About a month ago, I kicked off a spate of watching documentaries about North Korea. The first was Daniel Gordon’s “Crossing the Line,” and what follows in the next paragraphs is what I wrote about it on seeing it. The next two were another by Daniel Gordon (”A State of Mind”), and Pieter Fleury’s “North Korea: A Day in the Life.”
I’ve just seen a rather interesting documentary. It’s called Crossing the Line, and it’s an extended interview with James Joseph Dresnok, one of the four American soldiers who defected to North Korea in the 60s - the only one of the 4 still living there.
It’s sort of a hard film to talk about - one of those things where you don’t really wanna say anything one way or the other because whatever you say it will be wrong. The filmmakers are professional North Korea documentarians - this being their third movie about DPRK-related themes. They’re probably the only people in the world the regime would’ve let talk to Dresnok this openly, and so there’s a real sense of not wanting to analyze too much because you know this is all you’re going to get and you might as well make the best of it. But perhaps for that reason, I spent most of the movie unable to decide whether the filmmakers had done a stand-out job walking the balance beam this close to the edge without falling off, or in giving us the impression they had.
In the calm of hindsight, I’ll say it was neither. Rather, I think this movie was a bit of serendipity. Mainly, there’s the matter of it coming out a mere two years after Charles Robert Jenkins - the other of the four still currently living - managed to get out and go to Japan with his wife. He wasted no time in publishing a damning account of his treatment in North Korea. The North Korean regime being one of those that genuinely cares what the world thinks of it, putting the more loyal and grateful Dresnok up for an interview would be an obvious countermove. But this countermove couldn’t have been made without Gordon, really. No one is going to believe a homespun interview with Dresnok, so the North Koreans can’t very well release one themselves. Nor can they really trust the foreign media to do it, since any one-shot deal like this comes with no incentive on the part of the foreigners to behave. However, if the documentarian were someone who (a) runs a Beijing-based Tourist Agency that specializes in North Korean tours AND (b) had already made twoother reasonably regime-friendly documentaries, then of course things would be different. To top it off, Dresnok himself is, as the film makes clear, painfully unassimilated into North Korean society. In an odd way, that works to their advantage, because he’s not foreign or strange at all. Dresnok talks just like any other Southern straight-shooter. We trust him instinctively because we’ve met so many people like him, and yet we don’t really know what’s on the line for him in agreeing to this. He seems sincerely supportive of the North Korean regime, though certainly not fanatical. But even Dresnok only gets a stilted view of what life there is like, and unlike Jenkins, he doesn’t have any other options.
For me, the real fun of the film was getting to talk around Pyongyang a bit. You get a real look inside some shops, apartments, the subway, the streets. It’s not the no-strings walking tour I’d like, of course, but it’s a better view of the city than I’ve seen anywhere else.
Unfortunately, the filmmaker turns out to be a minor douche. If you watch the “Extras” interview with him, you get the standard-issue Eurotrash nuanced reflection on things. For example, I did wonder when watching the film why every time we flashed to Richmond (where Dresnok comes from) we saw a statue of Jefferson Davis. Now that I’ve seen the interview, I know that I’m supposed to draw a parallel with the statue of Kim Il Sung on Mansudae - you know, the one with his right arm outstretched and the mural of Paekdusan in the background. Yup - speculating about why Dresnok has managed to adapt to North Korea so well, our insightful director notices that there are statues of “bad people” in Richmond too. Of course, he quickly covers his tracks by noting that “we all do [build statues].” Well, right, but there are, I hasten to point out, some important differences - starting with the fact that Jefferson Davis is, to most locals in Richmond, just some dead white guy, and not the living embodiment of the nation that has to be bowed to every time you pass him. There are monuments and there are Monuments. Then he goes on to point out that Dresnok is the kind of guy who, if he’s stayed in America, would probably be sitting on a front porch talking about how great George Bush is. And I’m left scratching my head trying to remember even one uncritical Bush voter that I’ve met. I’ve met some pretty uncritical Obama supporters, mind you, but even so - nothing on the order of what I understand goes into Kim Il Sung worship. But most of all, I’m trying to figure out how he missed that long section of the movie he ostensibly directed and that I just saw where Dresnok explains how by 1966 he wanted out, tried to seek asylum at the Soviet Embassy, was denied and turned over to the North Korean authorities, and then spent the next 7 years in “reeducation?” What part of this makes for anything like an easy assimilation into North Korean society? If Dresnok weren’t a redneck from Richmond, I supposed it would’ve been decades of reeducation, then? For an encore, he points out that he was shocked at how many flags one sees in the US - and notes that you also see a lot more flags in Pyongyang than you would in the UK. Well, OK, maybe - it’s true enough that I didn’t see very many flags when I was in London, and it’s a common enough complaint from foreigners that there are too many flags in the US. But there again - I saw his film, and what I didn’t see were lots of flags in Pyongyang! It looked about like Germany to me. There would be city-sponsored flags on streetlamps and such, but I can’t recall seeing even a single national flag in someone’s house or on someone’s person (outside of the obligatory Kim Il Sung badge, I mean). So this isn’t even grasping at straws, really - it’s more like letting your stereotypes put up imaginary straws for you to reach for. And to top it all off, he’s wearing an Ahn Jung Hwan T-Shirt, which means I’m morally obligated to smash him in his prissy little face if I ever meet him.
Not that this is going to stop me from seeing A State of Mind, which I’ve already ordered from Netflix! Stay tuned.
- 20 June 2009
…and of course I did order and watch it, and I’m pleased to say it was better than the Dresnok one. I mean that in just about every possible sense, really. It was better-made, more comfortable to watch, about a more interesting subject, as well as refreshingly apolitical (well, mostly…).
This one deals with training for the mass games that are North Korea’s chief and most characteristic artform. Gordon follows two young girls over the course of several months as they train and eventually perform. And … well, beyond that it’s hard to know what to say. The film is what a documentary should be - a fairly straightforward depiction of its subject. As such, in this case, it’s also the most successful film on record at humanizing North Koreans, which seems to have been Gordon’s goal. So on all counts it’s a job well done. The amount of training and preparation that goes into the games is, exactly as we expect, simply staggering. It would have to be - however creepy one may personally find the games, they’re nothing if not technically jaw-dropping. But the more interesting parts of the film involve watching North Koreans in their homes, doing things North Koreans do - which both are and aren’t the same things we do. Family life in North Korea is, unsurprisingly, much like family life in South Korea, modulo huge amounts of drinking and hitting - but of course it’s unclear whether their absence is an effect of culture or censorship. At the same time, South Koreans don’t have a radio on the wall in the kitchen that looks like a circa 1963 high school intercom that broadcasts propaganda from 6am to 10pm, and while on which the volume can be adjusted, it can never be turned completely off. Nor do the luckiest of us live 3 generations in a three-bedroom apartment which has two televisions only by virtue of the fact that one of the daughters has participated in a state propaganda display. Still, this is exactly the view of North Korea that people like me have been longing to see - and though I obviously admit I have no independent way of verifying it, it rings true. Given what I know about North Korea, and given my belief that people the world over are basically alike and basically good (even if their governments aren’t necessarily) this is the kind of daily life that I would expect in a more organized and totalitarian version of South Korea.
We’re not completely free of Gordon’s simpering Euro-hip politics, though. The token pointed criticism of the North both in the film and in the director’s interview amounts to this: this girl has worked so hard for so long in the hopes that she can perform in front of “The General” (Kim Jong-Il), and he doesn’t even show up. Now - it’s not that I don’t agree that if Mr. Kim were anything like a decent fellow he would and easily could find the time to put in an appearance. The games go on for 20 straight days, after all, so there’s really no excuse. It’s just that focusing on particulars like whether Mr. Kim is a stand-up guy does worse than let the system itself off the hook - it actually implies that there’s nothing wrong with it that replacing Kim couldn’t fix. It implies that there’s nothing wrong with the enforced hero-worship that leads this clearly capable girl to spend her adolescence training to be the perfect communist through what can only be described, in the context of any starving country, as a waste of resources (at some point they actually quote the estimated number of man-hours that go into it), so long as the hero is well-cast. It implies that there’s nothing wrong with mass displays of subjecting the individual will to the will of the collective, so long as the dictator plays fair. But this implication is monstrous: the problem with North Korea and societies like it isn’t so much that they tend to be ruled by pigs, it’s that this is inevitable, because any time power is so concentrated, the center of power cannot help but draw the congenitally corrupt to it. Of course, Gordon is under no obligation to make political comments in his film - and indeed, given that his stated purpose was simply to put a human face on North Korean society to counter the standard western propaganda line, it probably would have been better if he hadn’t. But if he’s going to make political comments, it would be decent of him to at least stand up for the good guys rather than making exucses for the bad. But that, of course, is what is meant by “simpering:” the problem with Euro-intellectuals is that they tend to think that “giving perspective” and having “independent thoughts” means manufacturing reasons why Clearly Bad Things aren’t so bad as we’ve thought. But they’re wrong about that. This kind of exercise is bad enough if done in good faith; it’s downright depraved when done to score points with the in crowd.
Still, those comments aside, the film is largely apolitical, and this is one of its many clear advantages over Crossing the Line. Of the two - both of which, let me not be misunderstood, are well worth watching - it is far and away the superior: if you only have time for one, it should be this one.
Compared to Gordon’s work, Fleury’s is disappointing. North Korea: A Day in the Life is ironically controversial for - to hear some commentators tell it - having giving too sympathetic an ear to North Korea, allowing too much interference from the government. My impression was something like the opposite of that. Fleury has made what I consider to be the most effective bit of anti-North Korean propaganda I’ve seen. Unlike Gordon, he doesn’t make excuses for the system. Quite the contrary - he gives the system’s spokesmen just enough rope with which to hang themselves. We get, for example, a stock over-the-top rant from an old man that is ineffective not merely because it’s so silly (the Americans are apparently responsible for absolutely freaking everything that ever goes wrong in North Korea ever), but because it comes from a veteran of “The Big War.” We recognize the real motivation instantly from experience with our own grandparents: we in the younger generation owe everything to their generation, and we can’t possibly ever do anything to repay the debt. As a bit of self-serving positioning, it’s really not that hard to see through. This is then followed by his daughter repeating the same ridiculous rant but clearly uncomfortable with it. We get the point: she’s not so certain that the Americans are the root of all evil, but she’s not allowed to have her own opinion, neither by her self-righteous father-in-law, who is a bully, nor by the government, which controls all access to facts. The overall impression is one of a place so perverse that the deck is stacked by the authorities even in normal inter-generational family dialogue. Scenes from the kindergarten work in the same way. We hear a story about Kim Jong Il that’s embarassing enough in content, and twice as much when told in the carefully practised worshipful intonation of the teacher. For desert, we get to eavesdrop on a staff meeting where teachers discuss ways to make the already artificial telling of the story even more over-the-top than the performance we just saw. The point that in the west such a story of generosity would never be about a real person is lost on no one. All told, North Korea comes off looking like a really sick place.
Fleury’s honesty puts the lie to Gordon’s pretentions of objectivity - but perhaps on account of that honesty Fleury’s film is really boring. Because he hasn’t got anything to offer the authorities and they know it, they don’t seem to cut him much slack. We see North Koreans go through the motions of life at school and at work, but unlike with Gordon’s film, we don’t really feel like we got to know these people much, and consequently we don’t come much closer to knowing what life in North Korea is like. Gordon was smarter about cracking the regime’s nut. First he made what you might call a film everyone can agree on - a bit about the surprising 1966 World Cup performance by the North Korean national team. It’s the kind of thing that could have - and apparently did - play well as a national greatness film in North Korea, and sticking to a harmless subject like sports obviates the need to simultaneously convince your western (and primary) audience that you’re not kow-towing to the regime’s censorship. Whether by design or by accident, Gordon got his foot in the door and manages to slowly pry it open a bit, getting a more candid peek at daily life in his second film than Fleury was allowed to see, much less show.
So the bottom line is this: if you have time for all three, watch all three. If you have time for two, watch Gordon’s films. And if you have time for only one well, it’s gotta be A State of Mind. I won’t call it brilliant, but it was satisfying in an odd way. Highly recommended - if you can look past the hip politics. Which you can - blink and you miss it.
Mr. Tweedy has a post on the Gates arrest that hits all the right notes. The gist of it is that just because the press seems to know who Henry Louis Gates, Jr. is is no reason to expect every policeman to. If a cop gets a call that someone is breaking into a house and arrives to find someone doing something that very much looks like breaking into a house, it is, in fact, his duty to detain the dude - which he did. What happened from there is something that we here in Webworld simply don’t have enough information to form opinions about. Things might have proceeded according to Gates’ account, in which he showed the cop some ID and the cop refused to accept it. Things might have proceeded according to the cop’s account, where he asked for ID and Gates chose instead to launch into a political tirade. Things might also have proceeded in some other way that squares with neither account entirely. We just don’t know because we just weren’t there, and so anyone going on with any kind of certainty about the cop’s alleged racism or Gates’ alleged aggressive attitude are doing so on the basis of having chosen to believe whatever version of events is convenient for their politics. It’s an incident for the Cambridge police and Dr. Gates to sort out for themselves - possibly, but hopefully not, in court - not something for us to solve in our pyjamas on the web.
So it’s telling that so many people, including President Obama, have such certain opinions about this. President Obama thinks the police department acted “stupidly.” Which, for what it’s worth, is what it looks like to me too (I’m not a cop, but arresting the property owner on his own property does tend to suggest the cop wasn’t at his most professional) - but I do wonder why the president needs to comment on what is, as far as I can tell, a minor local incident? Is it so much to ask that the President just deal with, you know, Executive Branch stuff in his news conferences? And what’s with all the leaping to the conclusion that this was “racist?” Granted, it’s possible that it was, but shouldn’t “racist” be the kind of fighting words you save up until you’re sure? Cops are people. Harvard Professors are people (sort of). They screw up. It’s not such an exercise in stretching one’s imagination to think that one, the other, or both of Gates and the arresting officer were just having a really bad day and said/did some shit they now regret. It happens.
Matt Yglesias and people like him are, naturally, having a field day complaining about how quick conservatives are to dismiss any charges of racism by white people they hear.
Meanwhile, we see here yet another instance of one of my favorite themes on this blog. The conservative movement, which never ever ever dedicates any time or energy to the problem of racial discrimination suffered by non-whites, thinks it’s very important to draw attention to the social crisis of white people burdened by accusations of racism.
I’m not a conservative, but I guess I am one of the people he’s talking about (being a white guy who is generally skeptical of charges of racism from minorities he hears in the media), so let me answer this. The reasons I am disinclined to believe charges of racism issued by minorities without good evidence include, but are not limited to, the following:
(1) A lifetime of experience listening to trumped-up charges - it’s not only common, it’s pretty much the default. I got my education through the public school system in the South. There were more blacks than whites at my high school. Even in this school, where the student council was majority black and the student body president was black two of the three years I went there and honors and awards day was about 80% devoted to minority scholarships, absolutely every bleeding time something went wrong for a black person it was due to “racism.” You’ve heard of the boy who cried wolf? Yeah, well, this is one of the situations it covers. It isn’t to say that there aren’t real racist incidents out there. The boy in the story did eventually see a real wolf, after all. The point is just that when the vast majority of times in your life when people have complained about racism it was nothing of the sort, it does tend to dillute the credibility of the charge.
(2) A lifetime of not oppressing black people - it isn’t that I don’t have racist friends (I am aware of at least one) - it’s just that the overwhelming majority of white people that I know are not racist, do not oppress black people, and generally go out of their way to make sure that everyone is clear on just how not racist they are. Assuming that I know a representative sample of white people, it is simply impossible that the kind of systematic racism that the media likes to complain about exists anymore. Granted that I don’t know many police officers. Maybe the police are all drawn from circles I don’t travel in, and maybe those circles are just teeming with the worst kind of racism. It’s logically possible, I suppose, but it just doesn’t seem very likely. You get to a point where believing in systemic racism is a bit like believing in unicorns.
(3) A lifetime of witnessing racist attitudes in the black community - I can’t really speak for Massachussetts, but in the South black people operate under a kind of seige mentality. Black people who are friendly enough to you in class will sometimes pretend they don’t even know who you are if you pass them on the street because it’s just that uncool for them to be seen talking to white people at all around certain of their friends. This kind of attitude is completely gone from the white community, but it borders on trendy among blacks. Yes, yes, I am well aware of what the historic roots of it are. Yes, yes, I am well aware that the history of racism in America makes this kind of thing unavoidable. The point is just that given that this kind of behavior is REAL, it isn’t too hard to imagine that the same black people who won’t let their friends have white friends wouldn’t be above lying to say that a white cop had been racist when he hadn’t really.
So yes, I take charges of racism with a big ol’ grain of salt. And the fact that so many people - including the president (albeit obliquely) - are shouting racism about an incident that they can’t POSSIBLY know enough about to support any such conclusions, just confirms that I’ve adopted the right policy here. Show me some evidence, folks. Otherwise, fuck off. Shouting racism at every possible opportunity only makes it less likely that we will believe and respond to those incidents where it’s really happening and really needs to be addressed. This Gates incident is not news.
To Say Nothing of the Dog is Connie Willis’ Hugo novel (class of 1999, published in 1997), and it comes highly recommended by a lot of critics I trust. I myself will go with “fun but overrated.”
The emphasis goes on the “fun.” If the purpose of a novel is to entertain, then I can’t say enough good things about this one. It’s a page-turner, but it’s also no trouble putting it down and picking back up later. It’s funny. It’s intelligent enough to be engaging, but it’s not, like so much science fiction, a philosophy paper pretending to be a novel. The book tries to be, and works as, a P.G. Wodehouse-style comedy of manners - with everything else it has to offer tacked on as a nice bonus. An excellent choice for the beach or the plane.
As for the “overrated,” this book is fan fiction. Well-written, novel-length fan fiction, mind you, but fan fiction all the same. There isn’t a single bit of originality here. Willis is a fan of P.G. Wodehouse, a fan of Agatha Christie and Dorothy Sayers, evidently a bit nostalgic for pre-war sections of Brideshead Revisited, and so she’s thrown all that together in a pot, stirred it up, and come up with a workable bit of escapism. The plot goes like this: in Oxford of 2057 some clever people have come up with a way to travel into the past. And so they do - for research purposes. One bit of research they’re engaged in at the moment is an attempt to restore Coventry Cathedral faithfully. By way of macguffin, it turns out that they’re having a lot of trouble getting the details right on one detail - “the bishop’s bird stump,” a piece of victorian kitsch that may or may not have been in the Cathedral when it was bombed. They can’t really tell because it turns out the Timestream protects itself from tampering by not letting time travellers too close to critical junctures. And so the question is, why is the bishop’s bird stump so all-fired important that the Timestream goes to such a fuss to keep people away from it? There is also a secondary macguffin in the form of a cat that one of the time travellers was able to bring back to the future - something that has heretofore been impossible, and so everyone’s scratching their heads about why this cat is apparently an exception. Our protagonist is sent back to 1888 to return the cat, and of course he gets himself entangled in a comedy of manners while doing so.
The problems with this setup are these:
(1) Too much authorial liberty taken - a lot of the plot is motivated by the protagonist’s suffering from “time-lag,” a kind of jet-leg that you get from time travel that keeps you disoriented. So, he makes a lot of uninformed decisions when first plunked down in 1888 - can’t really remember why he’s there, what he’s supposed to do, etc., all of which comes across like a big cheat on the author’s part, since had he been better rested he wouldn’t have made all the missteps that get him entangled in the comedy of manners. Even worse is the fact that they’re only restoring Coventry Cathedral (and so completely obsessed with knowing whether the bishop’s bird stump was there during the bombing raid) in the first place on the force of one Lady Schrapnell’s personality, and the degree to which everyone is afraid of her and hops about doing her bidding is as implausible as her name. All of which is to say the entire plot gets a push from behind to pop it into gear on the basis of a giant IOU which never gets paid. Narrative hook by fiat.
(2) Deus ex machina - our heroes don’t end up solving their own problems. Rather, “The Timestream” does it for them - by shunting them off to remote locations in time just as everything works itself out. This is frustrating for all the normal reasons - plus one more. The extra bonus source of frustration in this case is that a lot of the positive reviews I’ve read of this book praise it for leaving behind an even bigger mystery than the one it solved. Actually, it did no such thing. All it did was move the point of disturbance that the Timestream is working to correct outside of our time horizon (500 years into the future rather than in good ol’ 2057). So it’s not so much giving us a bigger “sense of wonder” kind of mystery as it is just refusing to solve the one it posed. Which is LAZY.
(3) Makes excuses for its affectations - my least favorite most hated literary failing. It’s fine to try your hand at writing a comedy of manners, or an Agatha Christie. But you have to really do it. What’s annoying is when you make the characters in the story aware that they’re in a mystery story, like Willis does here. The protagonist and female sidekick consciously ape Dorothy Sayers characters - with the one even proposing to the other (and her accepting) in exactly the way their Sayers counterparts did in the Wimsey novels. And that’s not even the worst of it. In one throwaway scene, the everpresent hand of the Timestream sends our protagonist to the wrong destination briefly just so he can overhear a bunch of old women discussing Agatha Christie novels, providing him with a valuable clue. People with 5-6 PhDs in literature may wank off to this stuff; the rest of us find it boring.
(4) Libertarian political message misfires and comes out conservative - like all comedies of manners, this one has an uppity butler. He sits around reading The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire all the time - amidst all these upper class types who lounge about and do nothing useful, which I took to be a sly reminder that the dole is the dole is the dole, whether it’s doled out to the poor or the aristocracy. And if it’d ended there that would’ve been a nice vindication of Capitalism (you know, corporate welfare is welfare too, and worse for being given to people who don’t need it). Unfortunately, there’s still Lady Schrapnell and her vanity project of saving Coventry Cathedral, which turns out to be massively important to the Timestream for reasons the lazy authoress declines to elaborate in the end. Which is really nothing more than the typical conservative bully pitch: “trifles of tradition and ritual may be hugely important for all we know. Let’s pretend they are and never mind that that works out for me and not for you. Now eat your peas and don’t ask questions.”
So, if you’re looking for a bit of mindless fun, you can’t go wrong. Just don’t let anyone tell you it’s more than that, ’cause it ain’t. P.G. Wodehouse does it better.
TOWM quote of the day comes from John Scalzi, who has a laugh-out-loud funny rant about the anachronism of the “Big Three” science fiction - SCIENCE FICTION - rags refusing to accept electronic submissions here at the end of the second decade since the internet went mainstream. It’s a general takedown of the feeble arguments one of them posts, actually.
Fantasy and Science Fiction Mag: In our office, it’s very inconvenient to pass around an electronic submission from one reader to another. Scalzi: Why? Because you’re trying to lift a CRT from one desk to another?
Right.
I refer you to the original post for the play-by-play; it’s worth your time for sheer entertainment value. Let me just say for my own part that in addition to Scalzi’s excellent arguments, I think there comes a time, whether or not it’s directly in your narrow interest to do so, when you just adapt to change - just ’cause humans keep up with the Joneses. Just ’cause doing anything else will say something about you. Growing up, for example, I had a next-door neighbor who used to special order Neil Diamond albums on 8-track. Back in the 80s, you could still do that. They didn’t sell them in stores anymore, but you could write the record company and get one of the limited supply that had been pressed for albums that were popular enough. But WHY? It’s just pig-headed. Ostensibly it was because he had a beat-up old Aston Martin that he loved working on that came equipped with an 8-track. But this had to have been an excuse for a quirk, really. If your hobby is tinkering with this old car, then surely an obvious “tinker” you might indulge in is getting rid of the bloody dinosaur tape player? Sure, if all you like is Neil Diamond (stop and ponder for a second…), and Mr. Diamond comes out with an album every year (in the 70s and 80s, anyway), maybe skipping a year here and there, then I guess it technically doesn’t pass cost-benefit muster to replace all your 8-tracks with CDs. I just think … well, you just kinda do it anyway at some point. If you wake up in 1983, take a look around, and notice that absolutely noone is using 8-tracks anymore, then it’s just polite to chunk your collection and start over.
And that’s how I feel about people who don’t like email, electronic documents, etc. There’s a whiff of rudeness - as in lack of consideration - about it. If you wake up in 2009, and correspondence is all done with bits and bytes, then you need to correspond that way too - if for no other reason than it’s a dick thing to do to make the world play with paper and pens for you when it clearly doesn’t want to. And in some strange way that goes even for things that don’t directly matter to anyone else. My advisor, for example, keeps a paper-and-pencil date calendar, and every time we make an appointment he gets out a pencil and flips in his datebook and then writes down by hand when the appointment is. And I realize this is in some sense unfair, but my honest emotional reaction to watching this every week is not too different from if he’d just grabbed a handkerchief, honked his nose, and sat there looking at it for a bit before stuffing the wad back in his pocket. He can do what he likes, of course, but … well, it’s 2009, they’ve invented the iPhone, he’s a Mac person, can’t he just buy one and use iCal like the rest of us? (Or some equivalent contraption if the admittedly steep monthly fee gets in his way?)
Like it or not there is a kind of collective sensibility about things. That’s why, for example, walking around with a pocket watch is a fashion statement. They’re rare now, and more convenient alternatives have been invented and embraced - so if you’re walking around digging in your pocket and flipping the top off of a wind-up toy to tell time, then that’s a conscious choice made because you want to influence how people think about you. It’s no different from wearing a fedora, or suspenders, or speaking in hip-hop slang, etc. We all adopt affectations for reasons of flair - to mark ourselves off from everyone else. (And actually, the pocket watch thing used to be one of mine in high school - I love old clocks!) The point is just that it’s no use pretending that there is utility in these choices. Saying “I just can’t get used to this email nonsense” is about as plausible as saying “I just never could get the hang of these silly wristwatches.” Or “but there’s just something special about an 8-track.” Or “no, dog, ‘dis jus’ how I talk.” It’s affectation - all of it - and you’re either around people who think it’s cool, or you’re not.
And I’m just one of those people who doesn’t think getting flustered by electronic documents is cute. It’s exasperating, actually, it just makes you look retarded, and I’m all for Scalzi’s refusal to submit stories to the “Big Three” until they get with the program.
Humans have a problem with big numbers. To a lot of people, the $100million that President Obama is proposing to cut from the Federal Budget sounds like a giant whack. In reality, it’s pretty small potatoes. Here’s a clever video that really puts it in perspective. I would like to do my small part to help it make its way around the internet.
