{"id":77991,"date":"2026-10-09T20:59:28","date_gmt":"2026-10-10T03:59:28","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/briancebuhl.com\/?p=77991"},"modified":"2026-10-09T20:59:28","modified_gmt":"2026-10-10T03:59:28","slug":"a-brief-visit-with-politics","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/briancebuhl.com\/?p=77991","title":{"rendered":"A Brief Visit with Politics"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

No one really wants to read my political takes here, and I understand why. Either you’re in agreement with me, in which case we don’t have much to discuss on the topic, or you disagree with me, which will be frustrating because this isn’t a great forum for 2 way communication.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I do read all the comments, though. And I try to reply when I have anything meaningful to reply with. If I’m talk about something, anything, and I don’t have my facts straight and I’m clearly wrong, I’d rather find out about it than continue to spread misinformation or worse, do harm.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

It’s difficult to be apolitical in this day and age, because all too often, it’s not a question of politics but morality. For example, Ms. Rachel is a host for kids programming, and you wouldn’t expect a lot of political content from her corner. However, she believes children are dying in Gaza, and she no longer wants to work with celebrities that don’t use their platform to speak out about it. If it was political, it would be Republican vs Democrat, right vs left. She just doesn’t want to see kids get hurt.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

There is nuance there, of course. I talked about that with my last post about The Hugos<\/a>. I think it’s possible to be both against kids dying, and also be against antisemitism. That’s where I’m at.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Making art is a political act. You make a choice as to what will be included in your art, and what it reflects about you and the world. Sometimes, that statement might be “I’m leaving that out, because I don’t want to talk about that in this piece of art,” which I think is reasonable.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

That’s what I’m doing with The Psychic Out of Time<\/em>. I have it set in the summer of 2024, not because I don’t want to update it to be the current year, but because I don’t want to write a story in which Trump is the president. One of the background points in The Mel Walker Stories is that Mel and his friends are preparing for the end of the world. It would be way too easy for me to bring Trump into that, and that’s not the kind of story I want to tell.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

We all live in the same world, even if some of the inhabitants appear to be operating on a different information. When we sit down to write a story, we’re bringing our voice, which is a culmination of our experiences, both on and off the page. We make our stories relatable by bringing in bits of the world we know, and the reflections of the people that inhabit our world.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Let’s try an example. Maybe Charlotte’s Web<\/em>. Is that a political story? Not on the surface, but let’s look a little deeper. Wilbur is an unremarkable pig living on a farm that is doomed to be slaughtered. An intelligent spider named Charlotte helps Wilbur by writing words into her web that the farmers can read. “Some Pig,” “Radiant,” and “Terrific” are examples. Wilbur is spared, Charlotte dies, but not before 3 of her many children remain behind to continue writing messages in the webs, saving Wilbur and allowing him to live a long, happy life.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Charlotte’s Web<\/em> isn’t a political story, but Wilbur lives in our world. Without utility, or something to make Wilbur stand apart, he is bound to be slaughtered. No one questions this fact of the story. It’s just the way the world works. What does that say about the world? Pigs are slaughtered on farms, no matter how cute or innocent they may be. This is a world that eats meat.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

If you squint your eyes, you might be able to see a message here that capital punishment is wrong. Wilbur is a pig, but he and all the other animals on the farm are humanized, and we’re sympathetic to Wilbur and his plight. Slaughtering him would be wrong. Is it not wrong to slaughter humans, or creatures we relate to the way we relate to humans?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Or, maybe there is something there about Utilitarianism. If Wilbur were remarkable on his own, he wouldn’t have to worry about the farmer’s axe. He depends on Charlotte’s unique skill. What does that say about Wilbur and the world he lives in?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I’m not saying any of this is E. B. White’s intention. An artist’s intentions don’t matter as much as what lands on the page. J. K. Rowling claimed for a while that Dumbledore is supposed to be gay, but there’s no evidence of that in the stories themselves. I think it would have been great to have good representation in one of the most famous children’s fantasy series ever, but it’s not there.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In my opinion, it is better to be intentional with the messages that we place into our stories. To do that, we must understand ourselves, our biases, and then we must see where our biases may intersect with the material in our story. There will always be things we say unintentionally, and that’s okay.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

For me, whenever I talk about Trump and what he’s done to our country, I get a little heated. I possess a very strong bias and as such, I am avoiding writing stories that include him. I’ll write blog posts about him (probably one tomorrow, if I’m being honest), but unless it is my intention to write about modern politics, I’ll keep him out of my light-hearted, present-day fiction.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

No one really wants to read my political takes here, and I understand why. Either you’re in agreement with me, in which case we don’t have much to discuss on the topic, or you disagree with me, which will be frustrating because this isn’t a great forum for 2 way communication. I do read all […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-77991","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-general"],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/briancebuhl.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/77991","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/briancebuhl.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/briancebuhl.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/briancebuhl.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/briancebuhl.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=77991"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/briancebuhl.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/77991\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":77992,"href":"https:\/\/briancebuhl.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/77991\/revisions\/77992"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/briancebuhl.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=77991"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/briancebuhl.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=77991"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/briancebuhl.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=77991"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}