Last week in Utah, Tim DeChristopher was sentenced to two years in federal prison and fined $10,000 for trying to defraud the government.  It was not, as I noted in an earlier blog, exactly the normal case of fraud. DeChristopher is an environmental activist who bid on federal oil and gas leases on federal property without having the funds to pay for those leases.  He made the bids because he felt that the BLM had illegally opened the lands for bidding.  A federal judge later ruled that the process was illegal and voided the leases awarded, but the federal government still decided to prosecute DeChristopher, and in March he was convicted.

The judge who issued the sentence indicated that DeChristopher might well have avoided jail time if he had not been so publicly outspoken, even though DeChristopher was always polite in his statements and did not incite anyone to violence or public protests, but merely tried to explain why he had acted as he did.  So the judge punished him for exercising his first amendment rights as well.

Now… if I understand all this, DeChristopher got no money or gain from his acts, and the government didn’t lose any, either, because a federal judge had already declared the lease sale void.  But, if DeChristopher loses his appeal, he’ll go to jail for two years for trying to stop something that the courts eclared illegal, if many months after DeChristopher’s illegal protest bid.

At the same time, roughly, not a single one of the Wall Street bankers and real estate securitization wizards has been charged with a single crime.  These were the “wizards” who created bundled securitized high risk mortgages and fraudulently sold them as prime low-risk securities… and created the largest financial meltdown in U.S. history.

Obviously, Tim DeChristopher broke the law, and some penalty should be exacted, but it ought to be more on the line of 30 days in jail or time served or the like, especially compared to the “justice” [or lack thereof] meted out on those upstanding investment bankers… who, by the way, are still using practices that have been declared less than perfectly legal to foreclose on mortgages of delinquent homeowners.

What amazes me is the depth of public support for the politicians who not only bailed out the bankers and their overpaid managers, but who refuse to change the tax laws on compensation so that hedge fund managers and the like pay, by law, only 15% in federal income taxes on the bonuses they received for effectively defrauding the government and the American people.  [And no, as an author, I don’t get that kind of favorable tax treatment, and in fact, as a self-employed one, I end up paying both halves of Social Security taxes.]

All this suggests to me, and likely not just to me, that the legal structure we’ve built in recent years has strayed far from justice and is more a question of creating a form of legal financial and taxation discrimination in favor of the obscenely wealthy… and to a lesser degree, to those who are not truly poor, but who manage to exploit the “safety-net” of programs designed for the truly needy.

Meanwhile, a man who protested an illegal lease sale, if his appeal is refused, will serve more time in jail than those who destroyed billions of dollars in savings and investments, as well as millions of jobs.

One of the unspoken functions of parents and teachers with regard to their children and students is to guide them in ways that keep them from making huge mistakes that will forever blight their lives and their futures.  Despite the prevalence of laws and devices [such as seatbelts, automobile airbags, campaigns against drugs and underage drinking], both parents and teachers are at best losing ground slowly, and at worse losing it far faster.

Teenage pregnancies continue to abound; drug and alcohol abuse remain high; high school drop-out rates remain high; actual educational achievement is far lower than test scores indicate… the list of continuing and growing problems is far longer.

How did this all happen in a nation with the resources and wealth of the United States?

I’d be the first to admit that there’s no single “cause,” but I’ll also submit a causal factor that I don’t see any social or political entity addressing in a meaningful way or on a national scope.

It’s very basic.  In a national effort to motivate young people, our culture has either ignored or forgotten to teach them one fundamental truth: all actions have consequences, and the consequences of many actions are irreversible.

Oh… we tell them that all the time, but we undo the effect of the words by giving them “second chances,”  extra credit, do-overs, and the like.  Even our day-to-day technology undermines the law of consequences for young people.  Back a generation or so, if I made a typographic error on a paper, I either had to fiddle with White-Out or retype the entire page from scratch, if the error was bad enough.  And if you were using carbon paper to make copies, there was no choice.  You re-typed the entire page.  If there’s an error now, just back-space, or use the mouse or the appropriate key-strokes to click “undo.”

Intellectual property theft or misappropriation [otherwise known as plagiarism] used to be automatic grounds for academic dismissal.  Now, in many institutions, the punishment is failure on that paper, if that, and a do-over.

My wife the professor sees college student after college student who, after getting a bad grade – or missing a test – wants to know what they can do to make things up or get a better grade, looking for an “undo” button in life.  She can’t count the number of students who ignore their advisor’s advice about the classes they need to take to graduate… and then complain that they’ll have to spend another year or two to get their degree [because in our higher educational system, faculty can’t insist on a student taking a particular course, even required ones; they can only keep them from taking higher level courses or withhold degrees for failing to meet requirements].  The thought that there are consequences for failure is almost beyond many students.  And, then, when this does happen, they all want an exception because their situation is “special.”

Back in the bad old days, when I was in college, if you were an able-bodied male, there was a definite consequence for failure – being drafted and sent to Southeast Asia – and almost no one was “special.”

This failure to understand consequences goes far beyond classes.  There are consequences to using a cell phone or texting while driving.  Despite the fact that thousands of teens are injured or killed as a result of inappropriate cellphone and IPod use, the deaths go on. And that, to me, is entirely understandable, because we as a society have inadvertently taught them that everything bad can be “undone.”

And most of them believe that, at least on a subconscious level, until they’re confronted with a situation that can’t be undone… and by then it’s usually too late.

A number of recent comments on my blog have taken issue with and exception to my statements suggesting that comics and graphic novels cannot achieve great intellectual depth of text, especially of the depth possible in books.  Some commenters have even insisted that comics and graphic novels are the equal of books in this regard.

No.  They’re not.   They never will be, and there are structural reasons for this having nothing to do with opinion, mine or anyone else’s.

Contrary to the perception of some, I do not “hate” comics.  And there are some things a comic and a graphic novel can do that even the best book cannot, but those attributes do not lie in the area of intellectual depth and complexity.

Art, even the best abstract and/or illustrative art, cannot set forth abstract ideas, i.e., those ideas which are conceptual and which do not have a basis in the physical world.  A single word concept, such as “peace” or “harmony” or “stasis” or…. [fill in the blank with any number of such concepts] can’t be easily depicted artistically, nor can art itself discuss or describe it adequately – especially without a great number of words [which tends to defeat the idea of a graphic novel].

Nor can art depict highly intellectual or complex feelings or conversations, again, except with the use of text-dense balloons, which, once more, would seem to defeat the whole idea of a graphic novel.

Art is also limited in depicting and/or explaining and describing the deeper psychological interplay within a character or between characters.  As a result, graphic novels are necessity confined to a shallower and a less nuanced interpretation/exposition of character and motivation.

Does that make the graphic novel “less entertaining”?  Not necessarily.  Entertainment value depends on the reader/viewer as much as on the media by which the story is presented.  A graphic presentation, because human visual channels predominate, is likely to be more appealing to those who are less interested in or less capable of absorbing straight text rapidly.  A graphic novel or comic is also likely to be more appealing to those with shorter concentration spans… and thus, for them, more entertaining.

But… should entertainment value be the only standard by which the excellence of presentation of a story is judged?  A three-minute rock song may be more enjoyable to many listeners than a five minute opera aria, but the aria is far more complex and requires far greater expertise to perform – and to appreciate – than the pop song.  A four-hundred page novel, if written competently, will have far greater depth than a graphic novel of the same length, if only because words are far more compact in conveying complexity.

I’m not against art, especially since, once upon a time, I aspired to be an artist and spent several years painting.  Much great art is far, far, superior to a great array of competently written novels – but great art and great writing are two very different fields, with different objectives. As a result, using art to tell stories tends to water down the potential greatness of both art and prose or poetry, and like all compromises, the result is less than either… even if the result is entertaining and “popular.”

In southernTurkey lies an ancient temple or religious site – Gobekli Tepe – dating to 9000 B.C., by far the oldest human structure discovered to date that was not a dwelling of some sort.  It predatesStonehengeby some 6,000 years. Limestone pillars, including megaliths up to ten tons, shaped with flint tools, set in circular patterns range from plain slab-like posts to more elaborate pillars, some with finely carved sculptures of all sorts of creatures, including lions, snakes, spiders, and scorpions, each sculpted as an integral but protruding part of a different pillar.  Although archeologists have only uncovered an estimated five percent of the site, they’ve found no evidence that the site was used as a dwelling place or where any cooking or food preparation was done.

So far, there’s little evidence to tell what people or culture created it, or for what exact purpose, except that it had to have had some overarching significance to those people, because it’s highly unlikely that a people would undertake such a massive effort to shape such stone with only flint tools without a purpose that lasted generations, if not longer.

 When I think of past human creations that have lasted hundreds, if not thousands, of years, I can’t help but contrast such creations as Gobekli Tepe, the pyramids, Stonehenge, the Acropolis, even the great cathedrals of Europe, or the vast complex at Angkor Wat with our current American culture, where even tangible goods can be obsolete in months, and where houses are often now being built to last only 30 to 40 years. 

The eras in which those incredible ancient structures were built were harsher times, and I have no doubt that the sense of purpose behind their creation was enforced by either applied strength or rigid cultural norms, so rigid that they would be totally alien to the vast majority of Americans, and yet… I have to wonder… what of wonder and permanence will we pass on to future generations?

 Much of what we have done of a permanent nature is less than constructive.  We’ve leveled mountains to pull out coal.  We’ve cut through cliffs and mountains to create roads so that we can travel between places with greater speed.  Even great engineering works, such as thePanama Canal, would fail in a few handfuls of years without constant maintenance.  The stone structures of the Incas have endured earthquakes that have flattened new buildings and homes.

 Nations in these modern times rise and fall in the blink of an eye.  It’s been said that theUnited Statesis the second oldest government in the same form in the world today – and the Constitution that created our government is little more than two hundred twenty years old.  The ancient Egyptian governments lasted thousands of years with little change.

 More than a few social scientists have theorized that technology enables, indeed requires, more rapid cultural, social, and even physical change in the world… but there has to be a limit on how fast that change can take place, if only because the physical and economic realities mean that we are limited in how vast we can built and create.  Of course, we’ve compensated by creating goods and structures that are ever more quickly built and then destroyed or discarded.  Am I totally out of date, or does it seem to anyone else that creating and buying a new cellphone every six to nine months is a bit excessive, especially if we’re talking hundreds of millions, if not billions, of discarded electronic devices every year?

 But maybe that will be the wonder we leave behind, mountains and mountains of discarded electronic corpses, leaching toxic metals and chemicals back into the earth.

This week in San Diego, Comic Con is taking place, where thousands upon thousands of people will flock to, at least ostensibly, pay their respects or show interest in comics and graphic novels – and no, I’m not there. The San Diego Comic Con (SDCC) is certainly not the only comic-based convention, but if past attendance figures are any indication, it’s the largest one in the world, with attendance well over 120,000 fans.  Of course, it’s not entirely about comics, and more than a few media types have billed it as a celebration of geeks and pop culture, but the heart of the convention remains the comic book [and its upscale step-sibling, the graphic novel], along with the big and small screen media spin-offs.

For all the hype, and even considering that there are more than a few well-known fantasy novelists there, the whole operation gives me pause… and that pause is not because the comic con celebrates pop culture, but because, first, it shows where pop culture is and where it is headed and, second, because both pop culture and this celebration of that “culture” are based on the exaggeration of image… and the fact that so many millions of Americans are so poor in imagination that they cannot or will not create images in their own mind.

Back in the dark ages, when I was a boy, there were comic books everywhere.  Even Isaac Asimov read them as a boy, but for the most part, comic books were for the young and those who lacked the mental and intellectual ability to read the printed word and visualize a world evoked by those words.

From what I can tell from sketchy statistics, attendance at the World Science Fiction Convention, while fluctuating by location, has been dropping, and has been as low as 4,000 participants in recent years. By comparison the first California Comic Con was held in San Diego in 1970… and drew all of 300 attendees.  Now SDCC tops 120,000, and some have claimed there are far, far more attendees.  To me, this trend is symptomatic  of the fact that the percentage of serious readers, even among college graduates, continues to drop, but media and comics are booming!

The problem, as I see it, with media and comics as popular culture – besides the fact that, for a time, books were once considered popular culture and now are not – is that the proliferation and consumption of prefabricated images dulls imagination and creativity.  Even among F&SF writers, there are more and more books about narrower and narrower subjects.  When the F&SF field publishes books like Pride and Prejudice and Zombies [a best-seller, no less] or Twilight and all its clones, and every possible permutation on vampires, zombies, and werewolves, including, believe it or not, My Life as a White Trash Zombie, how much room is there for something different from such narrow sensationalism?  Even if there is, how many writers have the background and imagination to write something different?

For well over two decades, experienced F&SF authors have been deploring the dearth of good readable science fiction. But you can’t write science fiction if you don’t know more than a little about science, and readers who don’t understand science – and there are more and more of those – won’t read it because they can’t understand it. The same, unhappily, is becoming truer and truer of any once-popular genre fiction with any depth, and I fear that those writers who attempt to combine substance and depth with a story outside the bounds of the sensational will become rarer and rarer.

But… long live the comic con.