Does silence always equal consent?

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It’s past midnight now (I’m in Atlanta this week speaking at, and staffing the WordPress.com/VIP/Longreads booth at the AAJA conference.) My colleagues and I stayed up late to enjoy a last, late snack and drinks before we fly off to our respective corners of the country tomorrow, but I’m still wide awake and mulling over the keynote speakers at tonight’s unforgettable gala.

First, Captain Sulu — er, George Takei — spoke. He was interviewed by Juju Chang, co-anchor of ABC News’ Nightline. They chatted more than I expected about his experiences on the original Star Trek series (how many times has Mr. Takei answered the question of what his favorite Star Trek moment was? Even a lot of non-Trekkies like myself know that it’s the episode where Sulu gets to fence and save Uhura’s life), but mostly they discussed his activism on behalf of the Asian-American and LGBTQ communities. He’s currently promoting his upcoming AMC anthology series, The Terror: Infamy, described as a show that “infuses historical drama with supernatural horror.” Set in World War II, season 2 of the series zeroes in on the story of the Japanese American internment camps and is notable for featuring a large Asian-American cast and senior crew, including showrunner Alexander Woo and director Lily Mariye.

George Takei on stage with Juju Chen.

While a lot of folks know Takei primarily as Star Trek’s Sulu, he’s especially famous in the Asian-American community for his fierce and tireless activism. He helped found the Japanese-American National Museum in Los Angeles; starred in Allegiance, a Broadway musical loosely based on his own experiences at an internment camp; and has used his hugely popular Facebook page (currently at 10 million followers and growing) to share both hilarious memes and disturbing stories about racism, bigotry, homophobia, and hate. He recently published a graphic memoir, They Called Us Enemy, about that brutal period in early childhood when he and his family were imprisoned by the American government simply for looking like the people who had bombed Pearl Harbor.

Next was Congressman John Lewis, whom I’ve always known as a legendary civil rights leader, and frequent news show guest, but whom I’d never seen or heard speak in person. He radiated wisdom and gravity, and the entire, packed ballroom fell silent each time he spoke. He was interviewed by renowned broadcast journalist Elaine Quijano, and they spoke of his early work as a civil rights activist in the 1950s and 1960s as well as his thoughts on the current, distressing state of our fractured union. At some point he quietly said, “Silence is consent.”

The last keynote speaker was Maria Ressa, the founder and CEO of Rappler and one of TIME Magazine’s 2018 Person of the Year, and who is currently being charged by the Duterte administration in the Philippines of cyber libel and tax evasion. Ressa’s case gained considerable worldwide attention earlier last month when it was announced that Amal Clooney has joined Ressa’s defense team.

Maria Ressa

Ressa, never afraid to speak truth to power, is a tiny woman with a big smile and an even bigger well of courage and grace. It’s astounding that this charming, articulate, funny woman standing in the spotlight on stage in this fancy Atlanta hotel ballroom poses such an existential threat to the Duterte government that it will risk international condemnation in order to silence her. It’s also a clear sign that this clumsy, obnoxious, and brutal regional bully and strongman (oh, hell, let’s call him what he is: a dictator), who wields presidential power as if he’s engaged in a dick-sizing contest with fellow bullies and strongmen even within his own country, is making the same mistake as all other bullies and strongmen: underestimating the power of the press in general and this fearless journalist in particular.

And I keep going back to what Congressman Lewis said: “Silence is consent.” All three of these s/heroes have refused to be silent and have let their actions and words drive and inspire change. Is it possible to be silent — neutral, distant, removed, detached — and yet still be counted among those who support important humanitarian causes like freedom of speech, poverty elimination, education for women and girls, voting rights, reproductive rights, prison reform, criminal justice reform, and basic healthcare for all, to name just a few of the issues whose solutions remain elusive? What is enough? What is activism? Does contributing money but not time count? Does contributing time but not money count?

And what does it mean to be a liberal activist? If your particular brand of advocacy means outreach to disaffected and marginalized communities that also happened to have voted for Trump because they believed he was going to be their Messiah and deliver them to the Promised Land of well-paying manufacturing jobs with benefits and middle class comforts, does that count as activism? In an era when even some of the most empathetic liberal activists consider all Trump supporters — no exception — to be racist misogynists at heart, is it possible to imagine an activism that includes compassion and a desire for understanding beyond stereotypes and a simplistic view of a very complicated and human conflict?

I ask because I don’t know the answer. But I’m glad to have the question, and the lives and works of three unforgettable, inspiring and larger-than-life true s/heroes to reflect on as I pursue that answer.

Why books will always trump e-readers

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People who need to possess the physical copy of a book, and not merely an electronic version, are in some sense mystics. We believe that the objects themselves are sacred, not just the stories they tell. We believe that books possess the power to transubstantiate, to turn darkness into light, to make being out of nothingness. We do not want the experience of reading to be stripped of this transcendent component and become rote and mechanical. That would spoil everything.

— Joe Queenan, One for the Books

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Art Matters, So It Shouldn’t Be Free

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In a previous life, I worked as a wind energy developer. It meant lots of long trips to exotic places where people are usually not (at least, not in great or even middling abundance): places like Sweetwater, TX; Minot, North Dakota; Ozona, TX; and Santa Rosa, NM. Don’t get me wrong — these are all lovely places with very kind, welcoming communities. But wherever there is plenty of wind to support industry-scale wind projects, there is typically not much in terms of population.

Anyway, I remember vividly one day trip I took to some North Texas county (I can’t remember which one anymore, but it was a very rural, remote area with a lot of trees and, as we soon figured out, not as much wind as we’d hoped) one spring day. The company I worked for had sent over a young intern named Adam from Irish HQ, so as an educational experience and for some company I took him with me.

During the long, two-hour drive to the meeting, we somehow got to chatting about artists (musicians in particular), creativity, and the bubbling tension between the need for these artists to make a living and the demand of their fans for free content. This was a post-Napster, pre-Spotify world, when Pandora was just starting to find its audience and YouTube was exploding with illegal uploads of both official and “unofficial,” fan-made music videos.

Adam believed that artists should make their work freely available on the Internet and suffered not an ounce of guilt from downloading copyrighted content without paying for it. He genuinely believed that because his generation (he was about 19, and this was the mid-2000s) had grown up accustomed to paying little or nothing for music, movies and books because of their wide availability on bootleg sites, they shouldn’t be expected to suddenly pony up for access to them. Sure, he was happy to pay a few hundred dollars for an iPod, but for the music and other content he would actually play on it and without which the iPod would just be an outrageously priced paperweight? Nada. When I asked him how in the world he expected these artists to survive and continue to create without compensation, he said, “They can get a full-time job and create in their spare time.”

Artists have always, always struggled for respect and an adequate income for their work. Distributing content without artist compensation is a longtime tradition — it’s why copyright law was invented in the first place. But with technology making it so incredibly easy to distribute any creative work on a mass, global scale, it’s become even harder for artists to control their work and earn a living wage from it. If even musicians with vast financial resources and the power and influence of corporate money behind them can’t make money solely from their creative output but must hustle to make themselves into a “brand”, is there much hope for the “independent artist” who would rather spend their time and energies actually making art and not shilling t-shirts and plastic wrist bands out of cramped apartments?

I could never convince Adam that artists deserve to be paid every single time their music is downloaded, their film is viewed, and their book is sold. But while the conversation happened nearly a decade ago, it stuck in my head and comes out periodically whenever I read articles like this one, which calls for basically an overhaul of society and more expansive public investment in artists and their art.

Despite what I just wrote above about the importance of compensating artists for their work, I’m of two minds about the idea of devoting public funds to support artists. The Depression-era programs put to work thousands of writers, photographers, filmmakers, and visual artists left an astounding legacy of documents, films, and artwork that serve as a rich repository of content about a particularly critical time in American history.

On the other hand, the content, while voluminous, wasn’t exactly created solely for the sake of art. As this article carefully points out, “Nothing was published that was not first approved by Washington and the entire process required that the author remain anonymous.” Government money is rarely offered without strings, even today, and while I consider myself fairly liberal, I hesitate to endorse any arts program or idea that relies so heavily on government largesse. Socialist art has rarely produced anything of lasting cultural value and more often than not serves as a propaganda tool. The artist should only ever be beholden to their creative impulse, never to an outside agency with its own agenda.

Still, I also don’t think that we can expect the “masses” (who my former political science prof often referred to as “asses”) to suddenly have a change of heart and refuse to download anything without ponying up a royalty to the artist. One program I find appealing is Ireland’s Artists Tax Exemption. Rather than requiring artists to submit exhaustive applications and compete with their peers for a limited amount of earmarked funds — a process ripe with bias and the stifling of free speech and creativity — the program offers a simple blanket benefit to all artists who make money from their work. It’s not a perfect program: the government is still the final arbiter of what it considers “of cultural merit” and thus eligible for tax exemption. But it does strike me as an easier and more liberal means of supporting artists by removing or at least minimizing the burden of supporting oneself through one’s art. Like everyone else in society, the artist must still organize her paperwork and receipts to prepare for filing the appropriate returns, but at least she’s not enduring the soul-sucking business of filling out reams of grant applications, writing one more goddamn essay about why her work should be funded, and gathering reference letters and budget forecasts.

I’ve not spoken to Adam since I left the company in 2006, but I wonder what he thinks now, a decade later and 10 years older, about the state of the music industry. Folks wanting unlimited free music have never had it better — I listen to Spotify all day long and have never paid for it. But as a writer who works hard for every word and every page, I’m terrified of what the future holds for creatives who want and deserve to be paid for doing what they love and doing it well.

Art Matters, So It Shouldn't Be Free

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In a previous life, I worked as a wind energy developer. It meant lots of long trips to exotic places where people are usually not (at least, not in great or even middling abundance): places like Sweetwater, TX; Minot, North Dakota; Ozona, TX; and Santa Rosa, NM. Don’t get me wrong — these are all lovely places with very kind, welcoming communities. But wherever there is plenty of wind to support industry-scale wind projects, there is typically not much in terms of population.

Anyway, I remember vividly one day trip I took to some North Texas county (I can’t remember which one anymore, but it was a very rural, remote area with a lot of trees and, as we soon figured out, not as much wind as we’d hoped) one spring day. The company I worked for had sent over a young intern named Adam from Irish HQ, so as an educational experience and for some company I took him with me.

During the long, two-hour drive to the meeting, we somehow got to chatting about artists (musicians in particular), creativity, and the bubbling tension between the need for these artists to make a living and the demand of their fans for free content. This was a post-Napster, pre-Spotify world, when Pandora was just starting to find its audience and YouTube was exploding with illegal uploads of both official and “unofficial,” fan-made music videos.

Adam believed that artists should make their work freely available on the Internet and suffered not an ounce of guilt from downloading copyrighted content without paying for it. He genuinely believed that because his generation (he was about 19, and this was the mid-2000s) had grown up accustomed to paying little or nothing for music, movies and books because of their wide availability on bootleg sites, they shouldn’t be expected to suddenly pony up for access to them. Sure, he was happy to pay a few hundred dollars for an iPod, but for the music and other content he would actually play on it and without which the iPod would just be an outrageously priced paperweight? Nada. When I asked him how in the world he expected these artists to survive and continue to create without compensation, he said, “They can get a full-time job and create in their spare time.”

Artists have always, always struggled for respect and an adequate income for their work. Distributing content without artist compensation is a longtime tradition — it’s why copyright law was invented in the first place. But with technology making it so incredibly easy to distribute any creative work on a mass, global scale, it’s become even harder for artists to control their work and earn a living wage from it. If even musicians with vast financial resources and the power and influence of corporate money behind them can’t make money solely from their creative output but must hustle to make themselves into a “brand”, is there much hope for the “independent artist” who would rather spend their time and energies actually making art and not shilling t-shirts and plastic wrist bands out of cramped apartments?

I could never convince Adam that artists deserve to be paid every single time their music is downloaded, their film is viewed, and their book is sold. But while the conversation happened nearly a decade ago, it stuck in my head and comes out periodically whenever I read articles like this one, which calls for basically an overhaul of society and more expansive public investment in artists and their art.

Despite what I just wrote above about the importance of compensating artists for their work, I’m of two minds about the idea of devoting public funds to support artists. The Depression-era programs put to work thousands of writers, photographers, filmmakers, and visual artists left an astounding legacy of documents, films, and artwork that serve as a rich repository of content about a particularly critical time in American history.

On the other hand, the content, while voluminous, wasn’t exactly created solely for the sake of art. As this article carefully points out, “Nothing was published that was not first approved by Washington and the entire process required that the author remain anonymous.” Government money is rarely offered without strings, even today, and while I consider myself fairly liberal, I hesitate to endorse any arts program or idea that relies so heavily on government largesse. Socialist art has rarely produced anything of lasting cultural value and more often than not serves as a propaganda tool. The artist should only ever be beholden to their creative impulse, never to an outside agency with its own agenda.

Still, I also don’t think that we can expect the “masses” (who my former political science prof often referred to as “asses”) to suddenly have a change of heart and refuse to download anything without ponying up a royalty to the artist. One program I find appealing is Ireland’s Artists Tax Exemption. Rather than requiring artists to submit exhaustive applications and compete with their peers for a limited amount of earmarked funds — a process ripe with bias and the stifling of free speech and creativity — the program offers a simple blanket benefit to all artists who make money from their work. It’s not a perfect program: the government is still the final arbiter of what it considers “of cultural merit” and thus eligible for tax exemption. But it does strike me as an easier and more liberal means of supporting artists by removing or at least minimizing the burden of supporting oneself through one’s art. Like everyone else in society, the artist must still organize her paperwork and receipts to prepare for filing the appropriate returns, but at least she’s not enduring the soul-sucking business of filling out reams of grant applications, writing one more goddamn essay about why her work should be funded, and gathering reference letters and budget forecasts.

I’ve not spoken to Adam since I left the company in 2006, but I wonder what he thinks now, a decade later and 10 years older, about the state of the music industry. Folks wanting unlimited free music have never had it better — I listen to Spotify all day long and have never paid for it. But as a writer who works hard for every word and every page, I’m terrified of what the future holds for creatives who want and deserve to be paid for doing what they love and doing it well.

The ‘great and cursed work’ that was the Encyclopédie – Ideas – The Boston Globe

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Here’s the great difference between the Encyclopédie and the Internet, between what reading meant then and what it increasingly passes for today. While Diderot encouraged differences of opinion and perspectives among his closest contributors, he knew that all of them — from Voltaire to Rousseau, Baron d’Holbach to the Chevalier de Jaucourt — took the act of writing as seriously as did those who read it. No activity was more noble.

via The ‘great and cursed work’ that was the Encyclopédie – Ideas – The Boston Globe.