Who Do You Believe?
Early yesterday, I read a horrifying link someone posted on Twitter about Daniel Tosh making a rather horrible rape joke. I read the incident, which boiled down to “This woman who I don’t know at all said that Daniel Tosh did something truly horrible.” And I went, “Well, Daniel Tosh is a douche, and this certainly sounds like something he might do… but in the end, I have zero idea who this woman is and I’m not entirely sure I want to spread this around as though it were factually reported.”
So I didn’t Tweet it. I would have if I’d known this person, or someone I trusted knew her… but I didn’t feel comfortable disseminating information to thousands of people without more than “one woman was really upset.”
Yet thousands of people did feel comfortable passing that along. And so it blew up into a huge PR fiasco for Mr. Tosh, who half-heartedly apologized in that haphazard way that comedians do (“I’m sorry if I offended you, but I’m here to talk about uncomfortable things!”).
But I still don’t know what happened.
There’s no video, like the Michael Richards stupidity of a few years ago – just this one person who is very, very upset. And the club owner, who was also there, claims that things happened differently. And okay, the club owner sounds a tad douchey himself (“If you’re offended, why would you take a couple tickets to come back to the club again?” – well, probably because you weren’t willing to offer cash refunds, dude, and they felt you giving them something in recompense is better than nothing).
But as far as the actual joke itself, I have yet to see hard facts on the ground about what exactly what was said. No video, just two people batting interpretations back and forth. And that’s troubling to me.
On the one hand, this issue raises some very valid conversations about rape and comedy: is someone objecting to objectionable material a dumb heckler, or a woman taking a bold and necessary stand? How do rape jokes make it easier for rapists to justify their actions? (Because, y’know, they kinda do.) What sorts of subjects are okay to make fun of? When does responding to a heckler become an act of oppression?
All good questions. I’m glad to see them raised. These furor-storms are useful for raising awareness of tricky issues.
But perhaps I’m unusual in that I also want to know that the incident that triggered it was reported accurately.
Sure, it sounds like something Tosh would have said, because based on past actions, Tosh is a creep. I have zero doubt he made a rape joke that wasn’t funny at all. But was he actually encouraging the rape of the woman in the audience by saying it’d be high-sterical if five audience members gang-raped her right now?
I dunno. Conservatives I know pass on links about things that sound good to them, and they don’t fact-check either, and they phrase them as though this totally happened. And then, when it turns out things didn’t quite happen in that way, they shrug and say, “Well, this is the sort of thing that does happen all the time, so the truth doesn’t matter.” And I think it does. I think when someone who isn’t on your side finds out that you’re just sort of hand-waving the facts at the center of things, it calls all the rest of your argument into doubt. It makes it easier for those who don’t want to think about ugly truths to go, “Well, that never happened, so nothing like it ever happened.”
And had the majority of Tweets started with, “This is what someone claims,” then I’d be cool. But most of it is, “This one stranger’s word is enough to build a whole case on!” And I’m cynical that even if I hear something that totally sounds like something someone I absolutely despise would do, I wait for at least a secondary confirmation.
(And maybe her version of events was confirmed – I’m not following all the links. But if so, the confirmation certainly hasn’t circulated to the extent that the original version has. At this point, given the two data points, I’m far more willing to take her word over the comedy club owner, who goes the old route of “Hey, if 300 people are applauding, can it be bad?” and then I bite my tongue to avoid invoking Godwin’s Law.)
Maybe that lack of verifiability is a good thing. Because hell, if the only time a link got circulated was if the Tweeter knew the originator (or knew someone who knew someone who did), then most outrageous stories would get zero traction at all. And as I will stress, again, it’s good to have these kinds of difficult conversations. If someone’s acted like a douche on the level that Tosh supposedly has, then he should be called out, and should have to deal with some debate as to his actions. As should any public figure.
Yet I kind of wish we also took a second to put some disclaimer in. Not “This is what happened,” but “If true, this is terrible.” Though I suppose that distinction’s a little too long for a Tweet.
A True Escape
Without getting into details, last night my older daughter got some very bad news – the kind of news where you stay up all night, staring at the ceiling, wondering about an uncertain future. She sat on our couch, numbly, while we tried to comfort her.
“Do you want to see a movie?”
“…no, I don’t think that would help.”
“Do you want to walk down by the docks?”
“No.”
“Do you want to go hang with some of our friends, who are wise and may provide comfort?”
“No.”
“You wanna hack up some orcs?”
Now, it must be said that I am not a naturally improvisational DM. Oh, I’ll roll with the punches once the game starts flying – but when it comes to roleplaying adventures, I can’t just do “So you meet at the inn” and then make up stuff on the fly. So I ran downstairs and searched through my collection of RPGs to see what I had in terms of canned adventures that I could run my daughter through.
Mostly Call of Cthulhu. Hrm. Not the sort of one-shot you want to give to someone who’s down on life right now.
All right, said I, this will have to be in a world I’m familiar with. So I flipped through the Planescape Monster Manuals until I found an appropriate monster to hunt (a Sword Spirit), then called my kid and my wife downstairs to take them back to the campaign I ran for five years: Sigil, heart of the multiverse, the Casablanca of the planes.
I handed her a character sheet for a character she’d played twice, tentatively, back when she was seventeen, a Harmonium officer/ninja called “Officer Sunshine.” Gini stepped back into her role of Ardenal, rock-demon ninja. And so began an elaborate campaign that involved the usual Sigilian assortment of phoenix egg-juggling thieves, baatezu weaponsmiths, the best book shop in the planes and a rain of illusionary halibut, a trip through the dregs of the Hive and a chance to save some impoverished souls from certain death from an exploding weapons cache, culminating in a climactic battle against a whirling tornado of magical weapons.
They defeated the Cuisinart using teamwork, Ardenal distracting it while Officer Sunshine made a called shot to the spirit in the center that powered it. And two and a half hours later, it was done.
My daughter hugged me, smiling for the first time since she’d gotten the news. And I thought: this is why roleplaying has endured. I remember getting kicked around in middle school, the constant slaps and stings of bullies, failing my classes, feeling like a loser. Yet when Bryan set up that DM screen and I became Delvin Goodheart, with my improbable loot in the form of a +5 vorpal sword and my Invulnerable Coat of Arnd, for a while I could wander around in someone else’s world and be a hero.
Last night, I managed that for someone who needed it. And I all I could think was, “Play it forward, man, play it forward.”
Two Sales! "Shadow Transit" To Buzzy Mag, And "Shoebox Heaven" to ASIM!
I’m pretty weird about announcing sales; everyone else yells out their triumph when they get the email. Me? Paranoid, I wait for the contract. But I’m going to try to change things up.
The first sale is an extremely happy one, as it’s a very special story about a mother trying to deal with the ramification of Cthulhu. “Shadow Transit” is the first (and only) tale I’ve ever written that inspired a fellow workshop writer to pen a story in the same universe, with the same characters. (And I sincerely hope George sells that story somewhere! He did a great job!)
“Shadow Transit” bounced around for a while, getting wonderful feedback from editors who rejected it because it’s a weirdie tale – too horror-tinged for science fiction mags, too science-fictiony for the straight horror tales. People seemed to like it (and I even got a few rewrite requests), but it never seemed to land. Fortunately, Buzzy Mag – an up-and-coming professional zine who’s already published some great writers – has taken it. Now, my Delta Green-inspired story about a mother trying to care for her insane child will find a home. And I’m happy. Even if my lead characters aren’t.
The second sale is “Shoebox Heaven,” which is a story that’s gotten some bizarre reactions. I’ve had slush readers come up to me at cons and ask, “Hey, did you ever sell that story about the boy flying to heaven to find his dead cat?” Not once, but twice. Even if the editors didn’t buy it, clearly “Shoebox Heaven” made an impression. And I actually did sell it once, to an anthology that dicked me around for a year and ultimately collapsed. Fortunately, even though I have yet to get the contract, I trust Andromeda Spaceways Inflight Magazine – you may remember them for publishing my time travel story “The Backdated Romance” – and they have taken it! So yay! You will eventually get to read the tale of the kid who flies to meet some very angry angels.
Son, I Am Disappoint: The Terror Of OBAMACARE
If I was a kid listening to the news, I’d think OBAMACARE was some troll that lived under a bridge and ate people’s hearts. The word gets tossed around like a football – and I mean that literally. Have the Democrats fumbled OBAMACARE? No, wait, the Republicans have got their hands on it! No, wait, the Supreme Court saved OBAMACARE! Who’s winning in the great OBAMACARE game?
And I’m pissed at Obama, because for a legislative package that’s literally got his name on it, he doesn’t seem to care that anyone understands what it does.
Look, I voted for Obama on the strength of one book: The Audacity of Hope made me think, “Man, this is a guy who knows how to communicate complicated ideas. This is who I want in office, pushing my Democratic agenda.”
Instead, what I got was a genius politician. Seriously. For all of the Republican smear campaigns crying, “Why, he’s as inexperienced as a child! He’ll paw like a confused kitten at the levers of government if elected!”, they forgot that Obama got his start in backroom-dominated Chicago, and wouldn’t have gotten as far as he had if he didn’t understand the rules of the game. So he snuck through Obamacare in what was a magnificent act of legislative juggling, making all the right concessions to do something no other President has ever been able to do.
The problem is, he was so busy getting shit done in the halls of Congress that he forgot to speak to the streets. And FOX News and company dominated the conversation, talking about OBAMACARE as though it was a dirty bomb someone had smuggled into a church. Did the man on the street know what OBAMACARE did? Fuck no. But he DID know that Obama had pulled off kind of a sneaky trick to pass it, and Obama certainly hadn’t stumped for it in the same way he’d run for election, and he decided that OBAMACARE didn’t pass the sniff test.
So America dislikes it. And they STILL don’t fucking know what it does. The number of times I saw this “Explain Obamacare to me like I’m five” link passed around Twitter by people expressing surprise (“Oh, it does THAT?”) by progressives was amazing. Here’s Twitter, where people are usually a little more politically involved, and here’s liberals, who should have a good grasp on the overall picture, and they’re still like, “What?” To this day, when I’ve seen people polled on the individual things that Obamacare provides, and the results appear to be, “Yeah, I like that. And I like that. And that’s good. But I despise OBAMACARE like it was the love child of Hitler and Sauron!”
I do not think, as many conservatives would have me believe, that the man on the street has done a complex analysis of the many contributing factors of the insurance companies and the overall economic picture and the long-term effects and come on the downside.
I believe, rather, that Obama’s done such an astonishingly shitty job of touting his plan that people don’t actually know what benefits it provides.
So now that it’s officially here to stay, why isn’t Obama taking ads out in every state talking about what OBAMACARE does? Why aren’t there thirty-second commercials saying, “My child got cancer, and when I switched jobs the insurance company told me they wouldn’t insure him because, well, he had cancer. Thanks to Obamacare, they can no longer deny children for pre-existing conditions.” Or “My insurance company turned me down for treatment for my emphysema. No reason. They didn’t have to tell me why, and if I didn’t like it all I could do was hire a lawyer. Now, thanks to Obamacare, there’s an appeals process I can go to without having to spend $2,000 to retain an attorney.”
Why is Obama so concerned with passing laws and so little concerned with changing hearts? There’s a lot that people like in this bill, and he’s inextricably associated with it. If people think better of it, they’ll think better of him. So why is OBAMACARE still treated like a ticking time bomb that Jack Bauer needs to defuse, its innards mysterious?
That’s fucktastic long-term politics. Yes, Obama, you passed the law and the Supreme Court, by luck more than skill, upheld it. (I don’t think anyone saw Roberts coming down on your side, son.) But because America’s still treating OBAMACARE like it’s a tumor in the genitals, but if they understood it, then at least they’d see that there are tradeoffs.
Obama needs to start using some of the Audacity of Hope on America, explaining the healthcare bill’s strengths in a bombardment. Otherwise, it’ll remain so hated that legislators will have voter support in getting rid of it, without the voters even really understanding what they’re doing.
(And yes, he’ll get pushback from the Republicans on it, but at this point Obama literally can’t talk about pushups without Republicans bitching about it. Blowback is not an excuse for inaction, because frankly there are enough stupid-crazy conservatives who feel Obama’s doing too much by drawing breath.)
"The Insomniac Treehouses" Is The Name Of My Next Band
So I was going to write a big ol’ essay on The Need For Predicting The Future today, but this weekend’s insomnia killed it. I got five hours of sleep on Friday night, three hours on Sunday, and fortunately I slept well last night but now I’m drunk on sleep and damn near falling into snoozeland on my keyboard.
So instead, I’m gonna ask you to do a thought exercise. If you’re a member of the Clarion Echo, my Blog-A-Thon writing community where I’m plotting my current novel (join for a mere $5 donation to the cause!), you’ll know why I’m asking you, but if not, well, y’all can just wonder. But let us posit this:
You are fourteen. You live near some deep woods. A friend of yours has created the most kickass tree-house you can imagine, next to a waterfall and some caves, devoting hundreds of hours to its creation: it’s not just in the trees, but a sprawling, Winchester Mansion-style home looped among the hills and open spaces. It has no electricity (she’s opposed to hauling a generator out here on principle), but it can have anything else a dedicated teenager could haul through two miles of dense woods out to the spot.
What’s the coolest thing in it?