Many of my readers (and a lot more readers than I often have!) congratulated me on last week’s post, the text of my Friday night speech at Farpoint. A lot of members of the audience congratulated me too. That was very kind of all of you, and it’s nice to know my words hit home. A writer is a performer, and all performers live for audience feedback.

Unfortunately, last Saturday evening, the parameters I had laid out, for who is and should be welcome at our convention, were tested. That test has caused me a lot of soul-searching.

Here are the facts:

One of our regular attendees approached me late Saturday night to complain that another of our regular (so I was told) attendees was wearing a MAGA hat. The complainant wanted the other woman to remove her hat for the duration of the weekend and suggested that at least the hat and possibly the woman did not belong there. [There was a D.J. playing music.]

This weekend is Farpoint, my annual Star Trek and science fiction convention, which is why the blog is two days late. The last-minute planning for a three-day event tends to eat up all the days in the week before. Especially when you just closed a show the weekend going into that week. If you missed it, I just performed The Seagull with the Rude Mechanicals. So I’m the emcee for Farpoint’s opening ceremonies. I don’t always give an actual speech, but, given the tenor of the times, I wanted to say a few things to my local S.F. community. I had actually planned to use them as the basis of this week’s blog, and that decision was reinforced when more than one audience member asked me to do just that. So here is my opening address to Farpoint 2025.

I started this con when I was 27.

I didn’t start it alone, but I was the one that year who jumped up and said, “Hey kids, let’s put on a con!

People thought I was too young and reckless and feral to run a con, but, here it is and here we are, and  This year I turn 60.

It’s been a long and eventful journey for me, for Farpoint, and for Baltimore fandom. We’ve gained new friends and we’ve lost dear old ones. We’ve seen new incarnations of the thing that brought us together originally, which was the three-season 1966 series Star Trek. 

So I’m reading — for the seventh or eighth time–Robert Heinlein’s Friday. I’ve reviewed it before, 13 years gone. This time, I’m struck by some of the events portrayed against the background of a pseudo-dystopian future. They’re all too… familiar to a reader in 2025 America.

Heinlein was a very perceptive social critic. He could see past the conventional wisdom of the times he was living in and caught some trends and developments most people didn’t. That vision made him fairly prophetic. In Friday, he predicted multinational corporations taking ownership of whole countries and becoming nations themselves. Surely as American billionaires have re-launched the space race, once the province of nation states only, we can see that next step as plausible.

So last week I told a wildly slanted version of the story of Oedipus, the man who had a complex named for him long before we started naming complexes for banks and telecomms.

As you’ve guessed if you’ve read my blistering attack on the tale of the man who killed his father and married his mother, I don’t go looking for reasons to talk about Oedipus. I try not to think about him, because, “Eew.” But I recently read a book called The Wisdom of the Myths by a philosopher named Luc Ferry. Mr. Ferry’s goal was nothing less than to bring us better living through mythology. He dug into the philosophical underpinnings of the stories that, to the rest of us, are fodder for Disney movies and Ray Harryhausen films; and he came up with some advice for living.

His main point was that the ancient Greeks accepted man’s mortality in a way no cultures did. They didn’t really believe in an afterlife. People just died. Oh, yeah, their shades (ghosts) went to the Underworld, ruled by Hades. But as soon as Charon the ferryman rowed them across the River Styx, they drank from the River Lethe and they forgot who they were. And then they just sort of… milled about down there. Like the opening chapter of The Wizard of Oz, everything was just gray. (I in no way mean to imply that Kansas is Hell. Superman comes from Kansas, and I refuse to insult Superman.)

A few special souls got to live in the Elysian Fields. Sort of the upper floors of Hades, where you have to have a room key to make the elevators go there. Presumably these souls remember their lives, and thus achieve immortality. But they are special. The world of the Greek myths was elitist above all. There were also other special souls who remembered very well who they were: Sisyphus, Tantalus, Ixion… The people–kings all–who pissed off the gods and were tortured for eternity.

Oh, and one or two mortals got made into gods. And a few got plastered into the heavens as constellations. The stories never weighed in on whether, as constellations, they were self-aware and had memories. I sense not.

Mostly, though, the ancient Greeks believed you got one life, you died, and that was that. No mystical path to immortality. Mr. Ferry finds in this advice for us all: stop trying to bribe the gods into letting you have more life. Accept that one life is what you get, and make the most of it.

Oedipus did nothing wrong. This must be distinctly understood, or else the wondrous snark I shall direct at this story may never be appreciated. (The Dickens you say.)

It all starts with Oedipus’s birth father, Laius, eventually King of Thebes. Laius’s father, a grandson of Thebes’s founder, Cadmus, died while Laius was a child. The throne was seized by usurpers, and little Laius was unfortunately smuggled out of the city before he could be executed by the new administration. I say “unfortunately,” because no good came from Laius. Literally everyone he touched died tragically.

Laius grew up in Pisa, the ward of King Pelops. Pelops no doubt had sympathy for a child who had escaped execution because, well, Pelops hadn’t. Pelops had been murdered and butchered into stew meat as a child, by his own father, who wanted to impress some important dinner guests. (Okay, they were the gods of Olympus.) His guests were not impressed. They restored little Pelops to life so he could become Poseidon the sea god’s lover (you can’t make this shit up, even though someone probably did). Pelops led a charmed life which culminated in his becoming a king. Then he welcomed The Omen into his house.

Note: This is really long, comparatively, and contains spoilers for a film you’ve had 40 years to see. I apologize for nothing.

Before I get to discussing the film, a brief, perhaps self-serving anecdote:

I was performing, onstage at the Farpoint convention, with my group, Prometheus Radio Theatre. Lance Woods and I were playing Jim Kirk and Spock, as if they were roles essayed by Bing Crosby and Bob Hope in a (fictional) 1940s film called The Road to Orion. I was very proud of my script, and we had a great time with a lot of celebrity guests and in-jokes for the audience.

In that audience was one James Callis, star of Battlestar Galactica and the Bridget Jones films. Mr. Callis had been invited to perform, had declined, but had stayed to watch. After the show, his agent told me that he had spent the performance pointing wistfully at the stage and saying, “But I want to do that!”

Told you it was self-serving.

I can think of few forms of praise higher than being told that your work makes someone else say, “I want to do that!” When I first saw Richard Donner’s Ladyhawke, in 1985, it had that effect on me. I saw on the screen a story I desperately wished I could have told. And I promptly forgot that, and spent the ensuring years thinking of the film only when engaged in arguments about its soundtrack. (Best. Soundtrack. Ever. Fight me.)

But this past Friday, wanting to kick back and watch TV, my wife Renee and I chose Ladyhawke over all the newer content on our streaming services, probably because of the sheer novelty of seeing it show up on the top of Prime’s recommended content list.

Somewhere in my parents’ house (because nothing ever leaves my parents’ house), there is a copy of a slim paperback titled, Why Not the Best?

Okay, it’s not my parents’ house anymore, it’s mine. My son and his family live in it. And it’s likely that the book in question did leave, because my mother went on a binge of book donating late in life. She got so obsessive about it that she started donating books that belonged to other people. We had to have a talk.

This book was, I believe, a bestseller, and it introduced the world to a man named Jimmy Carter, just-departed Governor of Georgia. Richard Nixon had, only two years earlier, resigned the United States Presidency amidst scandal, and his elected Vice-President, Spiro Agnew, had preceded him in leaving office amidst scandal. So the Presidency fell upon a non-elected Vice President, Gerald Ford. By all accounts (including that of his opponent in the 1976 Presidential election, the aforementioned Jimmy Carter), Ford was a good and competent man, and, observed John Chancellor of NBC news, even a gifted athlete. Unfortunately, Jerry Ford had a habit of tripping and falling on camera. Jerry Ford pardoned a man that a lot of people hated then as much as many now hate the color orange. Saturday Night Live, already gearing itself up to be the sole source of political news for a large segment of the American electorate, had Ford portrayed by Chevy Chase as a dithering, absent-minded bumpkin.

The Presidency was not in good shape. The Democrats had last controlled the White House in the person of Lyndon Baines Johnson, who, despite an ambitious and oft-lauded program of domestic reform–“The Great Society”–lost mass approval for his expansion of the unpopular Viet Nam War. The Democratic Party was in no better shape than was the G.O.P. vis a vis credibility of Presidential candidates.

Along came an outsider, a peanut farmer, a Southern Baptist, a Sunday School teacher, a Southern governor, who not only won the Democratic Party’s nomination (away from the third political scion of the Kennedy dynasty, no less) but triggered something of a cultural phenomenon. Jimmy Carter’s prominent teeth were caricatured far and wide. The antics of his brother Billy served to fill the cultural void left by the mass-cancellation of rural comedies like Green Acres and the Beverly Hillbillies a few years earlier. Indeed, a two-season rural sitcom, Carter Country, earned decent ratings for ABC starting in 1977.  

A while back, a friend of mine shared on his Facebook timeline that he had just confronted the problem of having civil discourse with some homophobic relatives. When I was growing up, it was pretty much standard issue to have an older relative, out of step with the times, who made judgmental and even bigoted comments at family gatherings. It was so common that one of the most-watched TV shows of the 1970s centered around such a character. Google “Archie Bunker” if this is ancient history to you. Trigger Warning: Archie says all the words.

I sympathized with my friend and was yet a little surprised when someone commented to the effect that he simply should not have anyone homophobic in his family circle. And the old observation that you can pick your friends but not your family came to my mind, as Harper Lee summed it up in To Kill a Mockingbird, “You can choose your friends but you sho’ can’t choose your family, an’ they’re still kin to you no matter whether you acknowledge ’em or not, and it makes you look right silly when you don’t.”

We live in intolerant times. One might say I grew up in intolerant times as well, hence Archie Bunker. I guess that’s true, but I feel American society at large has grown more, not less, intolerant. Instead of pitying the Archies of the world, who are, in the end, ignorant and frightened, not evil, we meet intolerance with intolerance, hate with hate, and we quote philosophy to back up our two-wrongs-make-a-right approach.

In past blogs, (here and here) I’ve made a appeals for tolerance toward those with whom we disagree. Both times, I was advised in feedback to have a look at Popper’s Paradox. I did have a look at it. I’ve never really shared my reaction to it. So here it is: I think Popper’s Paradox is a cop-out. Nothing more than an excuse to behave badly.

This entry is dedicated to–and prompted by–my old friend Ben. In response to last week’s post, he suggested that he’d like to know my thoughts on comparing the United Health murder case with the case of Daniel Penny. 

Ben suggested that conservatives tend to admire the “Dirty Harry” model, being okay with the use of force, even deadly force, against those who dwell on the lower rungs of society’s ladder, while liberals seem to express admiration for those who use violence against the rich and powerful. This got me thinking, “Do conservatives believe in punching down, while liberals believe in punching up?” 

I don’t like people who punch down. These include successful people who are rude to servers, bosses who emotionally abuse and threaten subordinates, and V.I.P.s who are okay with getting special privileges based on their status. I have both liberal and conservative views on issues, but I wouldn’t want to be a person who punches down. 

Let me start by saying that Liberalism and Conservatism are both forces for good. Liberalism pushes for needed change; but change introduces risk. Conservatism resists change in an effort to reduce that risk. Taken to extremes, they can also be forces for against the good. But, overall,  I think even a person who leans heavily to one side is participating in the social process and providing part of the balance we need. 

When I was in 8th grade, my best friend’s parents gave me a copy of The Rights of Students – The Basic ACLU Guide to a Student’s Rights  (An American Civil Liberties Union Handbook.) I think it was a Christmas present. Maybe it was for my birthday. We studied American Civics that year, ably taught by Mr. Haddaway and Mr. Rosin. I was very fired up about the Bill of Rights and about the idea that people who had not reached the legal age of majority should still be treated as, well, people.

One passage from the book that struck me and has always stuck with me was this: 

Can students be prohibited from expressing their views if those who hold opposing views become angry and boisterous. 

No… courts have consistently held that the rights of those who peacefully express their views may not so easily be defeated.

The ACLU has fallen significantly from its perch as a champion of free speech rights since 1977, when the book was published; but, at the time, their stance was strong. I took a broader interpretation away from this question / answer couplet, which was that a person who is exercising his right to free speech cannot be held accountable for illegal actions performed by others.