the only protection, that doesn't explain a muffed prosecution. What we learned from his trial wasn't too big to lose in a bureaucratic paper shuffle, should DoJ partisans want to protect Stevens, avoiding a trial entirely. Hell, they wouldn't even have to lose the evidence; they could just drop the case without comment, as they did Vitter's. So ordinary incompetence and/or excessive zeal may well be all that's behind the Stevens muddle. Since general, non-partisan excessive zeal may be at fault, those of us who suspect illegal partisan motivation in investigating and prosecuting Democrats during the Bush administration need to reconsider that position. It's something to consider, even as we remember the evaporation of such zeal in pursuing Republicans other than Stevens. I honestly don't know what to make of it.

What I am sure of is that a Democratic administration, seeing a miscarriage of justice, came clean on the misdeeds of the previous, Republican administration, and took the lead in asking for Stevens's acquittal. That isn't much; it's come too late to save his 2008 election campaign. But it's something. Which is more than we would have seen for a corrupt Democratic senator convicted by illegal prosecutorial methods in 2004, or even 2000.

Cheerful news from Iowa, as that state's supreme court ruled homosexual marriage deserved equal treatment--including availability--under the law as heterosexual marriage. Iowa is a particularly fine place from which to hear such a ruling, with its reputation as the heart of the heartland, anchor point of the conservative myth that both the wellspring of political virtue and the political center lie with rural, white conservatives.

This reputation may be exaggerated; certainly individual Iowans may not fit the mold of the conservative myth, and Iowa's conservative fervor is lukewarm. (The stereotype holds Iowans fervor for anything to be lukewarm.) It does tend to wobble across the Democrat-Republican divide in presidential elections. Nevertheless, there is a homogeneity to the state, as there is in my native Illinois beyond the bounds of Chicagoland--corn isn't the only monoculture in the corn belt. And that monoculture tends to be socially conservative, which in turn gets reflected in the government, and thus in appointed judges.

So it was a pleasant surprise to see those judges buck an 80-to-85% public sentiment in the state against gay marriage. That's a huge margin, and a effort to ban gay marriage in the state constitution is being launched as I type, but I'm told the timing for such an amendment is unpromising: the cycle of deadlines and elections make it impossible even to raise the issue for five years or so, by which time we might hope the rising tide of live-and-let-live acceptance of gay marriage makes its preservation politically possible even in Iowa--in a way it has failed recently in California.

I find it astonishing that the epitome of stodgy of Middle America should outstrip the liberal hippie let-it-all-hang-out wildness of Hollywood and San Francisco, but there it is. Perhaps we could rely more on the common sense of simple conservatives, if only we can keep it informed with more than propaganda from the right wing which has taken over the conservative apparatus.

As I did the dishes this afternoon, Eileene called from the living room, "Your mother's online." Specifically, Mom has a Facebook account.

I have a Facebook account, too. Doesn't everyone? But there's a huge difference between having one and actually using it. I don't use mine. I haven't diddled about looking at its various options, or automatically befriended everyone in the hopes of running up my friend count (not even people I know), or played the various elaborate electronic versions of "tag." In virtual life as in real life, I'm a hermit. This is a problem, because as Facebook or something like it becomes the networking tool of today, I risk failing to master networking in the virtual world as I have already failed to master it in the physical world.

Today may have been something of a wake-up call. I don't know that Mom has any Facebook sophistication either, but if she keeps at it, she will--which will leave me behind my own mother in modernization.

One of the major goals of taking education courses is passing the Praxis test, required in many states for certification as a teacher. Technically, New Jersey does not even require a degree of its teachers, neither in education nor in their primary subject, although obviously candidates with degrees stand a better chance of being hired. But it does require Praxis certification, and the education program here at Montclair State is aimed at that test.

I found a study version here in the MSU library, similar to SAT and ACT prep books and practice tests, and checked it out. Initially, the test looked very easy--upsettingly easy. Real jawbreaker questions like identifying angles as acute, right, or obtuse, or identifying whether the primary religious text of Judaism is the Quran, the Baghavad Gita, the Torah, or the Bible. I was upset not so much by the thought that our teachers needed no significant skill to qualify--that thought came second--but rather by the idea that I was getting ripped off: if that's all I need, I could have passed the Praxis immediately, without spending all this time and money! And the department advisor told me I needed a university education for this!

It turns out she was right. While the Praxis does indeed consist largely of fairly basic general knowledge, I discovered the essay questions toward the rear of the study guide, and they aren't so basic. Questions about competing educational theories, or identifying likely causes for a hypothetical child's learning difficulty, or worst of all, what strategies the test-taker would employ to overcome them. A natural-born teacher without classes in education might do all right on the last question, but probably not. He wouldn't have a chance on the first.

Relief ensued: relief that teachers aren't just passing the bar of early high school reading and math skills, and relief that my work and tuition aren't being wasted at MSU. Followed immediately by anxiety at the realization that I'd have to answer these questions to the satisfaction of some faceless board. But hey, that's part of the cost of some professional pride, right?