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Catch and Release

The new airport body scanners are in place in time for the Thanksgiving ritual of flying to family dinners, and everybody is grousing again about increased security measures that don’t measurably increase actual security.

Glancing in car trunk didn’t increase security. Nominally a search for weapons, I’ve driven through airports simply to have guards confirm that we did, indeed, have boxes in our car. Random searches don’t increase security. Random searches may be an effective way to stretch a limited police force in deterring certain crimes—crimes where the cost of getting caught multiplied by the probability of getting caught outweigh the potential profit—but it’s hard to imagine Al Qaeda being deterred by the thought that one in six (or ten, or whatever) suicide bombers might get through, or that the suicide bombers would be willing to blow themselves up for infamy and eternal glory but not to risk one chance in six of being questioned by authorities and seeing their names on the news. Machines to examine people under their clothes don’t increase security. No-fly lists don’t increase security, though they’re a great way to harass undesirables like professors, opposition senators, and darkies. Elaborate rules over whether your private parts can be touched with the fingertips or the back of the hand in a body search don’t increase security, or in any way dilute the act of molestation.

At best, it’s pointless theater: an elaborate gesture of doing something about terrorists that doesn’t even fool the intended audience. We know we aren’t being protected. But it’s safer for officials to look busy than to admit vulnerability. At worst, it’s part of a general program to get people used to surrendering vital civil liberties for no reason beyond bringing a free people under authoritarian control.

This airport horror story evinces from start to finish both security personnel and the authority of “national security” run amok, but I call your particular attention to the section involving the $10,000 fine for acceding to being escorted from the airport. Turns out that leaving the airport is a crime punishable by a $10,000 fine. Quite apart from the fine’s excessive size, I fail to see the purpose of criminalizing the act of leaving an airport. If the law is aimed at terrorists, don’t we want them leaving the airport without boarding an aircraft? And if the law is aimed at lawful citizens, why should they be fined at all? Most disturbing of all, however, is the notion that citizens can be ordered to commit a crime, and punished for that crime, and the authorities who order it should not be subject to penalty of any kind, not so much as a reprimand.

Such an approach to authority and liberty is endemic to the war on terror, and it’s becoming endemic through society at large. More than that, it’s becoming institutionalized through habit, through practice, and even through law. If that isn’t more alarming than anything terrorists might do to us, something is deeply wrong with this country.

2010 11 15 mdlake Politics Comments (0) Permalink

Memorial

Veteran’s Day today. I was surprised to find the library closed when MSU had been open, and so was unable to return the Great Lectures CDs. This series is on Mediterranean religion, and it’s okay. More appropriate to the holiday, the previous lecture I borrowed was on WWI, and that was pretty good.

As a kid, I largely passed over WWI, despite an interest in military strategy and history. The Great War was largely devoid of good generalship, and entirely devoid of the kind of sweeping back-and-forth that characterize instructive battles. The western front was infamous as a meat grinder offering no hope of a breakthrough, but WWI was stagnant almost everywhere: at Gallipoli and Italy and the naval standoff where the North Sea meets the Baltic. The idiocy of frontal assaults and the cult of the offensive did nothing to improve the situation. The sole theater of maneuver, the Russo-German front, was more a product of poorly trained and led Russians than clever Germans, and ultimately achieved nothing: German victory and the treaty of Brest-Litovsk didn’t prevent the ultimate German collapse before the western powers. WWI is worth studying as military strategy only as an extended demonstration of what not to do.

Now that I’m older, and I’ve rather had my fill of strategy—enough to understand the basic principles, and uninterested in the kind of minute study of hardware that a more detailed understanding would entail—I realize that studying WWI for strategy rather misses the point. WWI was enormously significant for the social ramifications. Probably more significant than WWII, at least for the issues the US faces today.

The vast increase of federal power in an unnecessary war. The nurturing of war hysteria. Germany’s “stabbed in the back” narrative, and how it grew out of a leadership misrepresenting the war’s progress to its citizenry. The industrialists’ and bankers’ influence over national policy in all countries, but most notably in the US. The concealment of those power-political interests behind idealistic protestations of nationalism and the rule of law. Wilson’s careful steering of his nation into war, despite campaigning on a promise to stay out of it. Wilhelm’s visions of being hailed as conqueror…and the seizure of real power by more cynical ministers. The demonization of minorities at home. Spy fever. Austria’s nationalistic collapse in a war intended to harden national unity among its disparate peoples. Russia’s collapse upon fighting a war it could not win. Lecture after lecture of creepy parallels to the recent invasion of Iraq.

Every Veteran’s Day, I pause to remember our veterans. Usually I end up vilifying war in the process, even as I thank the individual soldier. It’s a good reason for a national holiday, and we should keep it. But we should add a holiday for remembering war. Not celebrating war, mind you, but remembering how it goes wrong, and especially remembering how evil people will turn it to their profit.

2010 11 11 mdlake Politics Comments (0) Permalink

Unintended Hints

The new campaign is off and running: our five PCs are to usher in a new epoch, whatever that means. I’m guessing that the once-invisible spirits which hover near select individuals and give them superpowers are about to manifest to the entire world. Hard to know for sure, because (A) we’ve only had one session, and (B) divine guidance reaches us via the PC who just escaped from an asylum. I’m playing the badass this time around, a retired hitman and field operative who operated in the murky boundary between CIA, drug cartels, and revolutionaries in Reagan’s Latin America.

This is Ella’s first stab at GMing a campaign. (Did I mention that already? Yeah.) She’s still insecure, and worries aloud about whether she’s “doing it right.” She’s doing fine. But, alerted to her insecurity, the players are being more cooperative than usual with what they perceive to be the GM’s needs, as opposed to individual character integrity.

In particular, our group has met and coalesced into a whole quite abruptly. One might even say implausibly, given our disparate backgrounds and the fact that we all carry some big secrets. (I know this because we were asked to create characters with secrets.) But group cohesion is a perennial problem for GMs, and Ella worried aloud about it more than once, especially since she decided not to require us to create a shared background. Thus alert to the newbie GM’s concerns, we seized on any convenient excuse to pal around together—in my case, respect for the consequences of ignoring an oracle, crazy though he may be, outweighs a field op’s considerable reluctance to throw his lot in with a nutjob and a ten-year-old. Yeah, kinda wacky.

So we bend our self-conceptions a bit—maybe more than a bit—to keep the game on track and accommodate Ella. Problem solved, right?

Not exactly. Ella confided to me as we drove home that things have progressed more quickly than she expected. She figured she’d need two or three sessions just to get everyone working as a team, and now she’s worried she won’t have enough material to keep us entertained next session, maybe for the whole campaign. Not an insoluble problem, of course: just add complications as necessary. But a nuisance, requiring more GM work and introducing lots of elements she hasn’t thought through quite so carefully, and thus high-potential candidates to derail the story entirely.

The lesson to be drawn from this, apart from being careful what you wish for, is that the things a GM says outside the game, like worrying about group cohesion, can be just as important to how a game unfolds as things said within the game as judge’s ruling, narrator’s voice, or NPC mouthpiece.

Improperly handled, a GM can drop hints he never intended, which revelations will worm their way into play no matter how careful the players try to be about the barrier between in-character and out-of-character knowledge. But properly handled, a cunning GM can make this same porosity work for him.

In our last campaign, I felt I needed to manage expectations. The PCs were on islands whose fate would be the foundation of the Atlantis myth. They were still thinking how to save their people from destruction, which was impossible, when I wanted them thinking how to ensure the Evil Conspiracy went down with them, rather than escaping into the larger world. So I stated off-handedly that I suspected Dave had figured out what was going on, but was keeping it to himself out of polite concern for the division of knowledge between player and character. I chose Dave because he’s generally good at figuring out the larger picture, and because he’d made some good guesses already. He hadn’t yet worked out the Atlantis connection, and probably wouldn’t have until it was too late, but that casual comment was enough of a hint to get him there, without—and this is important—seeming to tell either player or PC what he shouldn’t know. Feeling he’d been clever, Dave redirected the group’s goals to something more achievable: the survival of fellow PCs’ child Ibella—and, it turns out, her parents as well. Not exactly the death of the inner circle of conspirators, but close enough to an upbeat ending in that I was happy to seize upon it.

Ella overdid it a bit expressing her concerns, and her players overreacted a bit, but with a bit more sophistication and experience, she could have fine-tuned that response to get the players violating—er, refining their character definition to her ends, and leaving the players thinking it was all their idea. It’s all in the pacing of the story, and the timing of out-of-game information. A wise GM will stay aware of how side conversations bleed into the game and watch carefully what he says, what he shouldn’t say, and what he isn’t technically supposed to say but should say anyway.

2010 11 11 mdlake Games Comments (0) Permalink

The Lost Age in the RPG

Now that my stint as GM is over, and I no longer have to spend my spare time thinking how to run the last campaign, I’m spending my spare time thinking about how to run the next campaign. Fish gotta swim, birds gotta fly, GMs gotta think up adventure ideas.

I have one well-developed concept, but that concept was for a different set of players—one more amenable to firefights and less averse to railroading—and I’m forced to reconsider the possibilities. Since promising possibilities lie everywhere, choosing is largely a process of elimination: I just did a fortean conspiracy campaign, so no conspiracy or forteanism; three of our last four campaigns put the PCs aboard a ship, so no voyage stories; I have grown to detest the blasé gentleman fallen from grace that one of my fellow players adopts whenever possible (and often when thoroughly appropriate), so no pirate adventures, Victorian steampunk, or antebellum westerns. And so on. As my list of rejected elements grew, the permissible campaign tropes dropped, slowly at first, but then alarmingly quickly, to the point where I began to fear I’d need to rethink some of the things I positively did not want, beginning with elements that cut off relatively many possibilities at a stroke.

The first forbidden element to be retracted might surprise you; it certainly surprised me: the post-apocalyptic scenario.

“Post-apocalyptic” is a loaded term, so I hasten to clarify. I don’t mean games set in the immediate aftermath of nuclear holocaust, like Twilight 2000 or Aftermath; I mean games set in a world that harkens back to a lost golden age, the loss of which isn’t just a bit of background color but an influential event with ramifications throughout the setting. The trope is rife in RPGs.

In part, this is a simple matter of narrative practicality: if you want your players seeking powerful magic doodads, you need a reason why plundering ancient tombs offers a better risk-reward balance than simply going to the local mages’ guild and commissioning one. No matter how high the fantasy gets in Dungeons & Dragons, I have yet to see a world that doesn’t claim a lost age that was even richer in magic. The idea has proven insidious, from Gamma World mutants looking for laser guns and hovercraft to Werewolf: the Apocalypse garou questing for lost scraps of the litany to d6 Star Wars jedi-in-training sent to recover jedi holocron fragments. There’s also the matter of dramatic tension: a campaign requires a wrong that needs righting. A stable, comfortable setting can act as a backdrop for this action, but you get more bang for your buck if you tie the campaign action into higher stakes like the fate of the world. This means that most campaigns take place in one of three scenarios: the world has fallen apart and the PCs need to recover it, the world is in imminent danger of falling apart and PCs need to protect it, or the world is a promising frontier and the PCs need to exploit it. Only one of these three dynamics is not directly shaped by an apocalypse, and even these often include some fallen empire in their past, the rich frontier offering a chance to rebuild a nation rather than found one.

But I think there’s something larger at work here than practical needs of a GM. I think the post-apocalyptic scenario and lost paradise is so popular because it works with something deep in the psyche of western culture. Every culture has its Shangri-La myths, but the lost golden age took stupefyingly deep root in Europe when Christianity was seized upon as a political expedient and grew out of control: priests’ message of original sin and the expulsion from Eden resonated with a sense—from within and without the empire—of the loss of something grand and noble in the disintegration of Rome. Even when Europe dug itself out of the dark ages and began surpassing Rome in every way, culturally in the Renaissance and materially in the colonial subjugation of the world, it continued to look to Athens and Rome as perfect models of everything civilization should be. The lost golden age is a cornerstone of our worldview. It feeds into every narrative art form we have, which naturally includes role-playing games.

2010 11 11 mdlake Games Comments (0) Permalink

Retaking Guv’mint

Okay, so Tea Party darlings aren’t always the most sophisticated politicians. They get facts wrong, they make enemies more often than they make friends, they positively reject the very notion of accommodation and compromise upon which democracy depends. They spout hateful rhetoric and downright wacky ideas so often that it’s almost ceased to be funny. But at least they’re just ordinary guys like you and me, and they’ll keep the mean ol’ gubmint out of our lives, and make sure the little guy gets heard, right?

Don’t you believe it. Joe Miller, the teabagger to unseat incumbent Alaskan Senator Lisa Murkowski in the Republican primary seems now to have lost to her subsequent write-in campaign. No doubt his loss is largely self-inflicted, a product of a series of gaffes including praise for East German techniques of population control. I say “seems” to have lost because, technically, the vote is still being challenged.

Before the election, Alaskan courts ruled that write-in ballots would be counted despite small spelling errors, a ruling expected to help Murkowski in a state perennially rated near the bottom of the list in educational indicators. Miller, unable to find a sympathetic ear in Alaska, has turned to federal courts to punish Alaskan voters for bad spelling, thus proving his dedication to small government and his platform of keeping federal government out of state institutions, and even calling for states to take over federal institutions like Social security. He’s not even in office yet! (And, god and the rule of law willing, never will be.)

I think we can expect that level of dedication to principle across the board from teabaggers, just as we saw small-government Republicans squealing for federal support in the BP spill, small-government libertarians drawing multiple government pensions or calling for big corporate handouts, and small-government conservatives demanding the feds stay out of health care but interfere directly with Terry Schiavo’s treatment and your abortion.

Teabaggers want big government just as much as anybody else; the only difference is that they only want its benefits reserved for themselves. That, and the way they bitch the loudest when they don’t get it.

Postscript: …like Congressman Andy Harris. What an ignorant, hypocritical, perquisite-grubbing ass.

2010 11 10 mdlake Politics Comments (0) Permalink

Tom vs. the Martians

I watched the Tom Cruise remake of War of the Worlds this past weekend with my brother-in-law. It wasn’t very good. To be fair, there was never much to work with: Wells’ original novella didn’t have much of a plot, and the only protagonists were aliens whose perspective was never shared with the reader. (This is not to say it wasn’t a good read! Wells describes human helplessness that Lovecraft never matched, by showing rather than telling.) The once shocking idea of alien conquerors has lost some of its power through repetition; at the time, War of the Worlds was shocking because it dared to suggest that aliens would colonize us rather than joining Africans, Indians, and others that Victorian adventure fiction took by definition as inferiors rightfully subject to imperial rule. Plus, the audience already knows how the story ends: earth, unable to defeat the aliens on the battlefield, is saved when the martians all catch some horrible earth disease and die to a…er, man.

So to maintain some drama, the movie transforms the martians from conquerors to movie monsters, the kind that exist only to pop up whenever things get quiet and go booga-booga at the camera. And, of course, to eat humans and possibly mate with our women. To fill in the long gap between the martians’ terrifying arrival and ultimate demise by microbe, the movie adds a tedious subplot, in which Tom Cruise plays a good-for-nothing father who rises to the occasion, saving his children when the chips are down, regaining the respect of his divorced wife and her new husband.

That basic premise of the movie, that you can be lazy and irresponsible towards your family but still qualify as a good dad by being willing to defend them when the chips are down, is disturbingly common in disaster movies. It’s even more disturbingly popular in real life, mostly among authoritarian and/or good-for-nothing fathers, and deserves to be put down like a dangerous and terminally sick dog.

Your kids don’t need to be saved from martians, or falling meteors, or rogue KGB agents with a mad plan to ignite nuclear war by seizing a missile silo in Nebraska and using your kids as hostages while they work out the launch codes. There are no martians, meteors, or KGB agents. (And if there were, you wouldn’t be able to save anyone from them anyway. You’d be a casualty, not some idealized Bruce Willis-style hero.)

Your kids need help with their homework. They need help tying their shoes and blowing their noses and eating their vegetables. They need love and attention and instruction and good examples, day after day. That’s what makes a good father. Letting all that slide, and waiting for the martian invasion that will never come to prove familial devotion, makes a bad father.

2010 11 08 mdlake Uncategorized Comments (0) Permalink

Bad Apples

Uh oh. The apples are beginning to turn.

That didn’t take long. We picked them just two weeks ago at one of those self-pick orchards, along with sundry seasonal items, like our Halloween pumpkin. The apples aren’t rotten, exactly, but you can see black spots around the stems of a few, and you can see the discoloration lying under the skin where gentle bruises struck.

An old adage holds that “one rotten apple spoils the barrel.” I suppose that can happen, a single, damaged apple going rotten where the flesh is gouged open—maybe attracting insects which will burrow into the fresher apples, maybe generating heat as it rots, maybe just spoiling so far before it’s caught that it actually rots to the point of contact with another apple. But to my experience, apples picked together, or bought together in the grocery, tend to go pretty much uniformly. Oh, some few show signs of spoilage first, but others show signs before the first is so far gone as to be said to cause the rest to go. Apples—barrels of apples—spoil, and whatever causes one to go generally causes them all to go. Another bit of folk wisdom, like watched kettles and lightning strikes, that doesn’t stand up to observation.

Curiously, the falseness of the adage may make its use more literally true. When hard evidence of torture in Abu Grahib came to light, it was blamed on only “a few bad apples.” The metaphor was improperly employed to suggest that the problem was small, localized, anomalous. The rest of the adage was forgotten. Had anyone stopped to consider its entirety, it would imply that those bad apples had spoiled the barrel, that is, the rest of the staff, maybe the CIA and military detention staff generally. An even more thoughtful observer would have noticed that bad apples don’t spoil the barrel, but rather that the barrel spoils on its own, and tends to go all at once, whether or not you find and remove the most rotten of apples first.

2010 11 05 mdlake Politics
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Not Sinking In

A bad day at school yesterday, particularly in second-year algebra, in which the students had had a hard time grasping algebraic transformations and we had to try to recover old ground without falling behind.

We’ve been warned that new teachers are dangerously prone to take such failures as condemnations of their own technique. That doesn’t quite apply in this case, since I’m simply assisting an established teacher. She assures me it isn’t my fault, reinforcing the warning of taking things too personally, assures me that sometimes kids just don’t get the lesson. That’s the way it goes, and you just allow for such setbacks where you can—a practice that’s become harder with the rigid and often misdirected testing practices of NCLB—adjust your pace, and carry on.

Still, it’s hard not to get discouraged. Like stage performance, you knock yourself out and sometimes the reviews are bad. That’s life. Soldier on. But ask any actor: the bad reviews still hurt, even for established and idolized performers, but especially for newcomers who haven’t yet proven they’ve got the sand at all.

2010 11 04 mdlake Teaching Comments (0) Permalink

Messy Jack

We got three trick-or-treaters this year, the neighbors from the end of the block of our dead-end street. I continue to give out big, fancy candy to our first comers, hoping to attract more next year, but in vain. At least my jack-o’-lanterns turned out well. The idea is not original, nor is the handicraft particularly sophisticated, but I’m still pleased with the results. Eileene took photos of my best efforts, available at:

http://twitpic.com/32oyrj,
http://twitpic.com/32oyzi, and
http://twitpic.com/32oz58.

Happy Halloween! Hope you got more doorbell action than we did.

2010 11 01 mdlake Uncategorized Comments (0) Permalink

Sell Now, Pay Later

This report on Chicago selling its revenue sources in a monetary crisis—for less than it could have gotten, through the very architects of the money crisis—is a textbook case of crisis capitalism: create a crisis and use that crisis as an excuse for private gain at public expense, ideally one which will deepen the crisis and justify further private gains. I don’t know how much anyone can add to that analysis, nor to the Rolling Stone article from which it draws, apart from a reminder of the French Revolution.

Plenty of confluent forces fed into the French Revolution: a rise of rationalism challenging (among other things) the divine right of monarchs, a rise in self-governance in other nations against which the French could measure their own fortunes, the utter arrogance of much of the French nobility…but chief among these were taxes. France was spending far more than it could afford, on wars abroad and lavish parties for royalty at home, and piled this burden onto the shoulders of the commoners, taxing them beyond the limit of endurance.

The reason France was taxing the commoners was that it (or rather, earlier French monarchs) had sold off its other revenue sources over the past several centuries in exchange for quick cash in a crisis. Either it sold the right to draw taxes, essentially as Chicago has done with its parking meters, or it sold immunities to nobles against further taxation—literally, privileges. But the crises passed, as crises do, and the revenue sources were gone for eternity. Eventually, the crown found itself with nothing left to tax but the peasants, and they didn’t have the money to give, even had they been willing. Ultimately, a system in which the privileged owed nothing to the state and were entitled to charge what they liked from the common citizen proved unsustainble. The French Revolution erupted and destroyed the parasitic aristocracy—though not, it must be observed, without the ensuing Terror and a ruinous world war, ensuring that everyone suffered horrifically before the nation regained an even keel.

Comparisons to our own regressive capital gains tax structure, the elimination of the inheritance tax, and the power of wealthy individuals to sequester their private wealth in tax-sheltered shell corporations which exist only to sequester that wealth, and the likely implications for the US, are left as an exercise to the reader.

2010 10 29 mdlake Politics Comments (0) Permalink