C.I.T.O.K.A.T.E.

Last year conservatives made a big deal about a supposed "War On Christmas" because some private business choose of their own free will not to participate in publicly decorating for the Christian holiday. There is a certain kind of Christian who feels persecuted if cities don't pay out my tax dollars to display Christmas creches on public streets and squares that are paid for by my tax dollars.

But now witness the terrornoia reaction when some girls did a cool and fun art project for April Fools' Day. Click here for a link to the article in the Akron Beacon-Journal and the article in the online Record-Courier. I have put in a call with the Beacon-Journal's Metro Editor in charge of local news to confirm that this is not just an April Fool's Day joke on the part of the paper and that the events really happened as described.

The teenage girls followed the instructions on a cool website to make life-size Super Mario Bros. power-up blocks and spread them all over the town. The bomb squad was called out to disarm these pinatas. According to the instructions on the website, the foil-covered cardboard boxes should contain a prize as a gift to whoever is lucky enough to find them. As anyone knows who has not lived under a rock for the last twenty years, question mark blocks traditionally dispense help and not harm. These decorations were intended to delight, not threaten.

Criminal charges are being brought against the five girls ages 15 to 17. Are we now criminalizing random acts of kindness toward strangers? Some artists put up beautiful decorations for April Fool's Day, and are actually being persecuted for it. See, this is what it would actually look like in December if there were a war on Christmas. The internet is banding together to make an outcry, and pay their legal fees if this laughingstock of a case actually makes it to court.

One of my favorite comments to the article was from a user named "disgusted by cowardice": "Hello Police? Yes, there have been several unidentified packages left under our Christmas tree. We saw a bearded man leaving the scene. Can you send in the bomb squad?"

To which I would add, "Hello, police? Someone has made a rainbow and sprinkled it with dew. I feel that the security of my homeland is all tingly."

The nice thing about decorating a public place with privately-funded question blocks is that the first person to find them is supposed to destroy them. If people put out their own privately-funded manger scenes which yield coins, flowers and mushroom-shaped chocolates when smashed with baseball bats, I'd be all in favor of it. Sounds like a fun holiday season.

Cory Doctorow asked to present a panel at Penguicon about "The Hidden Totalitarian Assumptions of I, Robot." I've been curious ever since he told me this.

Now it turns out he's published a new story about it on the Infinite Matrix website titled I, Robot. After the story he writes, "Last spring, in the wake of Ray Bradbury pitching a tantrum over Michael Moore appropriating the title of 'Fahrenheit 451' to make Fahrenheit 9/11, I conceived of a plan to write a series of stories with the same titles as famous sf shorts, which would pick apart the toalitarian assumptions underpinning some of sf's classic narratives."

It's an excellent story but I still don't get the point. The money quote is probably this from a Eurasian missionary/secret agent to a Canadian cop: "You live in a country where it is illegal to express certain mathematics in software, where state apparatchiks regulate all innovation, where inconvenient science is criminalized, where whole avenues of experimentation and research are shut down in the service of a half-baked superstition about the moral qualities of your three laws, and you call my home corrupt?" But as far as I can tell, some characters decided to be totalitarian dictators, and other characters in their society allowed them to be, for reasons which I can only dimly connect to the three laws or to Asimov's book, probably because it's been years since I read it. (The movie, which was a script called Hard Wired until they slapped the I, Robot name on it for no good reason, doesn't count.) Why don't the Eurasian robots, who are not "3 Laws Safe," run amok and take over the world? The story does not say. In asking that question, am I making one of the totalitarian assumptions of I, Robot?

A few months ago I bought it the e-book from Fictionwise.com, but from this LJ entry you might recall how Digital Rights Management screwed me out of my property. I don't know if I'd call that totalitarian though.

My non-humanist friends are reacting to the outcome of this election with the same stress, fear, disgust and alienation that I experience all year round. The sad thing is, when I have someone else to feel this way with, I'm actually less lonely than I do when they are calm and conciliatory toward our enemies.

It takes the carnival sideshow of politics to bring it out in them. I wonder how long it will last. Why do people get so much more worked up about the publicized struggles of power brokers in Washington, but will be conciliatory and passive with the attitudes of their loved ones and neighbors that make it possible? Do they think we suddenly started living in a state that was against gay Americans just yesterday when Proposal 2 passed? I gave my time and money to stop it because I knew we were living with our enemies all along. I knew because I spend a lot of time in the trenches, in the thick of memetic warfare. What 60% of Michigan told us in unison yesterday by voting yes on 2, individuals tell me personally. "Hearts and minds" is where it counts, but most would rather confront office-holders than confront their families, neighbors and co-workers.

The re-election of a conquering borderline-theocrat and the passing of Michigan's anti-gay constitutional amendment was a symptom. Faith and obedience toward authority is the disease. My non-religious, non-humanist friends treat church as a pastime of harmless personal enrichment. They coddle the childlike trust shown by their friends and relatives as long as it's about something distant and abstract like gods and goddesses, with the idea that it won't connect to create real-world pain. But that's what faith does. Childlike faith and obedience is a relinquishment of personal judgement, of personal responsibility, of self-respect, of personal gain. Faith is anti-human: "mis- anthropy." When this little private misanthropy called faith is lauded as a virtue by our entire culture, how could it not encourage misanthropy to manifest tangibly? I have seen it happen in anyone from Christian Supremacists to Pagan Ecofascists.

They are not as rare as we think. A woman who lives a few miles from me thinks that we should carpet-bomb a random city anywhere in the Middle East until every man, woman and baby is dead-- and she holds to that position staunchly, because in her words, ethnic cleansing is the way her god treated arabs in her Old Testament. We are surrounded in the churches of this nation with the precise moral equivalent of the woman I once saw on television who said, with cowlike eyes full of vapid peace and tepid joy, that her greatest wish is for her small children to die as suicide bombers for Allah. I have heard comparable things from your neighbors and your doctors and your mailmen. It is even on your radio and your television. But we look the other way, out of a misapplied concept of what religious toleration means. Yes, under our first amendment (a triumph of secularism) we should never restrict misanthropic attitudes through legislation. They have as much right to speak and broadcast as anyone. By all means, leave them alone. But those of us who are pro-human should stop praising misanthropic books such as the bible, the quran and the torah. We don't have to pretend it's really OK if you look somewhere in them, "down deep," scraping the bottom of the barrel to make excuses for these books and their gods, and encourage the use of them for some supposed "true" interpretation.

It's time to choose our friends, our business transactions, and our families based on whether or not they are anti-human misanthropes. At the very least, be so unambiguous and outspoken that those relationships will inevitably cool as a result. Otherwise, one is contributing to a climate that condones authoritarianism. Then one can't complain and react with surprise when supposedly Unquestionable Truths are carried straight into the voting booth.

Please visit Faithless.org.