May 2009 Archives

Before reading this Times article, I’d never heard of the protest and shooting in 1970s Germany that toppled a conservative government and ushered in a generation of populist leadership. The event has much in common with our own Kent State shootings, but more dramatic in its political fallout: a peaceful protest, a reactionary government, an armed soldier fires on the crowd, and a few die. The number of deaths is not so important as their evocative power, a symbol of government gone wrong. Having read a bit about it, I suspect the NYT exaggerates the effects—that the shooting was more rallying point for those who wanted to overturn conservative leadership than the cause of the party shift—but a “want of a nail” case can be made for it. The shooting is a big moment in German history, and has a strong influence on the country’s current self-identity.

Learning that the shooter was a communist agent provocateur, as just happened upon the release of East German documents of the period, must create a weird tremor of self-identity in the politically aware among Germans, as if we were to learn that Aaron Burr had been employed as agent of the crown when he killed Hamilton in a duel, calculatedly destroying an American asset, and not merely acting as an arrogant prick.

The temptation to take the shooting as part of some grand scheme is strong. The plan, if plan there was, worked; the German government moved abruptly left, including some reduction in hostility toward communist bloc countries. We can imagine the security officer, or his spymasters, turning the protest into a massacre in the hopes of causing just such a reaction. But I don’t really believe he was thinking so clearly in the heat of the moment, any more than the National Guardsmen at Kent State were calculating the political fallout when they fired on the crowd. He was in a scary, chaotic situation, and, rightly or wrongly, pulled the trigger. I doubt, too, that his handlers could predict with superhuman prescience the outcome of the shooting and calculate it being worth the sacrifice of a useful “asset” in hand, so as to give the order to turn the protest into a massacre.

But however much more likely the prosaic interpretation of events seems, there’s no way entirely to expunge the suspicion that perhaps it was a deliberate act. Just as there must be suspicion that, say, Pearl Harbor was more invitation to war than mistake, or that Reagan sympathizers deliberately delayed the release of American hostages in Iran. Planning such specific cause-and-effect sequences is devilishly difficult, and believing events are orchestrated in this fashion is the stuff of conspiracy theory. At most, we might blame various powers that be for creating a climate in which such chains of events are possible.

Still, that’s enough for reprehension. The Bush regime is not responsible for 9/11, not even for overlooking the evidence that predicted it, or something like it—such evidence as existed only comes into prominence from amid a sea of competing crises to avert in hindsight. But it is responsible for magnifying and perpetuating Arab hostility, and for magnifying the climate of fear in American politics, for its own benefit: hostility and fear that cannot but have horrific consequences, even if we can’t draw a straight line between cause and consequence.

Cut myself shaving this evening—no ordinary shaving cut. It isn’t much to look at now, but at the moment the cut was made, it was. I carelessly reached too high, and the almost-fresh blade snagged the soft skin just under my left eye. Before there was any pain (which, when it came, was negligible), before I even felt the tug, I saw the snag in the mirror; the skin pulled away from my face, to the point where the lower eyelid pulled slightly away from the eye. In that split second, knowing from long experience that it was far too late to minimize the damage by overriding the neural impulses already directing my hand and arm, I anticipated a lot of pain and blood, maybe even a scar.

Fortunately, none of those came. Even as I yelped in pain, the skin popped free of the blade—it was a safety razor, after all—and snapped back into place. The whole episode lasted less than a second. It seemed as though I had shouted more in alarm than actual pain; the pain was an illusion.

But was it? Pain is, after all, a sensory phenomenon, and in that moment, I felt pain. The physical damage I anticipated was illusory. The pain was short-lived. Still, I’d have to call it real, even if the reasons for it weren’t.

I am reminded how much I dislike summer around here. The heat and humidity might not match that of tropical islands, or even Florida, but it’s still more than enough to make everything uncomfortable: sitting, sleeping, walking about the neighborhood. Mere contact with clothing is enough to make me irritable; whenever possible, I sit naked or half-naked on the living room floor, where (unlike the Florida room, where my desktop is set up) I’m out of sight of the neighbors. Eileene gets irritable, too. And it’s not even summer yet.

The weather has, in fact, been rather cool for late May. Using the fan on its lowest setting, just enough to keep the air stirred up, is enough to give me a chill, which creates something of a dilemma: clothed and itchy everywhere, or naked and cold. Sitting wrapped in a single, smooth comforter is about the best compromise available.

An old saw holds that “it’s not the heat but the humidity” that makes summer so oppressive. That’s true as far as it goes: while dry heat can be tiring, humidity makes that same heat unbearable. What people hardly realize is that the adage is true in cold weather, as well.

Pundits followed up the turnover in the 2008 elections with wild rhetorical questions suggesting the Republican party is doomed, doomed, doomed—that it lacks direction, that it will be out of power for a generation or more, and may even disappear entirely. Even as I pooh-poohed the demise of the Republican party, we were treated to the spectacle of the Republican party tearing itself apart, the rabid knee-jerk right wingers turning on the plutocrats who had welded them into an unbeatable party instrument. (When you encourage your supporters to demonize critical thought, compromise, and objective reality in the interest of party politics, you’d better not lose your grip on their loyalty.) Still, parties die hard, and it’s only been…what, six months since the election? An adage holds that a week is a long time in politics, and we’ve got a lot of weeks until the next election cycle, with a lot of painful clean-up to perform before then. Republicans aren’t doomed.

Not that you would know it from Michael Steele’s rally-the-troops speech on Tuesday. For all that he promises a complete turnaround in the party’s fortunes, beginning today, Steele seems determined to do it by redoubling its efforts in the same direction that got it into such trouble. If you dissect the speech, it comes across as black-is-white crazy talk. See how many contradictions you can find.

He describes the Republican comeback as a grassroots movement, engineered in five regional conferences “behind the scenes. Out of the public eye.”

He declares that voters are sick of politicians who will not apologize for their mistakes, and immediately announces that Republicans will no longer apologize for theirs. (Did they ever start? I must have been busy that afternoon.)

He promises that the Republican party is coming out with fresh, new ideas, which he invokes in the name of Buckley, who defined the Republican playbook of the past forty years, Reagan, who implemented it thirty years ago, and—I kid you not—Edmund Burke, who died back when Napoleon was the big threat to civilization.

He castigates us for looking to government to preserve our freedoms, and castigates Democrats for failing to recognize that we owe our freedoms to our military forces.

Along the way, he repeatedly employs the Rovian tactic of (inaccurately) cursing his opponents for some sin while his own side actively commits that same sin, bigger and nastier. He accuses Obama of slashing government scholarships. He accuses Democrats of trumping up security threats as an excuse to undermine civil liberties. He accuses Democrats of hoping Republicans will be silent, after a generation of Republicans shouting down opposition and insinuating that dissent is tantamount to treason. He promises to reinstate a two-party system, after five months since Obama took office, and a mere four years since Republicans were gloating over a “permanent majority.” He trumpets a determination to speak truth to power in the party that habitually speaks lies from power: Watergate, Iran-Contra, the Contract with America, war in Iraq, “Mission accomplished.”

Crazy talk. All wrapped in repeated calls for realism in setting policy. If Steele’s bubble of denial and self-contradiction is any indication of where the right wing is headed (or rather, where it has decided to remain), the political landscape is looking rosy—or would, were Obama not embracing Bush-era detention, backpedaling on gays in the military, and obliging financiers with handouts, and otherwise behaving like the supposedly vanishing Republican brand.

We watched the new Star Trek movie, and it was okay. The movie was okay in the sense of passing muster, though not spectacularly so, but the act of watching it was okay in the sense of “I’m Okay; You’re Okay,” okay in the sense of “not psychotically imbalanced.”

That’s a higher bar than might seem at first. As corny and wart-ridden as the original Star Trek television series was, it remains a beloved intellectual property, and violating its canon—or, worse, violating the personalities of characters who were always more important than the elements of mere plot—would feel like a violation of the audience. I have steadfastly refused to see the movie versions of I, Robot and Starship Troopers for that very reason, knowing they share nothing with the beloved books beyond the titles and the existence of robots and troopers.

So I went to the theater with a sense of unease. The very premise that the characters weren’t merely united for their five-year mission, but had always been together and always would be (something I’ve seen called “Muppet Babies syndrome”), raised an eyebrow. But the reviews were positive, and giving Star Trek Babies a shot was only fair. The Next Generation series was a revision, too, and that was better than the original, although I admit I never got into any of the subsequent series in the franchise. Plus, Eileene was adamant that we should see it.

I watched the movie expecting to see things I didn’t like, and I saw them. I also expected to enjoy a visit with old friends, and I got that too, though they had changed in ways I didn’t immediately recognize.

Ever the old school advocate, I got past the bits I didn’t like through extensive mental preparation: every time I worried about what canon or character might be broken, I reminded myself that the original series didn’t give a tinker’s damn for consistency. Indeed, often the inconsistencies became beloved canon. Kirk sometimes upheld interstellar law, and often blew it off, according to what the writer du jour wanted. That on-again-off-again attachment to the rules became emblematic of Kirk’s limitless arrogance, increasingly reflecting how he measured the law by how it served his own immediate convenience, but it started out as a product of the writers’ immediate convenience.

And you know? That reminder made it all okay: Spock and Uhura getting it on, Sarek offering touchy-feely parenting, lame Romulan villains, all of it. The details of the movie, plot and character details alike, were unreliable, but the spirit in which the script was written—an overarching decision to write to the desires of the moment—were deeply true to the original Star Trek. With a cautionary reminder that the original series was often quite bad, and revered more for its erratic successes than consistent value, I think we can expect a faithful recreation in future installments.

Last week was a big, eventful week, full of life changes large and small. Finals week is over, and I’m into summer vacation. (Though you wouldn’t know it to look out the window. I’m wrapped in three layers and still a little chilly.) We attended two weddings on successive weekends. My current RPG campaign ended, to my relief, and the next one begins in two weeks, skipping Memorial Day.

With all this warm-weather change underway, it’s only appropriate that I should find Jonathan Coulton’s “First of May” today—not quite on the first of may, perhaps, but more seasonal regardless.

Coulton is awesome. He deserves all the geek cred lavished upon him.

No longer protected by the stonewalling of the authoritarian regime practicing torture, US torture of prisoners continues to come to light. Determining just where President Obama stands on the matter is proving impossible; he has alternately promised to expose and prosecute those responsible and refused to expose and prosecute those responsible. Nevertheless, bits and pieces continue to come to light, exposed in the “on” periods of his off-and-on concern for accountability, and, as we work from the dark edges toward the center of the puzzle, each new piece adds a little more of the snarling visage of Dick Cheney at the very center.

Hard as it may be to believe, Cheney’s practiced contempt for critics (“Go fuck yourself.”), the law (“not an entity within the executive branch”), and the American public (“So?”) is cracking. Perhaps he is beginning to fear that we may actually see some accountability for US torture, and that some of that accountability might actually attach to him. I doubt he’ll get any farther than a period of the jitters, but if he fears, we have reason to hope.

So upset has Cheney become over continuing discussion of torture that he has called upon the CIA to declassify records of abusive interrogations of suspected terrorists, in the hopes of creating a “more honest debate” on the subject.

He should know better. Cheney himself has argued loudly and at length, the contempt dripping in his voice, that such information cannot be made public, as it might be used to train America’s enemies to resist tor—er, enhanced interrogation. He has argued loudly and at length that using torture as an interrogation technique cannot be compromised, as it has provided valuable information—the specifics of which have yet to be described. He has argued loudly and at length that the information cannot be provided even to the victims of torture themselves, as it might interfere with their trials—that is, with their preset prosecutions. Surely he understands, then, that information about torture cannot be simply released to the general public to protect a mere civil servant.

So I had to laugh in vindictive delight nod in somber approval of the CIA’s decision to protect vital American interests by denying Cheney’s request. The man who has perpetually taken the stand that the American public cannot be allowed to examine the internal workings of the Bush presidency at any time, for any reason, finds his own position backfiring, now that he is no longer in a position to do anything about it. The spectacle will never get old, no matter how many times it is repeated.

For maximum entertainment, all those documents (and only those documents) that Cheney might consider useful in his defense—legal or otherwise—will remain absolutely and utterly secret on grounds of national security until such time as he decides to risk lying about one, in hopes that the document about which he lies will remain absolutely and utterly secret, at which time, Obama will abruptly decide that that particular document no longer contains vital state secrets, but now I’m just fantasizing. I’d be willing to settle for a complete airing of the dirty laundry. It would instantly become my favorite show on the air.

Got a kick out of this report of one of Rush Limbaugh’s fans calling him to task.

It’s not really news in any grand sense. The schism between hatemongers and the amoral wealthy wings that comprise the Republican party is soooo last month, and nobody’s ever going to stop the presses for a sudden discovery that Rush is a bloviating asshole. It’s not even news that one lone dittohead is beginning to think he might not be a dittohead any more. In a fan base of tens of millions, I’m pretty sure it happens daily. Nor did this particular caller sound like he’d really found the soul of reason and compassion he’d been drowning out with right-wing logorrhea all these years—he still voted for John “you cunt” McCain and was heartily pissed off to see a moderate in the White House.

But it’s a start. It shows that a large enough shock to the system can make even the willfully ignorant sit up, look around, and say, “Hey. That really isn’t right.”

Well, we’re undergoing a shock nationally. Half of us have long known that Little Georgie’s Big Iraqi Adventure was founded on a lie, and preserved on a web of lies. Now the other half is beginning to wake up to the possibility that maybe, just maybe, canceling human rights for the duration of an endless war wasn’t such a good idea, and maybe we should reverse that behavior. Maybe even think about safeguards preventing its recurrence. (Too bad our current president isn’t among them.) Sadly, not even half of us have been long aware that blanket deregulation of business isn’t good for anyone but unprincipled owners of the biggest businesses, and, shocked by the economic meltdown, the left-wing enablers are beginning to sit up, too, look around, and say “Hey. That really isn’t right.” (Too bad our current president isn’t among them, either.) Too late to avoid the meltdown, alas, but…maybe in time to return the system to sanity.

What it will take is a lot of Democrats sitting up, looking around, and finally taking the elections of 2006 and 2008 as a confirmation that, yes, they can stand up to authoritarians and plutocrats and hatemongers. And taking that confirmation to bolster their will to deliver a calm, collected statement like Mike Gronstal’s, politely but firmly saying, “No. This is wrong. And we aren’t going to do it any more.” It can be done. All it takes is a little political spine. Right now, while one party is still in shock over its collapse, while the other party is still in shock at its own victory, and while the nation as a whole is reeling from fears of another great depression, knowing full well it was brought on by trust in the fascist values of military strength, unrestrained capitalism, and autocracy, that sentiment, delivered with firm conviction, could bring some real conservative values back to our country.

Back when John Edwards was a candidate, still running in the Democratic primaries, I was leaning towards him. Although a distant third behind the Obama-Clinton showdown, I liked his populist message, and hoped that, if he couldn’t be nominated, he could at least continue to push both candidates farther left from their preferred stance as “moderates”—as defined since “conservative” came to mean “militant reactionary.” But Edwards dropped out of the race just before I had a chance to line up behind him in the New Jersey primary (and just after promising to fight on), and that was that.

Since his departure, his affair with Rielle Hunter came out and left him so toxic that no one even mentioned his name for Attorney General or other cabinet office, where he might have done much good. Had he threaded his way to the nomination as a compromise candidate between the two heavy contenders, it seems likely he would have lost the general election on the news of his fling, doubly reprehensible for having been flung behind the back of a widely respected wife suffering from cancer and needing all the support he could give. News media, and the Republican smear machine, would have had a field day, and somehow people outraged at Edwards’s affair couldn’t bring themselves to care so much for the highly comparable fate of Carolyn McCain. Even had he won despite the news, Edwards would have been too wounded to begin pulling off the same kind of deft, if partial, victories Obama has enjoyed since winning the White House in an entirely non-hypothetical manner, nor would he have been able to offer the same coat-tail effect to fellow Democrats that Obama did with his celebrity. The damage Edwards might have so inflicted on our nation, in its desperate need to reverse a generation of right-wing rule, is incalculable.

The topic is on my mind since reading this article, concerning a plan on the part of Edwards’s campaign staff to sabotage his own run, should it ever have appeared likely he would win the nomination. Staffers, increasingly aware of the likelihood of an affair, determined to let the news fly before he could win the nomination…and thereby doom the party in the general election.

No one will ever know for certain whether they would have used this nuclear option, not even the participants—conspirators often chicken out when the time comes. But it’s a fascinating dilemma, one about which I’m not at all sure how I feel. Would I rather see another four years of the disaster that has been right-wing rule, or see mere campaign staffers deciding who will sit in the White House? What a terrifying choice.

Yesterday was Mother’s Day. I called Mom, though I spent as much time talking with Dad and Aunt Linda, and it was good to talk to her.

It’s also a year since my brother’s death. I wore one of his sports jackets to dinner celebrating my mother-in-law last night. Despite a dry-cleaning, the jacket still smells faintly of charcoal, Dan having asphyxiated, deliberately or accidentally, while running a charcoal grill in his apartment. I got a call from my good friend Tim yesterday, too, checking on how I was doing on the anniversary of Dan’s death.

I’m fine. Life goes on; it’s finals week, so there’s plenty to do. I admit all the reminders coming at once are uncomfortable, but I’m fine.

Still, I’m glad I’m not thinking about it from a mother’s perspective.

I already spoke of one trouble I face in character design for our upcoming RPG: a player who wants the setting to match her idealized vision of biblical Israel. That’s not my only chargen problem worthy of examination. I’ve got another player who, after claiming no interest in joining the campaign, changed his mind, and only let me know last week. (More precisely, he didn’t even do that; one of the other players passed the information to me second-hand.)

In some campaigns, late arrivals are no trouble. If your PCs are all out for an Asgardian romp of mayhem and partying, or otherwise simply motivated, you can simply plug a PC in anywhere: “Hi, guys. Can I join your quest? I’ve got my own battle-axe.” In other campaigns, where motivation is complex, or politics and subterfuge are the norm, or a specific back story is already in place, inserting a late arrival can be tricky. The task becomes downright impossible when the late arrival has a specific character in mind, and isn’t prepared to compromise.

Not all characters are appropriate for all games. It’s an awkward truth, but true nonetheless. A bookish scholar of the occult is great in a horror setting, but not in a swashbuckling pirate adventure, where his refusal to leave the library puts a serious crimp in everyone else’s fun. A murderous son-of-a-bitch can be an engaging anti-hero, but he doesn’t belong in a four-color superhero game, where he forces everyone else to adopt a double standard toward murderous sons-of-bitches simply because he’s got “fellow PC” stamped on his ninja-black spandex outfit. A flirtatious cat-girl doesn’t belong in a historical drama. A strict moralist doesn’t belong in the morally ambiguous world of an espionage game.

Generally, players who insist on creating such “toxic characters” want to play that same character all the time, regardless of the setting. There’s just something about murderous sons-of-bitches or flirtatious catgirls or whatever that the player loves so much that he wants to do it all the time, and seeks variety by plugging that character into different environments. But it can also happen as a one-off: a player who really wants to play this particular character in this particular setting and won’t let the idea go, often because he’s missed something important in the setup.

When faced with such a player, the GM has three choices, apart from the scorched earth policy of ejecting the player.

One, he can change the setting to accommodate the character. That’s fine if the setting is flexible enough—probably the ideal choice, in fact. Giving the players—all the players—what they want is the foundation of being a good GM, and few things are as important to player involvement as character identification. But it may happen that the setting is not flexible enough; the GM may have a particular story in mind, or (as is the case for me) the other players may have already settled on a definite concept or the campaign may even be underway. In such a case, it isn’t fair to toss aside everyone else’s work—and the GM is entitled to some consideration here, too—just to make room for the new guy, and it’s time to move to option two.

Two, the GM can veto the concept, no matter how attached the player is to it. Preferably, the GM can explain why the character would be toxic to the game, but if he can’t do so without giving away vital secrets, the player will just have to trust the GM and accept the decision.

Three, if for some reason standing up for the other players and the legitimate needs of the campaign are socially unacceptable, the GM can grit his teeth and let the toxic character in. When this happens, be prepared for a lot of adventures spoiled by genre-breaking behavior or, more likely, impasse—a player who won’t compromise during chargen is unlikely to compromise in play, either. The GM may be tempted to kill off such a character, and this works in a pinch, especially if the villains decide the only way to deal with this alien (literal or figurative) is to bump him off, but this can lead to resentment. Far better to simply leave the toxic character out of the loop: dramatic hooks are a vital part of a genre’s conventions, and a PC who flagrantly violates those conventions shouldn’t be lined up to receive any such dramatic hooks. Cagey players will sooner or later catch on to the fact that nothing ever happens around them, and begin to adapt, consciously or not, their character concepts to enter the flow of the action. Less cagey players may simply sit inert, doing as little damage as one could hope for under the circumstances, or they may move to disrupt everyone else’s fun in the hopes of sharing some of the attention, in which case it’s time for the dreaded “pulling the player aside” for a frank discussion.

None of these options look very good, do they? There’s a lesson here. For the players. If you’re a player, and not the GM, don’t put him in this dilemma. Find out what the campaign is about, understand the ground rules and the setting, before becoming attached to one particular character. Be prepared to tone things down or crank them up if necessary to the story’s pacing. If the GM calls for something specific—a career in the navy, a haunted past, a family—cooperate. It’s okay to negotiate, to ask if something’s really necessary, but not to dig your heels in and repeat, “But I wanna play a [whatever].” Understand that the GM knows more about what’s going to happen in the campaign than you do, and can better recognize which characters will kill a story. If you design something incompatible, you’re going to halt the action rather than participate in it. As Greg Stolze observes, “If ‘but my character just wouldn’t do that’ becomes a common refrain, well, then you didn’t design your character right in the first place.” In general, it’s a hell of a lot easier to create a new character than to create an entire campaign setting, especially if it isn’t some paint-by-numbers romp of Asgardian mayhem and partying. The least you could do is meet him half-way.

Let me illustrate this with specifics. The upcoming campaign is a conspiracy story, something similar to The X-Files or The Star Chamber, where a shadowy and powerful group controls the world for sinister ends. The conspiracy genre makes some imposing demands on an RPG, because an all-knowing, all-powerful, and utterly ruthless enemy can easily get out of hand and turn the campaign into an exercise in frustration. I’ve chosen to limit this frustration by moving the action from the modern world to a fictional bronze age setting with a limited population; the idea is to deprive the Conspiracy of its most powerful weapons in the form of modern complexity—an incomprehensible legal system, inaccessible world leaders, massive databases, high-tech spying equipment, impenetrable layers of overlapping state security organizations, unfathomable economic forces, and so on. But using a fictional setting has placed a different burden on me: I have to establish clearly and early on what is normal and culturally healthy in this world—or rather, what is apparently normal and culturally healthy even as the Conspiracy twists it to dark ends—so that the players, and through them the PCs, can react with horror as they begin to recognize the Conspiracy’s transgressions. If I don’t do this job well, players will witness some atrocity and respond, “Huh. What an odd facet of this fictional world. Well, let’s go do this other thing,” rather than, “Oh no, this can’t be real! What fiends could be behind such madness?” as should happen regularly in a conspiracy story.

I also demanded of my players that they create characters with an intimate connection with one another, and especially reason to trust one another. Trust is hard to come by in a world where the truth is unbelievable, and betrayal lurks at every corner, and the PCs need some kind of anchor point, both to avoid freezing up in the face of overwhelming peril and to skip the tedious second-guessing of intra-party suspicion. I offered a variety of ideas as to what kinds of relationship would work for this purpose, and my players took the suggestion of a childhood oath and ran with it in an inconvenient direction. They wanted to have lived as children in a village populated by a horrific cult; the village had been wiped out by pirates, but the kids knew that one of the village elders, the ringleader of the cult, was responsible for its destruction, and vowed to work together for vengeance even as they were shipped off to distant relatives in scattered islands. Now the children are grown, and gathering to fulfill that vow.

Great stuff. A bit of a problem for me, in that the PCs are already waist-deep in horrific secrets and lies. The shocking exposure of the Conspiracy won’t be very shocking at all when the time comes, and the players are going to have a hard time even recognizing disturbing revelations at all. But the players were enthusiastic, and I agreed to go with it rather than kill that enthusiasm. They went on to create their back stories, and I put in several hours of plot generation to tie the first few adventures into the larger storyline.

Enter our late arrival. He wanted to create a feral girl, escaped to the wilderness rather than being sent to live with distant relatives, who had learned some kind of witchcraft by participating in the cult’s horrific rituals, but had somehow become fanatically loyal to one and only one fellow PC. This set off all kinds of warning bells. An inability to interact with people is suicidal in the conspiracy genre, basically an extended question of who to trust, never mind how important it is for the PCs to be able to bluff their way through situations. A character tied to only one other PC would be poisonous to group trust, as well as making her single friend de facto dictator in a four-person party (or split it permanently into two conflicting pairs). A participant in the cult’s rituals would be a prime target for the group, not a comrade-in-arms, not to mention the firmly established ground rule that magic definitely does not exist in this world as a human institution. (It does exist in the wild, but a fanatical response to magical horrors that nearly destroyed the world a few centuries ago led to the complete and violent eradication of sorcerers and their works. A magically active character would face a lynch mob in a world where magic is hated and feared with the same intensity of witchcraft in Salem.) Also, the character’s back story inadvertently stole what was supposed to be another character’s dark secret, magnified it beyond all reason, casting the other PC in the narrative shade, and made keeping that secret a secret impossible, thereby trampling on a fellow player’s already-established concept.

This feral witch-girl was toxic to the campaign in so many ways that it was hard to express them all clearly, to keep all the objections distinct. This was a toxic character of the first water. Perhaps that confusion is the reason this last player was so resistant to drastic revisions or, ideally, trashing it altogether. Or perhaps it was his habitual preference for characters with, if not god-like power, than at least unique abilities which can’t be stopped, or even recognized, by the vast majority of the public. Either way, the character had to go, and the player wouldn’t let it go.

So what happened then? How did we resolve the dilemma? Well…we’re still working on it, the player having agreed to “think some more about it,” now that he had a better understanding of the nature of the campaign. And I’m writing lengthy descriptions of the campaign’s nature, because supposedly that character was designed after reading an ever-expanding wiki set up for just that purpose, including information on both setting and ground rules (and after hearing about the other characters’ back stories, albeit sketchily). I’m desperately hoping that this outpouring of text, describing how most RPGs are power fantasies but conspiracy games are about being powerless, and how the protagonists discover the Conspiracy from the outside, and how The Bourne Identity, where the protagonist is an unstoppable super-agent and the Conspiracy had better just stay the hell out of his way, isn’t the kind of conspiracy-suspense genre we’re aiming for will all carry the message. I have to hope because I don’t trust my player to absorb the ground rules laid down in our conversation any better than he did the rules laid down in the wiki. I’ll be happy to have him on board, but I’m not in a position to bend very far, so he’ll need to do most of the bending. If he doesn’t, I’ll have a hard time refusing his character outright, since he’s my brother-in-law (once removed), and my sister-in-law is one of the players…so while trying to draw him into the excitement with suggestions from one corner of my mouth, I’m also slipping in discouraging comments about how over-powered characters don’t live long in conspiracy games from the other corner, hoping he’ll give up rather than try to shoe-horn a toxic character in.

It’s the truth, too: over-powered characters draw lots of attention, and in a world run by an all-knowing, all-powerful, and utterly ruthless Conspiracy, drawing attention to yourself is a death-wish. And if push comes to shove, we may all get a chance to watch that truism function up close, preferably before the witch-girl marks all her friends for death, too.

Today’s tidbit comes from Natalie Ravitz, spokeswoman for Barbara Boxer (D-CA), arguing that any tax overhaul should be constructed so that any changes “do not result in unintended consequences.”

Now think this through. The law of unintended consequences holds that any deliberate course of action produces unintended consequences. This would apply to the slightest change in he tax code, let alone the overhaul we need. If we are to avoid any overhaul which produces unintended consequences, we can have no overhaul of any kind, whatsoever.

Which, I suppose, is the purpose of the argument. It generally is, when warnings of unintended consequences are floating about. Like appeals to religious faith or ad hominem attacks, warnings against unintended consequences are one of the universally applicable defenses to which those without a leg to stand on resort: “I can’t find anything wrong with your proposal, but I think we should deny it anyway, just in case there might be something wrong with it.” Sir Humphrey Appleby, the fictional civil servant of Yes, Minister who sought to block all change to government policy on principle, would have approved. The additional hurdle that we make sure ahead of time that there are no unintended consequences—how does one guarantee against the unexpected?—is redundant, but Sir Humphrey would have approved of that, too: if one categorical obstacle is good, two are better. If Ravitz could call Obama’s desired tax reform “courageous,” she’d have a hat trick. I thought Republicans were supposed to be the party of “No.”

Of course, enshrining in perpetuity the tax code as it now stands would have unintended consequences, too, but that doesn’t seem to bother obstructionists. And frankly, I think we ought to be more worried about their preferred policy’s intended consequences.

5/5/09

A very interesting article on NPR this morning about the influenza epidemic of 1918. The guest expert didn’t talk so much about the effects of the flu, but about the effects of the government’s denial that an epidemic had broken out. Worried that health measures might harm industrial productivity, and therefore the war effort, officials at many levels of government simply denied the health risk, with predictable results: the disease spread unchecked, and people died.

But the point of the report was how the public reacted once it became clear there was and epidemic, and that government was simply lying about it. Public trust evaporated, and understandably couldn’t be restored even when official reports began to admit the unhappy truth. Unable to learn the real risks, people stopped taking care of their family and neighbors; flu victims starved because no one was willing to bring them food. The expert quoted one official predicting that if the trend should continue—the trend of distrust and atomization, not the trend of the epidemic—civilization could disappear entirely. Alarmist, to be sure, but Ironically, the impact on war productivity was likely at least as large as health measures would have been in the first place.

This was just one of many cases of governments lying to their citizens in WWI, hoping to keep up morale, recruit soldiers, justify consumer concessions. Perhaps the worst lie was Germany’s claim that victory was just around the corner; when this proved not to be true, Germans found it easier to believe they were sabotaged from within than that they simply lost a hard-fought war, giving wings to Nazi political ambitions. But all the major participants committed similar deceptions. The war was finely balanced, at least until America’s entry in 1917, and slim advantages could make all the difference.

We now live in a post-Nixon era; the government routinely lies, and the public routinely doubts. Prior to Nixon, the government routinely lied, but the public was less skeptical, tending to doubt officials but not the government as a whole. Now, cynicism is the dominant reaction toward our own elected officials. Hell, we now live in a post-Bush era, under whom the government routinely lied, transparently and without the expectation of being believed, got caught at it, maintained the lie, and insulted skeptics for being “naive.” There’s little incentive to shape up; since WWI, mass media erupted as a force in public discourse, became a powerful watchdog of government, became a reliable lapdog to government in WWII, became a vital defender of American freedoms against our own government through the Red Scare and the civil rights movement and Vietnam and Watergate, and lately retreated again as news has concentrated in the hands of a half dozen communications moguls who, like Hearst, are cheerfully willing to play party politics. Unlike Hearst, they operate in an environment without much fear that competing news services will, in fact, offer competing messages. Government lies may not convince anyone who doesn’t already believe, but, so long as moguls like Zell, Turner, and Murdoch don’t object, the government can get away with telling them, and setting policy to its own disinformation.

Well… perhaps there’s one incentive to shape up. As the flu scandal described above illustrates, a decline in trust can ultimately undermine the whole purpose of lying in the first place. An official who wants to harness public participation, as Obama does, needs to work hard at building trust—something which slips with each announcement that public funds will be used to prop up abusive banks, or that his administration might continue certain Bush policies after all concerning Guantanamo detainees. Sadly, an official who wants to operate without caring a tinker’s damn for public approval so long as it shuts up and obeys, as Cheney did, can do just fine—maybe even better than an official hampered by a need to court public opinion.

Perhaps Cheney is still the future of our government. Certainly we aren’t getting much more truth than we did in 1918.

Eileene’s caught the baking bug. Far from considering cooking while I’m at class a chore—well, most days—she’s eagerly looking to master breads and pies. Saturday, and again on Sunday, she tried her hand at the traditional Indian bread called nan (or naan, depending on your typesetter), and it was delicious. Not quite authentic, perhaps—a little crispy the first time, a little fluffy the second, compared to what we’ve had in Indian restaurants. But close enough that she can probably get it just right with a little experimentation, and, frankly, I don’t care whether she does; they were just as tasty and satisfying as restaurant nan. They had the crunch and thump and aroma of rolls fresh from the oven, and I loved ‘em.

What I can’t understand is why I can’t make them, too. I know my way around the kitchen, but I’ve never once made good bread, and I’ve tried. My loaf bread is invariably tough and dense, even after repeated reductions in stirring and/or kneading (too much of either being common culprits in dense bread) and careful attention to my yeast (old or mistreated yeast being the other common culprit). I even tried a bread machine a few times, to remove my kneading technique from the equation. Nothing. The bread still thumped hard onto the counter. (Eventually, I gave away the bread machine to my Aunt Linda, who had no trouble with it, so it isn’t the machine, either.) My attempts at nan and pizza dough were even worse, incapable of spreading onto the baking surface without tearing through in the middle—more of a dough ring than a flatbread. Trying to get them to lie flat was very, very frustrating.

Bread is not a fancy recipe, or at least it doesn’t have to be. Neither my loaf recipes nor my nan recipe were complex: flour, water, yeast activated in warm water and an encouraging dab or sugar, pinch of salt. Mix. Knead, gently. Bake. Anyone can do it. Anyone but me. And, since I refuse to believe in kitchen gremlins, I’m mystified as to what my problem could be.

The topic of human sacrifice came up in relation to our upcoming RPG campaign. Knowing the setting draws largely on a rather romanticized vision of Phoenicia and Minoan Crete, one of my players asked, seemingly out of the blue, “There’s not going to be any human sacrifice in this campaign, is there?”

This discomfited me in two ways. First, I was put off that I had to admit that, yes, there would be human sacrifice. (It should play an important role in motivating the PCs: if the Bad Guys’ Nefarious Plan leads to human sacrifice, then clearly the Nefarious Plan must be stopped!) Not only was I loathe to reveal what was supposed to be a shocking event before the campaign even started, but I feared I would need to dispose of it entirely rather than offend one of my players’ sensibilities. Happily, we laid that to rest, but the surprise value is gone, gone gone.

The second way the question bothered me was the mystery of why, of all the horrible examples of man’s inhumanity to man—child abuse, genocide, rape, et cetera, et cetera—she singled out human sacrifice as the one thing not to be tolerated in the campaign.

The fact that she did single it out suggests we’re getting into dangerous territory. Jen has recently converted to Judaism, and is really, really enthusiastic about recreating life in ancient Canaan, which is decidedly not what game is about. And in her mind, ancient Jews did not practice human sacrifice. I find this difficult to believe. Every other culture that passed from hunter-gatherer to city-state has practiced human sacrifice; it seems to be one of the inevitable growing pains of civilization. The Chinese did it, the Egyptians did it, the Aztecs infamously did it, the Celts did it, the Minoans did it, and, by golly, the ancient Levantines, Jewish or otherwise, did it too, and some Jewish scholars can get quite defensive on the subject. Perhaps they feel that admitting that human sacrifice was made to Jehovah would make their religion—or their god—look bad, and rightly so. Arguments that “well, by ‘giving up their sons,’ maybe the holy books meant just sending them to the temple to work, yeah, that must be it,” or “stories of human sacrifice are just propaganda put out by enemies of the Jews,” or “no no no, it wasn’t us; we just got a bad reputation from the Carthaginians” are sheer denial. People don’t write extensive laws to prohibit practices nobody actually employs, and Jewish law wouldn’t have lavished so much attention on stamping out human sacrifice if they didn’t have a human sacrifice problem. If that doesn’t convince you, refer to Jephthah’s daughter. Human sacrifice may not have been common or prevalent, but it was there, and accepted by society at large. And Jen is participating in the denial.

The point should be moot, because we aren’t playing in ancient Canaan; we’re playing in a fictional setting. But I don’t trust Jen to keep that distinction in her own head. She identifies with ancient Jewish culture, and is clearly looking forward to pretending to live in it, whether or not anyone else at the table is actively participating in that fantasy with her. And she wants very badly to identify the campaign’s culture with ancient Jews. Depicting the surrounding culture of the game in an unflattering manner is okay; Jen was positively enthusiastic about portraying slavery because Jewish history openly acknowledges slavery. (Ironically, she was to be disappointed here, too: the slaves in the archipelago were freed, and armed, a few hundred years ago as a part of a desperate defense against annihilation. Those cities which didn’t free their slaves to fight alongside their former masters aren’t around any more.) But depicting the surrounding culture in a way that doesn’t fit her self-image and image of “her people” is not.

That’s going to be a problem, because I want to play the campaign I’ve designed, not a campaign about reliving the Old Testament. So the people I’m depicting are going to serve the needs of the plot, and not a garbled version of someone else’s history, neither accurate nor sanitized.

I got a small package in the mail, a CD compilation of the best of Radio Lab, our thank-you gift for supporting public radio. The CD was a surprise; usually I just check the box indicating that I want no gift and that WNYC should use the whole of the donation as a donation, and I had forgotten thinking that a CD is dirt cheap, so what the heck. If WNYC had simply saved itself the mailing costs, I would have been none the wiser.

In fact, they might have been better off that way. Getting the CD reminded me once again how recent the pledge drive was, which is a problem because I’m still getting letters calling for more money in the upcoming pledge drive. It looks bad when their annual pledge drive gears up just three months after the last one. It looks even worse when the station begins asking for more money before shipping thank-you gifts for the last donation.