Lullaby, Chapter 1

I said before that Lullaby had a linear storyline, but that isn't quite true. It is linear by Palahniuk's standard. It bounces between two points in time, but follows those two threads without jumping around on them too much. The two threads follow the past, and the present.Well, "present". This chapter opens with speculation on the subject.

The problem with every story is you tell it after the fact.  

Even play-by-play descriptions on the radio, the home runs and strikeouts, even that's delayed a few minutes. Even live television is postponed a couple seconds. 

Even sound and light can only go so fast. 

Another problem is the teller. The who, what, where, when, and why of the reporter.

I speculated at the end of the last chapter about how reliable our narrator is, apparently forgetting who wrote this book. Of course Carl isn't a reliable narrator--he's an actual character, so everything he tells us are things that happened to him.  He can pretend this is Helen's story, but it won't read like it, because he's going to be shoving himself at us even as he tries to matter-of-factly tell us what happened, and as he himself points out, he's telling us after the fact. Even the most honest person is going to make mistakes and remember things just a little bit differently than they actually were. The narration goes on to tell us that the whole book is being written on the road, from similar diners in different towns as they try to chase down the most recent "miracle".

Now, this is the danger of picking a book I've read before (but long ago, and I blitzed through it). Reading it now, it is painfully apparent who these two characters be alluded to next are supposed to be, but I'm not sure to a first time reader if it would be in another three chapters. So, compromise: I'll out one of them.

The miracle that is described is "The Flying Virgin". A young white* woman with dirty bare feet, an Indian cotton skirt, denim halter top, and dreadlocks is literally flying around (no plane, tragically no jetpack).  She sprays "STOP HAVING BABIES" in insect fogger in the sky, then accidentally flashes the crowd before blowing a few kisses, flashing some peace signs, and flying off. This woman is Mona, Helen's secretary from last chapter.

I'll get to the blatant cultural appropriation this character has going on in a moment, but first (I can't believe I'm saying this) I want to concentrate on her junk.

And there's a bush of brown hair under her arm. The moment before she starts writing, a gust of wind lifts her skirt, and the Flying Virgin's not wearing any panties. Between her legs, she's shaved.

I want to concentrate on her junk because the author so desperately wants us to. Palahniuk was very deliberate in showing us her junk, but first, in showing us that it's the only thing she shaved. Last chapter Mona was described in vaguely infantile terms (sucking on her crystal like a baby with a soother) and in this chapter she is described as seeming pretentious and clueless. She mixes and matches different cultures with little to no knowledge about what they mean and wears them as a statement, divorced of their context. You know at this point she's eventually going to talk about how Native American's are, like, sooo spiritual and isn't that like super cool?  And you're right, she will! Mona seems to think she's doing good, or at least is trying to, but is just steeped so far in her own white privilege that she can't see it. The general response to her will be people rolling their eyes at her affectionately. Oh, look at her, she thinks she's an activist!

Or... that would have been my read of her, if not for the unfortunate up-skirt here which underlines how she's unshaven where people can see it--but where only her boyfriend can see it, she's shaved. I think this is meant to underline both her hypocrisy, but also to make her "fake". Now, I am speculating on what I think Palahniuk is trying to communicate by having her shaved; these are not my feelings on women shaving what ever the hell they want. I see Palahniuk as writing this with a sneer: "Look at how hard she's trying. Look at how she bought all the accessories but in the end is just doing it all to please a man. Look at how she tries to be a child of the Earth but shaves like some sort of plastic Barbie". My general motto being "Do what ever you want so long as no one is getting hurt in ways they didn't consent to", this sort of judgement seeping in from the sides of the pages makes me uncomfortable. The random use of a woman's genitals, and the state of hair they have, as a quick character building thing is also telling of how the author (and this is the author, not the narrator) sees women. Which would not shock me usually, but Palahniuk is gay, so his investment in women's genitals took me by surprise.

Moving on, and wrapping up, Carl reports on people freaking out over the miracle (the can of insect fogger is being sent to the Vatican) in a way that again, feels almost like a sneer.  He goes on to say that this wasn't a miracle: it was magic, and he and Sarge (his travel companion, an older man) aren't chasing after these miracles for religious reasons or to witness anything. They're witch hunters! Hey, it's a fun hook, I'll give him that. We then swerve back to Carl insisting this story is about Helen.

Still, this isn't a story about here and now. Me, the Sarge, the Flying Virgin. Helen Hoover Boyle. What I'm writing is the story of how we met. How we got here. 

All of this judgement, largely aimed at women and common, blue collared folk isn't surprising, in a book that is supposedly about a woman but narrated by a man and concentrates on his feelings seems... typical. I am not sure if this is supposed to be Carl's privilege seeping in, or if it's Palahniuk's, but it's there and it's loud.

Tune in next Thursday for chapter 2!



*I assume white, given the character, but I can't seem to confirm it. However given the fact that this book is written by a white man who is encouraging me to challenge his narrator's bias, I'm going to assume from the lack of mention that she is. Carl is a journalist, and journalists never say "A young white woman" but they definitely would say "A young (any other ethnicity) woman" and another news article is reference about her, featuring a description that lacks race, so I feel this is a safe assumption.

It's that time of year again! The WAR ON CHRISTMAS!

Hello one and all! Erika sneaking out of hiatus early for a post! Did you miss me? I missed me you. Will should be back with the next round of Ender's Game posts next Sunday, but for today you get me! Today I want to write about something important to me, something I've written about before. Sort of. Let's talk about "The War on Christmas".

As I point out frequently, I live in Canada, and grew up in a small town. I come from a mixed background, and grew up celebrating both Catholic and Jewish holidays*. I've also had to work jobs that involve customer service. One of those was even in a boarding school cafeteria. As such, I have seen "first hand" what the war on Christmas actually looks like, even in the context of "What it's doing to our schools".

Growing up, I would see Christmas lights and Christmas decorations and signs that screamed MERRY CHRISTMAS and hear Christmas songs everywhere I went from November to January. I used to adore every minute of it, but I wondered, why were there no Hanukkah decorations? Why was half of who I was celebrated loudly and publicly, while the other half wasn't acknowledged, and even more rarely even remotely understood? Why did my teachers get nervous, and why was I mocked as a little girl by my peers (and sometimes their parents) when asking "What about Chanukah"?

I was a kid. I didn't understand things like minority oppression, I didn't understand that White Christian Straight Men were the default, I didn't understand antisemitism, bigotry, and privilege even as they all affected me. As I got older I found out the reason I saw no Hanuka decorations was because those houses tended to get vandalized. Like the synagog was several times over the years. I came to understand that being able to celebrate your culture and your religion openly was a privilege, not a right like I had thought. I realized the privileged people, on top of having no idea what sort of privilege they had, felt entitled to shoving their holiday and their tradition down everyone's throats. It's tradition, after all, and heaven forbid you mess with tradition. They would seize up and get panicky if you asked for change.

They didn't want to make room for other holidays and traditions. When token efforts were made, it was always with a smirk as they mocked the "Hernikah candle sticks" and sneered at "Jew beanies" (actual examples I have heard from adults). It wasn't safe to try to make space for our own culture in the main stream, and they didn't want to change theirs to be more safe, let alone inclusive, for us. It didn't matter what harm it did, it was their right to celebrate their own holiday in every way they wanted! They think if they say it is a right to practice and celebrate your culture and religion openly enough times, it will be true. They're willfully blind to how hostile it is for so many others. I used to believe that it was obliviousness, not willful ignorance, but when I see people get red faced and angry in discussions about it and change it back to their precious holiday being under attack so many times I no longer can. It is willful, deliberate, malicious ignorance, and nothing else.

This, by the way, is all the "War on Christmas" is. People who don't celebrate Christmas wanting to make room for their traditions that fall at the same time or year and do so safely, or people who are just exhausted of having to deal with the two month marathon of non-stop Christmas propaganda. Which is to say: there is no war on Christmas. There is a war on equality and inclusion.

Show of hands, how many among you wish people "Happy Holidays" instead of "Merry Christmas" for what ever your reason? Now, show of hands, how many of you, when cheerfully wishing people joy, have acidly been told "It's merry Christmas" and had people demand you change your greeting**? All the same hands, huh? Who's ever been told to wish someone happy holidays instead of Merry Christmas? Because I have never had it go the other way. I use both, because I can't safely always use "Happy Holidays" though I die a little bit every time I do. I have never seen a cashier get reamed for wishing someone a "Merry Christmas" even in a school, and I've been watching and listening and waiting for five years. Never have I seen someone get told off for saying "Merry Christmas" only "Happy Holidays". We make it hard for people to be inclusive, and sometimes make it hostile for people trying.

People feel so entitled to have their culture catered to that they fight to protect that catering. They protect it by starting fights with someone offering a simple, kind greeting that they think will threaten the status quo. They protect it by silencing people trying to speak up when their own culture is being pushed out. They protect it by making other people too scared to put a Star of David in their window at Hanukkah because someone might break the window and scare the kids. They protect it by running propaganda saying that no, they're the little guys, and all those mean old ethnic people are threatening their way of life by celebrating their holiday, too!

The war on Christmas boils down to privileged people having their privilege challenged. I get it, no one likes being told that they're blindly causing harm simply by being born into a certain group of people and it's a normal human response to get defensive and double down when you're told that. I'm white, I've been chewed up over the guilt of my own privilege before before too. I get it. But you know what? I don't care anymore. I don't care that you feel icky. I care that there are people who suffer, who are mocked, who have their homes vandalized, who feel unsafe being able to practice and celebrate their culture and holidays because there's so little room for them because Christmas takes up so much. Then they have the gall to claim there's a war on it.



*I use all Jewish holidays and examples because that is my own lived experience. I just want to acknowledge that Hanukkah isn't the only one, and I'm still talking from a position of privilege.

**I opt to smile sweetly and wish them a happy Chanukah when they do this.

Ender's Game, chapter thirteen, part two, in which Graff ruins everything again

(Content: apologetics for privilege and conquest.  Fun content: elephant art, astrothermodynamics.)

Time for Graff to justify a bunch of things that he can't actually justify and, in some cases, doesn't actually need to be justified.  I didn't notice that until Ender's Shadow, when they keep a bit of information from Bean while saying they had to give it to Ender--but I am getting ahead of myself. The point is that Graff is useless.

Ender's Game: p. 242--254

Valentine has gone, and Ender literally walks up off the beach, into the house, and asks Graff if they'll leave right away.  Have to give him points for decisiveness, I guess.  For the fifth time in the book, Ender reflects on how he's not taking anything with him, and I'm trying to find a progression now--when he left home, Graff told him everything would be provided and he didn't need to bring anything; when he joined Salamander and then Rat, he was forbidden to bring anything; when he left Battle School, he was comforted to see that Graff also came away empty-handed; now, leaving Earth, there isn't anything he can imagine wanting to bring with him.  Perhaps not a progression, then, but (if not for how bizarre some of those 'he can't bring anything' moments were) it is perhaps an interesting way of checking in on his mindset.  Ender is committed to the goal now; he's going back to school to win the war and save the world, not to do well on tests.  Not that Graff will let that go by without bludgeoning us with some blunt metaphors along the way.

"Back when the population was growing [...] they kept this area in woods and farms.  Watershed land.  The rainfall starts a lot of rivers flowing, a lot of underground water moving around.  The Earth is deep, and right to the heart it's alive, Ender.  We people only live on the top, like the bugs that live on the scum of the still water near the shore. [....] When you live with metal walls keeping out the cold of space, it's easy to forget why Earth is worth saving."

Weeeeeeelll no.  Not really, no.  (And not just because space isn't 'cold' unless you are in the shade.)  The Earth is indeed deep, but anything that could be considered 'alive' is pretty much done once you get a surprisingly short distance underground.  Then it's thousands and thousands of miles of increasingly hot stone and metal.  There are a lot of living things in the world other than humans, that's a good thing to keep in mind, but 'save the whales' and 'save the plate tectonics' are rather different concepts and only one of them makes a good rallying cry.

"We train our commanders the way we do because that's what it takes--they have to think in certain ways, they can't be distracted by a lot of things, so we isolate them.  You.  Keep you separate.  And it works."

 Just in case we've forgotten, Graff: in the seventy or eighty years since the Second Invasion, you've been running Battle School and you have never had a candidate who was capable of passing all your tests.  They fail or they burn out.  It's not that there was once a great one or two but it was long ago and they're too old now--this method has never worked.  So why, Graff, why are you so sure that the problem is with the students and not the tests? Mazer Rackham wasn't trained like this.  Mazer Rackham wasn't anything special--he was a nigh-unheard-of low-ranking commander with a history of disciplinary problems.  But we'll start getting into that more next week.

They march through the Fleet base to the shuttle; Ender notices that at first everyone pays attention to Graff with his Maximum Clearance Ball (he's carrying around some kind of pingpong ball that opens every door), but as they get into high-clearance areas they're more interested in Ender, who seems even less likely to be there.  Ultimately, just the two of them board the shuttle; Graff confirms that his only job now is to stay with Ender.  Ender thinks about what this implies for his importance, and basically starts channelling every white guy who has just stared into the face of privilege theory.

Peter could have fantasies about ruling the world, but Ender didn't have them.  Still, thinking back on his life in Battle School, it occurred to him that although he had never sought power, he had always had it.  But he decided that it was a power born of excellence, not manipulation.  He had no reason to be ashamed of it.  He had never, except perhaps with Bean, used his power to hurt someone.

I was deeply tempted to bring in Five-Tongue Fleming again to tell Ender that he is Wrong about this, but eventually I had to conclude that he is right that he did not use his power to hurt Bonzo.  He got away with killing Bonzo because he's the favourite son, the Chosen One, but I will grant that if he had been in the same situation and was not Graff's favourite, he would have killed Bonzo anyway.  (Possibly not the most sterling absolution ever.)  And in the years leading up to that point, when he could have apparently revolutionised tactics and training for Rat and Phoenix and ultimately the entire Battle School, and perhaps given insights and skills to hundreds of students rather than saving them all so he could show off when he got command of Dragon, strictly speaking he wasn't using his power to hurt people, but instead actively failing to use his power to help people.  Ender is innocent of not abusing his power by only the slightest margin, and he has benefitted from it anyway, but because he never intended to hurt people, he assures himself that he's a perfectly moral person.

Sometimes I am embarrassed for just how accurately and ruthlessly this book portrays its morality.

There's some competent SFing about the shuttle up to Inter-Planetary Launch and Graff requisitioning a ship to a secret destination.  Graff takes a moment to show affection to Ender with a gentle touch while he thinks Ender is asleep, which is shockingly not-creepy, before he gets right back to being a supervillain.  The pilot of their little ship thinks they're going to Inter-Stellar Launch, but is corrected that he'll actually be taking them to I.F. Command, the location of which which he does not have clearance to know (rather, his ship will guide him with the help of Graff's Ping-Pong Ball of Leadership).

"And I'm supposed to close my eyes during the whole voyage so I don't figure out where we are?" 

"Oh, no, of course not.  I.F. Command is on the minor planet Eros, which should be about three months away from here at the highest possible speed.  Which is the speed you'll use, of course." 

"Eros?  But I thought that the buggers burned that to a radioactive--ah.  When did I receive security clearance to know this?" 

"You didn't.  So when we arrive at Eros, you will undoubtedly be assigned to permanent duty there."

Graff adds jokingly that the war might be over in fifteen years and so the location can be declassified and their pilot will be free to go.  Seriously, this happens.  There's no advance planning to make sure a pilot with clearance is available, there are no volunteers for 'a one-way trip' to help with the war effort; Graff just decides 'You look like a convenient pilot; your life and career are now over because I need a ride'.  The pilot is predictably furious; Graff benevolently 'overlooks' his insubordination.  Skipping temporarily ahead to when they leave the ship, three months later:

The captain was bitter at having to leave his tug; Ender and Graff felt like prisoners finally paroled from jail.  When they boarded the shuttle that would take them to the surface of Eros, they repeated perverse misquotations of the lines from the videos that the captain had endlessly watched, and laughed like madmen.  The captain grew surly and withdrew by pretending to go to sleep.

Even here on a black rock in space at the end of humanity, Ender and Graff can take time to amuse themselves by bullying someone who can't fight back.  It is especially hilarious that we're told they feel like prisoners freed from jail, given that their pilot is now literally a prisoner until the end of either the war or his life, whichever comes first.  Ender Wiggin, master of empathy and sweetness.

But before that, they have three months aboard the shuttle, during which Graff jeopardises everything for no reason at all by giving Ender a lot of information that he absolutely does not need.  I understand giving him information on the formics--how they're all drones and they've never managed to hold one in captivity for long before it just fell over dead, how they lack any apparent sex organs but are probably mostly female, which doesn't stop Graff from calling them 'he'.  That's worth knowing, the hive structure and all.  What Ender really doesn't need to know about is the philotic effect: instantaneous telepathic communication, which humanity has now built into our ships.

"So they knew about their defeat the moment it happened," said Ender.  "I always figured--everybody always said that they probably only found out they lost the battle twenty-five years ago." 

"It keeps people from panicking," said Graff. [....] "We've taken some terrible risks, Ender, and we don't want to have every net on earth second-guessing those decisions.  You see, as soon as we had a working ansible, we tucked it into our best starships and launched them to attack the buggers home systems. [....] Our timing was pretty good.  They'll all be arriving in combat range within a few months of each other.  Unfortunately, our most primitive, outdated equipment will be attacking their homeworld." [....] 

"When will they arrive?" 

"Within the next five years, Ender."

Graff explains that the master ansible is waiting for them at I.F. Command, ready for humanity's greatest command to lead those ships into battle.  They want it to be Ender.  Ender says he can't possibly be ready in five years.  Graff says then they'll make do with what they have, which he immediately clarifies is "nobody".  Ender at least sees this for the transparent rubbish that it is, but thinks to himself that he doesn't need the extra motivation anyway:

I'll become exactly the tool you want me to be, said Ender silently, but at least I won't be fooled into it.  I'll do it because I choose to, not because you tricked me, you sly bastard.

Which is in turn hilarious because Ender is absolutely being fooled, and it baffles me that he doesn't expect it at all.  In Ender's Shadow, Graff specifically says that Bean mustn't be allowed to learn about the ansible because he'll guess the whole thing from that, but that Ender had to be told in order to do his job.  Except that as far as Ender is aware, his job for the next five years consists entirely of study and testing.  The entire point, supposedly, of letting Ender fight Bonzo, of bringing Valentine to fix him, was to make sure that Ender was independent and committed to saving humanity--this bit with the ansible and the five-year timeline is unnecessary for motivation.  Graff will also insist later that his whole plan desperately depended on Ender not knowing what he was doing--so why in hell is he telling Ender right now the two facts that he needs in order to puzzle it out?

The answer is of course purely Doylist: Card needs the reader to have this information so that he can spring the big reveal on us quickly later instead of having to throw in all this stuff about philotic physics and the human assault fleet in order to have it make sense.

Also, because we skipped it over--Ender asks if the Third Invasion (humans attacking aliens) is necessary, and if they aren't just going to leave us alone now that we've beaten them twice.  Graff says that they have to be safe, that the aliens already tried to exterminate us twice without provocation, and we can't risk it again.  But he also acknowledges that with the whole human fleet flying out to invade, we're defenceless on Earth and if there is a third alien invasion coming our way, we'll probably all get wiped out.  In other words, they're attacking the aliens because they might invade us again, but our military strategy is also completely built on the assumption that they aren't attacking us again, despite having had seventy years to build and launch their own fleet.

At this point I'm pretty sure that humanity's military would drastically increase in efficiency and effectiveness if they gave absolute power to one of those painting elephants.

As they take the final shuttle down to Eros, Ender asks why they're fighting the war to begin with, and Graff rattles off the list of unproven hypotheses--it's their religion, or their need to colonise, or they picked up our TV broadcasts and decided that we were too evil to be saved.  (If only they had caught the right anime series, they might think we were just delightful and ridiculous.  "My queen!  The blond ones grow delicious mushrooms to express despair!")  Graff's explanation is simply that, with the insurmountable communication barrier (their inborn telepathy keeps them from grasping how else beings might communicate) they decided we just couldn't be trusted and so had to be subjugated for their own safety, and humanity has made the same decision about them.  Basically, 'this might be an us-or-them situation, so let's assume it is and let's make sure we win'.  Graff also evopsychs about how nature can't produce a species that doesn't have a collective desire to survive, even if it allows individual sacrifice, because apparently he's never heard of panda breeding programs, but more to the point:

"As for me," said Ender, "I'm in favour of surviving." 

"I know," said Graff.  "That's why you're here."

Weeeeell, actually, Ender is in favour of defiantly doing as he pleases and handling threats to his safety through the focused application of violence.  That's not quite the same thing.  There are a lot of things Ender could have done, as we've discussed before, that would have let him survive without having to kill other children.  That is why he's there.  Because he has a toolbox full of solutions to your problems and all of them are murder.  Remember?  That's why Valentine couldn't be the Chosen One?  Yeah.  That.  It's about the killing, not the survival.  And in the end, it turns out you didn't need to make those things touch anyway.

Next week: Ender meets someone who should have replaced Graff from the very beginning.