Erin Ptah (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
ptahrrific) wrote2009-09-23 09:09 pm
ptahrrific) wrote2009-09-23 09:09 pm
Entry tags:
Never Written
I love a good fake-fic meme.
Give me the title of a story I’ve never written, and feedback telling me what you liked best about it, and I will tell you any of: the first sentence, the last sentence, the thing that made me want to write it, the biggest problem I had while writing it, why it almost never got submitted to magazines, the scene that hit the cutting room floor but that I wish I’d been able to salvage, or something else that I want readers to know.
Give me the title of a story I’ve never written, and feedback telling me what you liked best about it, and I will tell you any of: the first sentence, the last sentence, the thing that made me want to write it, the biggest problem I had while writing it, why it almost never got submitted to magazines, the scene that hit the cutting room floor but that I wish I’d been able to salvage, or something else that I want readers to know.
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Remember the Wørd where "Stephen" mocks a white critic of the President for highlighting the race of a black critic? The line was something like "Way to prove you're not a racist: by highlighting another person's race." When, earlier in the very same segment, he had delivered one of his "I don't see race; therefore, I'm not a racist!" zingers, which satirize the idea of colorblindness. And, well, I was a little frustrated with the implication that ignoring race and talking about race both demonstrate a person's racism.
Buuuuuut whenever I try to elaborate on ideas like that directly, I manage to put my foot in it. So I deconstructed the notion in my own head, then falsely reconstructed it with l!Stephen, and let readers work out my behind-the-scenes opinion on their own. (As with r!Stephen, it's easy for people to assume I agree with them.)
And now that I've revealed the secret behind the trick, I've probably sabotaged my future use of it :P Ah well.
(I do try to make l!Stephen a bit less clueless than c!Stephen on racial issues, because he's willing to listen and learn. But he does have a tendency to agree with whatever strong opinion he's heard most recently, even if it contradicts the one he supported the day before.)
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I kind of want to read it too - but I don't know if I could actually pull off the writing of it. That's the great thing about this meme: all the fun of meta, none of the work of fic. (And, in this case, none of the cringeworthiness of l!Stephen's flailing all over the place on race issues in glorious detail.)
So, here, have some more rambling:
Jon's scene came from something that's been on the back of my mind for a long time, ever since the interview that led to this blog post (the one where Judd Apatow pokes fun at his name change, and he instantly gets prickly). Basically, it seems that the normally Zen Jon has a serious twitch point about the idea that he has to fall in lockstep with, or be validated by, all other Jewish people.
So -- after shooting down the old chestnut that Being White And Jewish Is Exactly Like Being [Insert Racial Minority Here] at the outset, because that shows up on anti-racism bingo cards for a reason -- Jon gets to let out his frustrations about how no one member of any group is a representative of the whole group, and every time Stephen picks up a new argument and represents it as The [Minority] View, he's doing a disservice to everyone who has ever disagreed with it. Not even a figure as widely-respected as MLK spoke for All Black People (though he did speak as a black person -- which is something that Stephen will never do, no matter how well he can wrangle soul food and fist bumps).
The kicker, of course, is that towards the end Stephen can't just realize the error of his ways and agree with everything Jon has just said, because you wouldn't know if it's because he's come around or if he's just repeating the pattern of trying-to-agree-with-everyone which led to the problem in the first place.
So instead he gets introduced to the idea that you can hear an opinion and disagree with it -- and then go on your way, without trying to debate/question/discuss your way to agreement. And then he does.
(There's a lovely Lenny Bruce quotation: "Liberals can understand everything but people who can’t understand them." Which is basically the theory underlining factiness. L!Stephen has a hard time grasping that there are some times when no amount of facts or logic will bring everyone to the same opinion.)
I'm not sure if it's the most satisfying ending, but l!Stephen fics have a tendency to wind up like that. Usually the emotional climax of a story comes when the characters have broken down their walls and opened up to each other, whereas l!Stephen really needs to build some walls and close off a little.
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Hmm, I could actually see that as joyful but not as straightforwardly as r!Stephen which I suppose is what you said. I'm still re-discovering the joy in simply disagreeing and not having it be a huge deal or just saying "no" so I could see l!Stephen happy that he can do so now.
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The ironic thing is, there are a couple of different people I had in mind when typing all that up, and at least two of them would absolutely loathe each other. Same fact-oriented mindset, completely different political/social views. They would have a long detailed argument full of logic and citations, and eventually decide that the other one would just clearly Never Understand and they were wasting their time trying to explain things to someone so unwilling to see reason.
And if l!Stephen were talking to either of them, he would bend over backwards trying to agree. Until you put all three of them in the same room. At which point the ability to take a deep breath and quietly step back without trying to get everyone on the same page (that need is one of the Geek Social Fallacies, isn't it?) is pretty much a necessity.