Reviewing SF&F for Young People Part I: Akata Witch, All Men of Genius, Anna Dressed in Blood, Anya’s Ghost, Between Sea and Sky

Posted on January 17, 2012 by Mandolin

This year, I’m binge reading science fiction and fantasy books that are accessible to young adult and middle grade audiences. I’ve picked about thirty to review (1). They’re books that I felt I had something to say about, not necessarily the books I loved most. They’re all good enough to be worth reading, though, or I wouldn’t bother to review (2).

AKATA WITCH by Nnedi Okorafor (highly recommended)

Teenage protagonist, Sunny, discovers that she has the ability to learn magic. She makes friends with other teens who have the same abilities. They take lessons together, explore the magical world, and eventually form a coven to fight off a serial killer who is butchering children in order to fuel his own spells.

Sunny and her friends are memorable and interesting characters, each well-drawn through their traits and actions, but especially through their exceptionally written dialogue. Despite the ensemble cast, it’s never difficult to remember, crisply, who everyone is and what they want. Even the secondary characters are extremely well-rendered.

Reading about a setting that’s still unusual in American fantasy was nice, especially since Okorafor’s Nigeria seems sharply observed and non-sentimentalized. (She clearly wasn’t following the rules on how to write about Africa.) The strong imagery helps create a magic rich system that seems much more complex than what’s on the page. The world-building feels seamless and deep in a way I feel Okorafor often manages, creating a real sense that the settings exist both before and after the characters wander through. Other characters seem to be having their own adventures; we just happen to be watching this one.

The novel suffers from a rushed ending. The plot is foreshadowed for a long time, then suddenly turns up, and all of a sudden everyone’s rushing to finish things, and then the book is over in a way that feels unsatisfying. There’s no time for the danger to build, no time for complexities and reversals. The bulk of the book is about the journey of learning magic, and it’s rich and wonderful. The adventure feels tacked on. It’s not that it couldn’t have been an interesting adventure; the premises were interesting; but the structural issues caused it to pale in comparison with the beginning of the book.

ALL MEN OF GENIUS by Lev Ac Rosen

Violet Adams wants to attend college so that she can create mechanical and magical wonders, but the best colleges only accept men. Assuming her brother’s identity so that she can apply, Violet sneaks into a men’s-only school, knowing that if her deception is discovered, she’ll be sent to prison.

As an educated reader would guess, a book featuring a cis-woman living as a man is going to be full of mistaken identities, farcical situations, and puzzled lovers. All Men of Genius includes all that stuff, and it’s fine. It’s often fun.

But the real joy here is the description of the mechanical and magical wonders being made at the university. They. Are. So. Cool. I enjoyed the plot and the characters, but I probably would have still read the book if it had been nothing but a list of awesome experiments the characters were doing.

Don’t get me wrong—the book is good on other stuff, too. Fun historical details. Characters you can get behind, including the main character and her brother, but most especially an unexpectedly rich secondary character, Miriam.

There are some pacing problems—it’s clear about midway that all the characters are going to get along famously once the secrets are revealed, but the adventure plotline hasn’t really begun by that point, so there’s a large chunk of text that doesn’t have much drive behind it. When the adventure clicks into high gear, it doesn’t have much time to develop, so it doesn’t feel as realistic as it might; the villain’s motivations come across as thin. And the last attempts to wring suspense from “will they or won’t they?” read like the paper tiger’s pacing the cage; not only is it clear to the reader what’s going to happen, but it feels like it must be clear to the characters, too.

Anyway, all that’s true, but the major point here is: AWESOME SCIENTIFIC EXPERIMENTS.

Also, a really funny sequence with a bunny.

ANNA DRESSED IN BLOOD by Kendare Blake (recommended)

Ghost-hunter Cas travels the country chasing ghost stories. When he finds the ghosts, he exorcises them with his magic knife. He’s never had a problem until he encounters Anna (dressed in blood), a powerful and violent ghost whose strangeness draws Cas to investigate before he kills.

I don’t know if this is the year of awesome ghosts or if ghosts are always awesome or what, but this book featured some awesome ghosts. The awesomest of all is Anna (dressed in blood) who steals the book and runs away with it. The imagery describing her is amazing, from her physical presence to the chilling murders she commits, her character is compelling, and the best part of the book is the resolution of her plotline. Cas himself is a somewhat generic protagonist, a not-so-interesting guy in an interesting situation, but some of the other characters also stand out, such as Cas’s awkward, spell-casting friend. The tightly wound plot unspools suspensefully… until the very end when some things resolve too quickly and fail to meet the “inevitable” part of “inevitable and surprising.”

One thing that I’ve discovered in this reading ‘bout is that almost all adventure novels veer off at the end this way; it seems like it’s hard to toss all those balls in the air, keep them flying, and then successfully catch them all without letting one slip.

ANYA’S GHOST by Vera Brosgol (recommended)

This graphic novel depicts the story of Anya, an unpopular and resentful high school student, who’s out walking one day when she falls into a hole—and not just any hole, but one inhabited by a skeleton, which in turn is inhabited by the ghost of a sad girl with a puff of hair like a dandelion. The ghost sneaks a piece of her skeleton into Anya’s bag so that when Anya is rescued, the ghost can follow.

The art here is fun, sometimes funny, and intuitive to follow, even for people who don’t spend much time reading graphic novels. Anya’s grumpy, awkward, angsty adolescence is easy to identify with; she’s not always likeable, but she’s hard-headed and determined and interesting. The central mystery kept me turning pages, but unfortunately, the book didn’t quite manage to execute its leap into horror, leaving the ending a bit pallid and expected.

BETWEEN THE SEA AND SKY by Jacqueline Dolamore

Mermaids can turn into humans, but only if they’re willing to endure the shooting pain of each step. After her sister is kidnapped, Esmerine braves the pain and enters the harbor city in search of her. She understands little of the human culture around her, but luckily she runs into a childhood friend: a young, bookish man with bat wings, native to the sky as she is to the sea.

The plot of this novel was a little weird for me in places. For instance, some of the conceits about sirens vs mermaids seemed unnecessarily complicated. The book also draws from what I assume is the mythology about selkies, saying that if a mermaid in human form gives up her magic belt (equivalent to a seal skin?) to a man, she’s freed from the pain of walking, but loses her ability to transform back into a mermaid. The abhorrence of giving up the ability to return to one’s natural form is central to the way the plot unfolds, but it doesn’t entirely make sense—the man seems to be able to return the belt, which would seem to mean that the mermaids can zip back into the ocean, then return to the land whenever they want. Or rather, whenever they can get the men to cooperate. I can see how that would be a problem—many mermaids are kidnapped, and even if they’re not, is it really a good idea to trust the fundamentals of one’s freedom to someone else?—but it doesn’t seem like it’s an *impossible* arrangement, the way the book seems to treat it.

For me, the pleasure in this book came in its quieter moments, when the characters had time to sit and talk. There’s a long sequence in a bookstore which doesn’t entirely fit into the quest plot line (or, at any rate, seems to take a lot of the page count when it’s technically not moving the plot forward much), but it was one of my favorite parts of the novel, a kind of tactile pleasure, establishing the world the characters inhabit. Once Esmerine finds her sister, Dolamore does a delicate job of describing the awkward intimacy of their reunion as they find out they didn’t know each other nearly as well as they thought they did. I wasn’t up for the adventure on this one, but where the book is at its best, it evokes an interesting, quiet tone that feels almost like it comes from a historical novel.

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(1) I’m doing my reviews in alphabetical order, but I haven’t finished reading absolutely everything I’m planning to. I may tack some on at the end, out of order.

(2) Consequently, please interpret “recommended” as “especially recommended.”

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My philosophy on reviewing: I love books and I love talking about them. My goal is to support both readers and writers. It’s my hope that reviewing books and creating conversation about them is ultimately beneficial to both.

With few exceptions (and none here), I prefer to talk about books I’ve enjoyed. Please assume that if I talk about a book here, I enjoyed reading it, even if I’m criticizing the hell out of it. I’m the kind of person who could nitpick through the apocalypse and still have complaints left for the howling void.

Posted in Fiction | Leave a comment  

A Pretty Good Working Definition of Religious Fundamentalism

Posted on January 16, 2012 by Richard Jeffrey Newman

I found this in Barbara C. Sproul’s introduction to Primal Myths: Creation Myths Around the World. It has been a long time since I have thought of myself as a religious person or had much to do with people who are religious in the orthodox way many of my teachers were when I was in yeshiva. The description below would not fit most of those men and women, whose commitment to their faith I continue to respect and even learn from; but there were others for whom Sproul’s words seem tailor-made; and these others, of course, have brothers and sisters in all faiths.

Holding literally to the claims of any particular myth…is a great error in that it mistakes myth’s values for science’s facts and results in the worst sort of religiosity. Such literalism requires a faith that splits rather than unifies our consciousness. Thinking particular myths to be valuable in themselves undermines the genuine power of all myth to reveal value in the world: it transforms myths into obstacles to meaning rather than conveyors of it. Frozen in time, myth’s doctrines come to describe a world removed from and irrelevant to our timely one; its followers, consequently, become strangers to modernity and its real progress. Those of such blind faith are forced to sacrifice intellect, emotion and the honesty of both to satisfy their creeds. And this kind of literalism is revealed as fundamentally idolatrous, the opposite of genuine faith.

Posted in Religion | 5 Comments  

What Dr. King Did

Posted on January 16, 2012 by Jeff Fecke

We all know what Martin Luther King, Jr. did. He marched, and integrated the lunch counters, and made white people and black people friends forever and ever, and also he opposed affirmative action because he had that one line in that speech that conservatives love to quote.

This is what King did, and it’s a comforting tale. Sure, white people were a bit crazy in the South (and only the South; certainly not the North, were all us white people were already super-nice), and yeah, that whole drinking fountain thing was kind of silly, and it was good that he got rid of it.

But of course, that wasn’t what King did. He — and the many people who worked with him — did far more than that, though we don’t like to admit it much, because admitting it forces white people to admit to sins far more grievous than simply requiring kids to go to different schools based on skin color. Imani has a guest-post up by Hamden Rice laying out exactly what King did do, and while it’s a lot more painful that we care to remember, it’s extremely important that we never forget it:

The reason I’m posting this is because there were dueling diaries over the weekend about Dr. King’s legacy, and there is a diary up now (not on the rec list but on the recent list) entitled, “Martin Luther King, Jr.’s Dream Not Yet Realized.” I’m sure the diarist means well as did the others. But what most people who reference Dr. King seem not to know is how Dr. King actually changed the subjective experience of life in the United States for African Americans. And yeah, I said for African Americans, not for Americans, because his main impact was his effect on the lives of African Americans, not on Americans in general. His main impact was not to make white people nicer or fairer. That’s why some of us who are African Americans get a bit possessive about his legacy. Dr. Martin Luther King’s legacy, despite what our civil religion tells us, is not color blind.

[...]

So anyway, I was having this argument with my father about Martin Luther King and how his message was too conservative compared to Malcolm X’s message. My father got really angry at me. It wasn’t that he disliked Malcolm X, but his point was that Malcolm X hadn’t accomplished anything as Dr. King had.

I was kind of sarcastic and asked something like, so what did Martin Luther King accomplish other than giving his “I have a dream speech.”

Before I tell you what my father told me, I want to digress. Because at this point in our amnesiac national existence, my question pretty much reflects the national civic religion view of what Dr. King accomplished. He gave this great speech.Or some people say, “he marched.” I was so angry at Mrs. Clinton during the primaries when she said that Dr. King marched, but it was LBJ who delivered the Civil Rights Act.

At this point, I would like to remind everyone exactly what Martin Luther King did, and it wasn’t that he “marched” or gave a great speech.

My father told me with a sort of cold fury, “Dr. King ended the terror of living in the south.”

Read the whole thing. Really — the whole thing.

Image: Postcard commemorating the 1920 Duluth, Minnesota lynchings.

 

Posted in Race, racism and related issues | 2 Comments  

FOGCON: Literary, Feminist-Friendly Science Fiction Convention in San Francisco, March 30-April 1

Posted on January 14, 2012 by Mandolin

Here’s the official lowdown:

Friends of the Genre (FOGcon) is a literary-themed San Francisco Bay Area SF/F con in the tradition of Wiscon and Readercon. This year our theme is “The Body”, and we’ve two wonderful Honored Guests, writer Nalo Hopkinson and writer and artist Shelley Jackson. We will be building community, exchanging ideas, and sharing our love for the literature of imagination. FOGcon takes place from March 30-April 1, 2012. Visit fogcon.org for more information.

I enjoyed this con when I went last year. It fulfilled my number one convention prerequisite–lots of cool people to hang out with, which consequently leads to lots of fun conversations. The concom also did a great job with their programming track–not just interesting ideas, but also really intelligently assembled panels, which again, meant fun conversations.

Plus, Nalo Hopkinson. NALO HOPKINSON.*

Check out their website.

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*(If you haven’t read her, go read her!)

Posted in Uncategorized | 2 Comments  

The Joy of Books

Posted on January 13, 2012 by Richard Jeffrey Newman

This is a marvelous video, made at the Type bookstore in Toronto:

Posted in Whatever | Leave a comment  

Team Awesome!

Posted on January 13, 2012 by Jeff Fecke

As you may know, the semifinals in the race for the presidency are already winding down. Willard Mitt “Mitt” Mittens Romney appears headed to the GOP nomination, while Barack Obama, much to the chagrin of the Puritopians, is running unopposed in the Democratic primaries. It’s looking like it will be a battle of Mittens and Barack, two men who — true story — had fathers born in foreign nations. (Which reminds me: Where’s the birth certificate, Mitt?)

Anyhow, you might think that with Romney in the race, all possible political positions would be well-represented. But you’d be wrong. After all, where’s the guy who believes we need to gut social security, but doesn’t care much about abortion rights either way? Where’s the guy who thinks we need to cut taxes on the rich, but thinks the GOP is a bit caustic sometimes? Where’s the guy who thinks the whole “gay rights” argument is a distraction from more important issues, like reducing the deficit through draconian measures? Where’s the candidate of Tom Friedman?

Well, never fear, because a group of shadowy bankers has launched Americans Elect, which is seeking ballot access in all fifty states to allow Americans to pick their own nominee for president, as long as that nominee meets with the approval of said shadowy group of bankers. This group has its own idea of who could be a standard bearer, and despite their initial hesitancy at joining a non-existent party, they are awesome:

A new group that hopes to tap into a rising appetite for a third-party presidential challenger has discovered that $30 million in secret cash can buy ballot access and attention, but not necessarily a dream candidate.

The group, Americans Elect, failed to generate interest in possible campaigns from Sens. Joe Lieberman and Lamar Alexander, and its intensive outreach to a host of other prospective candidates, including former Nebraska Sens. Chuck Hagel and Bob Kerrey, hasn’t yielded much public enthusiasm for its efforts.

No public enthusiasm? Unpossible! I mean — Chuck Hagel! Joe Lieberman! Bob Kerrey! Lamar  Alexander! If David Broder were still alive, he’d die of joy at such a line-up of bland white centrists. It’s the party of the Beltway’s dreams. I mean, sure, there’s no consistent ideology among those guys, and, yeah, they have wildly different views on things like whether gay people should have equal rights, or women should be able to have abortions. But they’re serious! And willing to make hard decisions! And serious!

I just can’t believe they turned down Americans Elect. The chance to finish fourth for president doesn’t come along often, guys! I mean, imagine the joy of a Lieberman-Hagel ticket. Imagine President Lamar Alexander! (Who hasn’t?) It’s like a magical dream. Shh. Don’t wake the Beltway Boys up.

Posted in Elections and politics | 1 Comment  

Better Than Obama On the Issues That Matter

Posted on January 12, 2012 by Jeff Fecke

Tim Wise has decided that, like many of us true progressives, he’s had enough with that fascist Obama. He’s decided to throw his lot behind a guy that, sure, has some baggage, and, yeah, said some racist stuff. But on the big issues, the important issues, the issues that really matter, he’s spot on:

I would like to properly introduce you to a man about whom you’ve heard much — especially from his enemies and those who prefer a continuation of the status quo — but at whom you might wish to take a second look, and whom you might consider supporting for president.

Unlike Barack Obama, he supports an immediate end to our current and ongoing wars abroad.

Unlike Barack Obama, he supports an end to predator drone attacks by the United States military, which kill innocent civilians and foment growing hatred of America. He believes that the so-called “war on terror” as we’ve engaged it has undermined American freedoms at home and contributed to greater tensions and anti-American sentiment abroad.

Unlike Barack Obama, he supports an entirely revamped Middle East policy, in which the U.S. will no longer subsidize the oppression of the Palestinian people by the state of Israel.

Unlike Barack Obama, he supports either abolishing or fundamentally reforming the Federal Reserve system, and he opposed bailing out the banks with public funds.

Unlike Barack Obama, this individual opposes government spying and believes in absolute freedom of speech and the press, and as he puts it, “reduced government intrusion into our lives.”

Is it Ron Paul? It’s gotta be Ron Paul, right? Ron Paul rules! Ron Paul is the Constitution! Ron Pual Ron Paul Ron Paul Ron Paul!

Ladies and Gentlemen of the left, I give you your perfect candidate for 2012:

David Duke.

Oh I’m sorry, did you think I was talking about someone else?

Ron P–

Uh.

Yeah. Go read the whole thing.

(And yes, this is obviously satirical.)

Posted in Elections and politics | 5 Comments  

Responding to RonF’s Question about Reading, Plus, Just for the Hell of It, a Reading List

Posted on January 12, 2012 by Richard Jeffrey Newman

RonF, in my recent post on reading, Because Reading is Fundamental, asked if I could give an example of the kind of reading I was talking about when I wrote

but it has been years since I have been able to create at the center of my life a space for the kind of reading that nourishes me as a writer, reading that puts me back in touch with myself just for the sake of that experience, that connects me to language in ways that are challenging and revitalizing, that affirms my right to claim a place in this world simply because I am, that shapes who I am and shows me possibilities of being I would not otherwise have imagined.

His question is a good one, but I don’t really have the time to dig into any of the books I was thinking about when I wrote that passage, so I thought I would answer him by sharing an excerpt of an essay I am working on. The excerpt, though not the essay, tells the story of how I began to read poetry and how that reading led me to want to write poetry, and so it is about reading that took place a long time ago, but the experience it talks about is the kind of experience I was talking about in the post. Regular readers of this blog will likely not need any background to understand some of the larger context, since I have written about it many times before, but for those of you who may not have read some of my previous post, it may be useful to know that part of the context for the excerpt is the fact that I was sexually abused as a boy and that reading and writing played a central role in my coming to terms with that fact. Here’s the excerpt:

The first volume of poetry I remember taking down from the shelf in the public library across the street from where I lived was Conrad Aiken’s Selected Poems. I was fourteen or fifteen years old. I read the first eighteen lines or so of the first poem in the book, “Palimpsest: The Deceitful Portrait” (Aiken’s poem is the first one in the pdf), and I knew I needed to make poetry part of my life.

Well, as you say, we live for small horizons:
We move in crowds, we flow and talk together,
Seeing so many eyes and hands and faces,
So many mouths, and all with secret meanings,—
Yet know so little of them; only seeing
The small bright circle of our consciousness,
Beyond which lies the dark. Some few we know—
Or think we know. Once, on a sun-bright morning,
I walked in a certain hallway, trying to find
A certain door: I found one, tried it, opened,
and there in a spacious chamber, brightly lighted,
A hundred men played music, loudly, swiftly,
While one tall woman sent her voice above them
In powerful incantation… Closing then the door
I heard it die behind me, fade to whisper,—
And walked in a quiet hallway as before.
Just such a glimpse, as through that opened door,
Is all we know of those we call our friends.

To say that I identified with the woman in these lines would be an understatement. I might have been keeping my own door well hidden and tightly locked—I did, after all, have real secrets to keep—but I also needed someone to open it who would hear my voice, as Aiken’s speaker had heard the woman’s, carrying it back into his own life and thus reducing, by however small a degree, her isolation. What I thought consciously at the time, however, was that I wanted to understand how Aiken had made that woman so real for me, how his words had left me feeling that his speaker had heard me too; and so I started reading a lot of poetry, taking books off the library shelf pretty much at random, jumping from Aiken to Frost to Sandberg to Eliot to Williams—I don’t remember if I read any women at the time—and finally to e. e. cummings, whose work, especially his sexual love poems, spoke to me at least as powerfully as Aiken’s poem did. Take, for example, the first three lines of the last poem in & [And], cummings’ second published volume:

i like my body when it is with your
body. It is so quite a new thing.
Muscles better and nerves more.

Nowhere else in my life—not in the pornography I was looking at or the sex education clas-ses I’d taken, not in what my male friends who’d had sex had to say or in the sexual wisdom the adult men I knew occasionally chose to share, and certainly not in own experience—nowhere else had I heard a man state so plainly that, whatever else it might mean, being sexual with someone could also be about liking his own body. I desperately wanted to feel that way myself, and so I de-voured as much cummings as I could, trying to internalize his vocabulary and technique and then to use them in my own poems about sex, which I failed at for years, well into my early twenties, when I was sitting in the workshop where my teacher told us about her “cunt poem” challenge. In part, this failure had to do with my immaturity both as a poet and as a lover, but it also had to do with the fact that I couldn’t just write the consequences of having been sexually abused away. Learning to like my body meant unlearning the self-hatred, physical and otherwise, that I’d been taught by my abusers, and that meant puzzling through the particular form this self-hatred took in me.

I also thought it might be fun to list some of the books and writers that have had this kind of effect on me since then, even though the specifics might be very different. Here are some, in no particular order, that I see on my bookshelves right now, though most of them are books I read years, and some of them decades, ago:

Posted in literature | 3 Comments  

The Trouble With Anti-Tobacco Hiring Policies

Posted on January 12, 2012 by fannie

[content/trigger warning: This post contains a discussion about fat shaming]

I used to smoke, But I’m Not Self-Righteous About Being a Non-Smoker ™. (Seriously, I loved to smoke. Loved it. So I totally get why some people can’t or won’t quit.)

I quit about 6 years ago.

You’ll notice I say “about” because, for me, quitting was a gradual process. One day, I ran out of cigarettes and just didn’t buy more. I stopped taking smoke breaks. And, even though I wanted to smoke, I began using gum, toothpicks, coffee, tea, exercise, water, and fun energy drinks to fill in the gaps of the time I used to spend smoking.

Naturally, I became that annoying person who borrows cigarettes because she “only smokes when she drinks.” And then one day, I stopped doing that too. Now, I’m at the stage where smoking doesn’t even sound appealing to me anymore. I tried a cigarette about a year ago at a party and it tasted/felt like what I imagine it must taste/feel like to people who have never smoked. Like smoke (it taste/feels different and better to many smokers, LOL). I think, for me, I had to make quitting not be a Big Thing that I, like, talked about and shared with everyone. It let me live in denial for a little while about the fact that I was quitting something I really liked to do.

So, with that disclaimer noted, I recently came across this article, about how some workplaces are refusing to hire smokers.

The reasoning is that “such tobacco-free hiring policies, [are] designed to promote health and reduce insurance premiums.” Within the article, the following statistics are noted:

“Each year, smoking or exposure to secondhand smoke causes 443,000 premature deaths and costs the nation $193 billion in health bills and lost productivity, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention…..The bottom line will benefit because health care costs for tobacco users are $3,000 to $4,000 more each year than for non-smokers, says Bon Secours’ Cindy Stutts.”

While I understand employers’ concerns about “the bottom line,” two issues stand out to me with respect to this hiring policy.

One, I wonder if it will have a disparate impact on certain groups. While I do not believe smokers are, or should be, a “protected class” as is understood in the US legal system, smoking does correlate with socioeconomic status, education level, and sexual orientation*.

For instance, according to the CDC’s statistics, 49% of those with a GED reported being smokers, compared to 5% of respondents with a graduate degree. 31% of those living below the poverty line reported being smokers, compared to 19% living above the poverty line. In addition, a (somewhat dated) 2001 study (cited in
this PDF) found that 46% of gay men and 48% of lesbians smoked, a rate double that of their heterosexual counterparts (data on bisexuals was not included).

A blanket policy against hiring smokers is going to disproportionately impact these groups. The assumption seems to be that such a policy will get people to quit smoking, but an argument could also be made that a policy that doesn’t take into account why some people tend to smoke more than others might not be an effective anti-smoking program. It might just end up turning many smokers into people who are good at hiding their smoking, while, say, tobacco companies continue to develop
charmingly-named projects aimed at recruiting new groups of undesirables smokers*.

My second issue is that if we look at the reasons for the policy in light of the dominant narratives regarding obesity, a policy against hiring fat people could also be developed. No one, to my knowledge, is proposing such a ban (erm… right?), but I think we have reason to be wary of a parallel reasoning process being applied to fat people.

Consider:

The employers’ argument is that smokers choose to smoke, smoking has high health and economic costs, therefore, the hiring ban is acceptable. If people want to be hired all they have to do is make different life choices.

Headlines consistently inform us that Obesity Is Overtaking Smoking As the Leading Cause of Preventable Death in the US. The US Surgeon General reports that 300,000 premature deaths per year are attributable to obesity, while the CDC notes that the health costs of obesity are a “staggering” $147 billion dollars per year.

A quote in the smoking article notes that smokers are easy targets, but (as someone who is, or tries to be, a fat acceptance ally), it also seems like fat people are easy targets too. The two words “smoking and obesity” are practically a conjoined phrase in conversations about “preventable” deaths.

Many fat people believe (and I would agree) that being fat and being happy is a radical act given the degree to which fatness and fat people are shamed and demonized. Many non-fat people view being fat similar to how they view smoking, as a bad life choice and an individual you-deserve-what-you-get moral failing, rather than as the result of more systemic, collective issues.

So, to circle back to a point I made earlier, I don’t expect policies that only penalize people who fall into certain categories and do not address the reasons why people fall into those categories to be effective public health measures. When employer honchos say things like, “We’re not denying smokers their right to tobacco products. We’re just choosing not to hire them,” I think a lot of people are going to hear:

“We’re not denying people disproportionately targeted by tobacco companies the right to their tobacco products, we’re just choosing not to hire them”

or:

“We’re not denying people who live in food deserts the right to eat their cheap, high-fructose-corn-syrup-laden food, we’re just choosing not to hire them.”

or, (my personal fave):

“We’re not denying people who get fat partly because they work in front of a computer all day the right to work in front of a computer all- oh wait… yes we are. Whoooooops!”

[*Note: Although, the CDC also reports similar smoking prevalence levels among Blacks, Native Americans, and Whites (with lower prevalence levels among Asian-Americans and Hispanics), it also deserves highlighting that tobacco companies have aggressively and disproportionately marketed certain tobacco products to African-Americans and that African-Americans disproportianately suffer from tobacco-related disease.]

Posted in Class, poverty, labor, & related issues, Fat, fat and more fat, Lesbian, Gay, Bi, Trans and Queer issues | 28 Comments  

The Love Song of W. Mitt Romney

Posted on January 12, 2012 by Jeff Fecke

Every so often, a candidate will accidentally let slip what he or she really thinks.

This doesn’t happen with the better candidates. Not because the better candidates are more guarded — they aren’t — but because the better candidates generally are honest about what they believe. They may slip and say something goofy or off-key, but it’s not revelatory, because it’s not something they’ve been trying to keep hidden.

Mitt Romney is not one of the better candidates. Indeed, he’s one of the worse ones. Guarded beyond all rational levels, his very political positions a mystery to all but him (and perhaps, all including him), Mitt has been running for various offices since tge 1990s on a “Whatever you’re for, I’m for” platform. And in all that time, he’s never expressed a coherent reason for running.

But I think yesterday morning, while discussing the envy and jealousy that we all feel about the über-rich — because we can’t be concerned about income inequality for any other reason than that — Mitt accidentally let slip his entire worldview, and the precise reason he’s running for office:

LAUER: When you said that we already have a leader who divides us with the bitter politics of envy, I’m curious about the word ‘envy.’ Did you suggest that anyone who questions the policies and practices of Wall Street and financial institutions, anyone who has questions about the distribution of wealth and power in this country, is envious? Is it about jealousy, or fairness?

ROMNEY: You know, I think it’s about envy. I think it’s about class warfare. When you have a president encouraging the idea of dividing America based on the 99 percent versus one percent — and those people who have been most successful will be in the one percent — you have opened up a whole new wave of approach in this country which is entirely inconsistent with the concept of one nation under God.The American people, I believe in the final analysis, will reject it.

LAUER: Yeah but envy? Are there no fair questions about the distribution of wealth without it being seen as ‘envy,’ though?

ROMNEY: I think it’s fine to talk about those things in quiet rooms and discussions about tax policy and the like. But the president has made it part of his campaign rally. Everywhere he goes we hear him talking about millionaires and billionaires and executives and Wall Street. It’s a very envy-oriented, attack-oriented approach and I think it will fail.

Did you catch that? (Probably. I bolded it, after all.) Mitt thinks things like inequality are subjects for “quiet rooms.” Not a campaign. Not even in Congress. But in quiet rooms, away from the limelight, away from the prying eyes of the hoi polloi. That’s where the decisions get made, after all. Not by the plebes. But by rich men in sharp suits who discuss these things over a fine dinner, perhaps some drinks for one’s non-Mormon friends.

And that’s how Mitt sees things. He’s not running because he has any particular ideology — he doesn’t. He just wants to be in those quiet rooms, discussing things with his fellow Very Important Men. And he’s willing to change his positions like some people change underwear because his positions don’t matter. This is all a show for the rubes. Discussing actual policy positions? That’s unseemly. The public should have no voice in these matters. And the idea that they should — well, that’s just stoking envy and class warfare.

That’s Mitt’s worldview. That’s Mitt’s core. You don’t matter. Nobody matters except those select few who manage to trick people into giving them power. It would be best if all of us just shut up and elected Mitt so he can do what he thinks is best, which itself doesn’t really matter.

It is an interesting way to view the world, one far more consonant with 16th century England than 21st century America. But one that never went out of fashion with a certain subset of wealthy people, who really do believe that they are born to lead, and we are born to serve. He hid it well, but Mitt has finally come clean about what he honestly believes.

Posted in Elections and politics | 10 Comments