From The Morgue

Preview of the first 4 pages of ‘Concrete: The Human Dilemma’
The first issue of ‘Concrete: The Human Dilemma’ throws out an idea thats a new one on me. In the story, a businessman wants to hire Concrete as a spokesman for his foundation. Here’s what he says about it to Concrete:

——

SAGEMAN: Its mission is to stem the population explosion. That’s a cause I know you’ve embraced in the past. We provide contraceptives and education to women in poor countries – the conventional stuff of which there’s never enough.

SAGEMAN (cont.): But I want to make an impact in this country, too, where each child has a sevenfold impact on consumption. I want to change norms. I want childlessness to become acceptable, even chic.

SAGEMAN (cont.): The foundation will pay young couples to choose education, careers, and good works over childbearing. To receive the entirety of payments, they must be sterilized, graduate from college, and even agree never to adopt.

CONCRETE: Huh!

SAGEMAN: Yes. We’re not dancing in the posies here. The point is, a meaningful and fulfilling life can be made in defiance of the human drive to perpetuae one’s genotype. They’ll be role models. I hope to start a trend.

——

Interesting stuff.

Are we still worried about overpopulation? I didn’t think that was such a problem. If I recall correctly, in developed nations reproduction is currently below replacement level (which is two children for each person). This is why we’ve got an aging population in most developed countries. The problem isn’t overpopulation, but resource management, at least as far as I’m aware.

That said, I think there’s a lot of merit (from an ecological point of view) in limiting human population. Finding ways and means for this that do not injure our collective humanity isn’t easy, though.

The most fascinating thing about this proposal is the way it’s framing its action in terms of a culture hijacking. Sageman hopes to make sterility cool.

I have a bunch more ideas loosely connected to the issues raised here. But I’m not gonna write about them now. Instead I’m going to say: buy this comic. It’s six monthly issues, the first one is out now, and it’s going to be all good.

Not sold? Okay: there’s also boobies. And a three-legged dog. Now go to your local comics shop and buy it.

A quick note, cut and pasted from my Livejournal:
Some of you may be interested in some photos taken while Cal and I were wandering around Ireland.
Here they are:
http://www.apocalypse.gen.nz/ireland/
There are links inside there to my travel emails. If you haven’t signed up to my roving reports, you bloody well should. I go to interesting places, me. It’s a topica email list and you can sign up by sending an email (blank) to:
morgueatlarge-subscribe@topica.com
You can of course unsubscribe at any time. If you want to see what you’re getting yourself in for, you can read the archives here:
http://lists.topica.com/lists/morgueatlarge/read
While I’m at it, might as well note that I’ve revised my personal website too:
http://www.apocalypse.gen.nz/

It seems that this blog is now allowing comments and new entries again! Hurrah. Here’s one I prepared earlier:

Matt has made a few comments that I�ll address together.

I stand by my claim that the principal cause of global poverty is �the exploitation of the free-market system by economic hyperpowers, with all the structural consequences that follow. As long as corporate power is largely untamed in a global economy, there will be poverty.�

This is admittedly an oversimplification. The principal cause is far from singular. Additionally, this focuses on poverty as a global and international phenomenon, as opposed to one that is internal to a society. The two are related but distinct. The cultural rationalisation of poverty (Matt uses Indian religion and culture as his example) is an important factor, but I believe its importance is small relative to the global economic structures within which that culture exists. The relief of poverty will require a profound cultural change, but I am convinced that a structural change must happen first � which brings us back to the economic hyperpowers.

This situation is also a new one. A global economy has not really existed until this past century, reliant as it is on a magnitude of information and goods transfer impossible before recent technological developments. This magnifies a structural inequity that has been around for as long as there have been economies. Poverty has existed as long as economic systems have existed, but the economic systems have changed radically.

Matt also questions another theory of mine: �Not sure I agree. I don’t think that civilian giving shames governments and governments giving shames corporations. What gives you that idea?

This, of course, is not something that can be proved. I think it can be convincingly argued that civilian giving has encouraged greater governmental giving, certainly in the UK; although this can never be confirmed, because no government would ever admit to such a cause. There are, no doubt, other influences as well, but this one should never be underestimated, especially in the UK where the tabloid press would love nothing better than to call the government to account for stinginess. I think this link is relatively uncontroversial.

The link between governmental giving and corporate giving is much less clear, and basically an assumption based on how I think corporations make all such decisions. Any giving will, I believe, be made with one eye on the government, and the other on the public. I don’t think such decisions are made in a vaccuum, and the government’s giving sets a social context that corporations must respond to when making their own decisions. Even the most sincere of corporate donors cannot fail to be at least subconsciously influenced in their calculations by the number of zeroes in the government’s donation.

All of these points are quite theoretical. On a more practical level, Matt reminds us of the incredible difficulty of even so fundamental a task as ensuring economic aid gets to those who desperately need it. Like him, I have no solutions to offer. Perhaps – and I can’t believe I’m suggesting this seriously – aid money should be used to send auditors into the stricken zones?

Windy today in Edinburgh. (Well, not by Wellington standards, but y’know.) Christmas trees lying on roadsides waiting for collection are sliding into the middle of streets, as if the invisible hand of market forces was pushing them.
Must make driving interesting. It’s hair-raising enough to watch from the roadside.
———-
In comments to my previous entry, Karen questions whether there will be any “sea-change in how we in the developed and wealthy west regard our wealth” (my words).
She makes two good points:
* she doubts people will make a connection between a one-off ‘act of god’ and the ongoing structural situation of poverty
* showing generosity in this case is easy as it requires no ongoing effort, unlike the challenge of poverty
Hard to argue with both of them. My point was really somewhat tangential to these – I basically want the developed to world to associate its wealth with global responsibility. It’s playing with symbols and framing, again, working on the hidden level of culture-as-intuited. Such transitions are hard, but by no means impossible, to engineer. It is extremely unlikely that this disaster will lead to this kind of meaning-transition as a single revolution, but such changes rarely happen as a single moment of revolution anyway. If this seeds the relationship
between wealth and responsibility still deeper, all the better.
Additionally, it is precisely because of the act-of-god nature of the event that we can hope for such an idea to take deeper root. There are no political actors to blame, and thus no spin that absolves us of responsibility. All there is, is deprivation and need, and our wealth. It is a simple equation, and all the more powerful for it. The re-emergence of the Bam earthquake into general discourse is another helpful sign.
(Of course, talking about culture change is only one level of what’s at issue, and we aren’t going to get very far just sitting back waiting for deep cultural change to solve all our problems. )
Karen finishes on a question – “what DOES one do to address poverty?”
I suspect that was a rhetorical question 🙂 I’ll throw out part of an answer anyway. I consider poverty to be the outcome of a number of factors, but principally the exploitation of the free-market system by economic hyperpowers, with all the structural consequences that follow. As long as corporate power is largely untamed in a global economy, there will be poverty.
Hmm. Can it be said that the first world is outsourcing its poverty and exploitation to the third?

I am heartened by seeing, pretty much everywhere I look, collection buckets for tsunami appeals. On every till in the supermarket I ducked into this evening, for example.
There seems to be a real penetration of the idea that our sacrifices, however small, can make a real difference.
I’m hopeful that this marks something of a sea-change in how we in the developed and wealthy west regard our wealth, as something bringing great responsibility as well as opportunity. Something of a re-emergence and re-legitimisation of the UN may take place as well, to the good of us all.
But, as has been frequently pointed out, the disaster in Bam a year ago – an order of magnitude less than the tsunami but still a level of destruction almost beyond comprehension – is still far from healed, and aid from the west didn’t all come through. Let us keep that disaster in mind as we look toward renewal from this one – the lesson, if we are to learn it, comes from the earthquake as well as the tsunami.

Watched the Lord of the Rings marathon today. Pressed play at 11.15am, turned off RotK at 11.33pm.
My brain is somewhere in Ithilien, I think.
Also noted by me for the first time: the lost fifth hobbit, Fatty Bulger (The One Who Stayed Behind) does make an appearance in Fellowship, getting namechecked by Bilbo. Maybe those of you who would care already knew this, but I didn’t. Still no sign of Bombadil however.

Styley cafe the Elephant House was packed this arvo, a long queue for the counter, quite unusual. Got chatting to a guy in the queue with me over the sign by the tip jar saying that the staff had pledged their tips for the week to the tsunami appeal, and that management would match it – they’re a good bunch there. This chap was really interesting and as the queue meandered forward we got deep into a discussion about spiritual journeys and his own path which led to him converting to Islam. He was really quite interesting and bought me my latte, and I hope I run into him again.
(Obligatory disclaimer: No, mum, I’m not becoming a muslim.)
My plans to do some writing were scotched by sharing a table with an incredibly talkative Italian girl who talked and talked and talked for about ninety solid minutes. Still, since she was talking in Italian, I was able to do some reading and got stuck into Ulysses. I’m about 200 pages in and it’s a revelation to me. I was, I’ll admit, a bit intimidated going in, but it has been nothing but engaging and readable since word one. Thoroughly enjoying it.
I also managed to go through my general notebook and scribble some developments on various projects and ideas that are bubbling up, some of them dating back five or more years but finally finding a place to stand of their own. some of them only a few weeks old. It was invigorating to see so much energy in these ideas, and I bounced off down the hill with enthusiasm when time came to go home.
(Also enthusiastic because the first new issue of Paul Chadwick’s great comic Concrete in about eight years was in my hot little hands. I’ll be talking about that again.)
The evening has been spent watching DVDs. We’ve watched episode 2 of Doctor Who: The Caves of Androzani, episode 1 of series one of Teachers and we’re about to watch episode 2 of series one of Twin Peaks. It is SO GOOD to have old TV on DVD. The world has changed so much since I was fifteen, and ratty VHS copies of old TV broadcasts were passed around among near- and total-obsessives.
When I was fifteen I convinced my English teacher to let me and some friends go home in the middle of the school day to watch an episode of Twin Peaks, under some dubious rationale. That was pretty cool.
Hmm. Toastie pie. Yum.

Finally got around to making a donation to one of the appeals (the DEC here in the UK).
If you haven’t yet, do it. The scale of loss and deprivation is astonishing. But, most importantly – every bit of civilian giving shames governments into giving more. (Sure, it’s your tax money they’re using, but it’s worth it for the next step – every gift by the government shames corporate entities into giving more. And that’s where the real money is.)
Happy new year! Mine was cool. Hogmanay in Edinburgh – magic.

* visiting Palestine and Israel, in all their complexity and beauty and horror
* visiting the home of my great-grandmother in Ireland – I was surprised by how much this journey moved me.
* getting paid real money for my writing for the first time
* being there for Craig and Marcel’s wedding celebration in a castle in Switzerland
* making Leon a God (bespoke work for Buffy’s Alyson Hannigan)
* turning a bunch of Edinburgh acquaintances into friends, and realising what an amazing bunch of people they are along the way
* watching the Ottakars Roleplaying Club bed into its second year, and seeing its bunch of young talent try out wild and wonderful new ideas with verve and insight
* getting Ron the Body rolling
One of the themes that has emerged: the challenge to move from thought and discussion into action. (Not that talk is worthless, far far from it.) This has been everywhere in my life this year, not least in the comments on this very blog.
Those who’ve been paying attention may know this has been in development for some time. In a sense it’s the whole purpose of me being on the other side of the world. It’s what the journey is for.
Oh, I remember everything, and I’m making change.

So on the bus into town today I was sitting up the top about halfway back as I usually do, and in the back seat (trouble zone) were a pair of drunken folk, a man and a woman, who as the journey went on got ridiculously loud. Since they were mostly bellowing christmas carols I wasn’t too fussed.
Then the guy got up and leaned in: “got a light?”
“Sorry mate” I said, thinking, no-one will give you a light because the bus is a no-smoking zone. *sigh*
“Don’t be sorry, be happy,” he said.
He went through every person up top – about ten other people. The guy right at the front, he said “Don’t be sorry, go back to your own country.”
My brain eventually realised what he’d said. By this time he was in the back seat calling out that he hoped the guy wasn’t a terrorist and didn’t have a bomb.
So I leaned around in my seat and said “knock it off”.
This meant I suddenly had a rather dangerous-looking drunken guy with a woman to show off in front of inches from my face. I don’t remember what he said back, because my brain still hadn’t really caught up, but he was challenging me.
So I said “We don’t want any racism on the bus, mate,” which may not have made much sense in the big picture [“off the bus you can go for your life!”] but got the message across.
So I had some shouting at me and glaring at me and a very deliberately slow spit on the floor of the bus, which apparently I was meant to be upset by, and some rather threatening insinuations that my nose was about to be put out of joint, all delivered from a distance of about six inches.
(He told me to go back to my own country, too, which I was secretly pleased by.)
Anyway, I was completely at a loss. I just kind of sat there and blanked him, and I didn’t get injured so I guess it worked out okay. But when I got off the bus two stops later leaving him, his girlfriend, the guy he was harassing and all the other folk behind I wondered if I’d actually achieved anything.
I was pleased with myself for having the presence of mind to say something. I still feel like it was a bit of a random mess and I didn’t handle myself particularly well. But, oh well.
So that’s what I’ve been turning over and over in my head for the last few hours. Except for when we watched Garden State, which is cool fun and generally nice, and for when I watched the first five minutes of Jaws 3 on Sky, and hey! We’re going to London tomorrow!
They’re advertising Without A Paddle on TV now. I stare at the ad and look for things I recognise because it was shot in My Home Town. Um… Seth Green mugging… Matt Lillard mugging… eek.
Anyway. I posted a story about Christmas on my livejournal. Go read.