Flip-Flop

It drives me crazy when someone accuses a political candidate of "flip-flopping". Since when is changing your mind a bad thing? Wouldn't we want leaders who say things like "Well, having thought about the matter, I now realize that I was wrong"? And to make it worse, partisan journalists dredge up stuff that someone said twenty or thirty years ago to prove that so-and-so is an inconstant, untrustworthy flip-flopper.

Holy shit. What's the point of having a brain and at least a flicker of sentience if we can never change our minds? And how far back does it go? Will we be dragging future Supreme Court nominees through the mud because as six-year-olds they said "eww, boys are icky"?

I'd rather have a leader who changes his mind on the basis of new information and prolonged thought that some straitjacketed ideologue who never, ever, changes his mind, often because he subscribes to some essentially anti-intellectual ideology that doesn't brook intellectual dissent. People are complicated. Issues are often complicated. And changing your mind in the face of some complicated issue full of complicated people doesn't sound like weakness to me; it sounds like the sign of a brain at work.

And frankly, if I was today called to account for all the ridiculous things I thought when I was twenty years old, I'd be in a world of trouble. For instance:

* I used to hate Brussels Sprouts

* I used to think Blade Runner was a terrible movie

* I used to listen to Jethro Tull

* I used to think that Zoroastrianism was a dualist religion

* I used to think that barbarian hordes overran and destroyed Imperial Rome

* I used to think that the Battle of the Atlantic was irrelevant to the course of WWII

* I used to think that Blue Oyster Cult was heavy metal

* I used to think that senators and legislators had some vested interest in orderly governance

* I used to think that TV could have didactic purpose

* I used to think that the NEA should support one form of art over another

* I used to think that the stereotype of the loud, boorish, anti-intellectual American was a myth

* I used to think that postmodern "critical analysis" was something worthy of attention

* I used to think that East and West Germany would never reunify in my lifetime

* I used to think that automatic transmissions in cars were for lamers

* I used to think that there should be no speed limit at all

* I used to think that the Space Shuttle was a great idea

* I used to think I understood what Edmund Husserl was talking about

* I used to think that there was something glamorous about air travel

I no longer think such things. Does that make me a flip-flopper? According to American politics, yes, it does, and even worse, I'm not to be trusted with a burnt-out match. Maybe that's why American politics is such a pathetic joke these days.

Roman Perplexity

I've always been perplexed by one thing about Rome (the antique political entity, not the city itself). Actually, a lot of things about Rome perplex me, but the main one is this: given that the Roman people seemed so profoundly disinclined toward the notion of kingship, why did they tolerate a system of emperors, in many cases hereditary emperors, that look a whole lot like kingship? What's the difference?

The story goes that the city of Rome before the advent of the Republic was ruled by seven kings. The last, Tarquin the Proud, supposedly raped a woman named Lucretia. She committed suicide due to the trauma, but before she did, she told her brother Brutus (not the Brutus, merely a Brutus) about the attack. Brutus went on to raise the people of Rome against Tarquin and inaugurated the Roman Republic, with its system of elected magistrates and checks on power in the form of the tribunes of the plebs. From then on, the Romans tended to react quite negatively to the notion of kingship, the way third grade boys tend to react to the notion of girls. Kings, like girls, apparently have cooties.

It's arguable that one of the threads of resentment that led to the assassination of Julius Caesar was the dark suspicion in some quarters that Julius intended to have himself named king. That business where Marc Antony tried to lower a king's crown on Julius's head and he ostentatiously refused it notwithstanding, I wonder if some people worried that he was going to turn into a new Tarquin. That isn't the only thread, of course. Not even the main one. I think the main one was simply Julius Caesar's complete inability to compromise with the senatorial class, and vice versa.

Rome didn't really have political parties in the modern sense of the word, but there were two identifiable lines of political thought in those days. The Optimates generally seemed keen to preserve the rights and privileges of the patricians in general and the senatorial class in particular, while the Populares exhibited a sort of populism and claimed to act in the best interests of all citizens. Any reading of the fate of the Gracchus brothers would reveal that one tinkered with the rights and prerogatives of the senatorial class at one's peril, and one could argue that the day thugs in the employ of the Senate clubbed the elder Gracchus to death, the Republic took its first long step toward autocracy. There was that unpleasantness with Cornelius Sulla and Gaius Marius and all that, but the politically-motivated murders of the Gracchi seem to me to mark a line of departure, the day the Republic started to fall.

(But curse it all, it's very complicated. Another thing that led to the fall of the Republic was winning the first and second Punic Wars and the discovery that the Republican form of government that might be suitable for a small inland Italian city-state was simply not up to the demands of running a country that spanned most of the western Mediterranean. Empire was simply more efficient than Republic, especially since the Romans kept ending up with a bigger and bigger empire to administer, and not always intentionally either.)

But maybe what allowed the Romans to accept the notion of emperors was the idea that emperors had a different public face than kings. Both were absolutist leaders, both tended to be hereditary. But kings were seen as remote and distant - they lazed in their posh villas and were basically never seen by the common people (either patrician or plebian), as distant and unapproachable as the gods on Olympus. But the emperors were much more public. The Romans often referred to them as princeps, or "leading man" or "first citizen". Yeah, there were absolutist leaders, but they were public ones. They were expected to be seen, and to exemplify the hallowed virtues of Rome, virtus and all that. And unlike kings, they had to at least pretend to maintain relations with the senatorial class (in Rome, as in every society, money buys power, often through the direct method of buying soldiers who in turn generate power). It seems notable to me that the emperors that lasted the longest were the ones who were most able to keep peace with the Senate (Augustus, for example, even though Augustus was careful to never refer to himself as an emperor, but he clearly set the stage for Tiberius, who everyone agrees was an emperor).

Anyway. That's all the thinking on Rome I can manage without coffee. I'd make a terrible emperor.

"Princeps, the barbarians are attacking again!"

"Tell them to go away; I haven't finished waking up yet."

The Prison Sentence

I see that people occasionally want to declare George R. R. Martin "the American Tolkien." They can do so if they like, but I don't think I will.

I'm halfway through the fifth book, and aspects of while Fire and Ice thing are starting to really seriously wear out their welcomes with me. The books are slowly becoming more and more tedious to read, and I find myself skimming more and more.

For example, I don't need to know the following:

* What anyone is wearing

* What anyone is eating

* What songs anyone is singing (I swear, if I am reminded of that "A bear, a bear" song one more time, I may shriek.

* What subsidiary banners fly from what castle's walls

* What the "words" of the houses are

* The names of people who could just as well be anonymous

Admirers of this sort of thing may argue that all this needless palaver lends verisimilitude, but to me, it's like hanging out with a hard-core SCA geek: it's fun for a while, but comes a time when it starts to become tedious, even a little annoying.

But I think the thing that wears on me the most is the endless cynicism of the whole series. Admirers of this sort of thing will probably say that the deep cynicism of the series lends even more verisimilitude; that people really are that self-interested and ignoble. Maybe. But I think that when you put the label "fantasy" on a book cover, realism becomes entirely moot, and I find myself preferring the hints of nobility in Tolkien's writing over the endless barbarism of Martin's. Oh great, another ten-page digression on alliance-by-marriage. Skim. Oh great, another ten-page digression on who has the stronger claim to what throne. Skim. It's an endless procession of murder, insanity, incest, naked ambition, rape, regicide, patricide, fratricide, probably matricide, hanging, torture, mutilation, cruelty, bowel movements, cannibalism, bestiality, greed, and hypocrisy.

Realistic? Sure. But just because it's realistic doesn't mean I want to read about it either. I like to read the occasional fantasy novel as an escape, but Fire and Ice is less an escape than a prison sentence.

It isn't all bad. It has interesting ideas and interesting characters, and I am curious how certain things come out in the end. But it's also bloated, slow, tedious, cynical, encrusted with far too much irrelevant detail, and not especially entertaining, at least in my opinion.