America In A Nutshell (or, at least, in the Apple store)

TODAY I went to the Apple Store...

Yes, I went to the Apple Store. Think what you want of me. I'm not exactly a stereotypical Mac user. In fact, I've got a PC too. But the point is not that I was looking at replacing my current clunker of a PC. So I happened to be at the Apple store. Perhaps not the wisest decision in the world, given the famous lack of realistic customer support and inventory, but I guess I was feeling optimistic. You've gotta be optimistic when you're in my shoes.

So I walk into the store, and I begin looking at inventory. While I'm standing in front of something that the store is calling "New" (despite having less than one gig of processing power), I notice that there's a family standing in front of the 24" I-Mac next to me. It's a father and his kids, and they're toying with the net. The father has pulled up Fox news and is reading it intently. One of the kids is reading over his shoulder. The other two are waiting patiently.
After he's done reading the news, the father gives a satisfied nod and expands the window to "full-screen" size, walking away from the system with his children in tow.

There, on a 24" screen, is the Fox news website. It's been set as the homepage on that particular system, and is filled with all sorts of "fair and balanced information". In the middle of a store where most of the "customers" are prostitots updating their MySpace webpages, some assinine git has topped the stupidity by setting 'Fox News' as the webpage, blowing it up to full size on the largest screen possible, and continuing his shopping experience.

Quick as a flash, I travel to the computer, shut down the Fox window, and add a different website. Crooksandliars.com, and set the homepage to a nice, generic, Google.com... Satisfied at my work, I walk away, and continue in my own shopping. But Mr. Rumsfeld Jr. is not pleased with my handywork when he notices it.

He walks over, indignant, to a store clerk, and makes a fuss. He points at the computer screen.
The notion of left wing propaganda offends him mightily. And he wants truth told.
The clerk apologizes profusely and shuts down the web-browser.

Later, I see Daddy Dearest there again. He's set the homepage to Fox news once more. And looking very satisfied with himself. What is more, he is standing defensively next to the I-Mac as if to say, "See? I'm right. And there's not a damned thing anyone can do about that."

America. Gotta love it.

He Who Smelt It

SO, THE OTHER DAY, I DID SOMETHING STUPID.

I actually asserted myself again. I'm not use to this kind of thing. For years, I kept my mouth shut for fear that I'd offend somebody or say something wrong. Then, a while ago, I stopped caring quite as much. Don't know when it happened. But, there you go, I decided to stop acting like a wuss and defend my opinions, and those of others, from time to time. Yah rah for me, right?

When I began to write this Blog again after a long absence, it was because of the incident I allude to in Post #1 here - an encounter with one of the "self-proclaimed experts" of miniature gaming. Shortly thereafter, another incident occurred.

It seems that a certain author had written a supplement for a set of rules that I enjoy playing, but had chosen to use a rather controversial chronology for the events he dealt with. Controversial in that, when I'd attempted to use the same chronology for my OWN research, I was essentially told that using such a chronology was tantamount to academic suicide. This author, for whom I have nothing but respect, preceeded to classify the chronology he had chosen to use as being "generally accepted by the academic community" using the major mailing list accessed by many players of the particular game system he was writing for.

This is a very, very dangerous statement. Saying that something is "generally accepted by the academic community" is like saying that the State of Israel is "generally accepted by the people of the Middle East", or that the policies of the Bush Administration are "generally accepted by Americans". Academic types (I don't call myself an academic, but I do recognize that I am, by default, part of the academic community) generally have a problem agreeing upon ANYTHING. That's part of the problem with the Social Sciences at the moment - not a hell of a lot of new things are happening because the old farts who run the show don't like it when new ideas, theories, and avenues of thought are tested. For my part, I've recieved a fair amount of flack for my work on Mithraism.

So, anyway, as I was sayin', this is a very dangerous statement to make. Therefore, in the spirit of being helpful and defending my own viewpoint, I informed this author that the term "generally accepted" wasn't really accurate. Many historians and archaeologists, ESPECIALLY archaeologists, are loathe to accept the chronology suggested by my friend. At the time, I thought it a perfectly innocent comment. But lo, what a storm of human excrement I recieved...

Ironically, some of the most hurtful comments came from a certain individual, who accused me of "pontificating". Pontificating. Me. I realize that most of the people who read this Blog probably don't know me personally, but I assure you that, for me personally, being accused of pontificating is pretty damned brutal. I have always prided myself on being open-minded, fairly nice, and willing to discuss new ideas with everyone. I specifically AVOID playing certain historical miniatures games and historical wargames because they tend to draw pontificating, over-generalizing dunderheads.

I never play DBM, for example, in response to this very phenomenon. I don't particularly dislike the system, but I feel that many DBM players are snobs, know-it-alls, and told-you-sos. Not my cup of tea. I DO play DBA and HOTT, but this is primarily because the fatheads who ruined DBM for me generally avoid those two games like the plague.

I find my accuser's position to be rather ironic. I greatly admire his writing, and his research. I am particularly impressed by the fact that the guy, who isn't a historian or archaeologist by trade as far as I can tell, has such a copious amount of knowledge regarding a topic which is fairly obscure to all but the nerdiest of nerds in the Social Sciences. The problem is that I've seen him do what he calls "pontificating" a dozen times. Sometimes in direct response to my own posts.

I'll ask about a topic, and he'll respond with a very long, very well written response to my query; better yet, I'll discuss a certain subject that he's fond of with another member of the list, and he'll chime in with his own thoughts. All perfectly acceptable. But apparently, NOT when I do it.

Sort of cyclical, isn't it? Bitterly ironic, at least. I make a comment about how know-it-alls are ruining the hobby, then proceed a few days later to make a harmless comment that others percieve as my attempt to do the same thing I've just lambasted here in the Mithraeum.

Sometimes being a Vedic-Avestan deity can be more trouble than it's worth.

Have you ever wondered at the fascinating process which makes a human being proclaim himself an expert on any given topic? I have. Perhaps that's because I'm an arrogant bastard.

There's something about "gaming" type hobbies - particularly wargaming, though this can equally be extended from roleplaying to boardgames, to, I suppose, collectible cardgames - which seems to draw in the world's great experts on every subject from military history to the arts. Perhaps it is the quality of gaming as a hobby - the promotion of escapism to one extent or another - which allows this "expertise" to surface. Let's take one example...

A woman spends all day as, say, a textbook editor or a web designer. She's pretty good at what she does, and she makes a decent living. But she feels unrewarded. After all, there are millions of textbooks to edit and millions of editors for them, and its not as if the field is booming with innovation and new ideas. Maybe she's a web designer, and she spends most of her time building fancypants websites for clients who pay her entirely too much money to do something she could do in her sleep, but this in turn leaves her with no time to build her own website. Either way, she's unfulfilled. So she turns to gaming as an escape valve, something to elevate her.

She is no longer Jane Doe, textbook editor; she is now Jane Doe, Empress of France, or commander of the Sarmatian Hordes, or perhaps she's merely an Elven princess with a penchant for buggery and Gnome smashing. At any rate, she's got herself another gig in which she rolls dice, makes decisions, has control of her own fictonilized destiny, or the destinies of thousands of tiny pewter men, at any rate.

This happens to all of us at one point or another. We get into this hobby, be it to smash Orcs or to save Rome from collapse, because we want something more from our life, hopefully something that will allow us to smash our enemies figuratively with a fancy toss of the die or a simulated Primogen Council meeting. Nothing wrong with this. People build scale models, go to stamp collecting conventions, breed Boston Terriers, etc. for much the same reason.
But Jane doesn't stop here.

No. She decides that she is going to become an "expert" in her hobby. She is totally ignored as a textbook editor or web designer, and she wants someone to aknowledge that she knows more than typesetting and/or HTML. She knows, for example, 4th Century B.C. Hoplites. Now there's a subject she can really speak about ; it's something about which very little definitive is known by your average gamer, and yet Ancient Greek warfare - especially the warfare of that era, the last great stand of the Hoplite martial art, is relatively popular among the small community of Ancient Wargamers.

So she reads everything she can on the subject. She studies Victor Davis Hanson. She reads her Xenophon. Maybe she digs into a bit of Pliny and Plutarch. She studies Polybius and his experiences as a commander of Late Hoplite and Phalangite forces in the field, his opinions as to why the Romans finally triumphed over her chosen "beloved" period of history. And she makes herself an expert. It isn't her professional field, and it isn't even the topic that she originally loved so much about history, but it's exotic, it's sexy, and it makes her feel important.

Nothing wrong with this, either. I certainly never imagined myself becoming reasonably competent with the subject of the Spanish Navy in 1898, nor I suspect did Phil Barker wake up one day and say, "I'm going to write something really exciting about the Later Pre-Islamic Arabs today". It simply happened. We find something we are fascinated by, we come to love it, we learn all we can about it. But again, or Jane - sweet, lovely, Jane Doe - is different. She's an expert in her own mind now, and she wants everyone ELSE to know that she's an expert.

So she joins every mailing list that she can that has even a peripheral amount of relation to fourth century Hoplites. She posts a website. She manages to get a sweet gig writing occasional columns in the local wargaming magazine. And with every opportunity that she has, she reminds everyone that she's an expert. It's not enough to merely chime in helpfully. It's not enough to occasionally help out a newcomer to the hobby. It certainly isn't satisfactory to be consulted on the latest Osprey, from time to time. She's an expert, damnit, and to hell with you if you disagree.

You've doubtless encountered Jane, and others like her, a dozen times, as have I. You have watched her tear apart some poor kid's first posting on the "Hoplites at War" mailing list when he makes the unforgiveable mistake of misspelling "Aspis"; you have watched her criticize the conclusions of an armchair historian who thinks that Iphicrates may not have been so innovative as we give him credit for; you watch her turn a one sentence, off-handed comment about Chalcidian helmets into a five page essay on the nature of Greek warfare at the turn of the fourth century, B.C....

And you probably react one of two ways. I've certainly done both. The first way to react to these people is to respect their self-claimed expertise and to attempt to engage them in dialect. Befriend them, you might say. Exchange jokes with them, attempt to speak at the level they seem accustomed to. Most likely, your reception will be mixed - a few folks will take it in stride, smile, shake your hand, and choose to regard you as an equal. After all, you know about as much about the subject as they do, and if you don't, well then, you're polite enough to let them take the hell. Or, perhaps, they'll react with criticism, disrepect, or simply turning the cold shoulder. How dare you attempt to communicate at their level, to share their love of a subject that only they can completely comprehend. Worse yet, maybe they'll simply treat you like a foolish child, pat you on the head, and move on with the current of the conversation.

Or perhaps you'll react the second way. You'll get angry.

I'm angry. Perhaps it's because I'm tired, and it's been a rough move cross country. Perhaps it's because I'm watching the hobby slowly crumble from arrogance and elitism within. Or perhaps it's because, not long ago, I engaged in a friendly discourse with Jane, and Jane turned a could shoulder in my direction. Why? I suspect it's because at some point I had the temerity to engage her as an intellectual equal rather than accepting her statements as fact without basis in truth.

Let me tell you something, my dear reader. I'm getting sick and tired of Jane. I'm tired of hearing her speeches at the major wargames conventions. I'm tired of watching her write sourcebooks about topics that I know a dozen different men and women could write about better. And most of all, I'm tired of her turning our hobby into a greying mass of elitism and stupidity.

It's ok to be an expert on something - even an amateur expert, as most of us are. But, as an academic advisor I despised once told me in his single moment of genuine clarity, "There is a difference between being a scholar and being an enthusiast." Unfortunately, that isn't the common viewpoint in the gaming community, particularly the historical wargames community, at present. Write a set of rules about the Franco-Prussian War and suddenly you can out-talk anybody on the subject of Napoleon III; create a wide-ranging set of Ancients Rules and suddenly you can shout down anyone who believes that your opinion of the Jewish Revolt of AD 70 is, to say the least, highly biased; paint a dozen Sioux and spend a few hours at Little Big Horn - suddenly you've ridden with Custer.

As an historical wargamer, even a well-read historical wargamer, one must learn to accept one's limitations. The same goes for roleplaying. boardgaming, yu-gi-oh, whatever. Painting one hundred Hoplites as early fourth century Thespians doesn't make Jane a bonifide world authority on the subject of Hoplites any more than it makes me a world authority on Spanish cuisine from having eaten more Tapas in my lifetime than most folks would care to admit. I don't care if she's published a sourcebook for WAB or Vis Bellica on that same subject. I don't care if she's personally handled the sanctified armor of Iphicrates himself. She's well read, a worthy contributor to a debate, but she isn't the final authority on her subject of choice.

And I'm not an idiot for disagreeing with her.
Neither are any of you...