Freedom of speech, as enshrined in the First Amendment of the United States Constitution, means that the government itself is not allowed to impair your ability to say whatever it is you want to say — within certain boundaries laid down by various Supreme Courts over the years. The government can prosecute you for shouting ‘fire’ in a crowded theater (um, maybe), for example, or for uttering ‘fighting words,’ whatever those are.
Ender’s Game
Freedom of speech does not mean that you can say whatever you want to say without consequence. It just protects you from legal consequence. Non-governmental consequences often follow controversial or inappropriate statements. For example, if you smart off to your cranky old grandmother, she might slap you in the face. If you submit a plagiarized story to your editor, you might get fired from your job as a reporter. If you make up stuff in your memoir, you might make Oprah angry. In none of these cases will you go to jail.
More to the point: if you are a prominent and raging anti-gay activist, I’m not going to pay money to see your movie, even if the movie has nothing to do with your anti-gay activism or your rage. The government isn’t involved in this decision of mine. The First Amendment doesn’t apply. I’m also going to be encouraging everybody I know to Skip Ender’s Game, which is my own exercise of my own free speech rights! Ta da! See how it works!
Speech has consequences, because speech matters. It would be a terrible world to live in if the things we say were completely irrelevant all the time, because they were “just words” or “just opinions” or “just” whatever. There’s no “just” about it. Words and opinions are powerful; they matter, and like anything that matters, they have consequences. There would be no reason to speak at all, otherwise. A world where anything can be said because nobody cares is a world where nothing is really said — and that’s the opposite of a world with free speech.
I don’t understand why this is a difficult concept for Orson Scott Card or his whiny-ass fans to understand.
a). a Facebook friend I don’t remember actually having any relationship with, online or off, and
b). you send me a link to your Kickstarter or your Amazon author page, or even a request to “like” your website,
c). by private message, and
d). that’s the only contact we’ve ever had since we “friended” each other, then
e). I will unfriend you.
If that was the desired outcome of your promotional activity, then we are golden! But I suspect it was not.
Self-publishers and other indie artists have simply got to learn how to properly promote their brands and their personae online. It’s not about sending random, unsolicited pitches to people you hardly know, if at all. You can’t just hit me with a spam and expect any kind of happy response, even if you “apologize” for spamming in your spam. Extra demerits for
f). typing your message in all caps.
It’s not that I’m angry. I just don’t have time for this kind of “friendship.”
Kickstarter has done a lot of good. But it is also largely responsible for turning an entire generation of artists and writers into spammers. Same goes for ebook self-publishing platforms.
Using social media to promote yourself and your projects is not a bad thing in and of itself. Using social media clumsily and stupidly is the problem. Spam is spam, whether it comes from a multinational conglomerate, a Nigerian scammer, or Suzy Hipster who just finished her first novel, of which she is very ironically proud.
And spam doesn’t work. It is, in fact, one of the most inefficient promotional methodologies ever conceived. Those penis pill people do it because they can sell a couple of dozen units on a couple of hundred million emails, cheaply. If you’re not operating at that capacity, reaching that many people, you don’t have a chance. (And if you are, then you may be looking at a federal investigation, so I’d lay low).
Good, non-spammy social media promotion takes a light touch. It takes sincerity, and believability, and it has to go both ways. Make real friendships. Show genuine interest in your online friends’ projects too, for example — or in whatever else they’re sharing with you (their photos, their thoughts, their political rants). Don’t just collect a bunch of “targets” to push your stuff on. Again: not for any moral reason, but because it just doesn’t work.
In other words, good social media promotion takes a great deal of time — both in the sense of your butt in the chair working it, and in the sense of elapsed time — which is why so many fail. Everybody wants an instant fix. That’s the spammer’s mentality. You have to cultivate your relationships for years, and build strong and meaningful ties to the people you’re talking to online, before you can expect anybody to have any interest in your projects, especially if you want those people to turn around and promote your stuff to their own audiences — and even more especially if you’re charging money for your projects.
Written language is (should be) carefully refined, looked over at least once after completion and tweaked.
Spoken language is (should be) extemporaneous and loose, or else the speaker sounds like a liar or a robot or both. That’s why things that are not acceptable in written language — like using “like” or “so” as stalling tactics while your brain catches up to what you want to say — are perfectly reasonable, even effective communication devices, in the context of spoken language. (The unspoken but meaningful subtext is often: “I said ‘like’ or ‘so’ because the next part of what I want to say is a little difficult to formulate, and communicating that to you is part of what I am communicating overall.”)
I have a lot of friends and acquaintances, especially editors and writers, who expect spoken language to be as well-tuned and elegantly tricked out as a New Yorker piece. In particular they decry stalling words like “like” and “so.” Or at least they claim to. I don’t know if the use of these words in these ways really bothers them, or if, like most “pet peeves,” their complaint is just a convenient gambit to have handy in case conversation lags — a sort of intellectual tchotchke designed to make its owner look more interesting. I suspect the latter. I sometimes run with a fairly pretentious, persnickety crowd — and I love them for it! I’m a bitch, too, just in other ways.
The English language is not settled science, subject to the rules of logic and consistency that pedants wish to impose upon it. It is a performance, subject only to the context in which it is presented and the needs and expectations of the speaker and the audience. The pedant’s “proper English” is appropriate in formal contexts, even when speaking. Let’s say you’re addressing the United Nations. You’d want to avoid “like” and “so” as stalling words. But I’m not going to use subjunctive verb phrases when talking to my mom, though, nor will “whom” (nor “nor”) ever cross my lips when I’m hanging outside with a bunch of silly queens at a gay bar, unless I am making fun of pretension itself. I’ll use other words and speak in other ways at other times.
There are a lot of self-publishing writers who are really, really, really bad at promotion.
I’m saying this because I just looked at my Goodreads inbox for the first time in months. I was just going to repost my Meg Wolitzer review over there (might as well find readers where they are), but I got distracted by the fact that I had 74 “emails” in my Goodreads inbox! Oh boy! Reader responses! Old friends who have found me! Something cool, surely!
But no.
The majority were very literally nothing but a link to a self-published book — and when I say literally, I mean literally. Open the email, and find link, period. No salutation, no explanation of why the author thinks that this would be of interest to me in particular, hardly even any indication (other than the fact that the url goes to a bookseller’s website) that this is a book, or that the book in question was authored by the person sending the email. No, that would be too difficult. Too time-consuming! All these people are sending is just a raw, naked http:// link. That’s the majority. I shit you not.
The rest are form letters, from people who at least took the time to copy/paste. “Hello JOEY MANLEY nice to meet you here on GOODREADS, please allow me to introduce myself,” with, yes, a link to a self-published book following that salutation. No indication that they have any idea who they’re talking to. No reference to anything about me. No attempt to make a real human connection, just a transparently pathetic attempt to fake same.
Here’s a tip: if you are a writer, do not use the same “online outreach” strategies to promote your book that penis enlargement companies use to promote their sugar pills! Your potential readers are out there, and approaching them one at a time is surely one way to find them, but you have to seem like an actual human being trying to make an actual human connection. No, strike that. You have to be an actual human being trying to make an actual human connection. This is work. But it works.
Just recently, WordPress.com, which I use to host this blog, “improved” its stats tracking for blog authors by adding visitor counts. Previously they only counted pageviews. Here are my stats for today, so far (be warned: this blog is pathetically unpopular — and if you laugh I’ll cry):
5 visitors looking at 45 pages.
This makes no sense at all. Here’s a few reasons why:
According to another statistic on the same stats page, 22 pageviews were the result of people following a link from elsewhere, 11 from search engines, and 14 from other sources:
So if we are going to believe that only five people visited the site today, we have to assume that those five people visited the site, left it, went to Twitter, clicked a link, looked at a page, then left the site, went to Facebook, clicked a link, looked at a page, and so on. Each of them did this approximately five times each, to arrive at the “25″ number of views from referrers.
That’s not all that I find fishy. Let’s have a look at today’s search terms:
11 visits to this site were the result of people using search engines. Remember that 14 other visits to the site were the result of people clicking links from other sites (14 Facebook/Twitter/whatever clicks + 11 search engine links = 25, the number of visits from referring sites). And remember that there are only five people, presumably, generating all of this activity. There are ten search terms represented here. So each person who found the site via a search engine found it separately, twice — once by searching, for example, for “Andy Warhol Penis,” and another time by searching for, say, “church swing icon.”
Not likely, sorry.
One possibility that immediately springs to mind is that I personally am being counted multiple times as I test links in Twitter, Facebook, etc. — but I have told WordPress not to count my clicks (it’s an option in their dashboard), and I have been logged in as myself all day, so unless that functionality is broken (and that’s as likely to be broken as the stats themselves, I guess) … well. I dunno, really.
I just know that these stats don’t make a damn bit of sense at all. I wish they’d let us put Google Analytics bugs on our blogs. Dear friends, please do not send me links to plug-ins that will do that. This is not a private WP install I’m running, it’s WordPress.com — I can’t install plug-ins except for a hand-selected few — and overall I do like it that way, for security reasons. I want to be clear: overall, I am very happy with WordPress.com. But these stats suck.
It’s not like these stats are life-and-death for me, though. I type stuff in here that’s too long for Twitter or Facebook, basically, or stuff that I’d like for people other than just my personal friends to have access to if they want to read it. I’m not fiercely dedicated to making it more popular. But these numbers are so transparently wonky that they make even me kind of irritated, and I really have nothing to lose. How bad must it be for people trying to build an income, or some notoriety, or whatever, off their blogs?
People need to cool down about this election in particular and politics in general.
As a liberal supporter of Obama, it saddens me to see my liberal friends threatening to de-friend their conservative friends and family members on Facebook for supporting Romney/Ryan. Some of my best friends are Republicans. They will come around someday, I’m sure of it. Ha! I’m not going to be able to help them see the light if I stop talking to them, am I? I’m sure they feel the same way about me.
Yesterday as I was driving over the bridge to southern Indiana, a guy almost ran me off the road, screaming, and giving me a thumbs-down out his window. I realized later (after he passed, and I saw the seven Romney bumper stickers on the back of his truck) that it was because of my Obama sticker.
And then there’s this complete asshole who wants to split the country into two countries, along the very lines that we cemented in place with the blood of our bloodiest war, just because “his” side of the country is richer and more liberal and better educated and smarter and “the other” side is stupid and hates the gays and gets on his nerves. Fuck that. I’m “a gay” who came from there: where would his plan have left me? It would have left me in an underfunded theocratic state, unable to escape, that’s where.
No.
We are each other’s conscience. Our disagreements fuel our engine. This country works because of our opposing and competing dynamics, not in spite of them. People, we have to be able to talk to one another. We have to live in the same country. We are the same country.
You’re sick of politicians arguing with insane single-mindedness, and refusing to listen to one another? Look in the mirror. It’s our own fault, each and every one of us. Gridlock starts at home.
I’ve seen friends of mine — and television news anchors, even — laughing over Santorum’s recent statement to a group of his fellow social conservatives that “we will never have the elite, smart people on our side.” Most of the people I’ve heard who’ve talked about this have treated it as an obvious mis-statement, a Freudian slip, a gaffe. “I can’t believe he actually told the truth about conservatives, har de har,” and so on.
Rick Santorum
But that’s missing the point. Santorum’s statement is one of those things that actually means something different to people who were raised in a fanatically conservative Christian environment than it does to people who were raised in a normal place. He wasn’t speaking to normal people. He was speaking to the other kind.
For normal American people, “smart” is always good.
For fanatically conservative Christians, though, “smart” can be a hindrance to accepting God, and anything that keeps somebody from accepting God is bad. No: is worse than bad. Is evil. I was taught in Sunday school that “too much intelligence” can be a deliberate challenge that Satan places in the way of a child — something to be overcome on the way to finding faith (which is the ability to believe something without any evidence). Intelligence leads to questioning faith, and “there is a way that seemeth right unto Man.” An intelligent person is cursed with the impossibility of believing impossible-to-believe things, and believing impossible-to-believe things is the only way to salvation.
I’m not saying I believe this. I’m saying that that was the party line when I was growing up. It’s actually a sublimely effective piece of brainwashing, turning your consciousness against your own ability to reason. If my intelligence makes me question these fairytales, then it is my intelligence that is to blame. I’d call that the very definition of mind control.
I’m not the only one who had this ill logic drilled into my brain during my formative years. Hundreds of thousands of your friends, neighbors, and co-workers were similarly taught. Santorum’s statement was not a gaffe at all: it was him re-engaging this little bit of brainwashing that his followers all share with him and with one another. It’s like when George Bush would say “there is wonder-working power” in some tax cut or another, and normal people would think he was just being flowery, but people raised in conservative Christian households heard the rest of the song (“in the blood … of the lamb, there is power, power, wonder-working power in the precious blood of the lamb”) instead of whatever Bush was actually talking about for the rest of the speech. Similarly, Santorum was igniting old programming in people’s minds. It probably worked. I’m sure that Santorum’s anti-smartypants statement made his followers love him more, not less. It was the opposite of a gaffe.
I am telling you this so that you will understand the enemy a little more. That is all.
Almost nobody made fun of mullets until almost nobody had one. In the eighties, shaving the sides of your head was just one way to look different from your older, 70s-styled semi-hippie siblings and cousins. Today we would say that if you shaved the sides of your head but cut the hair in the back, you had some form of a mohawk, and if you didn’t, if you left the back long, you had a mullet. But back then, mullet and mohawk sat on the same continuum, with a lot of give and play between them, a thousand variations of mohawk-like mullet and mullet-like mohawk. We didn’t have a name for “mullet,” either. My hairdresser called it a “ska-fish” when he shaved the sides of my head. (He pronounced “ska” to rhyme with “play.”) My mom called it a “shag,” after David Bowie’s famous haircut. Bowie, because he has remained cool over the decades, somehow avoided being blamed for the mullet, though I think he has a lot to answer for, frankly.
The ancestral ur-mullet, 1973
Lately my redneck relatives have started making fun of hipsters. Note: I do not use the word “redneck” disparagingly. My redneck relatives are reasonably proud to be rednecks, as they should be. If you think that that word is an insult, then it probably doesn’t mean to them — or to me — what it means to you. We’ll talk about rednecks another day. Today the subject is hipsters.
So yeah. Redneck relatives. Talking about hipsters.
“How did the hipster burn his tongue?” asked my Uncle _______, a tractor/trailer operator, the last time I visited Alabama.
I was surprised that my uncle had ever even heard of hipsters. I’d been dealing with hipsters for a number of years, myself, mainly because of my work in the webcomics field, which is crawling with scrawny kids of both genders wearing granny glasses and fedoras, smoking pipes smugly above ironic t-shirt slogans. They can be adorable and they can be annoying. They’re easy to make fun of; they always have been. They kind of set themselves up for making fun. It’s kind of the thing they do. So it’s understandable that my redneck relatives, for whom these kids must look like space aliens, would make fun of them. My redneck relatives will make fun of anybody who isn’t a redneck. That’s the thing they do. That part I get. But as far as I know, hipsters have always been a phenomenon of the trendy, privileged, “alternative” parts of the country — Park Slope, Portland, Seattle, Boulder, Austin. I’ve never seen one in north Alabama, where Uncle ______ lives.
“He sipped his coffee — before it was cool!” said Uncle ______.
I’m going to talk about the word “hipster” for a moment. Pardon the new digression. First I’m going to talk about the word “Punk.” In the 17th century, “punk” meant “rotten wood.” In the early 20th century, it meant “young hoodlum,” “criminal’s apprentice,” and “butt-boy.” It’s easy to see how the word got from there to here:
“Hipster,” likewise, as a word, predates its own most specific definition. Ginsberg spoke of “angelheaded hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly connection to the starry dynamo in the machinery of night,” for example, in Howl. It’s pretty easy to assume that the late-fifties Greenwich Village cats and kitties Ginsberg knew were the cultural and spiritual (and maybe even actual) ancestors of today’s hipsters, but it’s also safe to assume that they were as different from their contemporary offspring as an Edwardian prison butt-boy would have been from John Lydon, whose Edwardian butt-boyishness was metaphoric rather than actual. Was a pose, let us say. Can we say that? 50s hipsters read novels and epic poetry instead of webcomics, for example. That’s one big difference. If they drank Pabst Blue Ribbon, it was because they honestly couldn’t afford a better beer, and they didn’t pretend to be happy about it.
But back to my Uncle _____.
Generally, when a lot of people who aren’t part of a pop subculture start making fun of that subculture, it’s a good sign that the subculture they’re making fun of is no longer viable. I’ll take that a step further. Generally, when a lot of people who aren’t part of a pop subculture acknowledge the very existence of that subculture, then that subculture effectively ceases to exist as a subculture. It becomes a part of the larger culture. It’s safe to make fun of because there is no longer any real reason to make fun of it. The threat is gone. See mullets, above. Hipsterism — in the contemporary definition, not the larger Ginsbergian definition — entered the mainstream the day the first Keystone Beer ad featuring “Keith Stone” appeared on the television set of my Uncle ______.
When Madison Avenue co-opts a subculture, that subculture dies, at the same time that it appears to explode. People start to dress and talk and act like members of the subculture because they picked it up from (for example) a beer commercial. See punk, above. “Punks” who don’t understand the punk ethos – who think that “punk” is a sound and a style, and don’t see how, for example, Patti Smith or Talking Heads fit into that sound and style, because they don’t sound like Blink 182 — are the norm rather than the exception. Right?
Hipsters are a little more slippery than that. They were never much more than a pose, so one wonders if it matters how the pose memeticized its way into a new hipster’s head. Is a hipster who caught hipsterism via Questionable Content in 2008 more or less of a hipster than one who caught it from Adventuretime or Portlandia in 2012? Can a subculture be co-opted if it was always commercially-driven and ironic at its heart? Or is faux mass-media-generated hipsterism, ironically (or, I guess, “ironically”), the most sincere expression of the style?
I guess we’re about to find out.
Turns out, by the way, that Portlandia is where my Uncle ______ first learned about hipsters. He loves that show, the same way that Joe and I love watching nature documentaries.
And, yes, my uncle proudly sports a mullet.
I told him to pretend it’s ironic.
He says, “But it is.”
And who am I to argue? We can all be hipsters now.
Lately I’ve been seeing a lot of image memes featuring a quotation from a famous dead American — usually either a President or a “founding father” — that seems to speak directly to issues being raised in today’s Presidential election. I’m sure you’ve seen these too. Here is one:
That sounds like a totally “in your face” response to Romney’s position that corporations are people, until you go get more of the context:
Jefferson was saying that the US government, not banks, should be the only institution allowed to issue legal tender. And that is currently the case. Neither Presidential candidate disagrees with this position. It’s not even an issue anymore.
So your quotation looks silly.
I do not say this as a supporter of Romney. God no. I am a Democrat through and through, and a particular fan of Barack Obama, whom I will be voting for in November for a second time.
I’m just saying that cherry-picking quotes from great figures from the past can be a dangerous game. The above example is fairly tame in comparison to the worst case scenario. For example, there are plenty of times that Teddy Roosevelt said things that maybe support my political position in contemporary times, making the supporters of the modern version of his own party look bad in the process.
Madison, both of the Adamses, and even Thomas Jefferson are all fonts of immense wisdom, and bizarre racist/classist/whateverist horribleness at the same time. Jefferson believed, for example, that all the slaves would ultimately have to be freed — and returned to Africa, since there was no way they could live freely among whites. That’s a really strange position. And it’s one that has absolutely zero bearing on today’s politics. You’d have to expect that to be the case, given that more than two hundred years of social progress — among them the eradication of slavery, which was the cornerstone of many of these gentlemen’s own personal wealth — have occurred between now and the time that they were active in politics.
So be careful before you pass on that out-of-context quote attached to an image. The very next sentence in the quotation — the one the person making the image neglected to include — might horrify you and counter the very point you were trying to make.
I see a lot of people in political arguments, especially people supportive of gay rights, making fun of people on the other side by stereotyping them on the basis of a presumed lack of education, economic status, and/or social grace. “Stupid, ignorant rednecks,” that kind of thing. “What do they know? Bottom-feeders. Trailer Trash.” I’ve done it myself from time to time.
These kinds of statements feel good. They validate us and our opinions. They are sometimes even true. But they don’t help.
My goal in any debate about gay rights should be, always, to find people who disagree with me, and change their minds. Period. Even those guys up there (though I have a feeling they may be as gay as I am — dunno what gives me that sense, and I could be wrong). I need a significant number of minds changed in order to live a quality life. Winning this debate on a national level is not a luxury. It’s not a fun thing to do online. It’s simply got to happen.
If I can’t change the mind of the person with whom I’m actually arguing (and let’s face it, that’s a rare event), maybe I can change the mind of somebody who is watching the debate unfold online, or in person, or wherever. It’s the onlookers, real or virtual, who are almost always the best targets for conversion.
Making fun of my opponents and dismissing their positions as being nothing more than manifestations of their stupidity or ignorance is counter-productive in the following ways:
it puts people on the defensive, making them more difficult to talk to, and making a pro-gay rights message impossible to hear
it sets up the implication that it is only because of my education that I think the things I think, when that is not the case at all
it also implies that I believe that my good fortune in having an opportunity to get an education in the first place makes me better as a person, with more valid opinions, than people who didn’t have that kind of luck,
it makes any onlookers who are already sympathetic to your opponent immediately have more sympathy for your opponent, because you look like a sanctimonious dickbag when you pull out your education to beat somebody over the head with it, and, finally,
it’s not as true as most of us liberals think it is. There actually are educated social conservatives aplenty. If you base any significant portion of your pro-gay-rights argument on the ignorance and lack of intelligence of the opposition, and a clearly educated and articulate opponent shows up (let’s say Mike Huckabee), then you’ve just lost a lot more ground than you had to, before the debate even starts.
In short: we never change people’s minds by patronizing them.
Now, okay, I know. Just last week I was calling them all assholes. I get caught up in the moment just like anybody else. But what I didn’t do is make fun of their spelling skills or their lack of reading comprehension. I went after their moral standing. See the difference?
