Salman Rushdie Doing Television

This past decade has seen an interesting shift in the question of can books survive in a culture increasingly dominated by visual media. The story has become more complex than high brow literature for elites versus the crass popular entertainment of movies and television, particularly as we have seen shows such as Lost, Battlestar Galactica and Mad Men, which have used the open ended screen time of multiple seasons provided by the medium to create complex stories and characters with a literary quality that is hard to deny. Those who would see this new breed of television show as the new literature of our century may have just received some hard evidence of this. Salman Rushdie is doing a television show, noting that "he was drawn to television by the comparatively high status of the writer in the process. 'In the movies the writer is just the servant, the employee. In television, the 60-minute series, The Wire and Mad Men and so on, the writer is the primary creative artist.'"

I do not assume that this is the end of the novel, but I think this does mark a major shift in how we think about television. Will it be so obvious to our next generation of writers that novels are the respectable medium and movies and television are the popular entertainment, done for money and not respect.

Piled Higher and Deeper Movie

My life as a graduate student; just replace science with history. Now off to grade some forty finals plus a bunch of essays on Candide.

Final History 111 Spring 2011

My final was scheduled for Shavuot so I decided to simply give an online final. I just sent it out to my students. Here it is.




Pick three of the following essay questions and write 2-3 page responses. Each question is worth 50 points. Feel free to make use of your notes and do research online or in books. Your work, though, has to be your own. I will be on the lookout for plagiarism. I strongly advise everyone not to talk to their classmates about the final as this will likely cause your essays to sound too much alike. When you are finished, please email your finals to chinn.26@osu.edu. You have until Thursday midnight to finish.




You have been hired to write a screenplay about either the battle of Thermopylae, Robin Hood or pirates. Please write a summary of your proposed screenplay in order to hook a skeptical, but historically illiterate film producer into providing $100 million dollars for the making of this movie. What historical liberties do you plan on taking? Defend your decisions in terms of “narrative thinking.”




Describe life in the Middle Ages as it related to government and law enforcement. Why was life in the Middle Ages so violent despite the fact that almost everyone, at least on paper, was a Christian? What role did nationalism play in people’s minds? Give specific examples.



Does religion make people intolerant of others and hostile to democracy? Give examples from ancient Rome, Islam, Catholicism and Protestantism. In each of these cases, consider the role played by the specific content of their religious beliefs in the type of decisions made.




The study of history requires a great degree of skepticism. Is this skepticism absolute? What is the ironic conclusion of absolute skepticism? Is there a difference between claiming, as a historical fact, that Persia invaded Greece twice in the fifth century BCE and Mohammed spoke to the angel Gabriel?


What is “Occam’s Razor?” Why is this concept so important in one’s day to day life? What role does Occam’s Razor play in the study of history? Give an example.



What were some of the major technological innovations in warfare from antiquity up until the eighteenth century? How did some of these innovations advance the cause of democracy; how did some of them hinder democracy? What does it mean to have a “citizen’s army?” Why is it so important for the formation and maintenance of democracy?






Bonus: “Everything I needed to know in history (and life for that matter) I learned from watching Monty Python.” Defend this proposition with practical examples from the wisdom of this great British comedy team. (5 pts.)

Why Nobody Wants to be a Feminist: My Response to Clarissa

Clarissa did an excellent post a few days ago, Why Nobody Wants to be a Feminist where she challenges women to accept the full consequences of being liberated from patriarchy.

Feminism has given women a lot in the last several decades. However, new rights always come accompanied with new responsibilities and obligations. While feminism was in the process of granting women rights, they were happy to accept it. As soon as the time came to “pay the bills” and assume new obligations that came with being accepted as fully human, women abandoned the movement in droves. Unless we accept this very unpleasant truth and start doing something about it, it is my profound conviction that no amount of ethnic-specific feminisms and happy bondings between second, third and fourth generations of feminists will help attract more women to feminism. The problem does not lie within the movement. It is located outside, in people who don’t want to belong to it, who cringe when they hear the word “feminism”, or who have abandoned it.


Unless we accept that the patriarchy victimizes and rewards both women and men, we will never move on from this stalemate. Many women are standing in the way of feminism today because they are unwilling to let go of the benefits the patriarchy offered them, even as they keep enjoying the removal of constraints it used to place on their lives. In my culture, we call this “sitting on two chairs.” And that, my friends, is always a dangerous activity to engage in.


I agree with Clarissa, though I would take it a step further. At its heart, feminism has never been about a principled defense of equal rights, but simply a grab for arbitrary special privileges. If feminism was actually about equal rights then the very term "women's rights" would be dropped and everything would be framed in terms of human rights. For example, abortion would have nothing to do with a woman's "right to choose" or "control her own body;" it would simply be a plausible extension of the premise that individual human beings are the ones best suited for evaluating their own good and must be left as the sole arbitrators of matters relating to their own bodies. This leads to the conclusion that individuals should be allowed to use drugs, sell themselves as prostitutes, their own organs and possibly to have abortions. (See "The Libertarian Case Against Abortion.")
   
Closer to Clarissa's point, feminists themselves have proven unwilling to abandon distinctions of gender when such distinctions are beneficial to women. We see this when it comes to sports and acting awards, but more importantly the draft, which women are still protected from. (It would be worth bringing the draft back just to see men in mass refusing to serve unless women did so as well or agreed to give up the equal right to vote and hold down a job.) Either gender is rendered politically or socially meaningless like race and religion across the board or we admit that it is meaningful and negotiate where and how on the assumption that any special privilege will be paid for by accepting a form of discrimination on a different front. For example, it may be that if women desire special protection in terms of maternal leave they may have to pay for it by surrendering reproductive freedoms. The logic being that if the bearing of children is of some value to society at large so that companies should make special allowances for it then women, in turn, should submit themselves to the needs of society and fashion their reproductive lives in a way that best serves those needs.

Naturally, if the privilege is merely social then the discrimination, in turn, should also only be social. To make my own position clear. I oppose political distinctions based on gender (including women being exempted from the draft). That being said, and this is the Burkean conservative in me, I accept that, at a social level, there will for the foreseeable future continue to be social distinctions based on gender. It is my hope that, as a society, we can figure out a way to negotiate through these distinctions, men and women talking as equals.

There are consequences for this feminist unwillingness to take a principled stand on equal rights. If feminists are seen as trying to sit on two chairs with one rear end, then non-ideologically committed women can naturally only be expected to follow suit and not ask themselves the hard questions about being courted in marriage and becoming stay at home moms. Furthermore, this opens feminists to attack from different sides. Minority group feminists will attack establishment feminism as "white" feminism. If women are simply an arbitrary group grabbing for arbitrary special privileges then other arbitrary groups can arise within this already arbitrary group accuse others of wanting arbitrary special privileges and demand arbitrary special privileges of their own.

The greatest concern to any honest liberal should be how this plays into the hands of conservatives. If the people who claim to be liberals and supporters of equal rights behave like conservatives, creating arbitrary groups and handing out privileges and discriminating against at will, then we can only expect the true conservatives out there to throw away any pretext of supporting equal rights now that they no longer need to feel ashamed in the face of an honest principled liberalism.

John Constantine on Israel and the Jews

My roommate just showed me a piece from the Hellblazer comic. For those of you who are only familiar with the character of John Constantine from the Constantine movie with Keanu Reeves, the comic book version is a lot edgier. In the following piece he takes out a skinhead and gives the most pro-Israel and pro-Jewish speech you are likely to ever hear from a comic book character. Considering the amount of Jewish writers out there, it is a pity we do see more of this. Perhaps if more comics were like this we might see Jewish leaders willing to talk like this as well. 

Tzabi the Israeli "Duck and Cover" Turtle

My friend Frank Blazich Jr., a fellow graduate student at Ohio State, is a specialist in American Cold War era civil defense. Right now he is working on a dissertation North Carolina's civil defense program. (Why someone would be working on North Carolina history from Ohio is a separate story that you are free to ask him.) A few months ago, he came over to me and asked me if I could translate something in Hebrew for him. Why would Hebrew be relevant to American civil defense? He had an Israeli version of the American cartoon Bert the Turtle.







I allowed the project to languish on my back burner for several months. (Frank is a much better friend than I am in reverse.) One of the reasons was that there were some terms I was not sure of and my translation is very stilted. So please go over to Frank's blog to see Tzabi the Israeli duck and cover turtle. Those of my readers with a background in Hebrew should feel free to suggest alternative translations.

It is interesting to note that the Tzabi comic was produced in 1967, presumably during the lead up to the Six Day war. Unlike Bert, there is no mention of Atomic bombs. The concern is merely that Egyptian planes might bomb Israeli cities. As a good Israeli turtle, Tzabi does not follow in the ways of the waspy Bert and wear bow-ties.

History 111: Candide and the Innate Goodness of Man (Part II)

(Part I)

If medieval and early modern Christianity had a pessimistic view of human nature in which man is innately sinful and can only be kept in check by Church and State, we moderns tend to have a rather optimistic view of human nature that stresses man's innate natural goodness. This too has consequences for both theology and politics. If man is good then it stands to reason that he can achieve salvation through his own means without the aid of the Church. Now it becomes possible to talk about human reason as the bar against which to judge all things. Only someone confident in the intrinsic goodness of human beings could allow them to judge the world around them and do it based on what is innate to them. As for politics, a belief in human goodness allows for human beings to craft their own laws. We can even begin to talk about government as a contract between equals instead of the dictates of a patriarch to his children, leading to liberal democracy.

The legacy of this notion of human goodness still presents itself in our debates over crime and punishment and foreign policy. Why do people commit crimes? A conservative would say it is because they are "bad" people, motivated by greed and malice. In order to protect itself, society must remove this person from its midsts, either through prison or even the death penalty. Punishment is something that the person deserves as his just deserts. In the liberal model crime results from either mental illness, being raised in a problematic society or simply bad education. One way or another it is not the person's fault and the purpose of any "punishment" is not to penalize the person, but "rehabilitate" them. (See "C. S. Lewis on the Implications of the Nazi Holocaust.") Why are there terrorists? The conservative will tell you that it is because they are "evil" and hate "freedom." Naturally, such people can only be stopped by invading other countries and killing those people who deserve it. The liberal will tell that terrorists are the products of economic inequality, the legacy of colonialism and a fundamentalist education that preaches hate. Agree to peace talks, address the massive economic inequalities across the globe and provide a proper education for all and terrorism will disappear.

Now even the liberal acknowledges that there is much that is wrong with the world. Rather then lay the blame on people, the blame is placed on society. It is society that creates inequalities and teaches prejudice. People, left to their own devices, would naturally wish to live in harmony with others, recognizing the common humanity of all, and would not be bothered by the existence of other races and creeds. People have to be taught to hate others because of the color of their skin and the deity they pray to. The good news is that people can be saved from their own prejudices. With a properly funded welfare program, civil rights legislation and tolerant education, the natural human goodness in people will reassert itself and stand against all the ills created by society in the first place.

This brings us to Candide, a novel that represents this Enlightenment shift in how one views humanity. Candide is naturally good. Contrary to a simplistic view of the character, Candide is not stupid (a mistake made by the modern day adaptation, Forrest Gump). Candide is simply naive due to the fact that he is raised with no experience with the world. This is crucial to the character because it is precisely this lack of worldliness that allows for Candide's goodness. Candide does not suffer from greed, does not hate anyone and only wishes to live in brotherhood with all. Candide is not even capable of understanding the possibility that other people are not like this. The reason for this is that Candide exists completely uncorrupted by society. (This idea would be taken even further by Rousseau.)

It is for this reason that Voltaire subverts the garden of Eden story. Instead of Adam and Eve committing Original Sin, willfully disobeying the divine commandment to not eat from the tree of knowledge, and being rightfully thrown out of paradise, Candide has no notion of sin. He only wishes to experiment with the laws of "cause and effect." The fact that he kisses Cunegonde is interpreted as sin by a corrupt society, leading to him being wrongfully exiled from his beloved home in Westphalia. Instead of degenerate humans needing to be saved by righteous laws, Candide is the pure one, it is the outside system that is degenerate.


       

Americans and First Person Shooters

Extra Credits has a video blog post on why Americans are attracted to first-person shooter (FPS) video games. His argument is that this is rooted within American culture and perceptions of violence. Americans tend to focus on the individual versus society. Guns are symbols of personal freedom. Violence comes out of the struggle of the individual for freedom. This plays itself out in FPS games in which it is the individual against hordes of "others." Furthermore one's advancement through the game is mainly marked by more powerful guns, which are external interchangeable tools. Japanese culture tends to see violence as a spiritual struggle which, while manifested externally, is really a reflection of an internal conflict. This plays itself out in Japanese games where weapons are not simply tools that one picks up, but extensions of the self. One advances by internalizing greater powers. The FPS has advanced enough that this model may not hold up. For example, Mass Effect requires one to lead a team and use bionic powers with less emphasis placed on guns. Still, this piece holds for more traditional games and is useful food for thought.

If only someone told me this argument years ago when I was a kid. Mom, you have to let play Wolfenstein. I am exercising my natural American love of liberty and abusing it. If you do not let me play I may grow up to become a liberal and not support the invasion of other countries.

 

History 111: Candide and the Innate Goodness of Man (Part I)

(Go to 2:55 for Candide's showdown with the villainous  Jew.)


My last discussion of the early modern debate about human salvation proved surprisingly fitting for the last book we are doing, Voltaire’s Candide. Candide has the advantage of being short enough that we can go through it in two classes. If it is part of the Enlightenment, it is a critique of the old world I have spent the quarter trying to describe. If Voltaire was prejudiced against Jews, it is still one of the funniest books ever written. Candide also serves as an example of the modern shift in the understanding of human nature from a pessimistic view, in which human beings are hopelessly depraved, to a more positive view, in which humans are assumed to be innately good.

In the debate over salvation, both our Catholics and Protestants operated from the assumption of human depravity. In the Catholic model humans are just mostly depraved. We are tainted by Original Sin; while we are capable of doing good and resisting sin in specific situations, it is inevitable, barring divine intervention through grace, that we will come to sin. For example, even if I resist temptation and do not sin with a woman, the mere fact that I lusted after the woman is itself a sin; if I truly understood who God was, I never would even contemplate breaking his commandments. The fact that I would contemplate such a thing demonstrates that I am under the taint of Original Sin and of Satan. From this perspective it may be less damaging for my soul in the long run if I had given in to temptation. Now that I have not, I am in danger of believing myself to be righteous so I will never repent and I will add the sin of pride. The Catholic solution is that one needs to enter the body of the Church and come under the forgiveness earned on the cross. Being baptized and receiving the sacraments will not necessarily make me a better person; human depravity remains and I will have to answer for my sins in purgatory. By being part of the Catholic Church, though, one has access to Jesus’ atonement and can hope to eventually get out of purgatory and enter heaven.

Protestants are even more pessimistic about human nature than Catholics. Lutherans believe that man is almost completely depraved, incapable of doing any good or avoiding any sin on his own. The only redemptive feature in human nature is the ability to have faith. Calvinists are the most extreme, believing in utter human depravity and that humans can have no role in their own salvation. While, in a sense, Protestants value good works less than Catholics do, Protestants tend to agonize over the implications of their day to day works. Catholics can feel confident that, having entered the body of the Church, they are part of the saved despite their sins. With Protestantism there is no longer a set recognizable body of believers that one can belong to and be confident of salvation. Furthermore there is an assumption that one’s salvation should be manifested in good works. Thus if I am still sinning, even after being baptized as a Protestant, it is a sign that perhaps I never genuinely believed and received graced and am therefore not really one of the saved.

This view of human nature has political as well as religious implications. If I cannot hope to get right with God on my own because I am so depraved, neither can I fashion laws and a government for myself to live with others. Just as I need God to reveal his laws through the Church as I could never learn them on my own, he also needs to establish a government for me, such as a king, with rulers to keep me in line, because I could never do so on my own. Now it might happen that this king will prove corrupt as he is also a depraved human sinner. If that happens then I should take it as a punishment from God for my sins and should pray for forgiveness and ask God to change the heart of the king. Under no circumstance should I even contemplate rebellion. What basis do I have to believe that I, a depraved sinner, can possibly fashion anything better? How dare I reject the government that God saw fit, in his infinite mercy, to grant me that I may become less of a sinner.

Admittedly, already with Protestantism this model becomes more complicated. While Protestants may believe in human depravity they also believe in grace which can rectify human nature. This allows for there to be a “community of saints,” that small group of people blessed with grace. Such people would be capable of establishing their own “godly” government. It may even be their duty to seize the reins of government from an unsaved king. In the case of the English Civil War, this led to the execution of Charles I and the establishment of an English Republic under Oliver Cromwell. It also led to the Fifth Monarchy movement, which thought that Cromwell was not godly enough and tried to remove him as a limb of Satan.

A Quick Guide to Christian Salvation as Applied to Early Modern Europe

I often seem to find myself in the position of defender and explainer of Christianity, particularly when I teach. For me, educating my Christian students in what they are supposed to believe ranks above even Monty Python and classic films as unofficial purposes of my class. For example, the other day I spent a large part of the class explaining Christian notions of salvation (Are all people even capable of attaining salvation?) as they relate to the early modern period. I got into this topic by means of, believe it or not, the new Pirates of the Caribbean movie, which has a Christian missionary struggling with issues such as whether Blackbeard and mermaids can be saved. His final conclusion is that Blackbeard cannot be saved and he falls in love with a mermaid, who takes him down to the depths with her. (His ultimate fate is left open.) I must say, I cannot think of many movies with positive Christian characters with sex appeal. That being said I was confused as to the missionary’s religious affiliation. He is brought on board by Penelope Cruz’s character, who was seduced by Jack Sparrow as a girl in a convent. This would lead us to assume she is Catholic. But the missionary appears Protestant. No Spanish Catholic girl would be so careless as to entrust the salvation of her father's immortal soul to a Protestant.

Certainly, the early modern period was one with much concern, debate, and ultimate uncertainty about salvation. Things were fairly simple for medieval Catholics. One was saved through a combination of good works and belonging to the body of the Church, the mechanism through which Christ’s salvation was administered to the world. One did good work, such as giving to charity and not cheating on your wife. This led to divine grace, which allowed one to have faith and enter the body of the Church through baptism and the administration of the sacraments. All people were assumed to be capable of earning salvation through this model. People were also presumed to be responsible for their own actions and will be held liable for them in the afterlife and on Judgment Day. In fact, most people will have to spend at least some time in purgatory for their sins. Time in purgatory could be shortened through having masses said and giving money to the Church.

The problem with this view of salvation was that it presumably condemned all decent non-Christians, many of whom might go their entire lives without even hearing about Christianity, as well as those who lived before Christ to everlasting hellfire. Even without modern notions of multiculturalism, this bothered medieval Christians. Hence you had the doctrine of limbo for unbaptized babies. (The modern Catholic Church has removed limbo in favor of simply sending all unbaptized babies straight to heaven.) Dante went so far as to create a “nice Hell” for all the righteous pagans such as Homer and Virgil. (Even the Muslim ruler Saladin gets to live here.)

The discovery of the New World exacerbated the problem of non-Christians living in complete ignorance of Christianity. Christians in Europe now had to face the fact that the world was a much bigger place with lots more people and almost all of them were going to Hell.

Enter Martin Luther. Luther overturned the entire model of good works and membership in the Church through baptism and the sacraments leading to salvation. For Luther, it was not possible for humans to do good works on their own because Man was inherently depraved due to Original Sin. The only choice that one could make was to have faith. If you had faith you would receive grace, which will, in turn, allow you to engage in good works. Furthermore, there was no corporate body of the Church on Earth to belong to and be saved. The sacraments and the salvation they bring did not come from the Church and its representative priest. The miracle of transubstantiation happened in the body of the believer through personal faith.

An even more extreme position was taken by John Calvin. According to Calvin, humans were so depraved that they could not even choose to believe. All people really deserved to go to Hell. God, though, chose to freely grant some individuals grace, which allowed them to believe and be saved. From this perspective, sacraments served no purpose beyond a memorial to the last supper and transubstantiation could be done away with as human beings have absolutely no role in their own salvation.

What Luther and Calvin accomplished was to radically even further limit the number of people with a chance at salvation. Now not only were Muslims, Jews, and Native Americans doomed to Hell but even most Christians. (For this reason, it is difficult to classify Luther as an anti-Semite, despite some truly horrific statements; he did not treat Jews worse than Catholics.) The advantage of this rather depressing view of human salvation is that it removed the question of why God would choose only Europeans to be saved and condemn everyone else. Europeans were mostly all going to Hell along with everyone else. This position also opened up the possibility for greater levels of tolerance for other religions. For example, Jews might still be condemned to Hell, but they were not satanic. They never willfully rejected Jesus; they just were never granted grace. Jews could even remain as the special chosen people of God and keepers of special knowledge such as the Talmud and Kabbalah. Thus Protestantism produced some remarkably Philo-Semitic thinkers such as Peter Serrarius, John Dury, and Samuel Hartlib.

Within Protestantism though there is going to be a backlash against this condemnation of almost the entire human race. The seventeenth century sees a revival of the revival of the views of the third-century Christian thinker Origin, who believed that even Satan, let alone Jews and heathens, would eventually repent and be saved. This view had nothing to do with Enlightenment religious skepticism; it was a matter of religious Christians needing to solve a major theological crisis of how one can hope to be saved in the face of the collapse of any unified Christian theology. (See D. P. Walker's Decline of Hell.)

Look Who Just Got a Degree in History

Pittsburgh Steeler safety Troy Polamalu just graduated USC with a degree in history of all things. So can I now use this as proof that earning even a B.A. in history plays a productive role on the path to becoming a millionaire? Obviously Polamalu's unique blend of speed and linebacker strength must now be retroactively credited to his mean skills at deconstructing historical texts and not just his hair. Considering all the bone headed idiots, like Rashard Mendenhall  and Ben Roethlisberger, the Steelers seem to employ its nice to know that someone on the Steelers has a brain.  

Fuzzy Aliens Learn About Theory of Mind

I found myself up early Sabbath morning so I read John Scalzi’s new novel Fuzzy Nation cover to cover. (It is not that long a book.) I find good science fiction the perfect ticket to feeling spiritual enough to actually pray. This is not Scalzi’s best novel, but considering that this is the author of Old Man’s War we are talking about, that is hardly a knock on the book. The basic premise of the book, a reboot of a novel from the 1960s, is that a prospector, Jack Holloway, finds himself at the center of a pair of major discoveries. The first a major gem stone find on a newly explored planet and the second that one of planet’s native species just might be sentient. Think of this book as Avatar with actual characters and a sense of humor. My favorite part of the book is Holloway; in classical American heroic tradition, he is a self absorbed man-child, though a charming one and one who turns out to be a much better man than even he believes. (If they ever make a movie I would want Nathan Fillion from Firefly to play him, though I would not say no to Josh Holloway of Lost.)

What particularly caught my attention was a part in which the female scientist, Isabel Wangai, gets one of the Fuzzies to make a sandwich and then is surprised that the Fuzzy “demonstrated theory of mind” by offering her the sandwich. I doubt Scalzi meant anything by it, but theory of mind (ToM) is a rather loaded term within Asperger culture thanks to the nonsensical notion put out by researchers like Tony Attwood and Simon Baron-Cohen that people with Asperger syndrome lack a “theory of mind,” the ability to recognize that other people think differently.

In truth there is no such thing as a theory of mind unless you mean it in the very narrow sense that a person, having made the Cartesian leap to recognize that they have a mind and are not simply figments of their own imagination, uses Occam’s Razor to conclude that other people also have minds along with their own likes and dislikes and are not simply figments of his imagination. As the inner workings of the minds of others lies outside of empirical science and logic, the only way to know what someone else is thinking is to guess based on one’s own mind, usually a hazardous decision, or have the person tell you what they are thinking. In this Aspergers are at a disadvantage because they think differently from neurotypicals, making it practically useless to guess based on oneself. This leaves the Asperger with only the option of asking neurotypicals to clearly state verbally what is on their minds. The proof that Aspergers have no particular lacking in theory of mind is that neurotypicals are equally ill suited at intuiting our minds as we are at intuiting theirs.

If a stranger asked me to make a sandwich, I would assume that the person was assessing me to see if I was a rational being, who could understand language and follow instructions. In other words a being who could be negotiated with in order to form social contracts and possibly even a government, a preferable alternative to coercion and violence. As I desire to build relations with other beings based on negotiated agreement and not coercion, I would happily comply with such a test and make the sandwich. While I am making the sandwich I might even regale the person with tidbits of information and stories relating to sandwiches (such as Arthur Dent serving as the prophesied sandwich maker for a group of aliens in one of the Hitchhiker books) to demonstrate that I posses culture and am therefore not some barbarian incapable of social negotiation. After my demonstration of rationality, I would eat the sandwich. Do I lack a theory of mind? Hardly. I was not informed what kind of sandwich the person liked and would be unable to come to such knowledge through logical intuition. Obviously going on my own taste would be useless here. Why would the person want me, a complete stranger whom they have no relationship with, to make them a sandwich in the first place? If they desired to make me their servant to be coerced then I do not care to feed them.

If I were a Fuzzy dealing with a human scientist, like in the book, I would be correct. The purpose of the  interaction would have been to prove that I was a rational being, who should be granted rights and left to exploit my own planet for myself and for the rest of my kind in peace.

My Article on Neil Gaiman and the Thor Movie

My friends over at Melt Magazine have put up another piece of mine; a review of the recent Thor movie. As with most of my reviews, it is only incidentally about the movie, which I use to discuss larger issues of interest. This time around, I talk about mythology and what I admire about fantasy novelist Neil Gaiman, whose books often directly confront classical mythological stories. (See also "In Search of a Sense of Wonder in Fantasy.")