Spanner R5 #amediting Update: Why Does the Future Keep Catching Up With Me?

In the Spanner comics script I did for Script Frenzy in 2008, I opened issue 2 with a Dalek-like security robot summarily executing a one-shot character. Then in Chapter 4 R3, I gave Corporate patriarch Dr. Lars Thorwald, chairman of Biotron, a more advanced production version of a prototype robot that uses an iPod as its head and brain.

And now this:

The article: <a href="http://rt.com/usa/207395-robocop-security-silicon-valley/">5-foot-tall 'Robocops' start patrolling Silicon Valley</a> (RT.com). The subject: a security robot now policing the streets of San Francisco — and it looks exactly like the one from the Script Frenzy 2008 version of Spanner #2.

Why does the future keep catching up with me?

One thing about speculative fiction is that an author must keep second-guessing the future. My second guesses involve "friendly fascism", the technology of oppression, the cyberpunk truism that the street makes its own uses for things, and the level of tolerance that masses of ordinary people have for tyranny before their desire to live forces them to revolt (and the eagerness of elites to push that tolerance to its limits). Not superheroes, not psychics, not vampires and werewolves and shapeshifters; those belong to my critique of superhero mythology.

My problem is that I've been delaying Spanner's publication for so long that history has started overtaking my speculation. This problem has become so bad that I actually moved the years in which the series takes place from 2014-16 to 2018-20, simply because 2014 had already arrived and thus was no longer speculative. I picked the 2014 date all the way back in 1994, when I aged Shira down from her original 25 down to the Standard Anime Protagonist Age of 15; now I've aged her back up to 19 while keeping her birthdate of September 9, 1999.

Some events that occurred in the middle of writing and editing Spanner:

1. the 9/11 terrorist attacks and the ensuing invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq in 2001-3, coupled with a "USA PATRIOT" Act that almost convinced me that the "future fascism" I'd been setting the series in since 1992 (if not 1989) had already arrived;
2. the death of Steve Jobs in 2011;
3. the "Arab Spring" revolutions and Occupy Wall Street movement, both also in 2011, and both of which failed; and
4. the anti-police-state protests going on as I write this.

On the technology front, progress in aircar, jetpack, hoverboard, and sexbot technology is such that all of them will be in commercial release by 2018. Despite the failure of Google Glass, augmented reality will become common and normal just as tablet computers, which were a pie-in-the-sky technology, have become today. Another new technology I borrowed toward the end of the plotting phase (late 2000s) was the smartphone; later, in the leadup to the NSA surveillance scandal, I gave my hackers and rebels generic smartphones without tracking devices; and now the PiPhone (made from one of those tiny Raspberry Pi computers) has convinced me that, under a Chinese-style phone company/ISP monopoly with massive supercomputers dedicated just to censorship, hackers must kludge up their own smartphones and use secure meshnets for calling without the monopoly's interference.

Even the particular manifestations of the reactionary politics I would later call "the Conservative Revolution" have largely come to pass. Apparently I didn't get dystopian enough to expect the British "panopticon" surveillance policy, the growth of Soviet-style "vote for the ruling-party candidate Or Else" elections in the US, or the return of the Gilded Age capitalist predators who tried in the 1890s to destroy American freedom and are trying yet again. I did throw in a tyrannical megacomputer, but that's almost a cliché of 1960s and '70s science fiction that — surprise! — turns out to have become a reality as well, along with The Terminator's Skynet. It also took me years to realize that the "Conservative Revolution" is really just the ultimate manifestation of the American Civil War that, despite the near universal assumption that it lasted only four years in the 1860s, really started in the seventeenth century (or even the thirteenth, the century of mother country England's Magna Carta) and has never ended.

Yeah, I know, science fiction has a reputation for making predictions that turn out to be not just wrong but impossible. I throw in some impossible things myself, usually to either critique the superhero mythology or pay homage to classic SF. But too much of the SFnal speculation I've put into Spanner since 1992 has already come to pass, and I'm certain a lot more of it will by the time the story begins in 2018.

Now to edit that second-issue opening back into the third chapter of the new Book 2...

Spanner R4 Update: Corporatism Is the New Communism (Plus: Chapter 4 Progress)

The article: "The New Totalitarianism: How American Corporations Have Made America Like the Soviet Union" (Alternet)

Back last century, when Soviet Communism ruled a third of the earth, there were some big business types such as Armand Hammer of Occidental Petroleum who developed an infatuation with Communism, while others (a whole lot of them) fell in with the Soviets' Nazi enemies. And then America spent about 30 years or so locked in cold death struggle against the Russian bear. The Cold War imprinted America, big time.

Now this country's sinking into a big-business knockoff of Soviet tyranny. In fact, it's becoming so indistinguishable from China, another Communist former enemy, that I went so far as to rename China's ruling party "Chinese Corporatist Party (Holdings) Limited". America's market choice is getting as restrictive as the official Soviet stores, as the above-linked article points out; conversely, China has the largest shopping malls in the world to go with its ever-growing collection of never-occupied new cities (the biggest mall of all, the South China Mall, is still has only 2 stores).

Congratulations, America! You're now the Union of Corporate Socialist Republics! The only difference between Corporatist America and old Communist Russia is that our all-powerful State is owned by private corporations.

The collapse of this system is what I'm documenting in the five volumes of Chaos Angel Spanner. Henry Becket, Chairman and Secretary General of the Conservative Revolutionary Party of America (as of Chapter 16) backed by his hand-picked Central Committee of Business Leaders and ace political operators, is the antagonist or tragic (super)hero trying to singlehandedly save the collapsing American Empire from certain doom by sheer force of personal will. And yet he follows the failed examples of all the "republican" and "socialist" absolute monarchs he used to fight against as a Cold War superhero. He's trying to save the world through a "People's Republic of Tyranny" by the Great American method of the "Privately Owned Society". The Law of Entropy is laughing in his face all the while.

Prepare for The Great Politics Mess-up, act two. Everything that has gone wrong in the Western world since the 1989 Revolution is because America was totally bummed the Red Menace fell. Everything Dictel Corporation has done since 1989 ruined its business, up to and including pulling off the Conservative Revolution of 2012, has been an attempt to bring back the black-and-white pre-'89 world, when America was righteousness itself battling Absolute Evil. It's revolutionary nostalgia, a militant refusal to look any direction but backward, that fuels the Conservative Revolution. The Germans even have their own East German version called "Ostalgie" (ost [east] + Nostalgie). The Cold War can never end until the surviving Evil Empire follows its symbiotic enemy into the trash can of history.

This is the world our heroines are forced to survive.

Chapter 4 Editing Update
After over two weeks of procrastinating, I finally got around to editing Chapter 4. I finished all the remaining new scenes and did a little editing of existing scenes. I'll have to make one final edit, inserting Shira's redheaded three-years-younger niece Elle and her mother Ruby into the meeting at Mudlark House before I turn to the next phase, removing a full thousand words from the first edit to get the final version under my 15,750-word target representing the 65-page maximum episode script length. After that, I'll make one more scan for typos, and then I'll declare it ready to post. Since Chapter 4 had only five sections in Revisions 2 and 3, I'll probably end up using one of the seven sections of Chapter 5 to make up the difference.

Speaking of Chapter 5: I've already cut down some scenes and added new ones. The biggest addition not yet fully written is the climactic chase for serial-killer fake teacher Mark Bernkastel after Team Bremelo interrupt the assassination mission SPEC Chairman Ross gave him and chase him into gang-ridden Dictel Park across the street from Bangor High. My task for tomorrow is to write out the sequence in full and then retcon the rest of the chapter to lead directly up to it.

Classes at Bangor High start in Chapter 6. Let's start with social studies and history, which SPEC management can't seem to distinguish. What's across the Atlantic in 2014? Used to be a lot of countries there. Now there's only the World Caliphate of Al-Assass, the Islamist empire America's at war against, and the Millennial Messianic Christian Empire of Africa, which America's allied with but is no better at all, merely Christian in its fundamentalism. Part of the African Empire is in the Caribbean, making it contiguous to the Imperial American Homeland itself. Now remember the People's Republic of Fernando Poo from the Illuminatus! trilogy? Some Mexican gangster who claims descent from Becket ancestor Robert Putney Drake conquered Equatorial Guinea from a Colombian gang and renamed it "People's Republic of Fernando Poo" (the namesake island's real name is Bioko) only to find himself under assault by the crusading hordes of mainlanders. The reason this is mentioned in class is because there's not enough gangsters in Latin America to defend it, so he's begging Dictel Corporation to send troops. Figures.

The Sixties Radicals Have Become the Man (Plus: The Latest Spanner R4 Update)

The article: "The Real Class Warfare (Reason)

Nick Gillespie is saying that billionaires and plutocrats aren't screwing you over, which in fact they are. The big surprise here is who among the general public are supporting them. Which generations are voting Republican and most gung-ho for Corporatism? The old.

The Sixties Radicals have become the Man.

For those who don't know their 20th-century history, there was this big youth revolt in the 1960s that took place in America, Europe, and other places such as Japan. Youth were rebelling against authority. The fatal premise of their revolt was the kind of romantic irrationalism that youth are prone to anyway, what with raging hormones and all, reinforced by the rationalism of the technocratic system current during the Cold War era. Some rebels even became madly infatuated with America's Communist enemies: Russia, China, Cuba, Che Guevara (who met his spectacular end in 1967).

Then the rebels grew up, got jobs, even became rich. No, Kurt Anderson (born 1954, by the way), the Sixties didn't make us selfish; that was the Seventies, the "Me Decade", followed by the "Gimme Decade" (the Eighties). Radical after radical turned anti-Communist, pro-Israel neoconservative without compromising their irrationalism one bit; only the nation defined as Better Than America changed.

And so the Baby Boom rebels inevitably became the sanctimonious authority figures their younger selves rebelled against, to the point of adopting the religious piosity of their late elders (and you thought God died in 1966...).

Sure enough, the right-wing turn of the Baby Boomers comes with a Confucian sense of entitlement: you whippersnappers wouldn't even exist without us, so you owe us a debt of perpetual duty. They've redefined "freedom is not free" from "eternal vigilance is the price of liberty" to "freedom is slavery". Gerontocracy marked the long decline of the Soviet Union, that "Marxist" and "republican" version of the Russian Empire. Now America's elders, especially the rich ones, are trying to turn "the land of the free and home of the brave" into a Corporatist oligarchy dominated by — surprise! — rich old white men. You know, the same force of tyranny the Sixties Radicals were so determined to destroy back when they were young and had some semblance of conscience?

Now consider the gerontocrats of Spanner. The Becket brothers: born in the 1930s. Their baby sister Drusilla and nephew Walter Brinkman? 1950s. But they were always conservative; they were targets of the Sixties Radicals and were surprised to find them flocking over to their side as neocons. The Conservative Revolutionary Party militants who aren't simply right-wing militia types are the former Sixties (less often Seventies through Nineties) radicals turned conservative in their old age. But they haven't given up their Sixties Radical infatuation with terrorism. They still long to blow shit up, only for the Fascists rather than the Communists. And their Revolution is not just against the democratic "rabble", but even more so the "whippersnappers", who are increasingly non-white, threatening the comforting uniformity of traditional American white-bread-ness (for which threat they also blame those America-hating liberal traitors!!! whom they think are the same Sixties Radicals they themselves used to be). And so they give dominion and offer hero worship to a cabal of self-righteous Cold War superheroes born in the 1930s and whose heads remain stuck in the 1950s.

This is the theme that Willa and Hope, two "Xists" (actually, Hope's technically a late-Boomer born in 1962, but we'll let that slide) who have always refused to heed the siren song of Conservatism and Corporatism no matter how rich they got, introduce in the meeting they hold for the student tutors and dissident teachers at Mudlark House in Chapter 4.

Now for a relevant sidetrack, here's the Cracked list of six movies with political agendas you didn't notice and the Spanner response:

6. The Dark Knight: Batman kidnaps foreign citizens — just like the CIA! (Nolan was trying to justify Shrub Bush's tyrannical imperial policy in this kinder, gentler version of Frank Miller's infamous Holy Terror.) Spanner: That's what bounty hunters are licensed to do; some are themselves costumed heroes, and they get very self-righteous about it.
7. Ghostbusters: If you give the federal government too much power — ghosts! Spanner: True! Plus: rampaging angels, demons, and giant robots!
8. Saw VI: Jigsaw pushes for health insurance reform! Spanner: Good luck torturing the chairmen of the entire healthcare industry, Jigsaw. Not that you're any less a villain (and a self-righteous one at that) for it. In fact, you'd fit right in with your fellow Social Darwinists who make up the CRP...
9. Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen: The Government is dumb — but America is the world, and Shrub Bush and America's Heroic Armed Forces are way righteous! Spanner: Michael Bay is an official Party propagandist, just like, say, Frank Miller or Ted Nugent. Unlike them, he loves loves loves to blow shit up.
10. The Day the Earth Stood Still (the original): even space aliens love Jesus! (Note: Klaatu was supposed to be a Christ figure anyway, but those earnest Catholics in the Hays Office forced the filmmakers to hammer home the point without the slightest subtlety to prevent the weakening of social control. This was the Cold War, after all, and anything short of pro-Christian propaganda was by definition atheism and therefore Communist treason.) Spanner: What's Jesus? (Remember, God died in 1966 — or at least turned comic-book dead for a few years.) Is there a Space Jesus? (Actually, America is supposed to be Jesus: the Second Coming, the Becket brothers and baby sister Drusilla won't stop telling us, occurred on July 4, 1776...)
11. Superman IV: The Quest for Peace: Superman fixes the world — by taking it over! Spanner: Nice job breaking it, heroes! So, who watches the watchers? Also, fuck the sun.

Spanner R4 Extra Update: Cascadia Has A Real Flag!

I read this article on the soccer fans of Seattle, Vancouver, and Portland, and how they've been bringing out the Cascadian flag. Well, guess what? Cascadia really does have its own flag! In fact, you can buy one!

The site where you can buy the flag defines Cascadia as the entire Pacific Northwest envisioned as a potentially independent nation. My definition in Spanner is considerably smaller, basically western Washington and Oregon combined with southwestern British Columbia, set apart as a sort of Indian reservation for liberals by the Conservative Revolutionary federal government, essentially the Cascadia of Ernest Callenbach's utopian novel Ecotopia without the California part that Callenbach was focused on.

But guess what? Even this "rump" Cascadia is still secessionist and rallies under the Douglas Fir flag a.k.a. "The Doug". That body of water in the northern part of the state, around which the urban heart of Cascadia nestles, is still called by Cascadians the Salish Sea. And the entire theme of "legal in Cascadia but not in America" just has to carry the implication of "Cascadia wants to be independent of the American Empire", and so do all those references to the Arab Spring and the Occupy Movement that I threw into the Third Revision last year as they happened. And what could Chapters 21-23, the last three chapters of Spanner Book 1, be about but Cascadia trying to be independent, with the Doug waving throughout the aspiring nation?

I slapped my forehead and cried out, "But of course!"

EDIT: It turns out Cascadia has a Native American name as well: Chinook Illahee. And Illahee just happens to be the name of a neighbourhood in Bremerton, come to think of it...

On the Death of Steve Jobs

Since yesterday, the Internet and the old media news outlets have been all abuzz over the death of Steve Jobs, cofounder and recently retired chairman of Apple. (I almost said Apple Computer, but they dropped the "Computer" part after the iPod became all the rage roughly a decade ago.) You're probably wondering what I think of the man. Sure, he was a visionary and all that, but he adapted to the system more than nearly anyone knew. Over the years I found myself appalled to find a John Lennon turning into a Bill Gates (and I mean the hated, ruthless Gates of the '90s). I should mention that though the first computer I ever used was a Radio Shack TRS-80, the first I ever truly loved was the Apple II. From the fateful year of 1984 on, I was a confirmed Macintosh cultist. And yet I was this poor kid who could never afford a computer of my own until I got a hand-me-down IBM Personal System/2 from my grandfather. Running Windows 3.1. That was in 1998, when I was already in my twenties.

Why did Jobs and Gates end up blurring together in my fevered brain? It was their management style, which is of course business standard. Capitalism is a very dog-eat-dog system. "Social Darwinism" may not apply to humans, but it sure as hell applies to corporations. It's my opinion, probably idiosyncratic, that corporations are private governments. The corporate world is a world made up entirely of absolute monarchies, all eternally at war with all the rest. Business, as they say, is war. But this is a war with no end and no victory, I probably could never have made it in business. I may have a bit of a vindictive streak, but I'm no general.

Steve Jobs is being hailed as a genius and a visionary, and I don't doubt any of it. The President hails him. The stars hail him. His competitors, enemies, and ex-friends all hail him. If I were to add one more encomium, I would only be adding one more echo to an already deafening echo chamber.

During the middle of July last year, as I was failing once again to complete my 2007 NaNoWriMo novel during JulNoWriMo, I dropped it the moment the inspiration came to me. It turned out, of course, to be the "deadly distant beginning" to Chaos Angel Spanner, my long neglected manga project set (since 1994) in 2014, which was now morphing into a long five-volume novel. It now had a new name, thanks to TV Tropes: Press the Reset Button. The next thing I wrote was the first chapter, "Spanner in the Works". The chapter began as a story idea I worked on in my Project Notebooks in the years between 1999 and my discovery of NaNoWriMo in 2006. It was a riff on the 1984 Macintosh commercial. Then I remembered the entire history and development of Apple after 1984, and I realized — 2014 will be like "1984"! So I drafted the man himself into the novel, or more accurately his image, as if he were a fictional character (which in 2014 he now is). The rest was easy.

The chapter has expanded since then. The original chapter is now the fourth installment. It is now in its final form, now that the man whose face is on the screen has died. It's called "Enter the Monkeywrench". Read it here..

RIP STEVE JOBS 1955-2011

Real-Life Bad Companies: America's Universities! or, Aaron Swartz and the Great Intellectual Property Heist of 2010

The article: Feds Charge Activist as Hacker for Downloading Millions of Academic Articles (Wired)

Online activist Aaron Swartz, a near-founder of Reddit, has been charged with the federal crime of "hacking" for downloading ostensibly public-domain academic papers. "Hacking" is a term borrowed from the same media panic as "cyberporn". What's he really charged with?

1. Copyright piracy.
2. Theft of trade secrets.

You see, these ostensibly "public domain" academic papers are not public domain at all. They are owned by the universities that publish them, under the strictest copyright license of all: not the Digital Millennium Copyright Act that protects corporate entertainment product from the likes of those heinous pirates, namely people who rip their CDs to their hard drive, but the Uniform Trade Secrets Act and Economic Espionage Act which put corporate trade secrets under the same "top secret" protection as military secrets. In this case, the intellectual property protections on the journals the papers are published in are among the strictest in the entire intellectual property field: the licenses are restricted to a select few, namely select researchers at the copyright-holding universities, plus researchers at other universities and research institutes that have paid the sky-high licensing fees. The reason? So that the science can be patented, and the patents licensed to corporations, for a lucrative payoff to the already ultra-rich corporate trustees.

And you wonder why America is falling behind China and India so rapidly in science.

Basically, Aaron Swartz is being accused of bank robbery. The bank pulled the heist on is called JSTOR. It is ostensibly nonprofit. Its real purpose is to keep academic research away from the prying eyes of the unwashed rabble so that it can be lucratively licensed to corporations. Swartz, fired by the hacker ideal of "information wants to be free", was trying to pull a Robin Hood: his goal was to take this proprietary research and put it into the public domain. This makes him the Bradley Manning of academe.

The issue, of course, is Intellectual Property. Now, go to the bottom of this post and look at the copyright notice. You'll see that it bears a Creative Commons Attribution, Noncommercial, Share Alike license. Creative Commons was created as a way for individual creators to get around the draconian protections imposed by the likes of DMCA for the benefit of giant corporations with large IP portfolios. It's for us peons who aren't conglomerate executives and their IP lawyer hired guns.

America's universities do not believe in Creative Commons or in open-source research. They protect their scientific research with corporate intellectual property laws so they can license their intellectual property to corporations. Like their agent corporation JSTOR, they are nonprofit institutions in name only, for-profit corporations in actual fact. And that's why Swartz, like Manning, is doomed: he robbed giant corporations of their precious intellectual property the same way bank robbers rob banks of their gold. Which, legally, is the same thing. Except an intellectual property robber can't flee to South America: the banks aren't everywhere, but the IP administrators are.

Bradley Manning will be executed for treason for certain. And Robin Hood, remember, was caught and executed by order of the tyrannical King John of England. Due process? What due process? When corporations are raped — and, as Manning found out to his horror, the federal government is the most merciless of intellectual property trolls — there is no such thing as due process. In this respect, MIT, and American universities in general, are no different from such predatory corporations as Carter-Ruck, News Corporation, the RIAA cartel of record companies, and any bank that's "too big to fail".

Copyright © 2011 Dennis Jernberg. Some rights reserved.

Real-Life Bad Companies: NEWS CORPORATION, full stop. #msmfail

According to the prevailing journalistic ideology, news organizations are supposed to be dedicated to finding and reporting the truth. As Jack Webb's most famous detective character insisted: "Just the facts, ma'am."

Rupert Murdoch does not believe in objectivity, truth, or responsibility. All he believes in is power, and he wants as much of it as possible. He will go to any lengths to get it. For one thing, he invented the TEA Party alongside the brothers Koch for that purpose. In Britain, his publication News of the World has been hacking the phones and email accounts of murdered girls, slain soldiers, and victims of the 7/7 London terror bombings (which happened six years ago today), leading their bereaved families to believe their loved ones were still actually alive. If that weren't enough, that most infamous of tabloids has been spying on Murdoch's critics, from muckraking journalists to liberal political opponents. In America, Fox News has the comparable James O'Keefe scandal.

As the phone-hacking scandal become ever more gruesome and intolerable, Murdoch decided to sacrifice the News of the World. This turns out to be suspiciously convenient: he gets to destroy the record of his crimes, and he also gets to turn his other sleazy British tabloid, the Sun, into a full daily publication by converting NOTW into the Sun Sunday edition.

The real problem is that Murdoch has infiltrated his agents into the highest reaches of the British, American, and Australian governments. He has bought thousands of British police. His control of the Conservative and Labour parties is so complete that one could almost call the UK itself a division of News Corporation, the same way his friends the Koch brothers are trying to turn the US government into a division of Koch Industries. And so the NOTW hacking scandal now threatens to bring down the entire British government.

Corruption has become News Corp's biggest business.

News Corporation is the company, and Rupert Murdoch is the man, hellbent on monopolizing the entire news business. His publications and "news" channels are the Corporatist version of Stalin's Pravda and Izvestiya. It is good to see the chief propagandist of corporate socialism and his empire fall at last. Hell, he could even go to jail. Millions would cheer him on.

We'll have to see if the scandal that destroyed the News of the World metastasizes and brings down the Sun, and maybe even Murdoch's British flagship paper, the London Times. For all we know, it could spread across the Pond to his big American propaganda outfit, Fox News.

You can't lose by short selling News Corp. Wall Street and the City of London sure are.

America as a Fanatic Cult: Inside Spanner Book 2

The article: Nihilism Comes To America (CounterOrder)

The trope: EagleLand. It comes in two flavors, positive and negative. The positive one is the official doctrine of a cult, known variously as the Civil Religion and Americanism. The negative one, for those unseduced by the religion's siren song and who therefore remain objective, is the reality.

Face it: the United States of America is not and has never been a democracy, and was never intended to be one. An offshoot of the British Empire, it is an elitist representative republic founded by slaveholding aristocrats whose desire to rise within the English nobility was blocked by the established nobles themselves. This aristocratic republic was designed by and for aristocrats who wanted to build an empire, and did so. The empire it was intended from the beginning to replace was, of course, the British.

The problem: the Imperial Paradox — external expansion leads, directly and invariably, to internal decline.

The solution: save the American Empire by overthrowing the liberal oligarchic republic with a conservative dictatorship based on the cult of the nation. In other words, the Empire overthrows the Republic. In the Spanner backstory, this is called the Conservative Revolution. Its stronghold is the white-dominated rural "flyover country" sentimentalized as the Ideal by the national cult. Its predominantly urban opponents simply call it "the coup".

The cult does not just claim that the United States Federal Government is the Second Coming of Christ. It deifies a national narcissism that has its individual counterpart in the narcissism celebrated by the cult of celebrity as relentlessly marketed by the "fashion-industrial complex" (FIC). Spanner Book 2's "Pretty City Arc" focuses on the FIC and what it stands for.

The name of Book 2 is "Rage of the Prophets". This is what happens when the two factions of the all-powerful Conservative Revolutionary Party start feuding over which elite "is" America: the Empire's Corporate owners, or the priesthood of the Church of America, the national cult? The article linked above will help you understand the underlying issues. So will this article, in which Chris Hedges explains that the narcissistic American cult of "Rugged Individualism" is incompatible with not just freedom but America's survival itself. The Empire is destroying the nation.

This is part of the background of Spanner Book 2. I'm finishing the first draft for JulNoWriMo '11, and I'll post the first installment on October 23. Watch for it!

Spanner: Willa Explains Class Conflict, the Objectivist Way

As I continue to struggle with the Spanner TV series for Script Frenzy, I've been procrastinating on TV Tropes again and found this "useful notes" page on Objectivism. Ayn Rand famously opposed altruism in its strong form (as defined by the philosopher who coined the term, Auguste Comte) in the name of her form of classical egoism. The strong definition of "altruism", of course, is "live for others [vivre pour autrui] at the expense of oneself." In short: love others, hate self. Comte believed altruism justified an ideal dictatorship; his description of it became the political ideal of a very influential later disciple, right-wing occultist Alexandre Saint-Yves d'Alveydre, and his disciples, the Synarchists and their successors the Fascists and Stalinists. You can find an informative discussion of the issue here.

My last post, once you get past the indignation, is about how the more dubious parts of Rand's personal history were reflected in parts of her ethical system that were interpreted to justify the extreme forms of "rugged individualism" behind the current manifestation of American corporatism and leading up to the corporate dictatorship in Spanner. Here, my character Willa Richter-Thomas explains (not necessarily in these exact words) that the classical egoist ethics of Rand and her hero Aristotle turn out to have completely different implications according to social class:

For the Corporate oligarch, concern for others can only be at the expense of concern for oneself. The world of business is a non-stop battle royal, you see, and all the other dogs are out to eat you. Our Corporate frenemies call this "rugged individualism." But for the ordinary working people, concern for others is concern for oneself. Their predicament was elegantly summed up by Ben Franklin: "We must all hang together, or we shall all hang separately."

My guess is that any worker with a sufficient knowledge of both Rand and Marx can correct the most unpleasant parts of Rand by using her philosophy, including her ethics, to bolster Marx. But if you're Corporate, Rand means Stirnerism and Social Darwinism. The same thing can have completely different meaning depending on where you are in the hierarchy.

Rand put great emphasis on the importance of context. In the case of her egoistic ethics, context changes everything when the context is social class. The Corporate oligarch takes egoism to the extremes of militant egotism; that is, after all, required to succeed in business, in which all your competitors are eternally out to destroy you. But in the lower reaches of the social hierarchy, among the working people Rand so disdained, egoism and the fact (which Aristotle famously pointed out) that man is a social animal have equal emphasis, reinforced by necessity: one worker is insignificant, but masses of workers united are very powerful indeed. This is the principle behind trade unionism; combined with the phenomenon known as "the wisdom of crowds", it is also the foundation of democracy itself (which, of course, Rand also disdained).

The political consequences are likewise opposite. The upper-class interpretation Rand preferred ultimately leads, as we are finding out here in America, to authoritarian plutocratic oligarchism in politics and monopoly corporatism in economics. Never mind that Rand was attacking just that in the character of Nietzschean media lord Gail Wynand in The Fountainhead and the "looter" corporatists in Atlas Shrugged, even going so far as to call the latter altruists. The working-class interpretation, by contrast, justifies democracy and the corresponding democratic form of socialism (as opposed to conventional state socialism, which is little more than state corporatism and frequently overlaps with the plutocratic variety as in China).

What's missing, of course, is the free market Rand championed. That's strictly a middle-class ideal. Libertarianism is the radical politics native to the independent petite bourgeoisie which is the "threat from below" that the oligarchs are most determined to destroy. Willa (a professional, either as outcast psychologist or outlaw musician) does not see much evidence of this class' survival in the reactionary plutocratic dictatorship of Spanner's Imperial Confederacy. And it isn't the independent businesspeople who are protesting the TEA Party corporatists' jihad to either enslave or starve them in the name of the Free Market.

Even if you start from the identical premises, class context produces opposite perspectives and thus opposite politics. Context matters indeed.

Ayn Rand, the Psychology of Fangirlism, and How America Lost Its Freedom

The article: this one on Ayn Rand as serial killer groupie.

I've been upset enough about the Republican Party's jihad against the poor and the middle class on behalf of the ultra-rich to write Spanner. Turns out their overclass supremacism, Social Darwinism, hatred of democracy, and lust for corporatist tyranny come ultimately from Ayn Rand. And then I read the above linked article, which claims that her entire philosophy of Objectivism stems from her hero worship of a serial killer. That's right: not long after she fled Stalin's Russia for America in 1926, Ayn Rand became a serial killer groupie. Turns out she was so busy fangirling the sadistic murderer William Hickman that she blanked out the fact that his moral retardation made him too dumb to live.

I myself didn't realize the truth till early afternoon today, when I was drinking my second cup of coffee. There's a pattern here. 9-year-old Alissa Rosenbaum became a huge fangirl of the arrogant British-imperialist hero (named Cyrus, no less) of a serial adventure novel called The Mysterious Valley. Her earliest essays in Russian? On Hollywood stars. When she left for America to become Ayn Rand, where did she go? Right straight to Hollywood, where she became a scriptwriter. In her late essay "On a Woman President", she denounces the idea of female leadership because, she claims, the function of woman is to hero-worship a man. In other words, she defines fangirlism as the essence of female nature. In her manifesto "The Goal of My Writing", she says the purpose of fiction, or at least her fiction, is the creation of an Ideal Man—capitalized, of course—in order to hero-worship him with her fiction. In her lectures and essays, she constantly quotes not other philosophers, but her own heroes: Howard Roark, John Galt, Hank Rearden, Francisco d'Anconia—they, not all those "lesser" philosophers she despised (meaning all the rest), were the authorities to turn to in philosophy.

Is the picture becoming clear to you already? If not, I'll tell you. I realized with a shock: who is Ayn Rand? The most famous and influential Ascended Psycho Fangirl in history. Her entire philosophy is geared toward fangirling the oligarchs of Big Business. Sure enough, she was quickly surrounded by a worshipful cult of psycho fanboys and fangirls, which eventually expanded to include the oligarchs themselves. After all, she made them (along with herself) the object of worship of the entire American civil religion. Is it any wonder that she became far more influential than her fellow/rival Angry Atheist Battleaxe, Madalyn Murray O'Hair?

It all came together in this line spoken by my character Willa, talking about her early rock 'n' roll days in Spanner:

I remember narrowly escaping being murdered by psycho fangirls repeatedly. About the same time, I became intrigued by this Ayn Rand. Then I read her essay on why she thought a woman president would be a bad idea. Turns out she hated the idea of female leadership because she believed women were supposed to worship male heroes. In other words, if you're not a fangirl, you're not a woman, period, by definition, so saith Ayn Rand. She lost me there. I wasn't the least bit surprised to find out later that she was once a serial killer groupie.

And so I find that when I write a character to resemble an Ayn Rand hero, he turns out to be a villain. Conversely, though some of my heroes (including not just Shira but Willa as well) share some of the Rand hero's ruthlessness, I can't write them like Rand heroes because they're not antisocial enough. The most important Spanner characters "born without the ability to consider others" are vampires, whose disease has eaten away the moral centers of their brains.

I also find myself witnessing (and, in Spanner, writing) an unfortunate parallel between the ideal Randian political system the Republicans are trying to impose (by brute force if necessary, as in the 2012 coup in Spanner's backstory) and the Stalinist dictatorship Rand fled. In fact, the political structure turns out to be identical to her hated Soviet Russia, with corporations replacing soviets, Republican neocons replacing Communists, and big businessmen becoming the new nomenklatura—which, it turns out, is exactly what happened in Russia after the fall of Communism. The GOP's trying to turn America from the flawed democracy we've got now into a corporatist dictatorship modelled after authoritarian Russia and China. In the name of Ayn Rand, mortal enemy of Communism, America is turning into the right-wing version of the Soviet Union, with the Corporate oligarchs as the new master race (see her "Big Business: A Persecuted Minority").

And if you suspect there's a strong element here of what literary theorist Harold Bloom calls "the anxiety of influence"—that is, the artist's war against his strongest influences (John Milton, in the case of the English Romantic poets)—you hit it on the nose. It's supposed to be unconscious according to Bloom's theory, but my case is so bad I'm fully conscious of it. My villains all think they're Rand heroes because their real-life counterparts in the New Right believe they are. The Rand hero takes the American frontier ideal of "rugged individualism" to the sociopathic extreme; this explains why the Corporate elite are hellbent on not just stealing all the money in the world but seizing absolute power as well. They don't care if they make enemies out of the entire American middle class; after all, they can always follow the example of John Galt and kill off all of humanity except for the chosen ones in Galt's Gulch.

Fandom can go psycho. Science fiction author Harlan Ellison once wrote a famous but now rare essay on the phenomenon. But now America's ruled by an ideology based entirely on psycho fannism, created by the Ascended Psycho Fangirl named Ayn Rand. So why am I writing this in my project blog rather than my opinion blog? Because I happen to be something of an "ascending fanboy" myself, and I riff off various fanfics and doujinshi. You think psycho Twilight fangirls are bad enough? Now think of America turning into a dictatorship ruled by psycho Ayn Rand fanboys. You get the picture...