If you solve a problem, you can no longer exploit it

My Sunday movie was Mario. Mario plays for the soccer team in Thun, Switzerland. It’s the kind of team that if a guy does well he’ll move on to a better team with a bigger fan base and more money. Mario is hoping for such a contract. He lives with his parents in a nearby town and commutes to the stadium. Leon is also a rising star and new to the team. To save commute time Mario is asked to be Leon’s roommate. They fall in love. But soccer teams, and lots of other sports teams, are quite homophobic. The team management wants to make sure there is no scandal and asks them to appear in public with women. Some of the other players begin to talk of blackmail. Will it be soccer or love? Spoiler alert: Though I won’t reveal the answer to that question, Mario does get a contract with a team in Hamburg, Germany. I wonder how he managed to get such a prize apartment overlooking Hamburg harbor. I finished the book The Essential Dykes to Watch Out For by Alison Bechdel. The book is 390 panels of this comic that ran in alternative newspapers, including Between the Lines in Michigan. What’s in this book are panels that ran from 1987, when it seemed nobody was writing about the lives of lesbians, to 2008. It isn’t just about their love lives (though there is that), it’s about their home lives, jobs, interacting with neighbors and the community, dealing with parents, enduring medical issues, and raising kids – yeah, pretty much like families of straight couples. Which was Bechdel’s point. The main characters are Mo (the one most likely to rant), partners Tony and Clarice and their son Rafael, the friends Lois, Ginger, Sparrow, and Stuart (yeah, a guy) who share a house, Jasmine and her transgender daughter Janis, plus various lovers and other characters. Along the way is a lot of ranting against the politics of the day – this stretches from the end of the Reagan era through Bush I, Clinton, and Bush II. Many times the actions of the characters parallel the actions of the government as a way of showing what the government is doing wrong. An example is Stuart replacing the carpet on the stairs because it smells funky while Ginger insists the smell is coming from the wall, then Stuart doing a bad job laying new carpet. Bechdel makes clear this describes the invasion of Iraq, though the 9/11 terrorists came from Afghanistan and Saudi Arabia. One cool thing is these characters are not static, locked into being the same page to page. In particular Rafael grows from an infant in 1994 to a smart-mouth teen in 2008. These comic panels tell a cohesive story of friends over a 20 year period. Alas, the book’s ending doesn’t really seem like an ending. I read online that Bechdel put the story on hiatus while finishing a book that became Are You My Mother, and has drawn only a few panels since then – the characters reacting to the rise of the nasty guy. I enjoyed the book, though considered stopping reading when yet another character considered infidelity. I’m glad I stuck it out to the end. I downloaded Michigan’s COVID data, updated yesterday. I don’t know yet if I’m looking at a data reporting anomaly (no holidays this past weekend) or actual good news. The weekly peaks in new cases per day are 2786, 2419, 2396, and 1708. The deaths per day remain in the 10-20 range. Michigan will have three proposals to amend the state constitution on the November ballot. This past Sunday the Detroit Free Press recommended we vote yes on all three. Proposal 1 is there through a legislature vote. Instead of restricting a lawmaker to six years in the Michigan House and eight in the Senate, this will allow them to serve a maximum of twelve years in either chamber. To entice voters to go for it there is also a provision for better lawmaker financial reporting. Actually both parts are good. Over 25 years ago citizens voted for term limits so a legislator couldn’t stay there for a lifetime and develop long-term relations with lobbyists. But with legislators there such a short time it is the lobbyists that know what’s going on and run the place. Proposal 2 is enhanced voting access, to counteract the “Secure MI vote,” which was more voter restrictions in disguise. SMV got enough signatures for the legislature to consider it (and bypass the governor’s veto). They haven’t yet because Promote the Vote got a lot more signatures and is on the ballot. Proposal 3 is about abortion rights, which would overturn a 1931 law that bans abortion, and which is prevented from being enacted waiting for how this proposal goes. This one set records for the number of signatures gathered. Definitely yes to all three. Earlier this month Len Niehoff, a professor at the University of Michigan Law School, wrote an opinion piece for the Free Press saying why banning books – which Republicans and “concerned parents” are pushing for at an alarming rate – is a bad idea. First, it doesn’t work. See that thing called the internet. Second, demands a book be banned are often based on misinformation or ignorance. The person requesting removal usually hasn’t read the book and doesn’t know what it is really about. Third, because of the second reason banning a book is hypocritical. It is an exercise of raw power. Fourth, a ban violates the First Amendment which says the government should not be in the business of deciding which ideas we should be and not be exposed to.

Finally, if book banning did succeed at keeping young people from reading what they wanted our society would suffer terribly from the consequences. Reading takes them into other minds, other experiences, other perspectives, other ways of looking at the world. It destabilizes their natural human tendency to believe that everyone sees things like they do. ... No, the greatest evil of book banning is that it has the potential to stunt the empathic development of young people. That’s a serious problem because, given the collective challenges our society currently faces, we need now more than ever the helpers, the people who rush in, the brave souls who will put themselves in between the freedom of the human conscience and the evils that would dispense with it. Banning books fosters the bystander mindset. And that’s how the world ends. Not with a bang. Not with a whimper. But with a passive audience looking on. Silent, indifferent, and inert.

I missed reporting on Banned Books Week, which was last week. This is a time for the American Library Association to highlight, and through that to try to counteract, the efforts of people banning library books. The ALA reports the top ten most challenged books. They also remind us a high percentage of challenges are not reported and receive no media attention. And though the list has ten books, a lot more titles are challenged. In the ten most challenged of 2021 five of them are LGBTQ related, with Gender Queer by Maia Kobabe at the top of the list. Another three are, I think, banned because of race (such as The Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison) though the reasons given for all of the remaining five are because they depict violence or abuse or are sexually explicit. The Hate U Give by Angie Thomas is also challenged “because it was thought to promote an anti-police message and indoctrination of a social agenda.” Leonard Pitts, in an editorial in the Free Press had a critique of the Republican governor’s stunts busing and flying immigrants to Democratic cities. If Republicans wanted to fix immigration, they had plenty of chances, most notably when Bush II proposed a bill in 2006. But they don’t want to fix immigration, they want to campaign off it.

Again, this is not about immigration. It's about cruelty as political stratagem. After all, if you solve a problem, you can no longer exploit it. But leave it unsolved and you can use it to rub raw the emotions of your target audience -- e.g., white people terrified at the browning of America -- and stampede them to the polls.