Outrage and Art

Card is the problem, for me. I LOVED Ender’s Game and Seventh Son when I was younger, and I read many, many, many of his other works. I had the Folk of the Fringe hardcover, I had some of the 1970s Analog issues with his stories. Maps in a Mirror is a brilliant collection.

All of which just made it so much more difficult to fathom his anti-gay beliefs when I was finally confronted with them in an interview.

It was about this time when he started to go back to the Enderverse. I tried to read some of the books, but I had to just put them aside.

To this day, I’m afraid that I can’t recommend Ender’s Game to young people, despite the fact that I think that it’s probably perfect for most tween kids.

I just find it ironic how there are people out there who can say truly vile things about the person who holds a view, when all that person is doing is expression an opinion about someone elses view.

I think it totally undermines the homosexual cause when they say things even worse than what Wright said.

By their own definition and admonition they’re just as bigoted and hateful than he is, but for SOME REASON, when they do it, it’s justified?

And if smart intellectual people can write some good stories that are so interesting, wouldn’t it be worth understanding why they hold the views they do and not just assume they are bat shit crazy? Lots of reasons to hold a specific view that doesn’t worship at the altar of homosexual sacrosanctity.

I think there are two lines, both highly individual.

The first line is: I don’t want to support this behavior. (Usually financially, but ktempest makes a very good point about reputation.) This is a political and ethical line, and I think reactions differ on how political you are, the quality of the artist, the context of their times, and whether it’s your ox they’re goring.

The second line is: I can’t read this anymore, because of what I know about the author and their perspective. I’ve learned something which cannot be unlearned, and it spoils my enjoyment of the work. I’ve crossed this line with a couple of people, and when picking up their book gives me a queasy feeling it’s time to stop reading those books.

Speaking of unlearnable knowledge, Ray Bradbury did react poorly to Fahrenheit 9/11. I think it’s absurd that anyone who wrote “Something Wicked This Way Comes” and “I Sing the Body Electric!” would complain about someone else riffing off his work to create a title. I don’t think this damaged my ability to read or reread his work, but this might not be true for everyone else.

There are, as several people have said, too many good books, so considering the author when buying books is both a sorting technique and sanity-preserving defense.

Linking the art and the artist can work in the opposite direction – one of the nice things about blogs and conventions is watching an author’s mind at work and wondering why the hell you haven’t read anything by them yet.

I’m one of those who will not spend my money lining the pockets of a bigot like John C. Wright. For me, personally, that’s what it comes down to. He does not deserve my money and I’m pretty sure I can find better books written by better people. Not to mention, even his name fills me with loathing now, so I wouldn’t be able to enjoy his writing even if he was the greatest author in the world.

Frankly, people like that make me ashamed to be a writer of sci-fi/fantasy, even an amateur one. Aren’t we supposed to be more open to difference?

If it’s a living writer don’t read them, period. To buy their work is to support them and thus their views. I think it’s on us the readers to make it plain that having those sorts of views ARE NOT OKAY.

The only way to do that is through the wallet and through not giving recognition to them. Please, go back under your rock until you know how to act like a decent human being.

I’m gonna make a wild guess that if you “tolerate” these views in a writer because you like their work, then you likely do not fall into the group they are being bigoted against. That’s a privilege that group likely does not have.

There’s a large difference between “having an opinion with which I disagree” and “advocating in a vile manner for or against something I hold as a core value.”

I support single-payer nationalized health care. I would not stop reading someone’s books solely on the basis that they disagree with my political opinion, even if I thought the author’s views were profoundly illogical, wrongheaded or selfish. Someone writing a hate-screed against homosexuals, or acting a racist or sexist fool all over the place, however, is not just expressing disagreement with one of my political opinions. She or he is rather expressing something I find so hateful and appalling and morally corrupt that it changes the way I see the speaker as a person.

There’s a range of reactions, I guess, on my part, depending on (a) what it is the person’s said that I agree with or disagree with and the value I place on the issue as a part of my moral compass; (b) whether I think it’s an incident of the person being “flawed” or having made a mistake or if I’m comfortable that it’s a core and likely unchanging aspect of the person’s character; and, (c)frankly (and I’d be lying if I didn’t admit it), the past v. present issue and the value I think the work in question has. I’m far more likely to give an author lots of chances or be able to separate the work from the writer if it’s older, or if I read it long ago and ascribe some nostalgic value to the piece. But that only goes so far.

Harlan Ellison, as an example, makes me so sad. Deathbird Stories was a *formative* collection for me. I actively *wish* I could set aside how I feel about him now, but I see it on the shelf and feel a bit ill. It’s tainted for me now. Maybe in time that will change and I’ll be able to salvage at least the nostalgic value, but right now? It sits on the shelf. I’m trying to decide if I should just give it away.

John C. Wright? I would never pick up anything he wrote, because he’s so actively, dangerously and *hatefully* bigoted. There is no common ground for me, and it’s not like I’ve already read something and assigned independent value to it. I’ve limited resources (both time and money) and there are an awful lot of good books out there to read, so crossing an unknown author off of the list is easier, and–really–Mr. Wright has wholly demonstrated to me that he is a person I feel has some literally *evil* viewpoints and a determination to express them as hatefully as possible. So I don’t have any qualms about saying his work is not for me.

The only danger I see here… is that if you keep excluding people, building higher and higher fences to screen out people you don’t agree with, then eventually you’ll only move in a community of people whose views are exactly the same as yours. And you’ll believe anything you hear about those Others you’ve shut out, because you have never taken the time to understand why their minds work the way they do. This is not to say you should agree with them, at all, but you need to work from an informed position.

GK Chesterton, like many writers of his time, said a number of gratuitously stupid, racist things about Jews. When he learned what Hitler was doing, however, his eyes were opened and he changed his views. People aren’t cardboard figures who can be labeled “evil and hateful”. They may in fact be evil and hateful, but they are human beings, complex and contradictory. Understand what you’re condemning, if you’re going to condemn. Don’t base your judgment of someone on one statement.

silicate @@@@@ 41:

Well, I don’t think I said it was clear cut; my point was sort of the opposite. If someone feels that strongly about my view, they don’t have to read what I write. The extent to which some author’s disagreement with me influences my decisions on whether to buy their books is pretty personal and depends on the importance I place morally on a given trait or statement. For me, whether or not a book is tainted for me (which, as with the Ellison, might be something I’m actively resisting), or whether or not I would avoid someone’s fiction based on other opinions they’ve shared publicly, is a “decision” that will fall on a complicated continuum. It’s not like I’m advocating (or ever would advocate) banning in any way shape or form. I’m talking about what I would purchase or how I would feel upon reading something.

Medievalist @@@@@39

I just don’t agree Wright’s been silenced; he’s been criticized. He has a right to an opinion, but I don’t believe he has a right to avoid harsh criticism for either the opinion itself or the vile way in which he chooses to express it. That’s the whole beauty of the marketplace of ideas.

I also don’t think that saying “now that this person has gone up on a platform and shouted this screed from the rooftops, his work is tainted for me” is necessarily saying that the book is the author or that you can always discern authorial intent from *either* the book or the author.

And I don’t shield myself from reading people whose views I find abhorrent. But I read them differently, I don’t read them for *pleasure*, and they don’t, therefore, become a part of the *pleasure reading book (time and money) budget* as it were.

Additionally, using Wright as an example, sometimes someone can post something (or in his case, a series of somethings) so fundamentally flawed that it can’t help but influence me on my point of view about the person’s intellectual capacity. That, in turn, influences me about what value I’m likely to get from that person’s other writing.

Medievalist @43:

Well, I actually agree with all of that. But that a work doesn’t lose all value when I know those things doesn’t mean that I don’t read the works differently.

And really, when someone is currently writing and selling, and they are also using their own public forums to advocate for something I find abhorrent, I’m less inclined to use my limited resources to purchase their books and fund their endeavors, given that I already live in a world in which I can’t read *everything* that comes out, and I can’t afford the time and/or money to buy all of the books written by my favorite authors (many of whom are also close friends).

I have to prioritize anyway, and someone like Wright isn’t so much being crossed off a list as he is never making it on, now, because I’ve seen enough to assign, at this point in time, a priority of nil. That’s not to say there could never be a point in time where I thought I might want to read something he wrote, but it wouldn’t be for pleasure, and my knowledge of how he feels about the humanity of some of my closest friends? Well, I couldn’t keep it from influencing the way I read the book.

Medievalist @@@@@ 39: He silenced himself. He deleted the entry because it was linked to in his Wikipedia page. Link is here. No one deleted it for him. As he has a right to his opinions, we have a right to ours. I hope he will take something away from this that isn’t ‘people are persecuting me! Troll avalanche!’

From above: “I avoid Card’s work because of his anti-gay activism–and now Wright’s comments stand as a sort of perfect example of the kind of folks I would not like to support financially.”

This I think is pretty key. It’s not only the views that drive me away — it’s the activism. The public drumming up. It makes it impossible to ignore the source, even if one is careful to, say, get the book from a library or second-hand bookstore.

This has been a hard choice for me in some instances — particularly Card, who was formative for me, when I was a child, in developing exactly the tolerance, empathy and acceptance that he decries and fights against right now. Now, I betcha he didn’t mean to do that at all! But if I hadn’t read him… well, I’d like to think I would have come to the same place I’m in now, but it might have taken me longer.

Each case is individual, I suppose. And craft is often weirdly divorced from character, or what is voiced. Some of these people I’d never want to associate with in real life have (obviously inadvertently) gotten inside the heads and feelings of characters that have changed my life.

That said, there are a lot of books in the world. Public behavior like this is likely to make me avoid the writer in question, not because I wish to punish but because I’ve got a bad taste in my mouth, and how is that fun and relaxing? We have alternatives.

(I’m gutted over DiFillippo. I’ve loved his work.)

@@@@@ 64 LOL — they’re also not forcing me to buy and read their stuff. (As I am not forcing them to stop saying whatever they want to. Win – win!)

@bkaul

The issue here isn’t totally his ideas; it is how he chose to put them out there. It’s one thing to post that you have a moral objection to homosexuality, another entirely to spew slurs and also racial epithets wildly out at the internet. It makes you look like an asshole.

As for the main question: I think it depends. Dead authors who wrote in a time when their opinion was the majority and it doesn’t show up in the fiction (Lovecraft) are okay, because let’s face it, just because they weren’t a radical forward thinker at the time is no reason to blow them off.

For modern authors, it falls under two camps. One: calmly, rationally making an argument, even if the end point disgusts me. Two: epithets, insults, slurs, and general screaming insanity, which disgust but also enrage me. I will often still buy the works of camp #1, because someone’s personal opinions are their own, and as long as they’re not being assholes, okay. Strangely this never seems to happen.

Now, camp #2? If I feel like I am morally obligated to shove the person down a flight of stairs the next time I see them, no. I won’t be supporting their work. Two reasons: they horrify and disgust me as a member of my species, and also it is likely that if they are so irrational and angry and vicious about their belief (be it racism or homophobia or misogyny) it will show up in their fiction. And I will just be disgusted and enraged all over again. (Clarify: when these things are used intentionally in a story to make a point, it is different. When they are presented positively, just no.)

@realJD

I missed this one; double-comment:

This is not what we’re talking about. It wasn’t suddenly discovering he was a born again Christian and disagreed with homosexuality. That wouldn’t have particularly changed my opinion. Lots of people are religious; doesn’t change how I feel about their writing.

It was that he chose to fling vitriol, slurs, insults and filth out at other members of our species. There was no element of rational argument to the post. No hint of decency or functional head-meats. When somebody makes me feel literally nauseas with their racist and misogynistic AND homophobic hatred, I’m done. It’s not asinine. If my grandfather suddenly spewed that sort of thing, I’d probably stop talking to him too, because I would never be able to look at him again without knowing how full of violence and hate he was.

It drives me up the wall when conservatives boycott people they disagree with — actors who support gay marriage, pro-choice authors, leftist filmmakers — and I feel it would be hypocritical of me to do the same in reverse. Yes, I am right and they are wrong (of course), but boycotting someone for their (wrong wrong wrong) political beliefs doesn’t sit well with me — unless the work itself becomes a mouthpiece (*coughDaveSimcough*). I prefer to maintain the belief that even people who are viciously wrongheaded in one arena can say things that are worth listening to in another, and that the former doesn’t easily swamp the latter.

My grandfather was vocally racist; some of my new in-laws would probably agree with John C. Wright’s post. I still think they are (or were) good people, worthy of my time and support. I try to give strangers the same benefit. (But I admit I am sometimes tempted to boycott the occasional, ah, fuckmuppetry. And I’ve probably been subtly influenced more than I would like — I hesitate, for instance, before buying a Baen book because of Jim Baen’s politics.)

Relatedly, I don’t want authors — even wrong-headed ones — to self-censor because they fear an impact on their sales. I’m sure many do now, which is unfortunate. I want the benefit of a vigorous public discussion of gay marriage and public healthcare and fasten-vs.-zip among the bright lights of our field, and I don’t want the right to hold their tongues (for fear of losing readers like me) any more than I want the left to hold their tongues (for fear of a conservative boycott).

@75: Why does it bother me when conservatives do it? I suppose it seems like a type mismatch: “You said something that offends me, so I won’t do business with you.” Either they’re explicitly trying to wield a financial club to dissuade the people they disagree with from speaking, which rankles, or they’re writing off the entirety of the person for a single opinion — saying, in effect, “Because you believe this one thing, I can’t interact with you at all.” A political disagreement becomes a refusal to contribute to someone’s livelihood. The idea of not seeing a Pixar movie, say, because the CEO is queer-friendly is alien to me. Why does it matter to them? And why would it matter to people like me whether Brad Bird is an Objectivist?

I dunno. I like supporting socially conscious businesses, but I don’t expect everyone I do business with to agree with me. That feels divisive, a bit us-vs-them. I wouldn’t move out if I saw my landlord wearing a Sarah Palin T-shirt — we can be on opposite “sides” and still have a fine social and financial relationship. I would vastly prefer that everyone be queer-friendly and pro-gay marriage, but I know they’re not; should I privilege the homophobe who seethes silently over the one who posts to his LJ?

Do you read H.P. Lovecraft?

(PS: why does Tor require word verification to preview comments?)

Jason@84: No, my remark was not directed at you specifically, but at the thread in general. The Chesterton remark caught my eye because I’ve been reading a lot of Chesterton lately (got a packet of his books as a present).

I’ve never read what Chesterton had to say about Buddhists, but he did say some horrifying things about Jews– so did Agatha Christie, in some of her earliest books!–and he took the standard hyperCatholic view of Elizabeth the First, which was that she was evil and nasty for being a Protestant and executing saintly Mary Queen of Scots.

The thing is, he was a humorist; he had a light and silly personality; he spouted off the prejudices of his era and religion. I can’t imagine any scions of the British Empire in the last century having much good to say about Buddhism or Jews either, other than the occasional shining exception like Conan Doyle.

Chesterton, at least, when brought up against the brutal reality of what happens when race prejudice is taken to its logical extreme, realized he’d been wrong. A bit late in the game to do any good, but he did.

And he wrote a lot of fun stuff, which I have enjoyed reading very much. My take on the whole issue: John Wright said some truly vile things, and ought to be ashamed of himself. Maybe he is, judging from the speed with which he covered his tracks.

Card– well, has he written any books demonizing gays? I don’t read his stuff anyway, so I can’t judge. But if you’re going to hate him for his Mormon views on gays, aren’t you going to have to hate everyone whose religion says homosexuality is a sin? Which lines you up against all other Mormons, observant Jews, devout Christians and Muslims right there.

If you don’t want to give living hatemongers your money, I applaud you. But if you start excluding long-dead writers because their views don’t agree with your own, you’ll have to pretty much avoid most literature written before WWII.

pnh@92:

I stand corrected. I ought to have said “fundamentalist Christians” rather than “devout Christians”. Essentially, anyone who points to the Old Testament lines about young men committing abominations together as their justification for hating gays.

I seem to remember many people getting very upset at Card fairly recently. One, when he suggested that homosexual behavior be recriminalized and the laws occasionally enforced to send a message as to what is and what is not acceptable. Two, when he declared that he was in favor of the overthrow of the government in case of legal elevation of gay marriage.

http://www.nauvoo.com/library/card-hypocrites.html
http://www.mormontimes.com/mormon_voices/?id=3237

Both those strike me as rather different than simple anti-gay sentiment or belief in a religious proscription against homosexual sex. I suspect that many people against gay marriage–for example the current President and his Secretary of State–see little reason to overthrow the governments of Massachusetts, Iowa, Vermont, New Hampshire, and Maine for example.

At any rate, I certainly don’t refuse to read or buy books by people whose opinions or actions I find reprehensible or even by people who actively and explicitly dislike me. For one, it is purely practical — all “I’ll never buy your book!” means is what? Given hardcover royalties, what one is saying is “I certainly won’t maybe give you two dollars and fifty cents two years from now!” (The price and royalty rates drop with the format.) Is this really supposed to send market signals of some sort to authors? Yes yes, I know if lots of people stop buying books by this or that author…and yet I know many dozens of people who refuse to buy OSC books and perhaps three or four that quickly snap up whatever he publishes in hardcover but sooooooomehoooooow OSC still keeps selling hundreds of thousands of copies of his books.

(Personally, I don’t read Card because I find his work mostly very tedious. If I am ever in a desperate state I suppose I’ll reread The Worthing Saga, which I enjoyed when I was yonger.)

Practically, these informal, demandless boycott-sentiments don’t seem to have any real juice behind them.

The second is just a matter of my own experience: some people are better writers than they are people. Why reduce my pleasure by concentrating on what someone else isn’t good at, such as being a person? If their political sentiments and actions are harmful to me, well, I’ll deal with that in the political arena. The activism of even popular authors generally have much less impact on my daily life than the actions of the local state senator or the cop on the corner.

Drak @104, right now churches don’t have to host any weddings they don’t want to. They don’t have to host interracial marriages, they don’t have to let anyone other than their pastor or priest perform weddings, they don’t have to host the weddings of people outside the congregation or the denomination, or people with facial piercings, or people with Q’s in their name. Hasn’t happened in the past, and it won’t happen when same-sex marriage is legalized. (I’m speaking here as someone who got married in Massachusetts, where same-sex marriage has been legal for five years. I still bumped up against all sorts of wacky requirements while researching churches.)

It might be imprudent for me to comment specifically on these issues, but as I read the thread I kept thinking of Auden’s lines:

Time that is intolerant
Of the brave and innocent,
And indifferent in a week
To a beautiful physique,

Worships language and forgives
Everyone by whom it lives;
Pardons cowardice, conceit,
Lays its honours at their feet.

Time that with this strange excuse
Pardoned Kipling and his views,
And will pardon Paul Claudel,
Pardons him for writing well.

(“In Memory of W.B. Yeats”)

It’s a measure of how old my poetry library is that I didn’t know that Auden omitted these lines from the 1966 edition of his work.

I’m amused by Drak’s earlier comment that on conservative message boards the extreme rightists are controlled by the more reasonable conservatives. Once it is demonstrated that OSC is one of those extreme sorts, Drak lines up right behind him with a fanciful tale of forced religious marriage and the street battles that he will join on that occasion.

Hey it only takes five kooks to take the guns away from all white people and then redistribute them to all the black people! Someone told me that they heard someone wanted to do this on some website! So, moral litmus test right now: are you against this, or are you some kind of horrible liberal?

@bkaul(85)

“I don’t insist that my plumber agree with me on everything; why would I insist that an author do so?”

But the discussion hasn’t really been about trivial differences of opinion. It has been about people you feel have truly odious opinions or beliefs.

In the same way that I would be unlikely to enjoy the work of an artist whose politics or religion I found truly repugnant – I would not do business with a plumber I knew to be a member of the KKK.

Ever since I found out that China Mieville doesn’t permit his work to be translated into Hebrew, I resolved to never pick up another of his books again. (And it isn’t that hard.)

Ironically, I still get emails from people telling me that my customer review of “Perdido Street Station” influenced them to buy the book.

Yes, China, an ISRAELI helped you sell some books. You’re welcome.

tapsi @130: China Mieville is boycotting Israel for the reasons described here:
http://jewssansfrontieres.blogspot.com/2009/01/call-for-boycott-divestment-and.html

Unrelated fun fact: one of my favorite authors is a devout Mormon who returned to the church after having a mystical experience. He’s also a punk rocker, gay, wears Boy George make-up and giant hats with pictures of Barbara Streisand and Williams Shakespeare on them, and lives with his mom. And his favorite writer is, in turn, Lovecraft.

104: There is a fear among many religious people that ‘legal gay marriage’ will include telling the churches that they must allow gay marriages within their churches.

In the same way the existence of legalized Baptist weddings require the Catholics to perform Baptist wedding ceremonies? Or, for that matter, how legalized divorce forces the Catholics to perform wedding ceremonies for divorcees now remarrying?

I myself have vowed that if proposed changes to sales tax law in Canada ends up requiring all kittens to be BBQed alive I will most certainly protest loudly. I don’t have any reason to think this could be the case – in fact, it seems pretty crazy to think it would – but I think it’s important to go alarmist early and often. A Harmonized Sales Tax is the Kitten Apocalypse!

I’m afraid I don’t see any inconsistency at all. There are two parallel tracks:

I deal with politics in the political arena.
I read books I enjoy.

What, exactly is inconsistent here? I suspect that many boycotts have rather too much to do with some ultimate faith in the marketplace more than anything else. That is a faith I simply don’t share. Markets aren’t subtle yet potent political correctives for the politics of individual actors. This is why actual boycotts usually involve specific demands and a mass movement designed to really harm an organization’s bottom line as opposed to a group (but not a chorus!) of “Nah, I doan wanna give him no money nyah nyah” on the Internet somewhere.

Wake me when there’s an informational picket outside an OSC reading or signing, or even a letter-writing campaign to our hosts in the Flatiron Building. Then I’ll buy the idea of a boycott even happening. (And it’s not like such a thing must fail. I believe a reissue of the Gor titles was spiked after a letter-writing campaign to some indie press.)

Or, more practically, s $2.50 ending up in the hands of — gee, I don’t even know because I already don’t read OSC because he’s wooden and silly, so let’s just say HITLER — and $5.00 going to the bookstore and $5.00 to Ingram and $3.00 to Houghton Mifflin Harcourt (which may also publish work by, oh, I dunno, Our Lord and Savior Leon Trotsky, the World’s Best Anti-Fascist, and of course Ingram will fulfill orders for that book and the bookstore people will stock it) really going to put me at a disadvantage in the political arena, vis a vis Hitler? Really? Really really?

Really, if Hitler and I coincidentally shared the same dental plan, I’d be doing him a bigger favor.

And forget if we actually lived in the same state and Hitler, yes HITLER, were sucking up my tax dollars for nice roads on which to drive his Volkswagen (and me, without even a license, much less a car!) and for mediocre public schools to send Hans and Adolph Jr. and Little Eva (and I have no kids, Aryan Superbabies or otherwise!) etc etc ad nazium.

But but but…I’d also be giving him an extra $2.50. He might buy a hotdog with it and with that fuel in his belly give a speech that would lead directly to the sort of occupation that sent my male relations into the lonely hills of Ikaria to kill crack Nazi troops with kitchen knives and pillowcases full of rocks. (PS: We won.)

Oooor, maybe Hitler would choke on his hot dog and die and it would be thanks to me Me ME yes me NICK MAMATAS buying Hitler’s book and SAVING THE WORLD with the two fiddy I sent him!

And you little bastards probably wouldn’t even hold a parade for me.

The notion of not sending some writer with odious opinions money as a political action doesn’t fly to me. As some sort of self-reinforcement of one’s own beliefs, great, works fine. Doesn’t make me inconsistent in my political praxis at all. If it makes you feel better or works as a way of organizing your leisure activities and consumption, sweet. Enjoy, but include me out of the finger-wagging.

N

PNH: The author of whom I am speaking is Wilum Hopfrog Pugmire, a writer of Lovecraftian short stories. As he is, well, a total weirdo, writing to a very specific aesthetic, his stuff mostly appears in the small press. His work has been in several anthologies from major publisher as well. Off the top of my head, he was in the CUTTING EDGE anthology Etchison did for Dell in the Abyss days. (1986! Time sure flies when you’re FUNDING HITLER!!!!)