Hagenart’s constitutional amendments

 I really enjoyed making that list last week. Like Hammurabi, chiseling edicts on the stone plinths. So much so that I’ve racked my brain trying to think of other institutions I could improve with a few slashing pen strokes, just to feel that rush of sweet logical power and authority. This week I’ll improve the US constitution. A lot of people in America really venerate the constitution - too much, in my opinion. To the point that they don’t really understand what has actually made America a great place to live for some people, and what hasn’t made America a great place to live for some other people, and why. 

To begin with, many Americans might not know that lots of other countries have constitutions, and a lot of those constitutions grant all the freedoms Americans enjoy, and more. And those constitutions didn’t explicitly provide for human slavery like US constitution originally did. If you believe that God inspired the “Founding Fathers” during their creation of the US constitution, you believe that God was okay with slavery.  Hopefully you don’t, and therefore do not believe the constitution is scripture, and see that there are lots of countries with constitutions with varying degrees of actual democracy, especially concerning freedom of speech, ie the freedom to criticize the government and criticize any and all the government officials you want, which seems around the world to make all the difference, ie whatever their constitution, if the people can criticize the government all they want without fear of arrest, then it’s a democracy.  So you agree with me that it’s okay to change the constitution with amendments, which we already do. We just need to do it a little more. I have prepared a list. But before we get to that list, we need to go through another list, a list of key concepts for American democracy:

1. People have been told that their vote counts, and it does, but their vote counts more in the small-scale local elections that they pay no attention to. Their vote counts more mathematically because there are less people voting; so in a community of 1000 people each individual vote counts for one part in a thousand, and in a city of millions each vote counts for one part in a million, and in a country of 100s of millions each vote counts for one in a 100 million. But individual votes in local elections also count for more because they are more informed, because they can actually see the buildings and roads and schools impacted by their vote, because they can attend meetings and see and talk to the officials they have elected. 
2. Money determines the national, general elections more than the local elections. Mostly in the primaries. After the choices have been whittled down to 1 candidate per party, people generally vote along very broad ideological lines. Money still influences those elections amongst the undecided voters.  In the national elections, people can’t go drive to see all the buildings and schools and refugees and foreign affairs and armies and who knows what. They can’t go to a town hall and meet the candidates face to face. Television and internet provides the images and news stories about the schools and foreign affairs and refugees. But mostly the candidates and their families. 
3. Most people don’t really know what they’re voting about or for. They don’t even know if they’re voting in their own basic self interest. Especially, and I said it before, in national elections. Even if they know how to google “foreign affairs”. Education directly impacts democratic institutions. If someone votes on an issue they do not understand, they are voting how they have been told to vote. 

So now that we’ve made our initial list of key concepts, we can move on to amending the US Constitution with some amendments. 

Amendment 28:

Let’s deal with the Presidency. 

First, no more electoral college, obviously. The nation will elect the President by popular vote. 

We will also elect the Secretary of State, the secretary of defense, the attorney general, and the secretary of the interior. The secretary of the interior will become Vice President. That’s right, the person elected to be the direct successor to the president will have a real job. The senate can choose their own guy to bang the gavel and whatever. 

So each presidential ticket will consist of five candidates, not one and a half. I know, a lot of cultists and fascists and closet monarchists will complain, but we will start to look and think like people in a real democracy for a change

Amendment 29:

The Senate? Are we living in Ancient Rome? No more 6 year terms. We’ll give them 4 years, and the house must approve Supreme Court nominees and cabinet appointments as well. Honestly, why do we have a Senate? Don’t we elect the house?

Amendment 30:

Everyone in every state votes on all members of the congressional delegation. No more gerrymandered districts. 

Amendment 31:

Okay, here’s the big one. Remember our discussion about how your vote counts more in local elections? We destroyed the electoral college in Amendment 28, now we’re bringing it back with teeth, in a completely new form. That’s right, the new electoral college, no longer a pawn of state legislatures, directly elected by the people. Each elector is chosen by vote of 5,000 of their neighbors, people who know them, with access to talk to them in public meetings every week. You would know your Elector well enough to wave hello, and you could meet with them every week, and you would vote on them every two years. 

What would this new electoral college do? They would vote in the national elections, and they would vote on constitutional amendments. 

 I know, I know. I said no electoral college before, and we can definitely hold off on this amendment. You want a say in the national elections. But let me point out that my Electoral college would be elected by you, and you would get direct face time with them. Think about that. You would talk to the people who vote on your President and cabinet members and you would expect them to do their job to stay informed and push for issues important to you, and you wouldn’t be watching everything on the news with that sinking, helpless feeling. You will be empowered and participating in the democracy. You’re welcome

Hagenart comic 04/18/21

 

The church I would attend (sometimes)

 Last week’s post might have given someone the wrong idea about my feelings about growing up in the Mormon church. I disliked the services because you had to sit through a talk, but if they had changed a few things with the basic format and removed the proselytizing part from the missions, and some other things, then I would still be attending. 

I’ve compiled a list of proposals for the church leadership:

1. Women given the same priesthood designations and leadership positions as men. No separate Sunday school classes for girls and boys. 

2. Gay marriages recognized as equal to heterosexual unions

3. No tithing, and no more requests for individual members financial data. Voluntary and self-directed donations only. 

4. The donations can be itemized to go toward specified building projects, towards charitable services for the poor, etc

5. No stake presidents. Bishops must be elected by a secret ballot of the ward adults. The quorums will nominate the candidates. Each ward will elect 1 regional representative. The regional representatives will vote on all the general authorities in open ballots. The prime duty of the general authorities will be doctrinal rulings and fundraising. They won’t be running the organization. 

6. The church service will be the sacrament and musical numbers or holiday pageants. Strictly under 30 minutes. Attendance of individual members will not be tracked. 

7. Sunday school may be offered but refreshments are mandatory. The lessons will be optional audiovisual depictions of scripture stories, or an actual scripture study preparatory course for the priesthood exams. That’s right! Everyone becomes a deacon at 12, but advancement depends on passing scripture exams! The priesthood levels will mean something! 

8. The missionary program is humanitarian, no proselytizing at all. The point will be for young people to go out and learn about other people in the world and make friends with them, not to pester them with intrusive door to door telemarketing. And the church funds will go to those humanitarian missions. 

9. Yes to the two and a half minute talks. No sermon or talk can exceed two and a half minutes in any meeting. 

10. The general conference will be videos, and a Mormon video game competition. 

11. Total freedom of speech. The church leaders don’t get to excommunicate people. If someone commits a crime the congregation votes on excommunication. The leadership can put out announcements saying that something is not canon or not doctrinal, but they don’t get to rule on people. 

12. Baptism at 12. 

13. Comic book versions of scripture stories are to be celebrated and openly read

I think that covers it. I would definitely attend that church. Not every week of course, but more often than not. I would particularly welcome the rigorous scripture studies meant to weed out the morons of either sex from the upper priesthood levels

My youth in church part 1

 I don’t write about going to church as a child, because although I remember some specific moments from church services and Sunday school, I don’t think about it very often, and I remember very little on the whole. I could describe a Mormon service to people, maybe in dreary detail, and I could describe the sometimes annoying way Mormons talk at church, but I don’t recall many specific or meaningful instances from particular service or meeting because to be honest these memories blend together in their blandness and uniformity and the painful sense of wasted time, but I do remember that there were many non-remembered times sitting on the benches with my family or with the other deacons or the teachers and not paying any attention whatsoever to whatever the speakers at the pulpit said but daydreaming relentlessly about the girls my age in the congregation or maybe a science fiction book I’d read the previous day. 

Later I’d moved from science fiction to Carl Sagan and Isaac Asimov and by the time I’d turned 16 and become a priest (a Mormon priest, ages 16-18) I had not learned to drive and did not wish to go on a Mormon mission but I kept going to church in order to see my friends and some of the girls. 

Truthfully, I enjoyed church a little more after I stopped believing, because I knew I could completely ignore the sermons or talks and I wouldn’t go to hell. I could think whatever I wanted and didn’t have to worry about the creator of the universe reading my mind and getting pissed off at all my sex dreams. 

But eventually I got tired of it. 

Now I never go unless it’s a funeral.  But although I don’t believe in a human-like creator, and I don’t believe in any of the miracles of the Bible or anything at all in the Book of Mormon, my youthful church experiences did imprint my mind with most of the Mormon values. I believe that even when religious people talk about believing in a religion, they actually mean the values of that religion, and not the miracle stories. And values means the value of people. When someone lists the “values” that are important to them, they really mean “people-judging-criteria.”  A person says; “We value chastity,” but they really mean “We assess people based on their chasteness.”  Or “we believe the creator of the universe assesses people based upon their chasteness, and we believe this because we read about it in the Bible which is the ultimate authority on how god evaluates humans.”  If you think of yourself as chaste, this is a very comforting thought. 

I still have a Mormon youth inside me, instinctively judging myself and other based on the nonsense I learned in Sunday school. But I have to admit that without the validation of the miracle stories, those judgements no longer carry much weight

Sequel to previous post of intense critical analysis of Star Wars and CS Lewis now involving superhero movies

Many years ago, in my youth, I read comic books about superheroes. I also watched Star Wars movies. I did not ever read Star Wars comics. I tried a few, but I didn’t find them very interesting in comparison to the overwhelming visual and auditory experience of the movies. I say that, but in my teens I did read the Star Wars original novelization by George Lucas, or so I thought at the time. Now Wikipedia says Alan Dean Foster ghost wrote it. I enjoyed the book, but at the time I read any science fiction I could get from the local library, which meant whatever water warped paperbacks were on the spinning metal rack by the front door and sometimes I’d have to keep spinning and spinning it and all I could see were the same books that I’d already read, actually the exact same copies of the books, with the tears and creases that I recognized from when I’d checked them out before, and so i got desperate and read the Star Wars novelization and as I say I kind of liked it but I liked anything with spaceships by that time and I didn’t find it as imaginative as a lot of other books that I was interested in, which brings me to the theme of this post, the Hagenart 1st and 2nd Rules of Writing for Media

Rule 1: The higher the complexity of the performance medium, the lower the level of creativity and complexity required for it to be interesting to most people. Basically, you don’t need to be as creative to write for a movie with moving visual and sound elements, as you do to write for say a novel. At an intermediate level, writing the lyrics for a song with music accompaniment requires less creativity and excellence than writing a poem to be performed by spoken word only. Basically, a bird must work harder to fly than a fish must work to float. 

Rule 2: The higher the complexity of the medium, the less freedom you have when writing for it. A person writing a prose novel can write with less constraints than a person writing for a movie.  The movie script has to be portrayable on a screen in a certain time. Basically, a bird may fly faster than a fish can swim. 

Rule 3: The rule of Transfers. When you make a movie out of a book, you lose freedom but gain the added dimensions of the new medium. When you make a book out of a movie, you lose the power of the medium and gain freedom. 

3a: The new freedom doesn’t usually help the movie made into a book, because the story is already set. That’s why novelizations fail to be interesting, because something written for a film will suffer from the transfer to a less powerful medium, without gaining enough from the freedom.  It may swim with the fishes but it will not fly with the birds. And it must compete with books written with the freedom enjoyed by Rule 2. 

And that’s why the Star Wars comics weren’t that interesting. 

But what about the movies made from books? They actually work pretty well, in general, because they bring the high caliber imagination and storytelling of a successful novel to the power of the sound and visuals of the cinema. But to move to a new medium, they lose some of the freedom of their original medium, so those annoyingly picky readers like myself may resent or dislike the film version. But we still watch it. Well, I don’t, not any more. They’ve hurt me too many times. Lord of the Rings cut too deep. 

Now I bring in the super hero movies, the supposed point of this post, yes!

The MCU people have managed to take the creativity and storytelling freedom of the comic books to film, while making the most of the cinema’s visual and auditory power.  They’ve also had some good fortune, in that the new special effects technology has enabled them to bring the comic books to the screen with far less constraints in their storytelling freedom - Lessening the impact of Rule 3. 

But there’s a secret advantage to making movies out of comic books as compared to regular novels, that makes all the difference: The comic books are serials, with lots and lots of storylines to choose from. The comic books sometimes retell the same story with minor changes many times. The readers can’t possibly even remember all the plots and alternate versions of each character, so they don’t care if the movies stick with the exact plot of whatever original comic storyline it was based on. So the MCU creators didn’t have to stick to some exact plot like the Harry Potter movies did - ugh, how they did. So the fans didn’t care. 

Except for Origin Stories.  Which the MCU people have wisely avoided, except for Iron Man - but I think that worked because they had Robert Downey Junior, and fun visuals. But that usually doesn’t work - I have come to believe that Origin Stories generally do not work in movies, because they take too long and pretty much depend on the actor - so if you don’t get someone really good, it’s unbearable and uninteresting. 

Actually that’s rule 4: Origin Stories should be left to the Comic Book, unless you have RDJ to do it for you. MCU seems to know this. The DCCU people haven’t quite learned it.  But they’ve still made a lot of money, because of Rule number 5: Anything about superheroes makes money now because we humans love to fantasize about being superheroes because we want to be unique and we have learned from the internet that we are not unique. We are living in gigantic high tech anthills and we are not biologically designed to be ants, we are chest beating monkeys who live in small tribes where everyone knows us and we are important to the group. We dream about joining a special tribe, rising above the ants somehow, having a secret quality, a superiority that transcends our everyday ant struggles and failures. 

So those are some of the Hagenart Rules. There are more of course. I like making these rules. It feels like being an alpha gorilla with big hairy arms, telling the other monkeys about my favorite comics and hogging all the oranges. 

 

Now that I’ve thoroughly dissected HP Lovecraft and CS Lewis, we will pivot this high caliber analytic cannon of a blog toward our next target; a comparison of the Star Wars and Marvel Superhero movies. The movies that Martin Scorcese pointedly described as “not cinema”, igniting a firestorm of publicity for the Marvel movies and whatever he was working on at the time, I don’t really remember, but I do remember my appreciation for the sheer snootiness of his comment, and I remember that he and some other directors were concerned about some gloriously worthless and unbelievably snooty cause, something about preserving old movies on original handcrafted plates or something, and someone from Empire magazine interviewed him about it and asked him what he thought of all the superhero movies, probably hoping to get some priceless comment in a comic book store guy voice, and that’s probably the only interview in Empire magazine that people like me will refer to for years to come. 

So are the Marvel movies “cinema”?  I have no idea because I don’t know what that means. Are they artistic? Are they literature? I don’t think so. 

I think the first Star Wars movie is artistic. I think Lucas created a new type of fantasy with it, a re-imagining of the fantasy genre by replacing the medieval outfits with California new age cult robes and replacing the horses with spaceships and laser swords. I don’t think he brought anything new to the sequels, and I think his weird desire to tell an anti-technology parable with movies that glorify a mix of technology and fantasy fatally interfered with his storytelling instincts. He stopped going for the 70’s realism vibe that mixed so interestingly with the fantastic elements in the first Star Wars, maybe I wonder responding to criticism from his pompous film school friends or, worse responding to praise from Joseph Campbell. He needed someone outside his circle to bounce ideas off, maybe. 

Of course I could clear my throat and point at yours truly now, but that would be tacky. We’re here to talk about George and how we could help him, or could have helped him in 1980, after Empire Strikes Back and before the Ewoks. Or maybe the Ewoks existed in his mind at the time and so many beautiful people had called him a genius to his face that he’d already lost it and he wanted to be mentally naked and bare his mind Ewoks and all on the big screen. 

So it’s 1980 and we’ve walked through a time portal with a message for Lucasfilm.  

It just so happens that in a previous post, we had a book, That Hideous Strength, by CS Lewis,  from which we had removed the first six chapters or so, and were kind of left hanging there until now by, once again, Yours Truly. 

It’s all coming together now. The first two Star Wars movies - I’m not going to dignify that prequel Roman numeral crap with a turgid discussion of which came first - will take the place, in a multi-media format, in place of the removed chapters of That Hideous Strength. But whenever Obi Wan or Yoda talk about the force, they add a bit about the macrobes and how the leader of the bad macrobes on earth turned Darth Vader to evil. 

But what about Out of the Silent Planet and Perelandra? Totally improved with a judicious injection of laser swords and Star destroyers. Ransom visits Mars with an earth colonial battle fleet, and foments an insurrection after connecting with a mystical guerilla leader named Oyarsa Malacandra, who teaches him the force and gifts him a sweet lightsaber to fight the earthling empire. 

It gets better in the new version of Perelandra. Ransom gets word that a new super Jedi lives on Venus, named Perelandra. She’s green skinned but human in form, kind of a mix of a Yoda and a human. She rides around the oceans of Venus on a floating vegetable mat powered by her force-magic at triple digit speeds. Ransom teaches her to channel her energy for righteousness, but the emperor lands on his personal shuttle and tries to woo her to the dark side. Surprise! She joins the Emperor and kills Ransom in a duel, after Ransom wounds the emperor, who falls in a Venusian lava flow. The green lady rescues the Emperor and he becomes Darth Vader. 

Here’s the twist in the third book, the evil green Sith replaces the Princess in the Star Wars chapters. 

Now get ready for awesomeness - in the Empire Strikes back she’s the one who trains Luke in the swamps of Venus, no Yoda, and after the big reveal of Luke’s father, we’re ready for part three with Jabba and the fight between the rebels and the empire on earth. 

We go Meta at that point: Darth Vader turns out to be George Lucas. He’s the president of several film conglomerates, and also President of the US, and Chief Justice and Speaker of the house, and Secretary General of the United Nations. He’s been making movies about his own interstellar empire! The audacity! 

I would wrap up both series with a double wedding of Luke, Han, and the Green Lady, with the audience slash reader still the only ones wise to her big secret. Sequel anyone? Yes, I believe I’ll have another slice -of both streams, please!

PS: I know we never included the superhero movies in our critical discussion - Sequel anyone?

How to RPG the CSL Space Trilogy

 I originally tried to begin this post with the words; “According to my rather indifferently performed internet research, this post will mark the first time a literary work is analyzed by being turned into a role play game,” but the fact that I hadn’t done any internet research at all began to bother me, so much so that I tried to actually do some research, and ended up getting a nasty shock when my first google search result returned a Wikipedia article on “LitRPG” which seemed to be an entire genre based on an idea that I had been congratulating myself for inventing. I did some reading and even found some fascinating sub-genres with Japanese names because they pertain to styles of manga. Eventually I concluded that LitRPG does not quite correspond to my idea but that my idea no longer afforded me any satisfaction and I did not feel like developing it in a post. 

It just doesn’t seem all that neat or original anymore. But anyway, while other people may have turned books into role play games, I would be willing to bet scads of money that no one else has ever even felt an inclination to turn this particular book, Out of the Silent Planet, by CS Lewis, into a role playing game. It would probably suck. The protagonist that you would play doesn’t really do anything adventurous in the book, and most of his character development is learning how awful modern earth civilization is and how much happier and more in touch with everything the primitive seeming martians are. 

So I figure that you would begin the game on the spaceship. You could play Ransom, Devine or Weston, but instead of strength or intelligence points I would give them Earth Pride Points and Understanding, or Ken points.  Their Ken points track how hip they are to what the martians, who are in a state of Grace, are laying down for their gross fallen earthly civilization type souls, and would help them develop their  EP score to 0, so that they are sufficiently ashamed of Earth by the end. Ransom would have a beginning Earth Pride score of 10 (out of possible 20 like DnD), but as a linguist he would have a Ken score of 15. Devine would be a 12 on EP and a 12 on Ken. Weston would be a 17 on EP but only a 10 on Ken. After his trip through the space, Ransom would get to remove one EP point. By the end of the story, when Ransom meets the God of Mars, his EP would be like 1, but Devine would be like 7 because of his low Ken. But Weston would still be at 14 or so on EP because his Ken is too low for EP lowering opportunities. 

You could make a better game out of the next book in the series, Perelandra, because in this book Ransom is already hip to how nasty earth is compared to the other planets but he’s a wimpy professor and has to fight the devil. So the big conflict is whether he can work up the courage to punch Weston, who is possessed by the devil. Also, there’s a Venusian Eve who has green skin and walks around naked, and Ransom has to maintain British indifference to her condition. These twin goals can complement each other by giving Ransom a capacity to transfer his sexual testosterone into violent testosterone. So every time he sees the naked green demigoddess he has to make a saving throw for his British indifference. If he succeeds on the throw he can transfer 1 point of sexual testosterone to his violent testosterone score. Then every time he sees the possessed Weston (who is also naked which probably helps with the BI) talking to his girl he rolls for indignation. The higher his violent testosterone, the better his advantage on these rolls. If he succeeds the indignation roll he can take a swing at the possessed old man.  At that point you can just play the game like a DnD battle.   Both of the pugilists are professors, so strength and constitution would be minimal, as would attack damage. 

I think we’ve made some good progress with the Space Trilogy, but unfortunately the last book in the series, That Hideous Strength, besides being mostly unbearable to read until the end, is also almost completely unplayable, like the dictionary or Doctor Dre (showing my age there). I honestly don’t know what to do with the third. It needs something. If I were a book doctor, I would prescribe radical multi-segment-otomy, the wholesale removal of the preliminary chapters. But we have no organic replacements for those chapters, unless we could draft some master writer, like Charlie Kaufman or Eminem, to provide us with some replacement chapters. But of course they’re busy, and we have a patient on the table with four or five chapters removed, cut open to their binding, desperately in need. We’ll have to provide something. If not a living transplant, a clumsy, crude prosthetic will have to do. 

Fortunately I happen to have crafted some in my spare time