Haley is back blogging, after the sudden death of her father. A commentator there linked to Matthew Parris, who talks about how the void those who die leave is a form of meaning.
Quite simply, he has left a space that will never be filled; therefore he is, paradoxically, still here because the space is still here, and I can feel it all the time. The gap Dad left is not a vacuum, a void, a soft area of low pressure to be filled. The gap is hard-edged, chiselled by him into my life, measured by his worth, and ineradicable.
With this realisation has come another: that this sorrow is not itself a cause for sorrow. Regret is not a cause for regret. We ought to be sorry. We ought to regret. Death is not a ‘wound’ to be ‘healed’ or a ‘scar’ to ‘fade’. Once someone has been in the world, they have always been in the world; and once they have gone their absence will be in the world forever, part of the world; in Dad’s case part of mine. This is a good thing.
There is a time for therapeutic language, to talk about healing, understanding, reconciliation, and even that most horrible of words, closure. But there is a time not to do this. Not to say this will go away, this is not happening. Some pains need to be borne.
And we need to be able to talk about these things, not censor them. We must stop being silent, or speaking in euphemisms. For we are being asked to place chains around our thoughts, whips to our Soul, as Nick Cohen points out. Max Dunbar, in his review of this book for 3 AM magazine, describes how this happens.
Everyday corporate censorship is subtle and discreet and insidious. England is the laughing stock of the free world thanks to its libel laws, which allow every quack, fraud, oligarch, shakedown artist and pederast to silence criticism for big payouts. Cohen’s chapter on libel is a sorry parade of wealthy and respectable scumbags: the Icelandic bank Kaupthing sued a Danish newspaper for its investigations into the bank’s links between Russian oligarchs and tax havens; Saudi banker Sheihk Khalid bin Mafouz sued American writer Rachel Ehrenfeld, who linked him with Islamist terror; fugitive director Roman Polanski sued Vanity Fair in England (he had to appear by videolink to avoid being picked up and extradited for child rape).
Many of the cases had little connection to the UK. Rachel Ehrenfeld’s book Funding Evil sold twenty-three copies here, through Amazon. But England has the most litigant-friendly libel laws – it places the burden of proof on the defendant. Rich litigants with multinational business interests will contrive a UK connection to win the right to a hearing, and judges are happy to oblige. Win or lose, a libel case can bankrupt most defendants. Most people will retract and apologise rather than take up a great struggle and even greater risks.
What is important is not so much censorship as pre-censorship – whips in the soul. Cohen argues that ‘with censorship in all its forms’:
[...] you should not just think about the rejected books, newspaper articles, TV scripts and plays, but remember the far larger class of works that authors begin then decide to abandon. The words that were never written, the arguments that were never made.
Do you believe in freedom of speech? Are you sure? You’re a talented writer, a good professional, you have something to say, a story to tell, a warning to give, a truth to expose. But are you sure you want to risk your life, your job, your home, your relationships? Are you sure you want to go through all of that just to write?
The threat is of the random example rather than the boot upon the neck. Consider the case of the unfortunate Paul Chambers, who tried to catch a flight to Belfast from the East Midlands in 2010. On the day of the flight, Chambers learned that the cold weather had closed the airport. His jokey tweet – ‘Crap! Robin Hood airport is closed. You’ve got a week and a bit to get your shit together otherwise I’m blowing the airport sky high!!’ – resulted in an arrest, an anti-terror conviction, the loss of two jobs and a £1,000 fine.
It is the same with religious censorship. You never know what might set the fundamentalists off – so best not to talk about faith at all, except in the most reverent and prescribed tones. We are seeing the slow transfer of rights from individuals – living, breathing individuals, with cares and needs, and hopes and dreams – to the ideology, the belief system, the concept, the community and the group.
And the government does not help us here. We may, in New Zealand, not (as yet) have a tree trade agreement with the US — and this is for practical, not moral reasons, for we have one with China — but the HuffPo commentators note that Kim Dotcom of Megaupload should be extradited because the test in the US is “balance of probabilities”. Now I am no lawyer, but the NBR today had (behind a paywall: I read the dead tree version of this so can’t link) a simple defense. The treaty for extradition between the US and New Zealand lists the crimes for which one can be extradited: and (unlike a similar treaty with the UK, it appears that “racketerring” and fraud are not listed in that treaty.However, the fascists federales have frozen all the Megaupload accounts, which apparently is leading to the server companies stating they will delete files in the Megaupload servers. It would be interesting to see how the feds defend due process if, say, a companies records, or medical records, were on those servers and they are now gone.
You see, this is a time when things are changing: the credit driven bubble of the last two decades is slowly being allowed to degrade, devalue, and disappear, and the truths of the 1950s are becoming just nice myths. We need to argue. We need to seek truth, and not hide from it. Cat Valente, after describing her cats, dogs, chickens and island off Maine… was supposed to be writing about future focuses SF but instead wrote this.
To be honest, Brave New Worldseems kind of cute to me these days. At least the oppressive government thought to hand out Soma so trod-upon people wouldn’t be so goddamn miserable! Our governments just say: suck it up, epsilon assholes. Might as well be stamped on our coins.
It’s tough to say everything’s going to be ok. Living at the end of one way of life and the beginning of another sucks. Most people just want to be fat and happy and do some meaningful work, have kids, and die. Except for dying, the ability to do all of that is up in the air these days. And that’s where we are. Industrial life is in its death throes and it isn’t pretty or fair. Daddy Tolkien will tell us it was no treat living in the just-post Industrial Revolution, either. After all, we all know our history: what follows Revolutions? Usually, Terror.
That’s why, I think, there’s been a small but concerted effort to “bring back” optimistic SF in the last few years. We’re looking for ways to know it’ll all work out without mass extinction or widespread horror. The trouble is that massive technological change is not optimistic for some people, it’s frightening. Terrifying. And not just mainstream “mundanes,” or else what is the recent newfound love of the 19th century all about? What else has driven half my generation back to spinning wheels, knitting needles, preserving jars, and livestock? Everything is uncertain–let’s go back and pretend it’s still possible to live in the Shire.
But, folks, Tolkien did not live in the Shire. He lived in Oxford between two wars, and during what became the Cold War. He attended to his research, the sacraments, and wrote after the vegetable patch was weeded, the children fed, and the marking done. His generation was moulded by Christianity — from Belloc to Lewis — such that the intellectual leaders made a forest, not a few trees standing. In crisis, Post modernism does not work. But, as I am experiencing today, a church, even one distributed by email, does.