Not at all about writing

I Want Swoopy Spaceships!

/ JD Byrne / 1 Comment

Confession time. I have been a consumer – reader, watcher, even listener – of science fiction for most of life. I consider it my first love, even though when I write I tend to drift into fantasy more often than not. That’s not the confessional bit (not in 2016, for crying out loud!). No, the confessional bit is this:

I don’t really care that much about the scientific accuracy of my science fiction.

There, I said it!

Now, I’m not saying I completely switch off my brain when something walks into the room with “sci-fi” written all over it. We all have our flying snowmen points after all. But some of the things I see other sci-fi fans complain about – like movies with sound in space or faster-than-light travel – just don’t bother me that much. I kind of appreciate it when somebody decides to get it “right” and see where that goes, but I’m perfectly happy to nod and move on otherwise, so long as the story and characters are engaging.

All this is a way of saying I’m deeply bummed by the current state of spaceship design in visual sci-fi. Particularly, I’m disappointed that the ships in The Expanse look so damned ugly.

The Expanse is another attempt by SyFy to regain its footing as a decent home for science fiction on television. Based on the novels by James S. A. Corey (actually two authors working together), it’s set at a time in the future where humanity has expanded into the solar system, but not yet beyond it. With that caveat, it’s a space opera as you can get, with character shuttling off from planet to asteroid to space station as the plot requires. The books (at least the first two) are damned good and the TV series is doing an all right job with the adaptation.

A big part of said shuffling involves a ship called the Rocinante. Yes, it’s named after Don Quixote’s horse. It also happens to be the name of the narrator’s ship in Rush’s epics “Cygnus X-1” and “Hemispheres” in which he is “sailing through the galaxy.” When I pictured the Roci in my head (because I don’t remember a description from the text) I imagined something sleek, swoopy, and sexy. Truth is, I almost always think of space ships like the Heart of Gold:

one hundred and fifty meters long, shaped like a sleek running shoe, perfectly white and mind-bogglingly beautiful.

On TV there is no such leeway, however. The Roci looks like it looks and, depressingly, it looks like this:

Rocinante

This may be a very realistic conception of what such a ship would really look like. But, damn, it’s dull. Others will disagree – some folks value practicality when making an aesthetic judgment and who am I to say they’re wrong? It just bums me out a bit.

I’ve seen a similar transformation in the design of race cars over the years. When I was younger and first getting into racing, this is what a top of the line prototype sports car looked like:

Jaguar-XJR-8

lowenbrau-porsche-962_16c_apr-86

Mazda-RX-792P1-500x250

Now, as the black science of aerodynamics has continued to develop and every part of the car has to produce downforce, they’ve become this:

Audi R18 at the 1000km of Spa 2011. Picture was taken during the warm-up.

Don’t get me wrong – the modern car would run circles around the older ones. There’s something to be said for finding beauty in performance. But at the same time, it’s hard not to see that something’s lacking in the modern era.

Same goes with the modern visual depictions of spacecraft. Realism counts for a lot and I don’t begrudge anyone who prizes that in their sci-fi. But that doesn’t keep me from being disappointed.

I want my swoopy spaceships back. And race cars, too.

When Law and Literature Collide

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Let’s get one thing straight up front – any state that wants to throw someone in jail for criticizing its leader is repressive and not a friend to human rights. If free speech means anything, it means being able to say impolite things about those who wield power over you. Wherever the line is drawn when it comes to such things we should all be able to agree that, say, making fun of the king’s dog shouldn’t be a jailable offense.

Having said that, sometimes regimes that are so intent on maintaining their honor that they’ll lock citizens up for saying mean things about them at least make for interesting entertainment.

Consider the ludicrous prosecution of physician Bilgin Çiftçi in Turkey (via). His supposed crime? He shared a meme that compared president Tayyip Erdogan to Gollum from Lord of the Rings, particularly the Andy Sekris-inhabited version from the movies. Something like this:

o-RECEP-TAYYIP-ERDOGAN-GOLLUM-SMEAGOL-LORD-OF-THE-facebook

Stuck with a horribly oppressive law, Çiftçi is doing the only thing he could in his defense – he’s leaning in:

when he appeared in court, Çiftçi insisted that he hadn’t insulted anyone at all. For all his slimy skin and questionable syntactic habits, many say Gollum is not a villain. He may even be a hero. After all, it was he who freed Middle Earth from the tyranny of the ring by biting it off of Frodo’s finger and (albeit inadvertently) plunging with it into the lava roiling inside Mount Doom.

That might have been good enough – sure, it’s a post hoc justification most likely, but it’s plausible. We’re talking about art here, something open to multiple interpretations none of which are “wrong.” Alas, it wasn’t, leading to the court to summon an expert panel of five people (academics, psychologists, and a TV/movie expert) to weigh in on the merits. No word yet (that I can find) on the verdict.

Let’s hope Çiftçi’s ploy works, as he faces up to four years in prison if it doesn’t.

At least he’s not in Thailand, where the law prohibits anybody criticizing or making fun of the (largely ceremonial) king, even a king that’s been dead since 1605. The “lèse-majesté” even trips up unwary diplomats, such as US ambassador Glyn Davies (who, given his line of work, ought to know better). It even extends to making fun of the king’s dog, for which one unwary Facebook user is facing a potential 37(!) years in prison! He may not have as clever a defense:

‘I never imagined they would use the law for the royal dog,’ Siripaiboon’s lawyer told the Times. ‘It’s nonsense.’

It is nonsense, but not because it’s a law being stretched beyond its reasonable limits. It’s nonsense because such laws shouldn’t exist in the first place. They’re designed to be used unreasonably to stifle legitimate dissent and soothe hurt feelings. Being a president or a king (or even the king’s dogs) requires a little bit thicker skin.

When Law and Soccer Collide

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In the United States, we generally think of sports team logos getting in trouble with modern law, bowing to the changing perceptions of a (hopefully) more inclusive population. However, that’s not always the case, particularly when you’ve got a legal foundation that goes back well beyond 1776.

Consider this Big Soccer article about Ayr United, currently playing in the third tier of Scottish soccer (confusingly called League One – just trust me). They’ve been on a roll on the field, but could run afoul of the law off of it, all due to their team crest, which is this:

AUFC Crest

Nice, huh? It’s been around since the 1950s, but is in danger of something that’ s been around much longer – a law about heraldry that dates back to 1592. England has a civil court to deal with heraldry, but Scotland’s body, the Lyon Court (presided over by Lord Lyon, King of Arms, naturally) is a little more hard core:

In Scotland however, infractions in heraldry are actually a criminal matter and nobody can legally use any sort of heraldic device without the approval of the Lord Lyon, who has the power to have any unapproved heraldic devices, and anything they are attached to, destroyed. This means that if Ayr make no changes to their emblem, the Lord Lyon could destroy all team kit and merchandise.

Another club in Ayr’s league, Airdire United, actually did the latter when their crest came under scrutiny.

Why Ayr and why now? The Lyon Court only investigates things brought to its attention, so somebody must have ratted (suspicion falls on fans from rivals Kilmarnock because, naturally, an Ayr fan ratted them out decades ago). Having said that, one Scottish attorney estimates that 25 of Scotland’s 42 professional soccer clubs might have similar issues.

I like the conclusion the article writer reaches:

It may seem as though Ayr United and the clubs before them are being unfairly treated, but I should point out that the Lyon Court is there to uphold the law. It may be a ridiculous anachronism of a law, but it’s still the law, and if the Lyon Court decide that a prosecution is in the public interest, then that’s what they’ll do.

That’s why it’s important for legislative bodies to go back through old laws and clear out those that are outdated and never enforced. Not only do they undermine confidence in the law, the provide troublemakers, whether of the elected or civilian variety, with tools to harass their rivals. The UK is currently in the middle of such a project, looking to strike old laws from things like wearing armor in Parliament to handling salmon “under suspicious circumstances.” Hard to say whether that would reach so far as the Lyon Court, however. I’m guessing not.

So loopholes it is for Ayr United.

Why I Love The Knick

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One of the side effects of living in the Golden Age of Television is that there’s so much good stuff out there it’s just a fact of life that some really good shows get overlooked. Take, for example, The Knick, which is two episodes into its second season run. Helmed by Steven Soderbergh (and created by Jack Amiel and Michael Begler), the show has all the hallmarks of being one of those everybody-talks-about it cable shows. Only it isn’t.

I can fathom a couple of reasons for this. For one thing, Friday nights have never been great for struggling TV series (ask Joss Whedon). For another, Cinemax has yet to have its critical and cultural breakout series like HBO and Showtime have. People might be forgiven for still thinking of it as Skinamax first and foremost, which probably doesn’t help the show’s profile.

Which is a shame, because The Knick‘s become one of my favorite shows on TV right now. Part of that’s down to the wonderful world building that’s inherent in a show that’s set in 1900-1901 (I discussed something similar in an old review of Mad Men). But part of it’s down to one element of the show that’s a complete and utter anachronism – the score.

Cliff Martinez – a long-time Soderbergh collaborator – could have taken the safe route and used music of the period (or new music styled to sound like the music of the period) as a means to deepen the world building. Instead, the score is entirely electronic, full of burbling sequencers and noises that weren’t even contemplated in 1901, much less actually heard. It shouldn’t work, but it does, and brilliantly.

I think that’s because the story of The Knick is one of cutting edge advancements in science, even if it’s science that’s more than 100 years old and sometimes hilariously wrong. Even though electronic music has been around in popular culture for decades it still sounds vaguely “futuristic.”

But it also allows Martinez to do things in service of the story telling that would be impossible with a more traditional score. Brandon Nowalk, writing about the latest episode at the AV Club, describes one example. It involves a regular character’s father, a preacher, who comes to visit from home (which is West Virginia, if I’m not mistaken). Naturally, he winds up preaching:

He talks about the diversity of New York City and how all its exotic peoples have as much to learn from them, good God-fearing Christians, as they do from the exotic peoples. Okay, he speaks in tongues a few times. It’s a ballsy move after calling actual Earth languages he’s overheard on his visit “strange tongues from Babel.” He claims it’s God speaking through him. And then composer Cliff Martinez, whose work is often beyond my ability to express, ramps up the theremin sounds like it’s a classic sci-fi horror scene. AD invites the congregation to sing, and we pan back to Lucy, joining in with everyone else without hesitation. Soon the spooky sounds drown out the singing so we’re watching a silent group move in unison to the oooh-OOOH of the theremins and thump-thump-thump of the beat. There’s no clue in Lucy’s performance as to what could be the matter, but maybe that mindless conformism is the point, a demonstration of AD’s power. It’s a thrilling scene that somehow remains essentially elusive.

You can see that scene for yourself here. It’s just one example, but it’s a really good one. And while that’s only one aspect of a show that’s really hitting on all cylinders, it’s the one that most clearly sets it apart from its peers.

What Is Criminal Law, Chopped Liver?

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Thanks to Orin Kerr over at Volokh, I saw this piece for a recent issue of Time magazine in which numerous scholars were asked to name the best and worst Supreme Court decisions since 1960. As with most such lists it’s only interesting in prompting discussion, not as a real normative exercise. It’s also interesting for what is completely absent from the discussion.

The cases mentioned, either good or bad, all tend to be cases involving interpretation of the Constitution, rather than statutory or regulatory cases. That makes sense – statutory or regulatory decisions that get it “wrong” can be effectively overruled by Congress or the executive branch. Constitutional rulings, for good or ill, hang around longer.

Nor am I as surprised as Kerr that the folks sampled focused more on the long-term impact of a particular case than the legal reasoning of it. While lawyers and academics may get caught up in the details of legal reasoning, in the real world a case’s impact is the only thing that really matters. A well-reasoned case that reaches a wrong or otherwise bad conclusion still strikes me as a “bad” decision.

But putting all that to one side, while the cases cited by the panel cover a wide range of topics – free speech, racial and LGBT equality, federalism, etc. – there’s one area that’s overlooked completely. Much to my surprise, nobody thought a decision involving criminal law was among the Court’s best or worst in the last seven and a half decades.

A caveat – I realize that some cases that deal with other issues are criminal cases. I’m thinking of Texas v. Johnson, which involved flag burning. It only got to the Court because someone got prosecuted, but it’s really a First Amendment case, not a criminal law case. On garden variety bread and butter criminal cases, the surveyed experts are oddly silent.

Consider some of the landmark criminal law decisions issued by the Supreme Court since 1960:

  • Miranda v. Arizona (1966): Of “You have the right to remain silent . . .” fame.
  • Gideon v. Wainwright (1963): Of “if you cannot afford an attorney, one will be provided to you at no charge” fame.
  • Terry v. Ohio (1968): The birth of “reasonable suspicion” as a part of Fourth Amendment jurisprudence and, arguably, the beginning of the end of the Fourth Amendment.
  • Whren v. United States (1996): Enshrining the “objective” analysis for Fourth Amendment issues, effectively allowing cops to make stops on pretextural grounds.
  • Ohio v. Roberts (1980) & Crawford v. Washington (2004): Two for the price of one – in Roberts, the Court largely eviscerated the Sixth Amendment’s right to confrontation, so long as the evidence in question was otherwise “reliable,” while in Crawford the Court reversed, and held that confrontation itself is the Constitutional engine of reliability.
  • Apprendi v. New Jersey (2000): Holding that the Sixth Amendment required any fact that enhances a sentence to be alleged in an indictment and proven to a jury beyond a reasonable doubt. The basis, eventually (in United States v. Booker [2005]), for the declaration that the United States Sentencing Guidelines were, as enacted, unconstitutional.

And that overlooks every death penalty case for the past several decades. Given that all these cases involve interpretation of the Constitution and have had far reaching impacts (for good or ill – pick you side), it seems strange that not one of the 15 people interviewed for the Time piece picked one. The question is why?

Maybe it’s just a matter of limited room. In any “best/worst” list there’s going to be worthy items that just miss making the cut. Maybe some (or all) of those cases were considered and rejected. A lot of second choices, perhaps.

But I can’t help shake the idea that, just maybe, not a lot of people give a shit about criminal law, unless they’re directly involved in it. It’s easy to see yourself involved with a First Amendment issue or concerned about equality under the law. Less so when it comes to criminal procedure. Most people don’t care about things like confrontation of witnesses or appointed lawyers until they need it themselves. That’s partly why only now, after decades of unprecedented incarceration, does the public at large seem concerned about it.

Perhaps I undersell the academics in the Time piece. I hope so. One of the things that legal scholars and those of us in the legal community need to do a better job of doing is impressing upon people how issues that don’t necessarily impact them directly still need their attention when it comes to politics and policy. One way to do that would be to acknowledge how important the Supreme Court’s criminal docket is.

Why The Muppets Doesn’t Work For Me

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Last week, I had a chance to watch the pilot of the newest version of the Muppets, this time a prime-time sitcom called (creatively) The Muppets. In many ways it’s a setup taken from the beloved Muppet Show of the 1970s – our gang gets together and puts on a show every week, with backstage wackiness providing grist for the comedy mill. But something didn’t sit quite right about it with me:

There were a few good jokes, and it’s always good to see Dr. Teeth and crew back on TV, but the whole thing just didn’t work for me. I thought about it for a bit and finally figured out why. There’s one important difference between the classic Muppet Show and the new one, one that kind of ruins the whole thing for me.

If you look closely at the old Muppet Show, you’ll notice that it doesn’t take place in our world. Obviously, that’s true of any TV show with talking puppets, but what I mean is that it’s a Muppet world there – we’re just invited in every week. Look at the audience – it’s all puppets! It’s truly a fantastic thing, something that exists outside of reality and the humdrum of the real world. Human guest stars were clearly playing along for the fun of it.

By contrast, The Muppets is set in our world, modified slightly by the presence of a late-night talk show hosted and run by felt creatures (sort of like the kiddy morning show in that puppetastic episode of Angel). We’re not visiting their madcap, zany, confusing world – they’re visiting ours. And ours, well, kind of sucks in comparison.

I agree with David Sims, writing in The Atlantic:

But entirely gone is the manic energy of The Muppet Show, the classic behind-the-scenes formula that gave Jim Henson’s creations their big break. In its place is sardonic drudgery that makes for very unenjoyable viewing.

Dan Caffrey at the AV Club kind of hits on the same thing, from a different direction, when discussing a scene from that first episode:

Sometime later, there’s a flashback to the demise of Kermit and Piggy’s relationship . . .. The breakup itself isn’t anything surprising—Kermit has, quite fairly, grown tired of dealing with the constant bouts of vanity, jealousy, and anger from his famous partner—but then something unexpected happens. After he delivers the bad news, the handheld camera hangs on Piggy, shaking ever so slightly. Her breathing gets labored, her snout scrunches up, the camera continues to wobble. It looks like she’s going to cry—not the dramatic sob she’s done plenty of times in the past to get what she wants, but a stoic, painful, honest-to-goodness cry. Suddenly, we’re viewing Miss Piggy in a sympathetic light, thanks to the use of a convention we’ve seen in so many mockumentary breakup scenes before. Her character expands into something much more complex and—I’ll just come out and say it—human.

I don’t disagree with the technical aspects of the scene – they’re well done, even moving. But I don’t care because I don’t want Muppets who have real world problems. That’s the whole fucking point of the Muppets in the first place, isn’t it? If you’re telling stories that could just as easily be told with live people in their place, it seems kind of useless.

Let me say, at this point, that I’m talking strictly on a subjective level of “quality” here. The calls in some quarters for ABC to cancel the show because it’s “indecent” or whatever are just silly. Muppets dealing with some real world situations does not equal smut. You want smut with puppets? I’ll give you smut with puppets:

I’m clearly in the minority on this, but that’s OK. Over the years I’ve concluded I’m very hard on reboots for jettisoning what I see as the essential elements of the property being revived. Don’t care for Daniel Craig’s Bond flicks because, to me, they seem like generic action flicks, without the charm of the Bond flicks I grew up with. Don’t care for JJ Abrams’s reboot of Star Trek, which takes a thoughtful sci-fi property and turns into yet another excuse to blow shit up while being cool (I have more hope for his take on Star Wars, however). Just chock this up as another example.

Some Validation on War and Religion

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A while back I wrote a review of Fields of Blood, Karen Armstrong’s lengthy (if shallow) tome about the history of war and religion. There, I wrote this:

Third, and most troubling for the entire book, is Armstrong wants to view religion’s role in violence as simply as the critics to which she is responding. If it’s not THE cause, she seems to argue, it is exonerated. She ignores (or breezes right past) the role religion can play in making killing of the other guy all right, even if the underlying cause isn’t religious. The American Civil War is an example of a war that was purely political, but both sides thought they were doing God’s work. Ever listened to the ‘Battle Hymn of the Republic’? It’s all about how righteous the Union cause was.

I normally wouldn’t bring something like that back up just for fun, but a recent article in The Atlantic backs me up on this, so I thought I’d pass it along.

Allen Guelzo looks at the issue of religion on the Civil War, using a pair of new books as a jumping off point. While he’s ultimately more interested in what the war did to religion (created a bunch of new skeptics), along the way he discusses a new book by Harvard’ Drew Faust about how religion fueled the war, on both sides:

Above all, it was a time when Christianity allied itself, in the most unambiguous and unconditional fashion, to the actual waging of a war. In 1775, American soldiers sang Yankee Doodle; in 1861, it was Glory, glory, hallelujah! As Stout argues, the Civil War ‘would require not only a war of troops and armaments … it would have to be augmented by moral and spiritual arguments that could steel millions of men to the bloody business of killing one another…’ Stout concentrates on describing how Northerners, in particular, were bloated with this certainty. By ‘presenting the Union in absolutist moral terms,’ Northerners gave themselves permission to wage a war of holy devastation. ‘Southerners must be made to feel that this was a real war,’ explained Colonel James Montgomery, a one-time ally of John Brown, ‘and that they were to be swept away by the hand of God, like the Jews of old.’ Or at least offered no alternative but unconditional surrender. ‘The Southern States,’ declared Henry Ward Beecher shortly after Abraham Lincoln’s election to the presidency, ‘have organized society around a rotten core,—slavery,’ while the ‘north has organized society about a vital heart, —liberty.’ Across that divide, ‘God is calling to the nations.’ And he is telling the American nation in particular that, ‘compromise is a most pernicious sham.’

But Southern preachers and theologians chimed in with fully as much fervor, in claiming that God was on their side. A writer for the Southern quarterly, DeBow’s Review, insisted that since ‘the institution of slavery accords with the injunctions and morality of the Bible,’ the Confederate nation could therefore expect a divine blessing ‘in this great struggle.’ The aged Episcopal bishop of Virginia, Richard Meade, gave Robert E. Lee his dying blessing: ‘You are engaged in a holy cause.’

The problem, of course, is that once you have God on your side, the other side isn’t just wrong or dangerous, they’re downright Satanic. It makes it more difficult to view the conflict in realistic, practical terms. As Guelzo puts it, “Holy causes that can never be overcome do not make provision for surrender.”

Which is where Armstrong went so wrong. Warfare is evil, even if it’s sometimes a necessary evil. Dragging religion into it, even if only to bulk up your side’s morale, doesn’t help matters and almost certainly is going to make things worse.

Technology Changes, Human Desire Doesn’t

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I’ve said before that the War on (Some People’s) Drugs is destined to be a failure because it is, at bottom, a war on human desire. People will always look for ways to feel better, to escape the horror/dreariness/boredom of their daily lives, or to just slip away for a little while. Why else do we, as a species, keep coming up with ways to mess with our brains? See my current favorite example, the prevalence of “ether frolics” in the late 19th Century.

The same is true when it comes to technology, but in reverse. Almost anytime people freak out about how some new technological development is going to send the world straight to hell in a hand basket, chances are they’re not being very original. The same complaints have happened before when technology we now don’t give a second thought about was new and perceived as dangerous.

Amanda Hess at Slate has a good example of how, regardless of technological means, human desire is fairly constant. Riffing on a series of think pieces about the evils of Tinder, the hookup app, she goes back more than 150 years to a similar piece about the evils of a then-new technology – the private post office box:

In 1860s Manhattan, young men and women in search of some excitement could duck into a little stationery shop uptown, open the unmarked notebook on the counter, and scribble a message to all the other strangers who were in on the secret.

* * *

Beneath each note, the author had scribbled the address of the nearest post office. Now any man who found himself smitten with the writing of Blanche G. or Annie B. could send the girl a private note to the post office, where her father couldn’t intercept it.

Think of it as Tinder for the pre-steampunk crowd!

A man named George Elliot was having nothing of it. In a book called The Women of New York (which sounds like an app in and of itself) he wrote, as Hess explains:

This postal personal-ad operation, Ellington sneered, could only appeal to ‘a certain class of people of the metropolis—more particularly the classes known as the demi-monde, the fast men and the women who are inclined to a rapid life.’ Ellington hardly deemed these men worth mentioning, but he filled a 650-page volume with opinions on the women he believed were destroying the moral fiber of society with their whoring. Though these women ‘outwardly appear to enjoy their various midnight revelries,’ Ellington diagnosed their private condition as ‘blasé and tired of everything.’

The point is not to laugh at Elliot’s ridiculous notions about the place of women. It’s to recognize that technological moral panic is a recurring theme throughout history. More than likely there were people who thought Guttenberg was going to hell for inventing movable type. Certainly it’s true that similar panics accompanied the early days of the telegraph, telephone, television, and the internet.

Why should mobile apps be any different? And in a few years we’ll find some other technological gizmo upon which to fixate and declare how it, too, shall ruin society just like all its predecessors didn’t.

How Is This Not Yet a Major Motion Picture?

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Last week I was talking about ideas and how they’re everywhere. Over the weekend, I came face to face with a great idea that I’m stunned nobody has (apparently) jumped on.

My wife and I took a weekend trip to Lexington, Kentucky, and wound up at the Kentucky Horse Park. It’s a pretty neat place, sprawling through horse country with lots of interesting stuff to take a look at. One feature is the Hall of Champions, where several horses who won big-time races are housed. We met a couple of Kentucky Derby winners, but the one that stood out was this guy, Da Hoss:

DaHoss

Da Hoss (not to be confused with this ditty) won the Breeders Cup Mile in 1996. An impressive enough accomplishment, given that American horses are rarely the best on grass, the surface on which that particular race is run (British horses run more regularly on grass). More impressive is what came after.

For two years, Da Hoss battled injuries and didn’t race, but came back into form in time for the 1998 edition of the Breeders Cup. He won a preliminary race in Virginia, but it was against lowly regarded opposition so nobody gave him much notice.

Then in the 1998 Breeders Cup race this happened:

Notice how the announcer basically gives up on Da Hoss as they come through the final turn (he says the horse is “stopping”). Nonetheless the horse comes through in the end, winning by a nose. It’s one of the most exciting races – horse or otherwise – I’ve ever seen.

My first thought upon seeing the video and the horse was “how is this not a major motion picture yet?” Given the success of Seabiscuit you’d think a tale of animal powered redemption that had the convenient trick of being true would be an easy sell. So many sports movies manipulate the truth to arrive at the final Big Game that I’m stunned nobody has taken up one that wouldn’t need that kind of trickery. Maybe it’s out there in development hell somewhere, but it doesn’t seem to be.

Damn shame I don’t write screenplays (or sports stories). This one practically writes itself.

What Does “Being a Democracy” Mean, Anyway?

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We tend to think of types of governments in stark terms. A democracy means a nation run by the consent of the governed, right? But how does that work in the real world?

David Frum had a column in The Atlantic recently wondering what the world might have been like had the Allies lost World War I. It’s less an interesting experiment in alternate history than another facile argument for further American intervention in the Middle East, but he does kind of stumble into an interesting question when he unpacks Woodrow Wilson’s claim that the “world must be made safe for democracy”:

Not ‘democratic’ – ‘safe for democracy.’ Wilson wasn’t promising to impose democracy on Imperial Germany. He was promising to defend democracy from Imperial Germany. The First World War had not begun as a conflict between democracy and authoritarianism. Great Britain was not a democracy in August 1914. Tsarist Russia certainly was not. Ditto Japan, Italy, and Romania—all fought for the Entente, none had governments elected by more than a small fraction of the population. Even in France, the most democratic of the original Allies, elected leaders did not fully control the government (never mind that the Third Republic ruled over a vast colonial empire and denied the vote to women).

Of course, that description is equally true of the United States at the time, which disenfranchised most folks that were adult white men. Nonetheless, if someone’s voting on who runs the place, isn’t that democracy? It’s a far sight more democratic than a monarch who rules because God says so (or “some watery tart lobbed a sword at you”) or a dictator who holds power by sheer force. What’s the tipping point?

And if there is a tipping point, do any modern societies actually meet it? After all, “universal” suffrage isn’t truly universal. Most countries, at least, restrict the franchise to citizens and to those of a certain age. But the young and the alien (assume, for purposes of this argument, legal and fully documented) are subject to the authority of the government just as much as anybody else – does cutting them out of things make the system less “democratic?” What then of places where felons or the mentally infirm are banned from voting, sometimes for life?

Beyond those restrictions there’s the very real question of apathy. If, as Frum posits, most of our allies in World War I weren’t democracies because only a “small fraction” of the population could vote, what of when only a small fraction of eligible voters actually bother to participate? Only 58.2% of eligible voters cast ballots in the last US presidential election. Put another way, just over 129 million people cast votes – in a country with a population north of 320 million. When only 40% of the governed people vote, is that really a “democracy” under Frum’s test?

And that’s just the presidential election, which tends to attract higher turnouts. What percentage of the governed populace is actually voting in races further down the ballot? As a for instance, 453,659 West Virginians voted in the 2014 election that sent Shelly Moore Capito to the US Senate, out of a population of over 1.8 million. In other words, about a quarter of the state’s population voted in that election. Is that truly “democratic”?

Obviously, a lot of this is pure semantics and the political science equivalent of figuring out the right dance steps for angels on pin heads, but there’s more to it than that. We often do our worst when we’re motivated by the mythology we’ve built around ourselves. Confronting reality might make us think twice about going off half-cocked on various crusades.

In other words, if we’re going to lecture the rest of the world about the values of democracy, we better damned well make sure we’re practicing them ourselves.