specialagency.net: Stuck.

June 30, 2004

Stuck.

There's a lot to say, but I'm having trouble saying it. Part of the sticking, I think, is that I'm getting a little spun-up crazy when it comes to talking politics.

Here's about what happened: first there was Eleanor Arnason. At WisCon, Eleanor was one of the guests of honor, and she gave a big polemical speech at the guest-of-honor ceremony, all anger and radical politics, and it made me realize that I've kind of disengaged from the big picture. There's a lot of big-picture going on out in the world, after all. I have a lot of conversations but they're all kind of abstracted, even when they deal with topics I used to care passionately about.

What happened next was that I spent a couple of days re-reading some of Marge Piercy's writing, while working on an editorial for Strange Horizons. Marge Piercy worked her way in to my heart through her fiction and her poetry, but she writes (and interviews) very eloquently on topics of politics and radicalism, and reading the essays and interviews in Parti-Colored Blocks for a Quilt had the same effect on me that the Arnason speech did. Which is to say, it felt a little like waking up and wondering when I got so complacent.

The last step was having an argument with someone in which I was told that the only reason I care about civilized political discourse is that I'm a political moderate. That threw me, because the person I was arguing with was someone who I've talked politics with before, and she knew damn well that my politics aren't moderate. Or, perhaps more accurately, she should have known. But that's where you start to wonder, isn't it? Have I actually lost track of the issues I care about? I don't think I have, but it's hard to tell.

So it's hard, in all of that self-doubt, to talk about anything at all. Bear with me.

Posted by Susan at June 30, 2004 02:52 PM

Comments

I must write about the Arnason speech too.

I found it galvanizing and I stood up and cheered, because hurrah for the idea that SF writers should engage politically.

Even though I thought many of her opinions were nuts.

I am a moderate. Radically so.

Which is to say, while I approve greatly of radical analyses, and am not necessarily against radical solutions (though I mistrust most of them), I think the axes along which we have classically arrayed ourselves politically are stupid ones which distort our thinking.

Plus, I really just want Clinton back, so how radical can I be? :-)

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Posted by: David Moles at July 5, 2004 10:56 PM

So I guess my question is: what constitutes more civilized political discourse? Can everyone even agree on that? I get pretty wigged out by rhetoric with threats of violence, intimidation, throwing people out of the country, throwing people in jail, and so on and so forth, but is everyone as disturbed by that as I am? On the other hand, there are things I think of merely as strident or vocal rhetoric that other people may find intolerable.

I think there is a way to reach some kind of consensus, but it seems like people are either forgetting to ask this question, or assuming that everyone knows what the answer is already.

Posted by: Joanie at July 6, 2004 05:32 PM

If each side really is interested in finding out why the other side thinks the way it does, it's civilized discourse. Anything else is just some degree of barbarism.

Posted by: David Moles at July 6, 2004 05:45 PM

That definition kind of begs the question, doesn't it? Or rather, what I was asking was how do we -know- if people are interested in finding out why the other side thinks the way they do?

I'm also not sure coming to a conclusion about why the other side thinks the way they do necessarily entails civilized anything. Maybe openness to new information about why the other side thinks the way they do? Or is it more about the type of conclusion you come to?

Posted by: Joanie at July 7, 2004 01:19 AM

In my experience there are enough people who obviously AREN'T interested (case in point, Susan's interlocutor) that it's not worth worrying whether the "maybes" are sincere.

If you've really come to a conclusion — full stop, end of story — and not just a working hypothesis, then I think you're probably doing it wrong. (By "you" I mean "one".) The point is the process.

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