I have subscribed to The Christian Science Monitor for something like fifteen years, but when my current subscription expires, I won’t be renewing it. That’s not because I don’t like the content; I do. It’s simply because the Monitor is going largely online. One of the virtues of the Monitor was that I could read it away from the computer. The same is true of most of my periodicals. If I have to read material online, all that does is reduce the computer time available to write… and that costs me time and money. For several years now, the Wall Street Journal has been pressing me to pay extra to get their online issue in addition to the print issue. I wouldn’t take the online edition, even if it were free. Ah… say the techno-gurus, you should get a Blackberry or I-phone. Why? So I can spend more money looking at a smaller screen carrying around a gadget that I don’t need.

I have to admit that I’m not a technophile. Neither am I a technophobe. I do have an office full of equipment, and I’ve had a cell phone for years, but I only use or carry it when I’m traveling away from my home town. It’s not necessary otherwise, and, as more and more recent studies show, using one inappropriately, as when driving or at the controls of a train, can be exceedingly dangerous. And for that matter, even the simplest phone has far too many bells and whistles. Mine is the simplest offered by my wireless carrier, with no picture/camera features, and it still takes almost fifteen minutes just to scan through all the options and features offered, but it’s so badly designed that about half the time when I open it to receive a call, I end up turning on the speaker and broadcasting the caller to anyone nearby… yet the procedure for turning off the speaker is anything but easy.

For me, technology is technology. Useful technological developments allow me to maximize time usage and productivity, but loads of additional gadgets and features waste time, add to the costs, and complicate the procedure for using the device. I trend to get horribly irritated when a tech company loads up a useful product with all sorts of non-useful add-ons. For example, I need a good color copier, for a number of reasons, but I can’t get just a copier that is relatively high speed, has high quality, reduces/enlarges, collates, and is moderately priced. At least, I can’t find one in Staples, Office Depot, Office Max, HP, Epson, etc. No, I have to purchase a copier that is a combination scanner, fax machine, printer, and duplicator — and none of the extra features are ever used. I don’t want, nor do I need, a multi-function machine, but that’s what I end up paying for. As a one person office, I want a separate printer that serves my computers, a separate fax machine, and a separate copier — that way, as it happens often enough, one task isn’t delayed because everything would hit the super-duper multifunction machine at the same time. Also, there’s the issue of reliability. The more gadget functions there are on a machine, the more likely something is to go wrong… and sooner, rather than later, sooner being roughly one month after the warranty expires. And, with separate machines, if one crashes, usually late at night, the others still work.

So what’s wrong with wanting products that do what I need, rather than having to purchase equipment that does what the technogeeks think is so wonderful? Am I so unusual? Or doesn’t anyone else want to say anything about this form of technological pollution?

In a recent article in The Christian Science Monitor, Alan Dershowitz takes aim at Hamas for “its unlawful and immoral policy of using its own civilians as human shields, behind whom they fire rockets at Israeli civilians.” While I share Dershowitz’s repugnance at the Hamas tactics, the good professor really should be careful in using the terms “unlawful” and “immoral,” especially since he is both a lawyer and a law professor.

Why?

Because both terms are culture-centric. Laws are enacted by societies, and societies can enact laws based on very differing values, reflecting different “morals” and resulting in codification and sanctioned behaviors that would be illegal and immoral in other societies… or in other times. Less than a century and a half ago, slavery was legal and considered moral in half the United States, and depriving women of most legal rights was the practice in most western nations. Little more than a half-century ago, the German Reich legally removed civil rights from Jews and other “undesirables” as part of a declared public policy to return ethnic purity and “morality” to Germany.

In fact, Dershowitz’s words highlight exactly the problem the industriocratic western nations face in dealing with other cultures, particularly alien cultures. Make no mistake about it. Regardless of historical background, the vast majority of Islamic cultures and subcultures are in fact alien to the west, particularly to “liberal” Anglo-Americans.

Because such Islamic cultures in effect enshrine what might loosely be called male honor, other values become secondary, or even non-existent. Regardless of rhetoric or “explanations,” in reality, women exist largely as possessions to serve and service men. Children, except the males, and only the eldest, are largely expendable or valued only so far as they earn some form of upkeep. Any act, particularly by women, that can be seen to tarnish or diminish male honor must be punished. Since land ownership is a reflection of such honor, any nation or individual who takes land is an enemy of not only the individual, but of the culture, and no sacrifice — including the deaths of innocent women and children — is too great to make in the name of reclaiming that honor.

Needless to say, most westerners find these values disturbing, if they even acknowledge the presence and predominance of such values, and all too many scramble to find a common ground that does not exist. I obviously believe that current western law and accepted morality, even with all its considerable shortcomings, are superior to what I see in Islamic cultures, both in practice and in terms of their effects on those who are powerless or who have less power. By the same token, however, it’s very clear that the Islamic fundamentalists earnestly believe that their laws and morals are superior, and that they are acting in accord with what they believe.

Although we’re seeing a similar polarization on “moral” issues in the United States, on such issues as abortion, gay rights, gun control, etc., the differences between our factions are not nearly so great as between the “west” and “Islam.” Under these circumstances, arguing who is “right” is not only useless, but senseless, because the true believers, especially the Islamic ones, are not going to change their beliefs. They’d rather die first — or have others die first — and they’re doing both. And that means the only way to end the conflict, like it or not, is by destroying one culture or the other. They understand this; we apparently still have a hard time grasping it.

Destruction, I might add, does not necessarily require massive military might alone. It can be accomplished in a number of ways, but all, whether economic, political, educational, military, or some combination of all four, require the application of force. The Israelis understand this, but they’re hampered by a lack of resources and by the lack of understanding on the part of most Western cultures.

And claiming that what Hamas does is immoral and unlawful is almost beside the point. The real issue is how high a price a culture is allowed to put on male honor… and how long the rest of the world is willing to pay for it.

Last week I was reading about Barbe-Nicole Cliquot Ponsardin, the woman who created the modern champagne industry at the time when all the other winemakers were still trying to remove those pesky bubbles. Although Dom Perignon, the “mythical” creator of champagne, did make many contributions to the wine industry, developing and commercializing champagne didn’t happen to be one of them. That was the doing of the Widow Cliquot more than a century later. In addition to developing the riddling rack necessary for modern champagne, as well as a number of other innovations, she was also a master of commercial tactics, including finding ways to break the British blockade of the continent in order to ship 10,000 bottles of the 1811 cuvee Veuve Cliquot to Konigsburg. Yet the myth of Dom Perignon remains, almost untouched.

Mankind, and I’m using that term advisedly, has always had cherished myths. For example, there is the myth of man the great hunter, and perhaps this is linked to the myth of the lion as the king of beasts. Of course, the real hunting is done by the lionesses, and the only prodigious feats of the lion are his ability to mate with incredible frequency and to kill off cubs he hasn’t sired. Likewise, for all the myths about man as the hunter, studies have shown that the vast majority of food in hunter-gatherer societies comes from the “gathering” efforts of the women. Nonetheless, every year tens of thousands of men in the USA pay homage to the myth of the hunter by going out and trying to kill something most of them won’t even eat.

This male mythmaking goes beyond that. For example, most of the world knows Emilie du Chatelet, if they’ve even heard of her at all, as the mistress of Voltaire, yet this brilliant woman not only translated Newton’s Principia into French, clarifying and expanding it, but also provided the first detailed prose explanation of Newton’s mathematics, as well as converting the work into continental algebra. She also wrote Foundations of Physics, which integrated the work of Newton, Leibniz, and Descartes. Voltaire himself wrote that her intellect far exceeded his, and yet the world remembers him, not du Chatelet. History also records the intellect of Archimedes, but who besides historians knows about Hypatia?

Women don’t fare much better in the myths surrounding writing, either. Although “writing” has been largely an almost exclusively male-dominated field until comparatively recently in historical terms, it is interesting to note that what many scholars consider the first “great novel” [The Tale of Genji, @1007 A.D.] was written by a woman, Murasaki Shikibu — and that was seven hundred years before Richardson got around to writing Pamela. Historically, more than a few people seem to regard such writers as Poe, Verne, and H.G. Wells as the seminal figures in science fiction, but it’s far more accurate to cite Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein as the first true S.F. novel. Of course, like Norton and even Austen, Shelley couldn’t even publish under her own name.

In the F&SF field, the current “grand old man” and mythical figure is always Robert A. Heinlein, who wrote forty-some novels and a dozen or so collections of short stories, and sold over 40 million books. Yet Andre Norton [Alice Mary Norton] wrote over 130 novels and had the first SF novel to sell over 1 million copies, and might have sold as many books as Heinlein, except that the sales records of her publishers are so fragmented erroneous that there’s no way to tell. And, then again, in sheer numbers, the books by another woman — J.K. Rowling — have sold over 400 million copies and dwarf Heinlien’s sales numbers.

So… why is it that so many mythical figures and accomplishments are male? Could it just be because most men, especially those who aren’t the ones doing the accomplishing, are obsessed with image… and women with results?

On Christmas Eve day, my wife and I watched It’s a Wonderful Life. After it was over, she turned to me and said, “The world needs more George Baileys and a lot fewer Potters.” She wasn’t talking just about their differing outlooks on life, and her words got me to thinking. She was right, of course, because she usually is, but especially in the deeper sense.

George Bailey spends his entire life in the small town of Bedford Falls, running the building and loan society, making loans to the working people, occasionally giving them a month or day of grace in making their house payments. He judges people on their character, not on their balance sheets. He never makes enough money for a high standard of living, and he and his wife live in a drafty old house that she, largely, has fixed up. Mr. Potter, of course, is the banker and businessman for whom success is measured strictly by the dollars earned, the return on investment, the overall profitability. Potter won’t hesitate to foreclose, to call for a bank examiner, or even keep money inadvertently left on his premises by Uncle Billy. He will unhesitatingly employ any tactic to boost his profitability, even those marginally legal. Like so many of the recent Wall Street CEOs whose ill-considered pursuit of maximum profit at any cost led to the current financial and economic crisis, and who walked away with ill-gotten gains without either guilt or punishment, so does Potter. He almost destroys the better man, and he still gets to keep the money and is never punished. All along the way, George Bailey builds a better Bedford Falls, even using his honeymoon savings. Potter is a parasite upon the town, yet he represents himself as a financially responsible pillar of the community.

Critics of the film have called it “Capra-corn,” a pun on the name of the director, but Frank Capra produced a film that was not only feel-good and sentimental, but one that encapsulated an economic truth that has tended to be overshadowed by the holiday sentiment generated by the plot and actors. One of the sad things about the film is that, while we have accepted it as a “holiday classic,” so to speak, we’ve ignored the deeper meaning behind that sentiment. When we haven’t been watching the film, we’ve forgotten the George Baileys of the world, and idolized the Potters.

And now we’re paying for that ill-considered idolization.

Congressional committees have revealed that executives of various banking and financial firms who ran them into financial disasters have already received over one billion dollars in bonuses and “expenses.” It appears likely that the various bailout plans will cost well over a trillion dollars, and it’s not even certain how effective they’ll be. In the meantime, states and local governments are cutting budgets right and left, because most states have constitutions that prohibit deficit spending, and most state politicians have an incredible aversion to maintaining reserves for hard times when state revenues are solid. They’d rather splurge or offer tax reductions. This idiocy, of course, means that when the national economy turns bad, matters get even worse on the state level, because the states don’t generally have recourse to deficit spending, and increasing taxes during economic bad times usually only decreases total revenues.

Here in the great state of Utah, for example, the legislature is talking about slashing the budget by over 20%, five percent since October, and fifteen percent next year. The single largest cuts will be in education, needless to say, despite the fact that Utah is dead last in per pupil spending on the elementary and secondary level, despite the fact that 13,500 new pupils are expected to enroll in school next year, and despite the fact that close to half of all public school funding comes from the state. In addition, the state junior colleges, colleges, and universities are projected to be required to cut close to a thousand positions, as well as eliminate a large percentage of part-time faculty. Needless to say, it doesn’t appear that the legislature has actually looked at the situation at most institutions, or at the findings of the state board of regents who noted that in times of economic down-turn, enrollments in college and post-graduate work go up. Nor does anyone seem to be noting that most state institutions already have full classrooms and faculty working overtime and beyond, so that, in many cases, there are neither enough teachers, classroom spaces, and time slots to accommodate existing students, let alone those who will be flooding the institutions next year because of a high birth rate and a lack of jobs for those without more education. At the same time, the universities are offering early retirement incentives, but the problem with these is that it encourages the loss of those professors with the most experience to offer, and, frankly, from what I’ve seen, most [but not all] work harder and longer than their younger “replacements” do. The same problems are occurring with police and fire departments throughout the state, which are freezing hires, and with prisons, which have already laid off employees. Likewise, the state is eliminating most spending on infrastructure improvements, which isn’t exactly reassuring, given the sad state of all too many highways, bridges, and mass transit systems.

From what I can tell and from recent news reports, similar problems are occurring across the nation. Given this trend, what I want to ask is: Why can we easily spend hundreds of billions of dollars to bail out reckless banks and brokerage firms, to rescue mismanaged auto manufacturers, but ignore education, public safety, and local infrastructure? Even under “trickle-down” economics, very little of the revenues generated by the various bailout proposals will flow to support these basic areas of our society.