Reviving Robert Ingersoll

‘The Great Agnostic,’ by Susan Jacoby - NYTimes.com: 

Robert Ingersoll, image via NYTimes.com

... Jacoby adds her suspicion that Ingersoll might have fared better had a rise in secularism, which he helped bring about, proved to be permanent. But it is wrong, she notes, to allow his stature to diminish as a result of the resurgence of religion that occurred after his death. “Intellectual history is a relay race, not a 100-yard dash,” Jacoby writes, in a nice turn of phrase. Reporting on the irreligion of many of the country’s founding figures, Ingersoll kept the ideals of secularism alive during his own era and passed them on to us. In particular, he championed the memory of Thomas Paine, whose rejection of religion had led to his being forgotten in Ingersoll’s time, despite the considerable role Paine played in turning the American colonies toward revolution. It may be hoped that Jacoby’s book does as much for Ingersoll as Ingersoll did for Paine.

Ashamed to say that if you'd mentioned Ingersoll to me before I'd read this article, I would've drawn a blank. Knowing now in what high regard he was held by the likes of Clemens and Whitman, and having read a little of his work since stumbling across this article, I'm intrigued and ready to read more ...

Cory Doctrow on KSR's Pacific Edge

Locus Online Perspectives | Cory Doctorow: Ten Years On: 

The thing I loved about Pacific Edge is how good the people were, even as they got in each other’s way and fought with one another and made things miserable for each other. Robinson’s book is a tour-de-force character novel that is deeply compassionate about the way that people of good will and good faith can trip each other up. And it is ‘‘utopian,’’ in the sense that it is all set in a time/place where technology doesn’t threaten to get away from its creators and destroy them.

Cory's talking about how PE influenced his first novel, Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom.

Loyalty to the Union in North Carolina (Not exactly ancient history either.)

Blood in the Carolina Hills - NYTimes.com: 

In much of the South, the issue of the Civil War was not slavery or the legalities of whether a state had the right to secede. For many white Southerners, the issue was: Which is my true country, the United States or the Confederate States? In many places, loyalty to the Confederacy was the rule. But in Yadkin County, N.C., fierce conviction gripped both sides of the question, culminating in a February 1863 gun battle that traumatized the county for generations. 

... An intricate web of kinship and economic interdependence knits together the region’s family farms, many of which were first tilled by frontiersmen and veterans of the Continental Army ... [whose] descendants remained loyal to the Union they helped to found.

Third Wave KKK in NC (Not exactly ancient history.)

The Klan's Rise To Prominence In 1960s North Carolina | WUNC: 

At its peak, the Klan had more than 10,000 members in North Carolina. 

"Almost every night of the year in the mid-1960s you'd see a Klan rally somewhere in North Carolina," Cunningham says. "It was kind of a skewed county fair environment. They listened to live music, bought Klan souvenirs, and ended the night with an enormous cross-burning."

NC's relative progressivism during the Civil Rights era fueled the more reactionary response.

The more things change ...

The Tomb of the Cybermen - "If anyone wishes to leave they must do so at once. Not you, Jamie!"

BBC - Doctor Who Classic Episode Guide - The Tomb of the Cybermen - Details

Season 5, Story 1 (Complete Series Story #37) | Previous - Next | Index

Power. Maybe it's because I'm also watching Game of Thrones these days, this story struck me as hitting on some of the same themes with regard to treachery and the nature of power. Certainly, when dealing with the Cybermen, there's the whole fear of runaway technology and human augmentation, so I don't mean to downplay that aspect of the Cybermen as an effectively creepy adversary ... but when we ask ourselves who was the real enemy in this story, I think we have to say it was Kaftan and Klieg, the power mad schemers out to usurp the scientific expedition to Telos for their own nefarious ends -- though I honestly can't say I ever quite understood what organization they were acting on behalf of while watching. (I looked it up after and learned they were members of the Brotherhood of Logicians, a group with brains and ambition, but no brawn to back it up.)

So, Klieg, whatcha doin' there?

There's a clumsy attempt to make Boolean logic a part of the story, but that's never done in a way that I think was meant to fool anyone but 6-yr-olds. You just can't expect much of the technobabble to make sense in these old stories.  What I like about this episode though is the audience is shown, not told, that there are some questions that, had the they been asked, might have saved the expedition a lot of trouble, questions like: Where's the money coming from? What are the motives of the people funding the expedition? We can understand the desire to learn about the Cybermen, but it was surely the height of folly to go poking around their tombs blindly trusting that the only motive of all parties was simply the pursuit of knowledge. And, we can reasonably ask, was the pursuit of knowledge in this case worth the risk?, which is good practice for thinking about medical ethics and a host of other issues that are still relevant decades after this episode was produced.

There's a great deal of skepticism about science in this one. The scientist nominally in charge of the expedition is a short-sighted buffoon, so caught up in looking at cybertechnology, he can't see the peril standing right next to him. Klieg, is presented to us as a brilliant logician and scientist, but he's a megalomaniac. Then there's the archeologist chappie who's main character trait seems to be cowardice. If it weren't for the Doctor, you'd think the message of the show was "Scientists can't be trusted!"

I chose the quote for this post title first because it made me laugh out loud when Troughton delivered the line, but it also speaks directly to the Doctor's willingness to pick up stray humans and drag them into insanely dangerous adventures. We can forgive the Doctor though, because ultimately Victoria and Jamie know what they're getting into. Or, at least they are making the choice to explore even though they don't know exactly what they're getting into. The Doctor is a Time Lord and he's got a TARDIS, so some of the risk is mitigated anyways. We aren't so forgiving of the members of the expedition to Telos though, who know, or ought to know, their technology doesn't stack up against the Cybermen. This is one where the Doctor looks more irresponsible in retrospect, because the fate of all the team hung on Toberman's ability to resist the Cyber Commander's programming.

As long as we're talking about Toberman, let's deal with this instance of the mute, black strongman. (See, "Terror of the Autons" for another.) I mean, WTF? I know it was 1967 and the world wasn't quite to our level of post-racial harmony where black kids can walk the streets at night with skittles in their pocket comfortable in the knowledge they won't be shot down by a racist vigilante protected by NRA-sponsored laws protecting white people from prosecution when they hunt black people. But still ... it's very difficult to stomach this sort of portrayal even acknowledging that racist stereotyping was part of the TV landscape in the mid-20th century. If Toberman hadn't been granted the small measure of dignity of getting a heroic end, I'd be even less inclined to forgive this story. As it is, I'm reasonably comfortable that we can watch this without dismissing it as utterly hateful racist propaganda; instead, I think we can acknowledge that the production staff had some retrograde ideas about skin pigmentation we can understand as a product of the times and not quarantine it as unwatchable. We shouldn't deny it's a problem, nor should we just dismiss it as only a problem of a bygone age. Because, unless you missed the sarcasm earlier, we still live a society that deals with its disgusting history of savage oppression and cruel denial of basic human and civil rights by enacting voter ID laws and imprisoning an incredible number of black men.

The other brilliant comic moment, by the way, occurs very early when the Doctor puts his hand out to guide Victoria (a young 19th century girl who lost her father in the previous story to the Daleks) into tomb of the Cybermen, through a door that just electrified another member of the expedition. The funny bit is that Jamie reflexively grabs the hand offered to him, and both he and the Doctor react with a classically awkward heteronormative hand-dropping.  The crazy thing is that he is bringing Victoria and Jamie into what is clearly a dangerous situation.

GIF-able moment if there ever was one.

If this story were nothing more than it's plot and atmosphere, it wouldn't have much interest to us, but because of the themes and the great chemistry between Patrick Troughton and Frazer Hines, it stands out despite being a little over its own head.