Spenser, Battlestar Galactica, and the Ethics of Compassion

Two things have been occupying a good deal of my time and imagination, lately: The Faerie Queene, and Battlestar Galactica.

Both are exceedingly long, rather challenging works of imaginative fiction that delve fearlessly (okay, Battlestar Galactica does pull some punches, unlike Spenser) into the mind and heart of society and civilization. And both are, or have been seen as explicitly political, and concerned with the question of empire and the amount of viciousness a government is allowed in order to procure peace and justice.

Traditionally, the two are read as polar opposites.

BSG is, of course, like "all Hollywood" (as long as you exclude Pixar, Mel Gibson, and a number of other outliers) trends liberal. And of course the beginning of season 3 is one high point of their liberal focus. Humanity is colonized by cylons, who themselves want to institute a new, more humane and cooperative regime, but are willing to face just about any death toll to form the wastes of humanity into a governable civilization. The good guys, of course, are with humanity and against the cylons....

....and, of course, in desperate times a subgroup decides that their most effective strategies are to use suicide-bombers and target cylons and sell-outs alike. Coming during the current war, the allegory has been read as pretty straightforward: resistance fighters and suicide bombers are humans too, and are driven to such methods by desperation and military oppression. Bush bad terrorists good.


Spenser is, of course, the reverse. His book on "Justice" involves the expected allegorical personification of justice, who solves moral quandries with intelligence and grace. It also involves his pet iron robot Talus, who slaughters men, women and children by the thousands (and with absolutely no hesitation or regret.) Talus isn't a hero, exactly, but in some way he is a superego--it's fine and good for justice to be set out, and in fact it is necessary. But unless you're willing to go through the practical injustices of slaughter and unrestrained force, no one is ever going to follow your program. It is (as has often been put out) not insignificant that Spenser was an Englishman in Ireland--shortly thereafter he wrote a erudite and intricate analysis of foreign policy recommending the decimation of the Irish (through both slaughter and starvation) in order to civilize Ireland. Justice good, peace is obtained through superior firepower and the willingness to follow through with an invasion.


But I wonder--are both readings really getting at what is going on? Can we convienently group authors into "hawks" and "doves," and relegate the rest of their writings to the support of their independent ideologies?

The answer, unsurprisingly, is "yes." As art distributed in the public forums of their perspective times, both the creators of BSG and Edmund Spenser knew damn well what sort of effect their writings would have. That is, the former humanizes an enemy and therefore weakens our national resolve to kill them for their own good. And the latter shoves the reader up against the impotence of any form of justice that is so bound by its own conscience as to never respond to inhumane violence with inhumane violence. As Spenser later wrote, "better is a mischief [a purposeful evil done by a government] then an inconvenience [a situation in which the rule of law is prohibited because of civil unrest.]"

The answer, as well, is "no." Read in their entirety, the two works offer resistance to simplistic interpretations of their prima facia position.

In BSG, of course, both the political (former Education Secretary and now President Roslyn) and military (Admiral Adama) leadership are repeatedly forced to live in a darkly Spenserian world--from the very first episode, when thousands of civilians are killed at Adama's command, simply because that is the only way to ensure the survival of the human race (they are on a nuclear-powered ship hijacked by Cylons and headed towards the fleet.) Ethical lines are constantly blurred, enemies are arrested, tortured, and executed without trial, all simply because civilization must be maintained if human survival is to continue. The fact that such atrocities are never treated as commonplace or above reproach is besides the point--contrary to the Bush-bad-terrorists-good impression, BSG is constantly in dialog with the way in which liberal debates about human rights are only possible in a place kept safe by military and executive violence.

Nor is Spenser less complicated (in fact, he is quite a bit more subtle--but then, he had the benefit of a better rhetorical education and more time for composition and rewriting.) Talus, notably, is neither human nor noble; it is an impersonal force, whose vicious slaughter of enemies nearly always exceeds the immediate mandate that unleashed his power. His scenes are uncomfortable to modern readers not because we have progressed but because they are intended to be uncomfortable. Throughout the rest of the text Spenser valorizes knightly combat, aliging it with St. Paul's description of the armor of God and the abstract allegory of Christian-as-soldier. But Talus is something else entirely. Talus doesn't seek quarter, he doesn't use a Shield of Faith or the Sword of the Lord. Talus harvests bodies with a giant flail, leaves them in bleeding masses on the ground, and continues slaughtering people until reigned in by a horrified justice.


So what, then, do these stories have to say about Guantanamo Bay, about the continual wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, about the possible invasion of Iran, about the nature of surveliance in wartime? Nothing, perhaps, since they're escapist fantasies. And everything. Both texts offer a remarkably similar entrance into the issues, and a remarkable stubbornness to stay comfortably in the realm of easy and clear decisions. If you pay attention, they should make you think twice about the way you vote, the way you talk, and even the way you think about political issues. But in both cases, I'm not sure that the statement "the author would vote for resolution X" is all that relevant to the way we understand the text--or even the way the creator(s), working in the playground of our civilization and its ideas, want us to understand their creations.

How to Begin an SF or Fantasy story

There is, I think, only one really good beginning to an SF of Fantasy story. It goes like this:

"Reader, imagine this false thing to be true, for just as long as this story lasts. When you're done, then maybe, just maybe, you'll have a bit more wisdom about the world outside our heads. But certainly you'll have a fun time."

Of course, there are a million ways of doing this. "In a hole in a hill there lived a Hobbit" gets the idea across pretty well--we know there aren't Hobbits, but doesn't it sound fun (and maybe there's some Hobbitness in all of us.)

So does "Hwaet! We Gar-Dena in gear-dagum / [th]eod cyninga [th]rym gefrunon" (Loosely: "Lo! We have heard tales of the Spear-Danes, in days of ancient years / those princely-kings.")

Or: "Far out in the uncharted backwaters of the unfashionable end of the western spiral arm of the Galaxy lies a small unregarded yellow sun." Facts are aluded to, but the big emphasis is fantasy: there are things going on in the galaxy, interesting, fascinating, unimaginable things, and we provincial earthlings are just left out of the loop.

Or: "Now is the winter of our discontent / turned to glorious summer by the son of York."

Or: "No one would have believed in the last years of the nineteenth century that this world was being watched keenly and closely by intellegences greater than mans and yet as mortal as his own."

Or, by the same author: "The Time Traveler (for so it will be convienent to speak of him) was expounding a recondite matter to us."

Or even "One morning, as Gregor Samsa was waking up from anxious dreams, he discovered that in bed he had been changed into a monstrous verminous bug."

Or, perhaps the most honest (and trenchantly political of them all), Robert Heinlein's declaration: "Once upon a time there was a Martian named Valentine Michael Smith."



None of these statements prove their premises. This isn't Science Fiction in the strictest form, arguing that something must happen or will happen based on technological advances or societal evolution. This is pure fantasy: "Once upon a time there was" when we know very well there wasn't, and almost certainly never will be.

It is also, I think, what everyone wants when they get a story. Here are words, outside of the reader's immediate experience. It's no less true to make any claim than to say, for instance, "On the morning of Friday, December the 13th, Joe Smith stopped by Starbucks on his way to work." Both are imagined, unreal. Both rely, in the end, on the reader's curiosity. Fantasy just admits the fact.

But exploring these ideas, as any reader of SF or fantasy knows, is as fun as figuring out what it is that makes people tick--probably because the two categories overlap. More fun, really, since psychology is always reductive ("your problem is simply that...") whereas fiction suggests possibilites and often leaves open gaps--the reader gains experiences; psychology merely posits theories and abstractions.



And, fortunately, this mode of thinking--honestly positing falsities in order to suggest realities, is not dead. One of the Nebula-award nominated short stories, "The Ray-Gun: A Love Story," begins:

"This is a story about a ray-gun. The ray-gun will not be explained except to say, "It shoots rays."


It's fantasy, but as the story develops it is also about psychology and ethics and literary criticism and love and heroism and who knows what else. But really, that was all in there from the beginning--after all, we were warned that this was a story about a ray-gun.

CR's Law of Political Delay

When the government and people scream "Crisis!" or "Scandal!" and want dramatic, sudden action.....

don't give it to them.

This applies to wars in which uncertainties about WMD's abound when we're already engaged in a different war that relates to the fight against terrorism.

This applies to the economic collapse, when people want the government to bail out banks NOW.

This applies to the same banks, when they give out bonuses and people want blood and don't care to put too fine a point on contractural law or consequences.

The Greatest XKCD Ever

For a while, I've read the webcomic xkcd. It manages to combine surreal randomness, technical science-based humor that's occasionally beyond my relatively well-educated generally interest, and just plain old-fashioned silliness. If the essence of humor is surprise, kxcd manages that by simply being utterly and bizarrely unpredictable.

And today it outdid itself:


































(Content warning: xkcd can, occasionally, be rather crude. Caveat lector.)

Appropros of Nothing

For a long time, I've heard of the legendary British newspaper, The Daily Mail.

It was a horrible newspaper when Lewis was around, apparently, manufacturing all sorts of false controversies and making apparently conservative but idiotic claims.

The tradition has supposedly carried on today; certainly they have a yearly tradition of printing headlines CHRISTMAS OUTLAWED IN BRITAIN on the basis of a single small town's ruling from many years ago.

But really, I thought, how bad can it be? I mean, if something stays in business that long, it can't be as idiotic as it's made out to be.

Today I was proved wrong.


Not unexpectedly, they posted a news article about the exchange of gifts between Obama and Brown. Apparently Obama carried on the great tradition of giving cheap gifts to the British PM, by offering him 25 classic American films. (On the plus side, this allegedly included ET: The Extra Terrestrial, so it's a good group of classic American films. This is a great relief. If you don't like ET, as everyone knows, you are either a Communist or a Terrorist. Or possibly a Nazi.)

Or so the Daily Mail claims. Normally, I'd believe them on such a factual and provable assertion, but today I'm inclined not to. They go on to show their equally encyclopedic knowledge of Great American Film Quotations:

"And he will hope that at a General Election the British public do not shun his imploration for another term in office by thinking at the ballot box of the famous line from another of the movies, Casblanca: 'Frankly, my dear, I don't give a damn.'"

He should also hope, methinks, that Obama doesn't lead an evil reign of terror and quote from Raiders of the Lost Ark when speaking to Gordon: "Luke, I am your father."

A Lenten Prayer from the Good Old Days

Haven't posted in a while lately--been working on a lot of projects at once, and the few blogs I've been inspired to write never quite got finished.

But thanks to Em the Luddite, I stumbled upon the last poem of Medieval saint Thomas More. Lent, and it seems for me life, is often a dark, confusing place. Too often, a phrase from a C.S. Lewis poem (addressed simultaneouly to God and Joy Gresham) dominates my life: "I speak of love / A scholar's parrot may speak greek." Yet I think More's words, written on the eve of his death, offer an important balm for troubled times--reminding us in a way more contemporary than the dusty past of the Scriptures of the importance, and primacy, of the two commandments that contain all the rest.

It is easier, sometimes, and certainly healthier, to remind ourselves of the fundamentals rather than drowning in the ambiguities and paradoxes of application.

Rede distinctely
pray deuoutly
syghe depely
suffer pacyently
meke youe lowly
giue no sentenc hastely
speke but rathe* and that truly once
preuent youre spech discretely
do all your dedes in charytye
temtacyon resyst strongly
breke his heade shortly
wepe bytterly
haue compassion tenderly
do good workes busyly
loue perseuerently
loue hertely
loue faythfully
loue god all only
and all other for hym charitably
loue in aduersytye
loue in prosperyty
thinke alway of loue for loue ys non other but god hymselfe. Thus to loue bringeth the louer to loue without ende.