Worldcon Day 5

Last day. Bank holiday Monday. Labor Day. Hungover. Four blurry figures make their way in the desert morning sun up Commerce Street for breakfast at the local Denny's. "Hi, I'm Mindy and I'll be your waitress today." Thank you, Mandy", say I, trying to be helpful. "Mindy!", she she snarls back over her shoulder. Sarah snorts and decides to call me Mandy for the rest of the day. Not starting well.

1000: Comic Book Movies: From the Page to the Screen. A lightweight start to the day where a panel of comic experts debate the good and the bad in the latest slew of superhero movies. Clue: The Avengers won the Best Dramatic Hugo award last night.

1100: 3D Printers: Our Replicators? I don't know much about this technology but the panel made a pretty convincing case that, economically speaking, this could well be a "destructive technology". Imagine every home with a 3D printer at the cost of a TV, making small domestic items out of any material based on blueprints downloaded from  the internet. Need something bigger? Just wander of to your local community fabricator with your DVD. Need to build homes in the Third World? Just ship out an industrial fab and make the "bricks" as you go from local raw materials. Want to colonise the moon or Mars? Fly out a fab first and build your colony from the ground up. This tech could well be a game changer.

1200: An Armed Society is a Polite Society. Ah! Now this was the real WTF!!! moment of the entire Con. The actual quote was from an old Heinlein book but I was pretty sure that this hour would satisfy my curiosity into the American obsession with guns. And boy, did it ever!!! Both panel and audience were as rabidly pro-NRA, pro-gun, out-of-control, I-can-do-anything-I-want, bleeding nutjobs as any paranoid Englishperson could imagine from watching the BBC. These people think you are socially irresponsible if you possess fewer guns to defend your home than you have windows to let in light. One wizzened old thing on the stage gleefully showed us the sword inside her walking stick as well as the palm-sized gun she admitted she "couldn't aim very well". They all, to a fault, reinforced the belief that possessing one or more death-dealing weapons of potentially mass destruction while walking down the street "made them more polite!" You could not fucking make this stuff up!

*sigh* I'm so bewildered/angry/terrified that I need to start a new paragraph here. If the panel had been looking at the audience, they would have seen a foreign couple looking at each other with their mouths open. I wanted to stand up and ask: "Hey! I'm from England. Does that mean we aren't polite? Or even civilised by your standards?". But the chair was, rudely, I thought, not permitting observations or questions and I was starting to be afraid of these people. Linda was starting to mutter ominously and I kept saying Shhh! and eyeing up the exits. As the panel got more crazy-arrogant they suggested that America should be exporting this cultural paradigm to other civilisations. Presumably at the point of a gun. One member of the audience managed to ask if there was a non-lethal option that could still satisfy the Americans' religious observance of the Second Amendment? "No" they replied, "because it wouldn't kill enough people in one go". I used to like America but this really changes my way of thinking. I mean, these are SF fans. We can dream up alternative universes ferchrissake! But this mentality so smacks of large-scale conditioning by commercial & political self-interest lobbies that it puts Iranian dictatorships to shame. Nowhere here was this about the pros and cons of the panel's guidelines: "Will an armed society be just polite? What other aspects, positive and negative, will this type of society exhibit? Will this make for a truly free society?". The only iota of rationality was from one panelist (a comics fan from a previous panel) who posited that the US had a unique history of large scale oppression of a portion of its citizens, bloody civil war and revolution that explains this mindset. After all, there were times under Gordon Brown or the EU when I wish I had a gun, but does anyone really think that's a good idea in an enlightened 21st century? (Memo to Ginge: OK you're a gun nut but I already know you're barking. It's the other 316,000,000 that really scare me!) As we tip-toed out, Linda whispered. "I need a drink!" Quite!