I saw this piece in Slate defending Governor Mark Sanford as a human being linked from Balloon Juice, which I read semi-regularly and like quite a bit, and I have to say, I really disagree with the premise:

I’m not offering Sanford’s humanity as an excuse. I’m just marveling at how few people stopped for a moment to even nod to it. My thoughtful colleague William Saletan and Andrew Sullivan were exceptions. Maybe there are others. Maybe people expressed these views in private conversations. But in the e-mails and Twitter entries and blog posts I read in the aftermath, Sanford’s human ruin was greeted with what felt like antiseptic glee. The pain he’s caused, the hypocrisies he’s engaged in, seemed like license to deny him any humanity at all.

Sanford’s fumbling efforts to explain how he’s tried to rescue himself with his faith offered some people an opportunity to make fun of his religion, as if a confused, lost, flawed person were the right spokesman for anything. People tend to think the most awful thing about a person is the most true thing. They also apparently think it’s the most true thing about his or her associations. So an e-mail arrived asking, “[I]s there any Republican not sleeping around?” Maybe Sanford should have been a presidential candidate. He apparently represents an entire party and an entire religion.

What Mark Sanford seemed to be trying to say is that he screwed up, in the biggest possible way, because he lost his bearings. He lost his self-control. He was indulgent. He forgot that there were other humans in the world. Yet in the constant flow of abuse, joke-making, and grand conclusions about his failings, it seemed everyone having a good time pointing at his self-indulgence was also engaging in a form of it.

(Emphasis mine.)

You have got to be kidding me, seriously. Mocking a man who governs on the basis of staunch conservativism and then secretly abandons his job, family and state to slip across a hemisphere and bang his mistress is somehow equivalent to that man’s hypocrisy? Even slightly?

Give me a break. Mark Sanford is the butt of a lot of jokes because he has destroyed himself in truly epic, hilarious fashion. This is a man who fought to deny gay people basic civil rights, like marriage, then destroyed his own marriage through a profound betrayal of not just his family, but the voters of the state of South Carolina as well. The man disappeared without telling his staff, without transferring his authority, leaving the state in a power vacuum and ungovernable, let alone accountable to its own people. Sanford tried to block the Obama stimulus money from going to help the citizens of his own state, then wasted untold taxpayer dollars by collecting a salary while he banged his mistress on another CONTINENT. His staff, his security detail, the entire executive branch of the state sat on their hands, burning cash, so that he could diddle someone in Argentina. The sheer, incredible, disgusting depth of his hypocrisy will either make you laugh or cry. I prefer to laugh, and I don’t think that makes me a bad person.

As for mocking his religion, why not? This is a man who wears his faith on his sleeve, has for some time, and now he’s claiming it can… rescue him from himself? That’s great Mark, really. Why couldn’t it do so last week? Last month? Clearly there’s an effectiveness issue here.   In the conference he says he’s been working with this spiritual advisor of his on this issue for five months.  Really?  After five months, ‘Don’t keep cheating on your wife’ or ‘Don’t abandon all your adult responsibilities for a fuck on the side’ never came up, specifically, during this counseling?  I could do a better job advising Sanford than this ‘spiritual giant’ in five minutes, without a bronze age tome to guide me either.

As for using Sanford to mock the Republican Party… why not? There IS a serious and obvious crisis of basic human decency in a party run by, let’s see: Sanford (until just now, head of the Republican Governor’s Association), Rush Limbaugh (drug abusing, racist misogynist pig), Dick Cheney (pro-torture ideologue) and Sarah Palin (Governor who uses state resources to settle family disputes, serial liar and ethics violator).

Why not ask if there’s an issue with powerful Republicans and marital ethics? Newt Gingrich famously divorced his wife while she was dying of cancer. Giuliani divorced his by PRESS conference. John McCain divorced his first long-suffering wife to marry a younger woman, who he was running around with before the divorce. Sanford is… well, he’s an obvious example now.   Larry Craig, as we all  know, LOVES his wife.  Just last week another prominent Republican, Ensign, was caught having an affair. Their party is the party that seeks to decide who is, and is not, fit to marry another human being, and yet they are up to their eyeballs in adulterers. I think it’s perfectly valid to ask if their obsession with marriage stems from their seeming inability to have decent adult relationships.

So yes, Sanford is a human being.  I don’t recall anyone saying otherwise.  He is also a liar, a hypocrite and a fraud, an immoral sideshow attraction who denies other people their basic human rights and dignity.  It is only right and proper that his self-immolation brings some satisfaction to the rest of the species.   Consider it moral education mixed with comedy.

I should say up front that I am a huge fan of Kage Baker’s work.  I’ve read all the Company novels, most of her short story collections, including Mother Aegypt, and The Anvil of the World is one of my all time favorite books, though it is over way too soon.

This isn’t one of those backhanded ‘I’m a huge fan BUT’ introductions either.  I liked The Sons of Heaven.  It’s a lively, interesting read.  I’m just not sure I like where it ends up, and from the way it *does* end, both the book and the larger Company story, I’m not sure the esteemed author does either.

This is of course not a book for first time readers.  Go back, read the Company books in order, see what you think.  It’s not my favorite by any means; it might, in fact, be my least favorite, but it will be completely and utterly indecipherable to anyone who hasn’t been keeping up.

Basically, The Sons of Heaven wraps up the Company storyline once and for all… at least, supposedly.  Without giving too much away, I can safely state that a series of books about time travel presents a lot of opportunity for revision.   You might call it Doctor Who Syndrome:

Writer and future Doctor Who executive producer Steven Moffat has gone further, arguing that “a television series which embraces both the ideas of parallel universes and the concept of changing time can’t have a continuity error — it’s impossible for Doctor Who to get it wrong, because we can just say ‘he changed time — it’s a time ripple from the Time War’.”

(From the Wikipedia article on the Time War in Doctor Who)

The same thing applies, I think, to a lengthy tale of conspiracies, wheels within wheels, and time travel by secretive immortals.

One of the blurbs in the front of the Sons of Heaven really does sum it up nicely — it states that Baker ‘bestows appropriate fates on all her characters.’   Looking it up now, it was from The Sci-Fi Weekly, for what that’s worth.

Basically, this novel screams ‘Coda!’ the same way that The Empire Strikes Back screamed ‘Middle Movie!’.  It’s a book that serves a purpose, to put away a box of toys that Baker, and her many fans, love, but that she no longer wants to play with, at least full time… and there are a lot of toys in this box to deal with.  There are points in the books where even longtime readers will puzzle over who a certain person is, or why we’re bothering with them; but I suppose even the most minor walk-on role might be someone’s personal favorite, or Baker felt she had to say goodbye to everybody.  It can be a little cluttered.

The writing is still top-notch, and the wonderful Baker characterization is still intact, though as a longtime fan I do have to say Joseph has changed a *lot* over the course of the books, somehow, without seeming to change at all, at least to his fellow characters.    The Silence… well, I’m not sure anything could live up to the terror of the unknowable End of the World.  It’s not entirely what you’d expect.  Is it entirely satisfying?  Not for me, personally.  Your mileage may vary.

Baker seems vexed on this point a little too.  Though The Sons of Heaven more or less definitively deals with the fate of the immortals and good old Dr. Zeus, there is an afterword of sorts by one of the people involved, which acts as both an epilogue and a sort of giant, cosmic, authorial shrug of the shoulders.  ’This is how it is… I guess…’

There’s a lot to love about this book.  The cliffhanger of the previous volume is dealt with neatly; Alec and Edward in particular get a lot of love and attention, and the first half of the book, which deals primarily with the relationships surrounding Mendoza, as well as the concept of Immortals having KIDS, is really great stuff.

But much like in Anvil, everything is over too soon, and at least I was left with both personal reservations for how certain characters/events turned out (which I welcome — who wants to agree with an author all the time?) and.. a certain mild dissatisfaction.   The ending just doesn’t have quite the heft it needs, I suppose, after who knows how many thousands of pages.

Still, beggars can’t be choosers.  Whether or not it really is The End, it’s the end for now, and it’s still a good read.  Recommended, 4/5 stars, etc.

Update:  Upon further reflection I realize that this still comes out sounding too negative.   It’s just hard to put an imprecise feeling like this into words… the metaphor I tend toward right at the moment is the letdown you naturally feel at the end of a rollercoaster that you wish had just one more loop, a really smash-up finish.  Oh well.  Now who isn’t satisfied with an ending, eh?

(An Open Letter to Ed Schultz)

I had the opportunity to catch part of your Monday show as I was doing some errands, and you were talking about health care and the need for, at the minimum, a public option plan to provide people with a legitimate alternative to our ludicrously expensive and corrupt private healthcare system.   This is all to the good, and I could tell you my own horror stories about dealing with insurance, waiting months, even years to see a doctor for painful illness, and so forth, but that’s a topic for another time.  Today I want to discuss something that came up when you sought to explain how to pay for expanding healthcare for Americans.

Namely, your big idea on Monday was an ‘internet transaction tax’.  You explained the need for this tax by angrily attacking web retailers like Amazon.com as, in essence, sales tax cheats, and their customers as opportunists stealing business from the little guy, the local retailers trying to compete.  It got quite heated, and a friend of mine listening at work also took note.  We both found it exceedingly strange that the ‘Nation’s Number One Progressive Voice’ was advocating a regressive form of taxation, as all sales taxes are (they of course hit the poor more than the wealthy, who spend less of their overall income).

(It isn’t just wealthy people who buy things online, if you’ve somehow gotten that impression.   A lot of poor college kids rely, for example, on Amazon.com to save them money on the outrageous costs of textbooks so that they have enough money to eat through the end of the semester.   But I digress.)

As to the issue of net taxation, a simple set of facts might help.  In 2008, according to the US Census Bureau,  US internet retail sales totaled a measly 133.6 billion dollars, 3.3 percent of retail sales overall.  If you were to tax that at the basically standard 6% sales tax, you would only add 8.016 billion dollars to the federal till every year, which, and let’s be honest here, wouldn’t pay for much of anything healthcare-wise.

Source: US Census Bureau

So your regressive tax on net commerce wouldn’t come within an order of magnitude of raising the money needed for even the modest expansion of benefits the Democrats in Congress currently envision.   We could argue that we don’t actually need to raise much money to expand healthcare at all, of course; private systems charge up to 30% of every healthcare dollar for overhead, whereas Medicare spends about 3%.   The United States spends far more of its per capita GDP on healthcare than any other industrialized nation, and gets far less for the money.  It is painfully obvious to anyone who looks at the issue that, rather than *costing* us money as a nation, a public option or single payer system would save us trillions; we would just be paying taxes instead of premiums.  Pure semantics.

That’s still another topic for another day though.  What I wanted to get at here was your obvious disdain for people like myself who spend a lot of money online.

The simple fact is that there is no such thing as local competition for Amazon.com.  Comparing Amazon to a local bookstore is like comparing the horse and buggy to the Toyota Prius.

I grew up in a small rural community, which had a total of one bookstore for the entire population.  This store consisted of a few hundred titles, about a third of which were textbook orders for the equally small local college, and another third for small children.  The bulk of the rest were New York Times bestsellers.   This store perfectly fits your model of a local retailer, a little guy competing against the big chains.  It was also a near total monopoly.

Not to mention, a terrible bookstore.   There was nothing there to interest me, and it took weeks to make a special order.  I stopped going there and had to rely on the public library, until I got my driver’s license and could take the car an hour away to a real bookseller in the city.  If it hadn’t been for the public library I would never have developed a lifelong love of reading.

(Interestingly enough, the local college eventually got their own full service bookstore for texts, and without the subsidy provided by their students, the Mom and Pop store went under.  As anyone who had shopped there in earnest might well have predicted.. and years before Amazon.com, I might add)

I don’t shop at Amazon for the six percent sales tax reduction, and I don’t know anyone who does.  I shop at Amazon because they have the best customer service I have ever seen at any store, whether locally owned or not, anywhere.  Ever.  I shop at Amazon because they have, far and away, the widest selection of books, movies, dvds, electronics, and almost anything else you can name, and yes, they are cheaper than your local establishments, or even large chains like Wal-Mart, Best Buy, or Borders.   As my interests got wider I found that there simply wasn’t a store that carried all the music I wanted to hear, the books I wanted to read, or the movies I wanted to buy, at least, not in the ‘real world’.   But, generally speaking, Amazon does.  (Amazon also allows small retailers to sell on its site through their third party, Marketplace program.  In just the last six months I’ve purchased over two hundred dollars  of merchandise from various brick and mortar stores this way, including a comic store in Massachusetts and a bookstore in New Jersey, who obviously would never have seen a dime from this Madison resident otherwise)

I fail to see how it is more socially responsible to get in my car, drive twenty minutes to a store, putter around inside looking for something to buy that probably isn’t even there for a half hour, give up in frustration and then spend another twenty minutes in traffic on the way home.  Who benefits from that, besides Big Oil?

It isn’t just Amazon, and it isn’t just the average local bookstore that is going the way of the dodo, thanks to customer focused internet retailers, either.   For comic books, I use a website called Heavy Ink, which is a small time, startup operation that focuses on, again, excellent customer service and low costs.  You can always talk to a real person if you have an issue, and they are friendly and knowledgeable about what they do.  Most towns don’t even have a decent comic book store anymore, so Heavy Ink is a lifesaver if you still want to read comics and don’t live in one of the fortunate few places that have a place to buy them.

Meanwhile, Netflix is absolutely devastating video rental stores, both large and small, by again, just being better at what they do: renting movies.  I worked in a video store as a part time job in college; I know just how lousy they tend to be.  The vast majority of their movies are shallow pablum, usually dozens of copies of the last ten big movies, and almost nothing else.  Their discs are also in terrible shape, and the prices are outrageous.  Why subject yourself to that?  Even when I worked at the store and got free rentals, I honestly never used them.  I preferred Netflix to my own employer, and why not?  They were better.  On the flip side, Netflix killed a local independent video store/performance venue that I used to frequent for live shows, who specifically laid the blame for their precipitious decline at Netflix’s feet.   It made me sad, but of course everyone saw it coming.   Getting mad at Netflix wouldn’t help anyone.

Finally, I’d like to mention another internet business, Topatoco.  This is your quintessential small, progressive enterprise.   They sell books, art and t-shirts designed by independent artists, with a focus on fair labor conditions.  Most of their shirts, for example, are available printed on American Apparel materials, and almost all are printed here in the United States.   Customer service is a priority here as well.   Am I to believe I’d be a better person if I went to the mall and bought a t shirt made in a Malaysian sweatshop, just because I’d pay some Wisconsin sales tax along the way?

This isn’t to bash buying local.  I have a share in a CSA farm here in Wisconsin; I got a load of plants from Kopke’s Greenhouse just this weekend (you have an ad running for them on the local Prog radio station).   What I’m getting at here is that Progressives should be fundamentally about *Progress*, about improving things and making life better.   Sometimes that means an old way of life will be supplanted by something new, telegraphs by telephones, telephones by email, the horse and buggy by the car.

And sometimes that means no more work for the buggy whip maker.

Regards,

John J Sears