Bad Karma

It isn't easy to understand this statute.  For me, at least.

Just what is Teddy Roosevelt supposed to be doing (besides riding a horse)?  Is he going somewhere?  If so, where? Why are an African and a Native American walking beside him?  Why would three such persons and a horse come together in the manner portrayed?

Obviously they wouldn't.  I suppose it would be possible they could meet together in some fantasy novel or movie (I think of Philip Jose Farmer's Riverworld series, where everyone who has ever died comes back to life on the banks of an incredibly long river and must interact).  But it's unlikely that's what the sculptor had in mind.

From what I read, the standing or walking figures are intended to represent continents, presumably North America and Africa.  That TR as he was called has a connection with North America, indeed with both American continents, is obvious.  It isn't clear to me what he had to do with Africa, however, unless he visited it to kill large animals with guns as I assume he did, or perhaps visit the Pyramids.  Personally, I don't think that merits a statute.  

The use of figures to represent continents or cities or peoples was once fairly common in art, and that was the case for a long time.  The Romans were inclined to do this.  Coins or reliefs showing figures representing Britannia, Germania, Judea etc., in chains or kneeling before an emperor or Rome personified were produced in response to many conquests.

Assume these figures with TR represent continents.  What then?  Why is TR riding a horse between Africa and, say, North America?  Is he supposed to unite them in some sense, or lead them?  Is he a bridge between them?

Probably not.  As I confessed, I don't really know what was intended.  I can't speak to the intent of the sculptor or whoever commissioned the statue.  I can merely speak to my impression of it and my impression of it is first that it is weird, and second that it seems to depict the standing or walking figures as lesser than the figure riding a horse between them for God knows what reason.  Indeed, subservient to the rider, in the sense that anyone on foot next to someone on horseback feels at a disadvantage; whenever one sees a person on foot and one on a horse in some movie, the person on foot is in most cases subordinate to the one on the horse.

I would have no objection to the removal of the statue solely because I think it's weird.  But the depiction of a white man riding a horse between a Native American and an African is of course particularly disturbing at this time.

At this time.  It should, of course, be disturbing at all times.  But if what is happening now in the form of protests and statue removal and the reaction to them is any indication, we can hope that this time many if not most of us are offended when others demean or oppress people merely because they exist and are not caucasian, or white.

No rational person, I think, can claim that this nation's treatment of the indigenous peoples and those taken from Africa to be sold and treated as property was not extraordinarily terrible, and remains immoral.  The reasons given for the extermination, oppression and discrimination in the past were always self-serving and incredible, and are being given less and less credence as time passes.  Read John Calhoun's defense of slavery, if you can, and, as they say, weep.

What will happen, this time?  One wonders if there's truth in the doctrine of karma.  As I understand it, karma is the belief that the sum of a person's actions in this and previous existences decides a person's fate in the future.  If karma may be applied to nations, we have much to worry about.  Other nations would as well, of course.  But we're here, and this is now.

William Gibson and the Creation of Worlds

I'm rereading Neuromancer and am moved to comment on what makes the superior writer of what's called science fiction such a boon to those who love to read.

All know William Gibson as the creator of cyberpunk, the man who named cyberspace, the matrix, who coined so many words and phrases now in common use when the Internet as we know it did not yet exist.  But reading this early work I'm struck by the imposing realness of the world he creates in this novel, and detailed in the subsequent novels Count Zero and Mona Lisa Overdrive.  As far as I'm concerned, our Internet is far less interesting than the artificial reality he described as accessed by his computer cowboys, though it is not (yet?) here in our world.  But the world in which his cowboys lived and, sometimes, thrived, bears considerable resemblance to the one in which we live.

Consider the ubiquity of drugs use in that world, the omnipresence of new and interesting technologies, the significance of money, the grittiness of the urban landscapes in which people live and die, deals are made and information obtained and traded, the twisting of medicine and genetics to doing service in making money and pursuing and exercising power though the enhancement of physical and mental abilities.  The latter may not be here yet, but one feels that it will come; that it must come.

For some reason, when I try to visualize the world that Gibson shows us in these novels, the landscapes we see in the movie Blade Runner always comes to my mind.  That's what I see when the Sprawl or Chiba City are mentioned.  I'm surprised that a movie hasn't been made of Neuromancer.  I would prefer such a movie to the sword and sorcery epics we're being dubiously treated to instead in the form of Lord of the Rings and Game of Thrones and their imitations.  Odd that we obsess over faux castles and kingdoms, swords and magic; there's something adolescent about it.

Which is not to criticize either Tolkien or George R.R. Martin, both of them being superb creators of worlds themselves.  Other such creators are (or were) Frank Herbert who made the Dune universe, and Philip Jose Farmer for his Riverworld.  C.J. Cherryh has made more than one interesting world, as has Dan Simmons, the maker of Hyperion and the Shrike.  Orson Scott Card, when he is not busy moralizing, has also manufactured fascinating alternate realities.

It is unsurprising that it is in science fiction and fantasy that the worlds are created and live and are experienced.  Nowhere else is the imagination given such free reign; nowhere else is it the case that new and different realities are expected.  But it is the gift of Gibson and others to make these realities simultaneously familiar and unfamiliar.  Outlandish worlds somehow turn out to be uninteresting.  It's impossible to picture oneself in worlds that are entirely unreal, and one must picture oneself somewhere in order for it to hold one's interest and attention; in order for it to be worth the effort of reading or thinking, or dreaming. 

Science fiction is a curious genre, though.  Great science fiction can fascinate in a good way, but science fiction that is not great can fascinate in a bad way.  The many versions of Star Trek and Star Wars are examples of science fiction that is not great.  They are not bad, really, but they are silly.  This may come of the need evidently felt to come up with aliens who always seem to be far too much like human beings, but human beings who are comical or irritating or mystical in one sense or another and used as expositive devices.  We see the results of the fascination with science fiction that is not great in conventions and cosplay, in a devotion to the Klingon language or to The Force, in dreaming one is a Jedi Knight or superhero. 

The worlds of great science fiction are disturbingly real; those of science fiction that is not great are cartoonish.  It's regrettable that the science fiction we see translated into visual media these days is that science fiction which generates cartoon realities, primarily those of the superhero.  This suggests we desire to escape our own world, which is understandable.  But to escape into cartoons is only to escape reality, not to reimagine it and think of it.