Month: November 2012

Last night I dreamed of a zombie story.  No, I’m not going to write it.  I don’t even read zombie stories.  In my entire writing career, I’ve written two zombie stories, one of them a Portuguese legend and another a really, really odd zombies in spaaaaaace story.

However, in the interests of full disclosure, I should point out I have the flu.  My husband had it last week, and we’re a family that shares.  I understand for this year’s flu I actually have a mild case, but I’ve reached the stage where I know I’m not dead but wish I were.  My throat hurts, my head is stuffed with cotton wool and there’s something seriously wrong going on with my bronchial passages.

But enough about me and more about the dream.  You see, when I run even a mild fever, I have very weird dreams.  Normally they involve zombies.  Normally’re big-canvas apocalypse type dreams, including the one in which everyone became a zombie and I shot them all with daddy’s gun.  (Not one word, Charles.)

I guess this time my subconscious decided that apocalypse was coming too close to home.  So, instead I was this noir detective (I don’t know about you, guys, but I’m rarely myself in my dreams.  Yes, I’m sure that a psychiatrist would have a field day) trying to find a very unsavory guy who was suspected of bank robberies.  You know, the sort of critter who has a dozen crimes to his count, but you can’t make a single one stick.

I eventually traced him to the small house where he was born, and was received by a very nice older lady.  The house was spic and span and it was obvious this lady, in her eighties or so, cleaned and polished and gardened constantly.  And then…

Well, she was this guy’s mother.  She was his first crime.  He had murdered her.  She had got up right out of the grave and come back to clean and fix the house and had been there for fifty years, cleaning and fixing.  When he came there to seek refuge, she knifed him in his sleep.  She opened the door to show “me” his corpse on the bed and she said, in a bewildered voice, “He don’t get up.  He lie flat.”

Now, this comes around to where we are:

We are a week past the election.  They won by less than one percent.  I’m sick and tired of people (few in these comments) saying it’s all gone.  You see, it’s easy.  And they just want to lie flat.

This is actually what happens  anyway.  To an extent, after a while, we all lose some anger.  We lie flat.  Oh, not yet.  I don’t know about you, but I’m still boiling at what the media did, sweeping Benghazi under the rug and STILL ignoring the people suffering in the aftermath of Sandy, so they could elect an oikophobic president who, like them, believes that the US is the center of all evil in the world.  And I’m still scared about what this team that has no contact with reality at any point will do to our finances and our defense.

You can’t live forever in alt.  Of course you can’t.  And at any rate, you are the sons of Martha (Please eschew theological discussion) the ones who do things.  You have jobs, you’re raising kids, you have responsibilities.  Unlike OWS, you can’t just camp out in parks and poo on police cars.  (Not that any of you would, I’m sure.)

Several ways have been suggested to somewhat punish the left – who have no compunction in using these normally, even not (just) to punish us – and yesterday in the comments, predictably, it was pointed out they won’t do much.

It depends.  I think it will.  Look, I know somewhat more about how perilously close even bestseller authors are to the bone.  As for movies, I don’t know, they already sell mostly abroad – but there is the spirit of the thing, and we can make the thing a resounding bomb here, like Lions for Lambs or whatever the heck that was.

But more importantly, living in a certain way and doing certain things, will keep it in your mind, as you go back to everyday life, that not everything is normal.  Unlike Dave, I don’t think this gang is smart enough (or actually in touch with reality enough) to boil the frog slowly.  I think they’re going for broke.  There’s nasty stuff coming, and this will help you be prepared and not relaxed in your non-watching position.

The first part of it is, I’m sure, at this point, a necessity for most of us.  If you’re sure you’ll still have a job in the next year, you’re the exception.  If your savings haven’t been depleted for the last four years, you’re the exception.  If you’re not worried about how you’ll make it through the next four years, how you’ll keep a roof over your head, how you’ll keep the house heated as energy skyrockets, you’re the exception.

So there is the scheme the whisper-campaign calls mini-galt.  Most of us – most of me – can’t stop working.  Most of us, even if we had a little more padding five years ago, are now living paycheck  to paycheck.  Going galt is a dream we can’t indulge in when it comes to stopping work and starving the beast of taxes.

BUT we can starve the beast in another way.  Look, it’s only because we’re Americans that this is even a consideration.  A lot of people would say we’re nuts, spending money we shouldn’t on entertainment.

But I grew up with Heinlein who advised that when broke you should budget luxuries first.  Over two periods of being utterly broke as an adult, I found this was true.  If we didn’t do it, life got to feeling like an utter slog, and then we’d do stuff like buy a paperback and pay it back by eating pancakes for dinner for a week.

Besides, if you are a little less broke than that – and heck you’re so busy, I know – you probably go out to eat once or twice a month just because you can’t possibly be everywhere at once.  For me, this takes the form of stopping by Carl’s Junior for the special or something along those lines.

Well, in mini-galt you don’t do that.  To avoid the sudden need to pick up something, you cook double for some meals and freeze it, or you learn to love omelets.  (I’m doing both.)  And as for the “big fun” you just don’t do it.  In full disclosure, my family is going to have one glorious last fling to celebrate my 50^th and younger boy’s 18^th – but after that we’re not even driving to Denver unless there’s some reason like meeting a friend.  Gas is expensive.  Eating out is expensive.  Museums are expensive.  We’re sitting tight.

But Sarah, you said, didn’t you say that you needed to budget some fun or life becomes an endless slog?

Well, two things – first yeah, sure, but wait and see, the left will give us enough reason to buy-cott some entertainment.  For instance, they’re frothing at the mouth at Applebys for having said if Obama won it would have to lay off people.   Papa John’s pizza is having a similar problem.

Also, rediscover your friends.  If they live close enough by, go to each other’s house to eat.  It can be done.  And hey, you’re going to need each other when things go pear shaped.

And over it all, feel the warmth of the certainty that you’re starving the beast.  Yes, you’re also starving some businesses, but that can’t be helped, and anyway, they – like you – can’t hold on very long this way.  A crisis is preferable to the slow-boil.  Of course you’ll feel better if the businesses you normally patronize are leftist (ours are, because we live in a city.)

Doing this will save you money which you’ll need AND will help you not lie flat, even when your mind turns back to everyday business.

The other part of the mini galt, also come to me three times now in the whisper campaign, is the one people say “won’t do any good.”

Don’t bet on it.  It might very well even change the editorial trends (though I doubt it.)

Media and entertainment betrayed the nation big time this election.  What’s more they’ve crawled through the institutions for three generations to do it.  Yep, they even  turned down better people, because they wanted to promote like thinkers.  (No?  Then how come it’s wall to wall to the left of Lenin. Yes, I’ve heard the argument that the left are just NATURALLY better artists and more creative.  If you believe that, I have some swampland in FL you can have cheap. )

It’s time to take the same tactic to the extent we can.  Yes, yes, the right is not like the left.  It amused me yesterday to hear you guys extol Guy Gavriel Kay because I can’t read him.  Yes, he’s an excellent writer.  HOWEVER  I grew up under Marxism and I’m overly sensitive to their spin on history and their distortions.  Books go against the wall.  His did – I don’t even remember which.  Someone had given it to me for my birthday… sixteen years ago?

But we’re more tolerant.  Heck, even I am.  I love some author’s mysteries, despite their obvious politics.  Part of this is because we HAD to get used to reading the left and ignoring the nonsense.  They weren’t letting anything else through.

Now let that sink in for a minute: they weren’t letting anything else through.  So we bought what they wanted us to.

Think about it.  Doesn’t it make you mad?  Maybe it only makes those of us who were trying to break in at the same time mad.

However, it’s time to get mad.  Don’t lie flat.

Your budget is limited, anyway, right?  So, for those lefties’ books, movies, games?  Wait and buy them used.  You can still enjoy it, but you won’t be subsidizing them.

Will they feel it?  I think so.  As I said, I know a lot more about how tight things are there than you do.  Will it break them?  Well… it might make them a little poorer, a little more in contact with reality.  If some of them are stealthing (I guarantee about half of them are) they might even give up the masquerade even if they have to go indie.

Yes, I know you feel dirty doing that.  I do.  “They’re entitled to their opinion.”  — Of course they are.  But the publishing establishment has made sure their opinion is the only one you hear, and these people most of them are in a bubble and think they’re enlightening the benighted.

If they’re right and our money is negligible to their wealth, then they won’t feel it, but at least you’ll know you’re not contributing to the propagation of a unified front of lies.  And if they feel it, perhaps they’ll wake up.  Call it an alarm clock service.

Needless to say, you should also be preparing.  Maybe there won’t be a big crash, but I think we’re going to hit hard.  Or rather, we’re going to have multiple, localized crashes and  it will be both not as bad and way worse than you expect (I’ll blog on this tomorrow, when I’m less feverish.)  For now?

Don’t lie flat.

(I’m doing a different post over at Mad Genius Club.  One on comfort reads.  It will be up in half an hour or so.)

There is a huge inflection running through “conservative” thought.  Even if you define “conservative” as small government and therefore get rid of the distinctions between social conservatives and libertarians, law and order and minarchists, strong-defense and isolationists.

In fact, all these distinctions are meaningless in the face of the one big distinction.

What big distinction?  Well… How do you feel about the following William F. Buckley quote about National Review?

“It stands athwart history, yelling Stop.”

If you’re nodding your head, chances are you’re older than I, probably by ten years.  If you’re wrinkling your brow and going “say what?” chances are you’re younger than I by at least ten years.

These things are not written in stone.  Generations are permeable.  For instance the current president is my age, just about, but he is technically of my older son’s generation, the echo-boom – the child of boomers who imbibed the ideology of the sixties in their mother’s milk and regurgitate it unexamined.  My parents OTOH were born during WWII and were the youngest of their family and therefore technically belonged to the prior generation.

However, in general, conservatives of any stripe who came of age before the seventies have the built in assumption that history is against their beliefs and they’re doomed to eventually lose.   They react to this in many different ways.  A lot of what you call RINOs are in fact conservatives of this stripe.  They think that they’re doomed to lose anyway – or rather, don’t think, just feel it, since it’s at the back of all their political beliefs – and therefore doing a little trade on the way to make things easier seems wise.  There are other types, like VDH who mourn the failing of the light and believe it is their duty to chronicle our journey into the dark, to warn some future rekindling of civilization (even though it’s understood he thinks they too are pre-doomed.)  Then there are the ones, like the Vikings of old who stand and make them fight for every inch they take, even though knowing that in the end evil and darkness win.

All of these from the “go down easy” to the admirable warriors have more in common with each other than with me.  You see, they don’t believe we can win.

Me?  I’m neither naïve nor stupid.  Yes, I’ve read the same historical texts they have.  Yes, I know the danger is grave.  Yes, I’m fully aware that forces of darkness are closing in on all sides.  They’ve been closing in on all sides forever, and the dawn of the industrial age made it worse.

BUT how could I not believe we can win?  In my lifetime, I’ve seen communist countries fall.  Even if they reconstituted again in some form, we found out one thing: no communist dictatorship can continue unchanged or unsoftened for over seventy years.  How CAN they be the future if they can’t even feed their own people longer than that.   Even strong men in benighted Latin countries do better than the dictatorship of the proletariat to which the future was supposed to belong.

How can I not believe we can win, when I’ve seen the growth of the new media, challenging the sclerotic orthodoxy of the mass-production age?

How can I not believe we can win when almost all new tech is geared towards giving individuals greater freedom and greater tech?

How can I not believe we can win when it is the “progressives” who are fighting the future so hard they’re willing to take us back to the thirties and permanent stagnation to stop history?

Look – I know where the older conservatives got this idea.  Each generation was going to be larger than the last, creating a sort of tyranny of indoctrinated youth and a sort of permanent dependence on the welfare state.  On the international front, larger and larger states would face each other across nuclear arsenals.  The almost mass-producing of people would create soulless societies where everyone was taught to think/act/dress alike.

Like Marx they made the mistake of looking at a point in history and thinking this goes on forever.  It’s a human thing.  (Unlike Marx, at least they didn’t rub their hands with glee and view it as a way to enshrine envy and vengeance as virtues.)

But their assumptions were wrong: their population assumptions, their assumptions on the longevity of industrial totalitarian states, and yes, their assumptions on technology.

What’s more the assumptions on tech and on economics were wrong in a spectacular way.

So, those of us who came of age after the seventies, those of us who took to the net like a fish to water, those of us who live in the stream of information, who are happy warriors in the battle for the future, can’t avoid but think there is not only a good chance we win – but our victory is almost assured.  Almost.  They have one weapon that destroys us, though it destroys them too.

Let’s start with some basics – can’t cover them all.  Again, the rule of science fiction applies – from which you can extrapolate the rest.  Let’s take the fact that you can now live in Podunk Kansas, or Santa Maria, Brazil and work in New York City.  If you’re thinking that’s just convenient, you didn’t think things through.

The industrial nation-state depends on territorial control for its power.  Their power to tax you, force you, coerce you, censor you hinges on your living in their territory.  What is the good of giving incentives to one industry and taxing the other to oblivion if it just means that it changes “offices” on paper, while not moving a single piece of paper.

We’re not quite there yet, but as better automated manufacture (and 3-d printers) come on line, the productive class becomes a will-o’-the-wisp thing that they can’t pin down and tax to buy the favor and votes of the moocher class.

Their troubles are only starting.

Yes, I know right now, the main stream media still shaped the narrative.  Or did they?  Note that Obama’s vote records fell way more from 08 than those of the Republican.  Yeah, the hatred campaign worked… for now.

But over the next four years, how many more people acquire tablets and computers?  How many more turn off the news?

Look, guys, the left was infiltrated by communists in the thirties and since then they’ve been preparing their beautifully detailed snare.  It was easy in a way.  Keep out of media, education and entertainment anyone who doesn’t think as they do.  Anyone who isn’t one of the “good guys.”

It worked.  It worked wonderfully.  They knew it would.  It worked everywhere else, too.  The entire Western World speaks with a unified media voice somewhere to the left of Lenin.  They don’t care if the people tune them out, something still sticks.

Those of us who came of age before blogs, came of age to feeling like we were insane.  EVERYTHING and everyone from newspapers, to our teachers to our favorite novelists/film makers told us a centralized economy was better and to think otherwise was heresy.

Okay, so the fall of the USSR made us think all of those authorities were full of it.  But it was still hard.  Now?  Now you can find a million people who think like you with very little effort – more importantly, you can find views that accord with your ‘lying eyes’.

They are holding on to the old way of doing things.  They conquered it the hard way over three generations.  They don’t want to let go.

What would you do if you threw a long march through the institutions, and in the end you found the institutions irrelevant?

Look at the talk show hosts.  That’s flop sweat on their brow.  Look at the merger of Random Penguin, because, in the face of all evidence, bigger must be better, they must stop these pesky indie people, they must OVERCOME.  They were told come the revolution they won, and yet now their victory is running between their fingers like sand.

They don’t know what to do.  All they can scream about is “taxing the rich” and taking us back to the good ol’ class war days of the 1930s.  They’re hoping by collapsing the economy they stop the clock of progress and cut off our route of escape.

Can it work?

Sure it can.  For a time.  If they collapse the economy completely, if they take us back to pre-history, it might work for a few hundred years.  BUT if they continue the course they’re in and only semi-collapse it?

Uh uh.  No way guys.  Yeah they “win” for a few decades.  But even China can’t stop the internet, and China has a FAR more conformist culture than anywhere in the west, even Portugal.  If they collapse the economy, we have to find new ways of surviving.  Things we can make/trade/sell the leviathan can’t trace.  Ways to be like the companies and move around to where they can’t force us.  In other words, if they continue in this course, they’ll only accelerate the progress of the technologies that will defeat them.

Doesn’t mean it’s not important to fight them.  When I say a few decades it could be as many as seven decades of untold misery.  The human life is brief.  Seventy years wipes me out and pretty much everyone I care about in this world.  I’m fighting for the near future.  I’m fighting to avoid pain for my children and grandchildren.  I’m fighting to keep the lights blazing bright.

BUT make no mistake – in the end, one way or another, we win.  Things can get ugly.  We might lose a few cities.  Things can get a lot more painful than they should.

But in the end it is the progressives standing athwart history yelling “stop.”  And that thing bearing down on them?  It’s an express train.  It stops for no one.

(Oh, and I didn’t say, but it’s understood — I’d be relieved if you can credibly tell me none of these, and no combination of them are likely.  Of course, telling me “this won’t happen because socialism totally works and is teh-awesome” is not credible.)

America has never experienced a collapse – economic, order or sovereignty collapse.

The closest the US came to a collapse of the economy was the thirties, and compared to the rest of the world, as Grapes of Wrathy as it got here, it wasn’t that bad.  The closest one came to a collapse of order was the race riots, and even those one expects were more exaggerated by the media than anything else, and for many (even European) cities would be known as “Saturday Night.”

When I hear people talk about being hungry in a year or two, it doesn’t sound “right.”

On the other hand, we’ve never watched the collapse of a country as large as the US, a country that in many ways has made the other countries collapses in the last fifty years slow mo and practically painless.

There are three things to consider in collapse, no matter how the collapse is brought about, keeping in mind that economic is the one we’re headed to at speed.

Economic – an economic collapse can range from people losing all their retirement, all their wealth, and having to accept a diminished lifestyle (we’ve been in this for four years or so) to real collapse, which I understand Portugal experienced in the thirties (I only have my grandmother’s stories for this, but she claimed some families survived by boiling weeds from the side of the street for soup, when nothing else was available.  I don’t know if people actually died of hunger, or if it would have been recorded.  I know my mom grew up barefoot and gleaning both from fields after the harvest, and coal from the railroad side for cooking – heating is not an important consideration in most of Portugal.)

Order – I don’t think any of you have any idea how law abiding Americans are even compared to Europeans.  I know having grown up in a southern European country, I experienced the other extreme, but even the Northern European countries are less law abiding In The Absence Of Enforcement.  The most astonishing thing about the US when I came here as an exchange student was not how much wealthier than Portugal it was – though my jaw dropped when my host mother bought a small TV on a whim – but how people could put Christmas décor outside and NO ONE STOLE it.  And how houses had no real protective fences around them and no one destroyed the gardens.

Part of this is cultural.  The US is extreme and past Germany for this, but it is a northern-European cultural thing.  BUT part of this is that Americans have bought into their own laws… up till now.  If that changes (and it’s almost impossible it won’t if regulations keep getting piled) it will destroy the culture.  Things could get very Ugly.

Territorial Integrity – 9/11 was, other than Pearl Harbor to an extent, and attacks on our embassies, the first violation of territorial integrity.  Going along on this scale can be … bad.  Really bad.  And can exacerbate all the rest.

So, here is a scale of “fears” from the “best” to the worst case scenarios for the next four years.  I don’t claim to have a crystal ball, and I doubt ANY of these will work in exactly this way.  The thing we SF writers don’t tell you is that predicting the future is hard because – like other complex systems – there are too many variables going on to say “this will go this way for sure.”  We get away with it, when writing, by scaffolding vast portions of the world and letting you imagine whatever.

Again, I doubt any of this comes true this way.  Likely we’ll have a combination of all three, and all of it muffled under another scenario I won’t bother putting in, which is “Everything goes to h*ll but no one knows it, which looks kind of like now but worse.  AKA “p*ssing down your neck and telling you it’s raining.”  In which we don’t even KNOW everything that’s gone wrong, and things are masked by other things.)

So, here goes.

First step:

The New Normal

In many ways this is what has happened in Portugal since it pulled back from the madness of 78 and the still crazy times of 79.

It’s not exactly collapse.  Or rather, it’s collapse in such slow mo you don’t see it.  You just rearrange your mental furniture to where you expect next year to be worse than this.

As energy restrictions kick in – and please, those of you who are going to argue, google the video of the president saying under his plan “energy costs will necessarily skyrocket” and that he will bankrupt coal plants. – because the privileged children running the administration think energy is used only to run cars and planes for the sort of pleasure jaunts they undertake, they’re baffled by the side effect of EVERYTHING becoming more expensive.  Greed is blamed.  The excuse is growing prosperity and competition from the rest of the world, too.  “Everyone is becoming richer, because we’re a little poorer” will be the thought.

It’s stupid economics, but a lot a people will buy it.  This will be wrapped in declinism and in how the US has had its turn, but now…

It will be used to bring a lot of UN law and regulations over here.

Meanwhile new taxes will decimate the middle class, till we ALL can’t survive without some form of assistance.

We get attacked, but primarily abroad, and it feeds into the declinism, and into our pulling in.

As for order in our territory, it will be viewed as oppressive.  After all, people are hurting, it’s no wonder that there’s more crime.

This scenario is the most likely.  It’s also bad enough.  Look, under this scenario, people get to believe that they need the government and that there’s no salvation without “help” – it’s the “you didn’t build that” scenario.

It doesn’t look so bad from here, but twenty years down the road, the same people are still being voted in because at least they care, and the downfall is not their fault, it’s currents of history, and we’ve had our turn, now it’s someone else’s, etc.  It will all be sold in the name of fairness, and with the media spinning, those who feel bad about their living conditions will feel guilty of protesting.  After all, would you want the Indians or Chinese to be poorer so you can live high off the Hog, you greedy capitalist pig?

The fact that it’s nonsense, doesn’t mean it won’t be believed.

Twenty years from now, it means what I’ve seen in Portugal at my last visit.  MOST young people are unemployed, still living at home.  Making drugs legal at this point means most of them are also addicted to something.  The only people doing well work for the government at some level.  There are massive public building projects but the private homes are falling apart.  And even in the good neighborhoods you have to have strong fences, alarms, etc, and no one is safe.  Instinctively, people know the law doesn’t make sense, and therefore there’s a lot more crime.  Also, of course, young people have nothing better to do.

This scenario we lose our liberty on the installment plan, each pathology caused by statism papered over with declinism and “it’s their turn.”  I think this is the scenario we’re being eased towards, and whether they manage to do it or not, I don’t know.  They’ve managed this in most of Western Europe.

(BTW in most of Western Europe, the new aristocracy is descended from the old.  All the sons and daughters of “good families” became communists.  This is because if you look at the end scenario of this – maybe thirty years from now – you see these people as the hereditary bureaucratic rulers of a sort of post-industrial feudalism, managing the herds of semi-literate peasants with media and just enough food and clothing to keep – some of them – alive, but not enough to allow them to get ideas and revolt.  We could call this “they think 1984 is an instruction manual”  Brave New World too.)

There is one big difference, here, though.   Europe has managed this soft declinism because we remained the world’s police, the world’s consumer and the world’s parachute, providing aid in massive amounts all over the world.

We don’t have an America to do that for us.  (Though we’re trying by buying our own treasuries.)

So we come to scenario two, which is I think somewhat likely:

Sudden Death

This is quite possible, but if it happens it will be SO sudden I don’t know how to give you signs to watch for.

Things ratchet up until normal American families know what hunger is.  Say nineteen thirties level.  This is combined (and this is quite likely) with random interruptions of electricity, besides its being unholy expensive.

It’s the “let the bastards starve in the dark” scenario.  People can’t afford to drive to work, even if there were work to drive to.

And suddenly the government checks stop.

I think to get there, you need to have our inflation so high that government checks count for very little anyway.

Under this scenario, what I call the “glossy bastards” of the media lose their power.  When you’re rationing your electricity because you can only afford so much, you’re not going to spend the day in front of your TV.

In this case we break in pieces.  Literally.  There are food crisis, and how your local area goes depends on who is in your area.  The government has no way of maintaining order except using force, and that won’t go over well many places.

Is this likely?  I don’t know.  I’d have told you no, but the small arms thing with the UN which the administration initiated the day after the election leads me to believe THEY find it likely.

Under these circumstances, anything can follow and my fear is that if order is restored (a big if) what will follow is probably what most lefties fear.  A “law and order social conservative” regime.  Aka, kind of the anthetisis of my ideas.  The economy will be regulated, but so will social life.

I can pass under this sort of regime.  I can actually write wholesome, clean books – as some of you know – and I am technically a married housewife.  I just think we’ll lose something vital about America and are likely to stagnate.

OTOH even with economic authoritarianism, let me tell you at least in this scenario, most of us would eat regularly and there would be order on the streets.  Think Starship Troopers.

That sort of reassembly is unlikely, though, and would only come about if the American Army goes rogue and decides to establish law and order in defiance of the  bureaucratic class.  I find this unlikely almost in the extreme.

More likely would be a breakup of the US, with some portions thriving as medium size countries and others becoming Detroit.

Unfortunately though, even though adventurism abroad was started by the “progressives” we now have enough of an history of it that other countries view us as “the foe to defeat” even when we have nothing to do with their particular problem.  We’re viewed as the king that must be struck down before the rest of the world can be conquered.  Which brings us to scenario three:

Fire From Heaven

Either under scenario one or two, at some point we’re perceived as weak.

Look, like most of you I don’t like adventurism abroad.  However, if you think that we can disarm and then no one will attack us, you’re living in dream world and I suggest you do this: go into a bad neighborhood, wearing expensive clothes and carrying an Ipad, with a sign on you that says “I’m not armed and I’m a pacifist.”  When you recover, get back to me about how well that worked.

And don’t tell me, “But Sarah, under these scenarios we won’t be that wealthy” – that’s nice, dear.  We’re still 40 years behind Europe on this path, and even though we’re overachievers and can get to ruin faster, we won’t be PAST them for ten years, unless scenario 2 ensues FAST.  Also America is no longer itself but its legend.  “Everyone knows” Americans are wealthy.  Also as America collapses, the rest of the world will get unimaginably worse – trust me.  My dad says “when America sneezes the rest of the world catches pneumonia” and I can tell you that’s true – and will inevitably blame us.  They’ll blame us for not protecting them from themselves, and they’ll blame us for “stealing” from them in some nebulous way they can’t define.

And the Arab world (most likely) will sense fear.  It doesn’t matter if you say “it’s not fear.  We’re dealing with our own stuff and ignoring them.”  They’ll sense fear.

Under this scenario we lose one or two cities to a nuke.  At a guess LA and NYC.  And then all hell breaks lose and I can’t tell you what happens next.  I don’t think we’re so far gone we just sit and take it, no matter what our leaders think.  BUT after that, literally, the world is mad.

Japan, South Korea and Israel will probably be casualties of the conflagration, but so will Europe.  (I wonder if Russia still has printed street signs in Russian directing troops all the way to Lisbon.)

When this is done, those of us who survive will face a world none of us wants to imagine.

I consider this the least likely scenario, but perhaps I shouldn’t.  I now realize that my depression since Benghazi comes from seeing the beginnings of this.

The people in power will never see it coming.  They’ve been steeped in Marxism, where the only reason people would attack the US is because they’re afraid of us.  (Shakes head.)  I learned this cr*p too, but I refuse to believe it over my lying eyes.

************************************************

And there you have it.  The steps of our fears.  The most likely is still scenario one.  We don’t have anyone to cushion us, but we’ve been wealthy so long there’s an astonishing amount of ruin in this nation, and it might be enough to cushion us down.

Note in all three of them I see a severe threat to who we are.

I was talking to Stephen Green the other day and he pointed out that the French (the English too, but less so) have been a monarchy, a republic, an empire, and now are a republic again but they are still French.  And that’s fine for them.  The French are a nation of land and blood.

But, as he pointed out, we’re only a nation of belief, proclaimed in the declaration of Independence, enshrined in the constitution.

It was those two documents that made us what we are, and not as our poor youth has been told, greed or theft.

If we lose that, who are we?  Where has America gone?  And can we get it back?

I don’t know.  I’d rather not lose it.  And that starts with figuring out what we can do to prevent ALL of these scenarios.  Detroit-America which is where scenario 1 ends might be better than “nuclear radioactive America” but it is nowhere we want to live.

So… What do we do, and where do we start.  Roll up your sleeves.  Let’s talk.

If I say “I’m not a particularly political person” in front of my husband and kids, they’ll probably laugh so hard that they’ll break something.  And yet it’s true.

I’m not a particularly political person, though I am aware of and anxious about politics, because seeing a country slide into ever more leftist and dysfunctional regimes while the media covers up the results and attributes them to “bad luck” is one of those things one only cares to do once per life time.  So I have an obsession with the news (and these days blogs) and sometimes I can only work in front of the TV, if things are particularly iffy (the three months after 9/11.)

I’m not a particularly political person because I don’t think there is a one-size fits all political solution for every land.  I believe, by and large the United States constitution is the best way ever come up with to organize government and the people, but I’m not saying improvements couldn’t be suggested that would enhance individual liberty and keep government in check.  I’m rather enamored of Heinlein’s idea of having a chamber JUST to repeal laws and prune the hydra-like growth of over regulation.

I’m also not going to say that in a different world, with different technology/setup a better system couldn’t be created.

Unlike the collectivists, I don’t have this dream that human nature will suddenly change.  So the only things I truly believe in is that individuals know what is better for them better than the government, and that individuals should be allowed to spend their wealth in the way they see fit, which is likely to accrue greater benefit to society than having the government take it and spend it in the way the government sees fit.  Studies about the buying of gifts, and studies of how one spends one’s own as opposed to “found” money (like lottery wins) would seem to confirm this in spades.

So in almost all circumstances, I pick the ticket/candidate who will have a possibility of being closer to the founding principles, fully cognizant half the time the choice is between bad and worse, and also fully cognizant of the fact that there are circumstances in which greater individual autonomy has to be sacrificed to third party control, such as during war (but not the “moral equivalent of war” which gets tricky.)

Because I’m not devoted to a universal solution to the human condition, and because furthermore, the idea of being recruited to preside over the implementation of any regime gives me the cold grue (Terry Pratchett about nailed it when he said “it would be like cleaning other people’s rooms for them”.  Apparently I’m not normal, or perhaps I’m normal to half the breed but not the other half, because there seems to be a lot of people who would do anything for power.  I’ve often wondered what kind of broken is in them that they feel the need to control others as if that were the only way they’d be safe.  Marx, btw, who “reads” Asperger’s, completely failed to take that impulse into account.) I feel zero compulsion to write characters that follow this or that ideology, spout this or that solution to mankind’s problems, and/or write about the paradise to come under enlightened rulers.

But Sarah, you’ll say – Darkships!  And, possibly more when you read it A Few Good Men!

Well, science fiction, by its nature, pulls into the writers’ understanding of both people’s motives and historical facts.  And that means that it will read “political” to many people, though really I’m just world building and playing with my characters’ circumstances.

As Heinlein once said – I think, though this is a wild paraphrase – I’d be very disappointed if any of my readers just reads the book and agrees with everything in it.  The goal is always to make you think.

Which is not to say I don’t think individual will is more moral than control by the state, or that the right to own property individually doesn’t, ultimately, redound to greater wealth than all the collectivist dreams – but that’s because I’ve read both history and economics, and I’ve lived through a good chunk of it, in a small country whose revolution was about as well understood by the American media as the current “Arab Spring.”  (Sometimes there just isn’t a side to cheer for, something progressives fail to get because they think history is sentient and has favorites.)

Anyway – while you might find politics (MY politics) – in my science fiction, you’d have a really hard time figuring out who I was voting for in almost any election based on that.  Because that’s not the point of the books.

And my other books are virtually apolitical.  Except, of course, for my understanding of human nature.  I realized, for instance, that Tom and Kyrie do fit the model of industrious small businessmen, and do not reach for government handouts which in the era of “you didn’t build that” might strike inquisitors determined to ferret heresy as contentious.  However, since my mother built and ran a business while I was growing up, it is just what I saw happening.

So I’ve always stayed away from speaking of politics in this blog – reserving anything I felt a need to say for PJM or Classical Values.

Part of this was mere prudence.  Until recently if Baen dropped me, I’d be in a position of never working again (and now I’m not sure if I’ll be able to live exclusively from indie, but that’s something else.  Sometimes you do what you must do.)  The other part is that I like people.  I like most of my colleagues, respect a good number of them, and only laugh at their politics because crying would make my mascara run.

Most of my colleagues are good people, see, and good people believe what they were told in school, and what they’re told by the “real” media, and…  And didn’t have eye-opening experiences like reading Time magazine completely misreport an event they’d been present at to present a “triumphant democracy” slant on something that was a communist takeover.

I can’t fault them for that.  I’d give my right arm and all its typing fingers not to have gone through/seen what I did before 18.  The desire to believe the mainstream narrative is correct is so great, and the fear I’m crazy for not believing it even though I was there so strong that even now, thirty years later, I’m likely to cry with relief when I come across an American who KNOWS — because he was there, or because he worked in some position that made him have to know – my recollection and not the collective myth is true.

So I understand my colleagues, and still like them despite the fact much of what they favor would destroy the country and my life and the life of those I love.  They don’t know that, see – and at heart they’re good people.  So, I don’t want to pick fights.

When they post stunningly ignorant, smug little posters with gloating type slogans that they think “prove” everything, I just unsubscribe from their updates.  And I go on.

Oh, there is another reason.  I don’t care what my favorite writers believe, so long as the story grips me.  Pratchett’s ideas on fiat currency make me want to dent a wall with my forehead.  It doesn’t mean he isn’t a god among writers or that I don’t love the other parts of the book.

The exception is when I’m reading some book where the author brings the action to a screeching halt and goes into current politics (for when the book was written) by name.  I’m likely to feel that way about both sides, mind.  I don’t want to be reading a mystery and suddenly fall headlong into a rant about Clinton, any more than I want to fall headlong into a hate screed about Reagan.  What makes it worse, though, is that often these go on the “preferred narrative of the left” such as that Reagan was going to bankrupt us AND get us in a war.  I’m reading this thirty years later and my ability to believe anything this author tells me, including but not limited to that the sky is blue in her world just went out the window.  Which, you see, is a problem.

However I’m aware that a lot of readers – usually hard, loony left – vet on beliefs of the AUTHOR and not the book, and that the hard loony left, with their incessant screeching have a way of cowing the soft left and even a lot of the center into place and convincing them NEVER to read someone because they’re “sexist/racist/homophobic.”  I’ve watched them do this to Heinlein, possibly one of the least racist/sexist/homophobic writers of his generation and it wasn’t worth my dime to have them do that to me.  I figured they were never going to love me, but they also wouldn’t find enough energy to hate me, provided I didn’t talk about politics openly outside books.

And that’s where we’ve been for the last few years, though I started talking more about my beliefs in the last year, with the possibility of indie.

Except…

Except when people like me stay quiet, when for our self-interest and because the loony left are vindictive harpies (particularly the men) as fond of free speech as your average brown shirt, we allow the other side to define us.  As we saw in that stunningly clueless comment yesterday, they’ll decide it’s all race, or that we want to control their ladyparts, because that’s the screams from the other side, who would much rather you don’t look at their record, or, OMG Benghazi.

We don’t say “I’m voting for so and so, not because he’s ideal but because our debt is so massive that otherwise we’re going to have a collapsed economy (I probably SHOULD write about living in a collapsed economy.  Most of what you guys envision is far direr than what it is – OTOH the fragmentation happens in interesting ways and with a country this  much bigger, it could be MORE lethal in spots.) and a health care system that won’t work at all, which kind of affects me/mine and can’t be allowed.”

That means they get to decide we hate gay people, or black people, or that we’re all textual Christian fundamentalists or that…

Among the regular readers of this blog, I know several agnostic, a few atheists, at least one Buddhist (hi sweetie!), an adherent to an offbeat Muslim sect (or perhaps it’s not considered Muslim.  The Muslims hate it, at any rate), at least a handful of pagans of various descriptions, and yes, a contingent of Jews and Christians, some of whom even belong to defined sects within their religion (but not all.)  Yeah, I also have at least one very devout Christian fundamentalist (hi sweetie!)

I have no idea what shades y’all are, but when I was growing up and spent a lot of time outside, and when afro perms were in fashion, shop keepers in Portugal – much more so than here – called me “the young lady of color.”  My older son looks like a younger Marco Rubio.  My younger son, OTOH could blend into any IDF unit unremarked, save perhaps for being a bit darker than any of them.  (Right now he’s growing a beard and a ridiculous moustache, and could also blend into any foreign legion posts as a French assassin – ah, mon dieu.)  I’m going to assume the rest of you are just as varied.  If you aren’t it doesn’t matter either.  Who the heck cares what something that’s literally skin deep does when we’re all related several ways.  (We’ve reasons to believe that at various times the human population was reduced to a few thousand, if not a few hundred.  So you and you and you and you are all my cousins, whatever color you are.)

Because I’m not a joiner, and because I know devotees of small government and individual rights come in all sizes, genders and shapes, it never occurred to me that fear of us would be enough to stampede people to vote for the most stunningly incompetent administration this country has ever known, one that, furthermore, displays open contempt for the people they are supposed to lead and which, in the end, believes the lie that if only America is made small the rest of the world will get better.  (I wish the people who believe this lie got the panicked phone calls I got from people all over the world who know better.)

Because I wanted people to not be able to demonize me and my books, I didn’t talk about how much these ideas are wrong – historically – and how demonizing “old white males” is exactly the same as demonizing anyone else.  I didn’t – not on this blog – point out that the people who think state power is always a good and the instrument of all improvement and who, themselves, crave power over others, have found it effective to paint anyone who opposes them into this dreaded, stereotypical “Other.”  Or how this was a total misrepresentation of our ragtag and diverse band of freedom-lovers.  I didn’t denounce it as the only, last thing they had.

Would my having done all that stuff do any good?  I don’t know.  It is possible the indoctrination has been so successful their ears and eyes shut down and, like the creature yesterday, they actually assume I’m an old white male (!)  Would I get more by simply embedding my beliefs in my books?  I don’t know.  I’ve found these people also not only do not read the “banned” books, but they don’t read outside the “approved” list that they’ve been told are so “good.”  So I don’t think I can reach most of them anyway.  I might have been able to reach the mushy left or the middle.  Maybe.  If there were time.

I don’t think there is time.  Because they believed the “othering” of conservatives (and calling us conservatives is hilarious, since most of us are so far out of power it’s not even funny, and want to change society as it is now completely – and before the ladyparts kick in – towards greater freedom of individual action) they voted for the hardest financial landing a country ever had.  This would be true even if the administration weren’t doubling down on stupid with things like carbon taxes (an unproven solution to a nebulous problem, but guaranteed to destroy whatever industry remains in the continental US, at this time.) On top of that, while I’ve lived through a slo-mo financial collapse before, it was in a country that was getting so much money from the IMF we could all have landed on it from the top of mount Everest and survived.  There is no cushion for the US.  We ARE the cushion.

But people voted for this because they didn’t want to align themselves with racist/sexist/homophobes, like all my gay conservative friends, like the black family who was working phones for Romney alongside the rest of us, like the Philippine lady at the Romney rally crying hysterically and saying that the other guy couldn’t win, because he’s going to destroy us all.  Like ALL the women who gave their all to prevent this, because they don’t want their children and grandchildren to live in indentured servitude to the government.  (No?  What do you call it when someone is forced to perform actions/provide services because the government tells them to, and won’t let them leave?  Do you even know that under this administration, if you have unpaid student loans you can’t leave the country?  No, not even if that’s your only chance to find a job and pay the loans.  What would you call that? You’ve become a serf, attached to the land. You didn’t know?  Why not?)

And so, whatever it costs my career, it’s time to come out.  I think it’s time for all of you to come out too, wherever you are, though honestly, I wouldn’t presume to judge your circumstances better than you.  Like my gay friends who never judge someone who chooses to continue closeted, I don’t presume to know what’s best for you.

However, everyone sending me “kind” missives on how they’re going to never read me again, because they always suspected I’m racist/sexist/homophobic but now that I’ve said it I’m despicable, and I’ve hurt them, can stop.  What you’re experiencing is neither hurt nor my despicableness.  It’s the cognitive dissonance of KNOWING I’m neither racist/sexist/homophobic nor – amazingly – a Marxist.  You can’t reconcile those two, and so you want me to make it go away and shut up.  That’s understandable, but no.  As a country we have (economically) come to the end of cake and as a person I have come to the end of patience with those who would enslave others and ruin the last, best thing on Earth to make themselves feel good.

If that means I lose readers, so be it.  And you can’t cow me into shutting up by telling me I’m losing readers – guys, we’ve gone well beyond that point.  When a mad woman is running around soaking the bridges with gasoline before setting them on fire, she’s just going to laugh at you when you tell her she’ll now have to swim across.  She knows.  She thinks it’s more important to keep the armies of ruin, starvation and statism from marching  in and despoiling her home.

And this is me laughing at you.  And your pious little missives (only one of you, btw, is a recognized reader/fan) only make me angrier, and you won’t like me when I’m angry.  Chiding me on not understanding the current trend won’t save you either – I’ve seen this before.  THESE EXACT POLICIES.  (Okay, so they haven’t sent our Port Wine to Russia.  That’s because we don’t have Port Wine – no, California doesn’t qualify – and Russia probably wouldn’t want it) and I know for a fact where they lead.  Except here we seem to be trying them harder and faster and whatever your college professor told you, it wasn’t a matter of implementation and it won’t be different this time.

Does this mean this blog will now be forever and all the time politics?  Partisan politics yet?

Most of the time it won’t be partisan politics at all.  Usually I don’t even vote for any party, but against the other side.  But sometimes I might feel the need to remind people who think they’re “on the side of history” that history has ONLY one side and what she whispers is always “die.”  Most people of historical significance are dead.  That’s it.  History is not sentient and did not anoint your side, and those who believe in that have fallen for a dead economist’s understanding of history as a machine and of economics as a set of gears.  Marx is dead.  His ideas will never be sufficiently so.

However, I’m not a politician.  I’m a writer.  I’m also an historian, a reader and a mother.  More often my blogs will revolve around those, particularly the writing because it’s an all-consuming passion, but sometimes about some fun discovery and occasionally about a good book or something the kids have done.

If you’re okay with that, stick around.  If you’re not – that’s fine.  But you don’t get to go all concerney and tell me to fall in line.

I know where you’re coming from.  If you weren’t trying to impose your wrongheaded delusions on me, I’d even sympathize.  But if you think you explain me away by projecting on me all those things they told you “conservatives” are, you have no idea who I am or where I’m coming from.

If you’re a thinking human being, you’ll stick around and try to figure it out.  Or you can run away, with your hands over your ears, back to your safe corner, away from the cognitive dissonance.

Your choice and frankly right now I don’t care which you choose.  What I care about is figuring a way to keep me and mine safe through that big crash to come – mine being defined as those who will listen.

You see, individual rights was NEVER about not caring for the weaker.  It is the weaker who are going to be hit bad in this.  They’re probably going to go hungry, cold, and ill.  BUT worse than that and even if they escape that, their children are not going to be able to start life in any way that leads to independence and prosperity.

I care about finding a way to avoid one or two lost generations.  I care about avoiding the world of Friday where the only safe place is in an enclave.  I care about my fellow man.  Far more than any pretty theories.

And if no one buys my books anymore because of this, fine.  There’s underpasses and free wifi at the library.

So when I need to speak out, I shall do so.  You don’t like it?  There’s your hands over your ears and your comfy corner.  You should be okay there.

Until the precipice.

And my friend Larry Correia is experiencing similar concern.  Isn’t it precious?

Setting bridges on fire, now a family affair.

WELCOME INSTAPUNDIT READERS and thank you to Glenn Reynolds for the link.

First, let me explain that right now my reading is full of French Revolution, for the second book of The Earth Revolution: Through Fire. Second that I have a cousin who was raised in France.  His parents came back briefly to see if they could establish themselves in Portugal when I was nine and he was three.  (It was a forlorn hope, and they went back and only came back to Portugal when he was in his twenties.  Fortunately for them he married a Portuguese woman and so they have the family nearby.)

Anyway, for that year, while his parents went back and forth to France to do legal stuff, he lived with us almost full time.  Among his accomplishments at three was the ability to sing the full La Marseillese.  The song impressed me immensely with its opening “Allons Enfants de la Patrie.”

The verse translated as “Arise” (or less grandiloquently) “Come on” “Children of the Fatherland.”

Of course, in English it has a very off-putting sound and for Americans it makes no sense at all.  This land is not our fatherland.  It might have molded our people, starting with showing the Pilgrims that if you don’t work you’ll die, but it’s not been the place where our DNA culled, filtered and mixed for thousands of years.

Anyway, this all came to me while reading Roger L. Simon’s rather dispirited article after the election, where he more or less says it’s all done, we’re no longer a center-right country.

As much as I like Roger, I’ll beg to disagree.  Even if that were true, we wouldn’t be a center-right country by less than one percentage point.  And if after more than fifty years of school indoctrination, media control, entertainment filtering, the left has only that advantage, it means at the very least that we’re a people with a hard head and that most of us find the way out of the plantation sooner or later.  This is confirmed by the fact that what gave the victory to Obama was the legions of (unemployed) under thirty years old.  These are people who, like him, are ignorant of business and the facts of life (I don’t mean sex.  That they know as much as previous generations, though they think they invented it.)  To him his rhetoric, the cooked unemployment numbers, the whole nonsense of needing more time because it was so bad makes sense.  They haven’t broken out of indoctrination yet.  And a lot of them want to be part of what they perceive as the “cool kids” (which at that age inevitably is the ones that curse more, have tattoos and have no visible means of sustenance.)  Most of them will grow up.  But the age group will be replaced by yet more indoctrinated youth.

Which means Roger is right about the causes: we must take back education, entertainment/arts, and the news.

I’m not sure he’s right about the solution.  His idea is that we need to go back, infiltrate, start our own long march through the institutions.

I have two problems with that.  The first is that it’s been tried.  Roger, as a recent convert, might not be aware of this, but the right didn’t give up on these fields.  Some of us even tried to infiltrate them by doing what we called “stealthing”  (which can be defined as “walk like one of them until you’re secure.”)

I still have acquaintances and friends (some of whom would surprise you) doing just that.

There are two problems with this approach – one is that the left, being a mystery religion, has so many signs, counter signs and symbols that it’s very hard to imitate the whole unless you believe it OR want to bring about their result.  The second is that they demand constant tests of loyalty.  It’s rather like infiltrating a criminal organization.

I might flatter myself that I had as good a chance as any, with my background, but I couldn’t do it.  Art is to a great extent a thing of the subconscious and things broke through without my meaning.  I also wouldn’t undertake the tests of loyalty, such as writing a book on how America had ruined my life.

The right let themselves be infiltrated because at some level the right had bought the left was the future.  It wasn’t that the people coming in weren’t obvious, it was that their bosses shrugged and sighed and said “Apres nous le deluge.”  Which left us in this fine mess. But the left thinks we’re evil.  They fight our infiltration with all strength.

The other objection to the scheme is that all of those fields are falling apart.  I think Hollywood lives, these days, mostly on foreign sales.  Part of it is that entertainment and the news are creating product no one wants.  (Which means I’m convinced that most people are still center right – where it counts.  Their wallets.  A lot of them just don’t consider themselves political and still buy what “everybody says” – never mind, the tribulation that’s coming will fix that.)

The other thing that’s hitting these fields is a wave of technological innovation that demands they adapt and innovate, something they’re UNABLE to do.

All of us in writing have watched with almost awe as again and again the publishing establishment balks the challenge and tries to force things back somehow to “business as usual.”

And this is because they can’t do otherwise.  It’s not in their makeup.

This is not cheap pop psychology.  It’s merely the result of how people become hard left, or anything to the right of Lenin.  Hard to center left don’t have to do anything.  They’re the good boys and girls.  They receive “wisdom” in the schools and they know by parroting it they’ll go far.  They never doubt, never stray, never go out on a limb.

I’m not saying they’re dumb.  Some of them are brilliant.  Some of them are even true artists and their product gives their spoutings the lie because their subconscious knows better than they do.

I mean, they are more creatures of the group.  Social approval is important.  They never strayed.

So their ability to innovate is limited to “improving on how things are done.”  When faced with the type of catastrophic change hitting  those three fields right now, they are flabbergasted and most of their reaction amounts to hands over ears and screaming lalalalalala.

Then there’s us.  If I had a dime for each conservative who starts with “I used to be liberal, but—“  Now the left trolls try to mimic this with “I am a lifelong republican” and that’s bs, and we all know it, because that’s not how things work.  But we all start more or less liberal, at least those of us under 60.

Heck, I was always anti-communist, but I didn’t understand why guns shouldn’t be regulated or why we shouldn’t have universal health care, or why–   Heinlein cured me, though it was a slow cure.

For most of us, coming to our present beliefs involved one or more Damascus Road moments.  (For those of other traditions, that was when St. Paul on his way to persecute Christians met with the resurrected Christ and changed completely – and no, I’m not as pious as I sound.  I was raised in a country where Catholicism is a course from elementary through High School, though full disclosure, my dad got me dispensation in High School because the priest who taught it couldn’t put up with my arguments anymore. He was a liberation theologist and I’m not a good person.)

A Damascus Road experience of the political kind involves suddenly trying to integrate an event or a circumstance that just won’t fit your mental map, being unable to, and then starting to examine all your received wisdom until you realize it’s all – or most of it a lie.  (I’ve had three, and yes, 9/11 was one of them.)

It involves walking around for about a year, wondering if you’ve gone completely insane, because “everybody knows” and yet…  And yet you can no longer believe it.  This gives you an impression of brokenness and loss of faith.

Those of us who survive it and stay the course are independent cusses.  People who are independent cusses socially tend to be creative too.  Or at least we are so far out of the box that we can’t find it.

This makes it easier for us to adapt when catastrophic change sets in.  And because the status quo establishment hates us, we HAVE in self defense to take to the new tech.

We’ve been doing so.  In droves.

However, Roger L. Simon is right and it’s not enough.

It’s not enough because the inmates just got four more years to run the asylum.  And with tech and society changing as fast as they are, these people have set the course to the 1930s, this time with more bizarre multiculti which also endangers us from abroad.

Guys, this ship is going to go aground and go aground HARD.  My friend Charles says that he doesn’t know what happens when a democracy implodes, but we do know: Empire.  Yeah, it’s possible that by being a different type of democracy we won’t get it, but I think it’s more likely we’ll just get a different type of Empire.  (Which, BTW, Soviet Russia WAS.)

We don’t have time to wait for them to die off and us to replace them.  IF we can keep the republic, we must accelerate this buggy.

Hence the title, which is actually from a Kipling poem, The Sons of Martha.  Again, if you don’t want to click through, it’s based on the New Testament story of Martha and Mary sisters of Lazarus, who are entertaining Jesus and his disciples.  Martha is bringing out the food and doing all the work while Mary sits and listens.  It’s in there to illustrate the difference between active and contemplative devotion, but that’s not important right now.  The important part is that Kipling picked up the tale and wrote a poem to extoll those who do real things in society: engineering, creating…

I think most of those who call themselves Sons of Martha in modern times are Engineers or scientists.  BUT it extends further.  They’re everyone who creates – everyone who works hard, breaks the mold, brings forth innovation.

We’re the sons and daughters of Martha.  And we must take up our heritage.

There’s not much point infiltrating the dying model.  It’s difficult, if not impossible.  It stains the soul, till you don’t know who you are.  And in the end there isn’t enough time for that.

But just playing with the new model isn’t enough.  We must consciously and vigorously push the new model forward in all ways possible.

I’ll propose some points, upon which you may enlarge at will and pass on to your several groups, which will enlarge them and in turn bring them back to us.

1 – Entertainment:

TV/movies: there is STARTING to be stuff on youtube that can compete with the commercial stuff.  This is not my arena, I don’t know what to do, other than wish I were twenty years younger and had time to learn animation.  The tech for that to be a solo thing is almost there but not quite.  However, this is not my area.  Those of you who are in the field, look to it, and come up with ways to go indie.

Books: Yes, I know tons of us do that, but a lot of us do it almost passively because it’s there.  Well, it’s time to put teeth in it. Accelerate, innovate, improve.  Let your beliefs through without preaching.  Write more.  Write better.  LEARN covers.  Help each other.  Make the traditional stuff look like the gray goo it is. Go.

Games: Those of you who know enough to supervise a team, create a pitch, put it on Kickstarter, see if you get enough to hire a team to make the games for you.  Again – GO, you have work to do.

2- News:

We have pundits aplenty.  Here and there a bit of news breaks through.  BUT believe it or not journalism is a craft, even if not practiced any longer.  There are ways to gather, test and filter news.  I was trained for it so long ago that it’s useless now.  At any rate, I think I’m more of the integrator/pundit.  Though I wouldn’t mind knowing how to do it.  If any of you know, teach the others.  Let’s start a blog or more of news-gatherers and (local) reporters.

We NEED that.  And if you have a face made for TV (well, let me lose another fifty pounds.  Am losing again, on new hormonal regime.  I MIGHT be presentable, unless all my skin sags and stuff… :-P ) do your news in video format.  Make it professional.  GO.

3- Education.  I confess here, I expected to have more time and for tech to develop more.  It’s there, it’s coming, I expected my grandkids to be learning at home/online/self directed.

We won’t have that time.  Some of the entertainment and news have to cover for education.  I’m thinking a YA detective series set during the American revolution might help…  YA romances might help too.  (I don’t think YA erotica helps anything, but maybe I’m a prude.  But there’s sweet-romance, i.e. without sex, and let’s admit it, 11 yo girls dream of their wedding and the great love.  There’s a market there.)

However, for parents like me who can be home with the kids but lacked the time to properly homeschool, we need … Online homeschooling leagues?  Online schools?  Online resources that can help de-indoctrinate kids who went to public school.

We need this, and we need it to be good.  My expertise in the field is now so rusty as to be useless.  At best I can glimpse what it SHOULD be.  But there are many of you with training and expertise.  It is your duty, for the sake of our republic, to figure this out, get together, form groups, explore forms, work like h*ll and create serious competition to the state’s indoctrination machines.  Now GO!  You have work to do.

If we succeed this might be the weirdest revolution of mankind, but it WILL be a revolution.

Arise, Sons and Daughters of Martha.  Our only chance to keep our republic is to claim our individuality and work around the stifling government that would herd us back to the nineteen thirties.

Go.  Innovation is in your blood.  Creation is your heritage.  Claim it proudly.

Be not afraid.  Go forth and bring us the future.

*Guys, I want to apologize for this chapter.  Not for being late, but for the chapter.  It was devilishly hard to write, and I had no intention of inflicting it on you, only it wouldn’t let me off, and you know…  I think it’s vital.  But … gag… it’s not the sort of thing I like to write.*

*This is the Fantasy novel I’m posting here for free, one chapter every Friday.   If your conscience troubles you getting something for free, do hit the donate button on the right side.  Anyone donating more than $6 will get a non-drm electronic copy of Witchfinder in its final version, when it’s published.
There is a compilation of previous chapters here  all in one big lump, which makes it easier to read and I will compile each new chapter there, a week after I post.  When the novel is completed and about to be edited the compilation page will probably be deleted.

Oh, this is in pre-arc format, meaning you’ll find the occasional spelling mistake and sentence that makes no sense.  It’s not exactly first draft, but it’s not at the level I’d send to a publisher, yet. *

Something Sickly, Something Sweet

 

Gabriel didn’t know how he’d got back to fairyland.  He couldn’t remember exactly how old he was, and he didn’t know what he’d been doing, just before he found himself here.

But there was no doubt he was in fairyland.  He recognized the mist around him, the weaving writhing kind of fogs that happened only when magic was involved.

It felt cold and clammy on his skin, permeating the sleeves of the too-small, too-tight suit which should have been replaced years ago, when he was … six?  Seven?  But which continued to be his only suit, even though his body had grown so much.  His wrists showed, bony, exposed, and his hands, small, thin, covered in the scrapes and sores a sweeper boy accumulated keeping the crossing clean for the fine lords and ladies who didn’t want to taint the hem of their clothing with horse droppings.

But he didn’t know where his broom had gone, nor the last time he’d swept.  He felt tired, as if he’d spent the whole day sweeping, but then why hadn’t he gone home?

His bare feet plodded along the pavement he couldn’t quite see through the mist, and his steps slowed down.  Somewhere, up ahead was… He couldn’t remember, only that he was supposed to go there, that he meant to go there, but he didn’t know why.

He shivered in the mist and wondered if his mother had locked the door because she was with one of those friends who paid money, and if he’d somehow wandered out so tired that he’d stepped, unwary, into fairyland.  But no, surely not.  He’d been thrown out of fairyland with his mother.  He remembered it.  And he had never wanted to come back.

A shiver ran up his spine at the memory of his last days of fairyland, of what he’d had to do, how he’d had to find the will to resist, just to be thrown out.

Perhaps his uncle wanted him back?  To serve as a source of magic and a–  He cut the thought off, and continued walking.

If only he weren’t so hungry.  Starving, really, which shouldn’t surprise him, since it had been his condition for most of his time in the earth of mortals, at least since Mr. Penn had left mama.  But it surprised him, or rather, it felt unaccustomed to his body, as though he’d been well fed and well taken care of for a long time, and this discomfort felt like an outrage. It made tears prickle at the back of his eyes, and it made him feel scared and fragile in turns.

The smell of cake came from somewhere to the left, away from the path he’d been following.  He didn’t remember why he’d been feeling that path, and though he was in fairyland and knew therefore directions could change without warning, and that the image the smell of cake invoked, of a bakery window piled high with treats was not true.  All he could think was that the bakery near his mother’s house, sometimes threw out cake that had gone so stale that it could be used for no other purpose.  He’d often found it in the rubbish bins behind the shop.

His steps changed almost without his meaning to.  The first disturbing change was that he felt as though the tendrils of fog had now become personal, intimate.  They seemed to insinuate into his clothes, attempt to crawl into his skin.  The touch disturbed him, repulsed him.  It felt too close, too… tight… too much of not letting him alone.  It awakened memories he could not quite focus on.

As he walked on, still in fog, the smell of cake got stronger, and but the light grew too.  Quite suddenly, he was standing in a plaza amid shops.  It was London, he thought, but not the London he lived in, with its decaying hovels, its narrow streets.  Once or twice, he’d walked beyond his neighborhood and glimpsed something of this: clean facades, prim maids going about their business in starched, frilled aprons, and the windowshops filled with dolls and toys, with cakes and hams and all manner of good things.

The shop windows were there and laden, but there was no one in sight.  The street was quiet, probably because it was nighttime.  But in the center of the little plaza, a table was set, with a sparkling white table cloth.  On the table sat cakes and pies, and candy in big piles.  The light pouring on it from the gas lamps above sparkled on sugar decorations and put a mellow gold color on the sweet buns.

Like Seraphim’s birthday table, Gabriel thought.  That first time.  But when he tried to pursue the memory, it retreated before him and he couldn’t remember at all who Seraphim was.

Instead he approached the table, slowly, with the certainty that this much food, freely displayed, had to be some sort of catch.  Even wild beasts knew that much.

He half expected it to disappear, but it didn’t, and with his eyes fixed on a certain, particularly colorful piece of candy, he imagined it melting in his mouth, sickly sweet.

But when he was almost within reach of it, the fog hardened like a prison, and held him.  “No,” the fog said, whispering in his ear in a sweet, cloying tone.  “No, little boy, there is a price.”

Gabriel caught his breath on shock, on recoil of that voice, on memories he couldn’t reach, and yet made him feel uncomfortable.  “Please, sir,” he said.  “I’m just hungry.”

And as he said them it seemed to him he’d said these words before, and that what followed – He stepped back, recoiling from the sweets, but the fog was there again, not letting him run.

If the table weren’t there, with its tempting sweets.  If his stomach didn’t hurt with hunger.  If—

He felt will power leave him and went limp, in the grasp of the fog.

Through his mind, unbidden, came a voice, a glimpse of an adult, in a classroom, standing by a chart that represented the worlds that touched Avalon and saying, “The power of fairyland is in childhood.  It reaches into this, feeds on it, in the manner of a leech or parasite.  This makes fairyland a parasite leech upon the worlds.”

Gabriel had a moment of wanting to protest that it wasn’t true, that the power direction was all wrong, and then he couldn’t remember what it was all about.  What a strange dream.  He’d never been in a classroom like that.  Classrooms like that were not for the likes of Gabriel Penn.

“Will you pay?” the fog hissed.

Gabriel looked at the table, at the candy.  His stomach roared its hunger. How bad could it be?  He had an idea that it could be very bad, but also that he’d survived it in the past.  He closed his eyes.  A voice came from somewhere in his memory saying, “An’ you can do whatever you want with him, governor.  No one will care.  He’s elfborn and got only a crazy fairymother.  You can even kill him if it pleases you.”

From somewhere too, came a memory that they’d almost had, but then Father had burst in and—

But the memory vanished as if it had never been, leaving only the certainty it could be survived.  But hunger might not be.  When had he eaten last?  How long could he keep walking with no sustenance?

He closed his eyes.  He said, “I will pay.”

And then the fog was on him, in him, touching every single pore of his being, while strange, alien thoughts poured into his mind.

Gabriel Penn found himself falling to his knees, while darkness and cloying sweetness consumed his mind.

Yesterday, on my blog post, I got a comment that completely puzzled me.  I used an allusion, not even a direct quote, from Paul Simon’s American Tune.  For the record, right now, that song can move me to sobbing tears.

Anyway, this commenter, who thought she was liberal but was in fact extreme left – more on that later – was offended I used the song of a liberal song writer for something she considered a “conservative” blog post.

(Kids, explain to me, I must be getting old – when did loving your country, the only country on earth where citizenship is based on a common constitution become a conservative thing?  When do people who go around blogs stomping and tell you that you can’t do this or that become “liberal”?  I must be getting old, and someone hacked my dictionary.)

The comment was so out of the left field that I was ruder than I’ve ever been to a person on this blog – I think.  Part of me wasn’t even sure what she meant by informing me that Paul Simon was an unabashed Liberal and that I should “Stay classy” for using his lyrics.

And then I thought about it.  And I thought about it (and this is always bad.) and at last I figured out what goes on in far left minds.

These are far left minds, never mind that they call themselves “liberal.”  Their mental equipment is much the same that is found in Stalinist apparatchiks.  They are not the soft left, the people who somehow believe government handouts will go on forever, but who bear no animus towards those who think otherwise.  They’re not the center left which has the vague idea the government should look after everyone, but doesn’t really care how to accomplish it.

No, these are the people who, were they in charge, would make sure that no one could work without a political loyalty oath.  This is because they have – poor sods – confused politics with religion.  They think what they call “liberalism”( It reads closer to Marxism and in fact, as we’ve seen in the last couple of days, they get very upset when we say the Communist Manifesto isn’t a work of genius and the perfect blue print for society.  Which leads credence to the idea that communists took over the democratic party in the thirties, as Heinlein claimed.  As does the fact our current president was endorsed by Putin, Chavez and PC USA.) anyway, they think this ideology confers inherent virtue upon them.  It is, as I said, scripture, not a belief about society.

So if you believe in it with your whole heart, you’re one of them.  And if you’re one of them, they can consume your art in the certainty that it’s been “consecrated” by your beliefs.

Suddenly I understood the tsunami of cr*p that has poured out of almost every traditional publishing  house and music house, and the sad, joyless parodies of visual arts that fill the most recent rooms of our museums.

Expertise is not needed.  Intelligence is not needed.  Anything that touches the heart and moves the soul is not needed.  What is needed is the joyless and unimaginative adherence to a set of principles that – yes, I know Marx thought the state would eventually wither away.  His formula was Give more power to the government — ????? – The state withers away. And I actually don’t think he ever believed it.  Like al losers, his idea was that he’d acquire power through the government and lord it over better people than him – in human history have created some of the greyest, darkest, most human devouring societies.

So you either have to want that, or you have to willfully ignore history economics and human nature.  Of course, it doesn’t need to make sense.  It’s religion.

But once you’ve warped yourself to believe this, you are “good” and everything you create is good, even when it OBVIOUSLY isn’t.

It isn’t a great secret in NYC publishing.  The code term is “is one of the good people.” And the editors will tell you their duty is to “lift the consciousness” of the people – a Marxist term for filling them with communist ideas – not to sell books.

The problem is not that they’ve sold their birthright for a pot of message.  That is of course a problem, but not so much as the fact that they’re not even looking at the piece of work – even if they were capable of perceiving art – but at the creator.  And if they don’t know the creator, they search the book/art/song for “hints” of politics.  If you’re “liberal” (please read Marxist instead of that) then you’re in and your work is “good.”  Because good is not a matter of quality but a matter of “do you belong to the church of eternal collectivism.”

This is what upset the woman so much. I took the words of someone she perceives as a fellow co-religionaire (is he?  I don’t know.  I’d say he’s one of the hereditary democrats and now getting old and hasn’t re-examined his beliefs in twenty years or so.  And of course he moves in the same circles as the commenting critter.  BUT why should I CARE?) and used them for heretical works – wail – how dare I?

I’ll tell you how I dare.  Art – real art, done right – transcends time space and the mere mortal clay that created it.  I don’t think Shakespeare had a libertarian bone in his body (Kit Marlowe might have.  Stop giggling.  Yes, I used the word bone.  NO I don’t meant that.  Juveniles!) but I can be moved and transported out of myself by his plays.  Jane Austen was, I’m sure, a good monarchist.  She surely believed in a class system, but why in heck’s name should that stop me enjoying her books?  Agatha Christie had some shockingly obtuse political statements in her thrillers, but I still re-read her mysteries every year.  Why shouldn’t I?  ART ISN’T THE PERSON.

It’s perfectly possible, when an art piece touches you deeply, to find meaning in art that is sometimes the opposite of what the author meant.  I know I have communist fans who adore Darkship Thieves.  Fine.  I’ve released the art (I’m never sure I produce that, of course!) into the world, and now it lives in other people’s minds.  I can’t stop it.

And ALL the libertarian fans of Firefly and Serenity know that Joss Whedon is as the offended commenter would say “quite liberal.”  So?  They see another meaning in the art.

From this side of the desk, let me tell you, when I’m flying, things come through my fingers that I haven’t even thought much less shaped.  Subconscious?  Channeling of the source of shamanic dreams?  Who knows.  Art is what it is.  If you control it too closely it misses that divine spark.  (To whom it may concern, this is not an excuse to be sloppy in craft.  If you’re thinking that you don’t even know what I’m talking about.)

So, Joss Wheddon channels libertarianism, or maybe we just read it into it.  It doesn’t matter.  Art only lives when it meets the mind of the one experiencing it.  And if it’s really art, not sad collections of twisted kitchen implements made by someone with the “right” political convictions and therefore “good”, it touches you in ways you don’t expect, it creates a symbiotic experience in which your mind and the artist’s interact and the result can be quite unique.

Paul Simon is, I’m sure, a real artist (not always.  No artist has uniform production) just like Leonard Cohen, whom I also adore is a real artist (though I’m sure he’s also “quite liberal”.)  Joss Whedon is a real artist too, and I don’t mean to stop consuming his work, even if I might, in repulsion at some of his political work, buy stuff used instead of watching it in theaters.

You see, we perceive art as art and good as good and evil as evil.  Because politics is not our church, we don’t require oaths of fealty.  We just require that the work itself move us.  We’re odd that way.  Heck we can even like a PERSON as a person while hating their politics.  Because people sometimes embrace a superficial good without looking beneath, or want to belong to the “cool kid club” and refuse to believe that what is beneath is as evil as we say.  That doesn’t make them evil.  Only useful idiots.  What makes them evil is confusing politics with religion and going around stomping and demanding fealty.  Okay, mostly it makes them annoying and stupid.  BUT that’s a form of evil when it’s done on my blog.

Go listen to American Tune, if you haven’t.  At this time and this place, I challenge you not to cry when you hear it.

And as for consuming the art of “quite liberal” people – grins – yes, ma’am.  Art enriches the soul, when it’s good.  And unlike people who think “good” means “Believes like me”, I have a soul.

And, oh, yeah, I aim to misbehave.

They met in secret.  No one is really sure how it started.  It was sometime after the fall, sometime after the riots, but before the biolords.  The world was a dark place and individual life worth nothing.  Or less than that.

We can’t tell you for sure how it was or when, because they didn’t talk.  A secretive sect with illogical beliefs, they gathered in twos in threes, they trusted only those closest to them.

It is said they carried – and later on, when recognized as a religion and before the prohibition – they wore, sewn on their clothes, a patch that was supposed to be a piece of a true flag once flown in their lost homeland.

But in the beginning, who knows what they were, and who they were?  A persecuted people, with a lost cause, considered dangerous by every land in the world.  Not quite a political belief, not quite a religion, and yet a bit of both.

By the time they came to public notice, this much was already established: they believed that the USA, that mythical, perhaps never-existing land was a special place, blessed by G-d, a place where humanity for the first time reached the heights of what it was meant to be, the heights of its potential.  Stories were told of freedom and riches, of ships that could reach the moon, of tolerance for all beliefs, all faiths, all skin colors.  We’re sure at least half of this must be exaggerated if not fabricated.

They also believed in two “holy books” the Constitution and the declaration of independence.  They sang The Star Spangled Banner, and the Battle Hymn of The Republic and inclined their heads, and prayed for strength to go on believing.

The afterlife didn’t interest them.  You were allowed to believe in it or not, as you pleased.  Some members developed an idea that the deserving hero would be born again in a reconstituted promised land, when the time came.

They named their children with the names of their heroes and omitted the middle name that made it particular: Benjamin (Franklyn); George (Washington); Samuel (Adams) and others, even the generals of a long forgotten war said to be for freedom and equality.

Through the night of centuries, five hundred long years, while principalities, mandates, caliphates and satrapies, while world governments, engineered rulers, rational systems and monarchies succeeded each other, they survived in the dark, in silence.  Briefly legal, then punishable with death, yet they carried on.

Through a revolution, through recolonization of their lost land they survived.

Eventually, they took to the stars and there, in their world, which is called USA it is said just outside the spaceport there is a rock engraved with the words:

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.

A statue of a woman holding up a lamp stands beside it.  Some think it is a goddess, but they say it is just Liberty, illuminating the worlds.

They have no promises of eternal life.  They promise no miracles.  Your salvation is between you and your G-d.

But for humanity they hold this promise: Life, Liberty, the pursuit of happiness.  They believe only in that way can the blessings of civilization be preserved.

And maybe it is enough.

Maybe it is a faith worth keeping through the dark days.  A promise of light for humanity.  Worlds everlasting.

I was going to write a profound post about the beauties of our founding document, the inexpressible wisdom of the founders.

I hardly slept all night.

Today is the swing between one reality and another, and the path ahead is dark and shrouded.  It can be bad.  Or it can be much, much worse.

And respected sf editor on Facebook was saying that one path takes back to “the fifties, where women and black people have no rights.”  He bases this on… cheese!  But then this is the same editor who once stated his mission not as selling magazines, but as educating the public AND smashing the capitalist state.  Because in the absence of the capitalist state, everyone lives on unicorn flatulence and all the flowers are pretty.

I don’t find this stuff amusing anymore.

Basic historic and constitutional literacy should be required for voting.  Same across the land.  You go into the voting booth, you get a question anyone mildly aware of the realities could answer.  You get it wrong.  You get two more chances, in case you’re having a bad day – say in my case, I transpose numbers – you get all three wrong, the booth opens again… empty.  Alternately on the second you can walk out and renounce your voting rights.

I’m not talking difficult questions, okay?  I’m talking stuff like “Who is the president”  and “If so and so wins, we’ll get: and three possible questions and one clearly impossible one, like segregation.”  Or “is from each according to his ability to each according to his needs in the constitution?”

You don’t answer that, you have no business voting.  Voting is a privilege NOT a right.  Having a pulse and being a vague humanoid shape (I have a cat who walks on two occasionally!) is not qualification for voting.  Being eighteen certainly isn’t.  I know this is heresy, but truly there is no reason for this.  There is a vast difference between rigging the vote and pole tax and making it so that even non-citizens can vote and people who couldn’t spell their own name given three tries.  I don’t want an IQ test.  Some of the worst politics come from geniuses.  They get very tired of other people, see.  BUT basic social awareness and literacy… what is wrong with that?

But no, I wouldn’t even require that.  Just let’s make sure the dead and illegal don’t vote, let’s make sure people vote only once,  and it will take care of itself, more or less.

Voter suppression is when your vote is diluted with the votes of those who aren’t supposed to vote under our very lenient laws.

I’m very angry at voting shenanigans in both CO and Philly.  If our vote is so sacred, shouldn’t it be protected.

I don’t find this stuff amusing anymore.

And don’t go talking to me of monarchy.  It can grow the state just as massively and Henry Tudor put as many people to death – because his loins were on fire – relative to his population as Stalin did relative to his.

I have friends who put their faith in revolution.  I don’t.  The American revolution was the exception.  Most go wrong fast.  And anyone, if we haven’t rebelled yet, what makes you think we will?  When is the stopping point, if not several months ago?

So… what can I tell you, this fine morning?  Well, children, I’m a human wave author.  I’ve put characters in much more difficult situations and they thrive.

There is no better place and no better time to fight than now.  Tomorrow the reality solidifies, doom or just struggle (and if you think there’s no difference, let me tell you!)

Today is possibly the only, last day we have that the tree of liberty can be watered with sweat and tears, instead of the blood of patriots.

If you’re not busy go out and volunteer.  GO OUT AND VOTE.

And most of all take superglue, against the idiots who are trying to smash society as we know it, in the hope something ineffable will emerge.  It’s our society.  Don’t let them destroy it because they’re misfits.

Fight like it’s life or death.  It is.  Even if there is no blood on the streets, in a broken economy people die of all sorts of things that are preventable.  And in an economy that is waging war on energy and modernity, people freeze to death and die of flu.

GO.  Sweat and tears and may we be spared the blood.

Today I’m going to come as close to political as I ever do in this blog.  You’ve been warned.  If it’s going to annoy you, you may leave now.

This election has swirled around a lot of crazy things, starting with “War on women” a concept that might as well have been invented by a Martian with no understanding of human psychology or anatomy.  I can just imagine the march on the women’s towns, guns blazing…  I can, unless I realize that most men love or at least like women, and that women are not an army of same-minded robots.  Then there was the war on Big Bird and finally the rather ridiculous injunction to vote for revenge – though what in heavens name requires revenge no one knows.  Of course human nature being what it is, all of us can come up with several reasons to seek revenge on several people.  We are none of us never wronged, and we, all of us, tend to see the wrongs against us as a much greater injustice than those we commit against others.  This appeal to humans’ baser instincts might be effective.  It is also a recipe for every man against every other.

My grandmother used to say “A house where bread is scarce, it’s every man’s hand against the other.”  Bread isn’t scarce in America, save in the areas ravaged by Sandy, where we are seeing once again how centralized operations do a magnificent job for the little guy on the ground – by which I mean they are hungry, cold and in the dark.

However, I am here to tell you that we are broke.  Not only are we broke, we are stone cold broke.  No, unlike the belief of the hopeful diarist at DU the other day, this doesn’t just mean we can print more money.  If you think that, you’ve confused the thing with the symbol.

If you print more money in an economy that is not generating more goods, you just make the price of goods go up.  This is known as inflation.  It devours the substance of those who have saved by making that saved money worth less; it makes us an undesirable borrower; in its extreme instances it makes it impossible for industries to accumulate capital for investment and expansion.

In fact, that’s what we’ve been doing for a good while now, and how we’ve got in the trouble we’re in.

So, we are broke.  Our country is broke, our cities are broke, our states are broke too – though broke might be too kind a word to explain the state of California.  We need another word Uber-broke, perhaps.

But why are we broke, you say?  Aren’t we the richest nation in the world?  Didn’t we put a man on the moon?

Yes.  We put a man on the moon with intense concentrated effort that was – at the time – suited to a governmental push.  (These days, with new tech, I pin my hopes on private space programs.)

Yes, we’re very rich, both in material and in terms of human capital.  That means nothing.  Some of the countries with most resources in the world are the most miserable.  Venezuela comes to mind.  The reverse is also true.  Think of Singapore or Japan.

We are broke for the reason nations go broke: we forgot that everything has a price.  We forgot this both individually and collectively.

Collectively we forgot that our wealth was finite and that everything we did meant something else didn’t get done.  We empowered tremendous bureaucracies to do things like wage war on poverty, which might be even crazier than war on women, because at least we know what women look like while poverty and the definition of poverty changes from area to area and from decade to decade.  Of course that was not all we did.  We’ve had many many wars against wraiths and phantoms.  We’ve gone to war against drugs – for instance – by which we mean a war against drug use, which is an individual behavior.  We’ve gone to war against racism – not just the expression of racism, which would still be repugnant as it violates freedom of expression – but thoughts of racism.  We’ve gone to war against illiteracy.  We’ve gone to war …  I could list it forever.

Never mind.  All that money that got channeled into these programs – minus the 90% that went to feed and clothe and retire the bureaucrats who were front line soldiers in these wars – didn’t go to expanding the economy.  It didn’t go towards colonies on Mars.  It didn’t go towards the development of new agricultural methods.  It didn’t go towards whatever purpose the people who earned it would have put it to.

But at least we’ve been successful, right?  The poor are no longer with us.  Oh?  Not really?  I see.

One of the things that money hasn’t gone to is to have kids and raise kids.  As the mother of two I’m here to tell the rest of you it’s one heck of an economic sink hole.  My husband and I, even when we’re both making decent money have times of barely scraping by.  Kids have open expenses: clothes, food, schooling, health.  They also have hidden expenses: without kids, Dan and I would be living in half the house, and probably in a more urban and cheaper setting.  Kids pushed us to the more expensive neighborhood, where they’d be safe playing in the yard.

Most people simply can’t afford kids.  And those who can, by working two jobs, don’t see the point of having kids for strangers to raise.

And therein comes how, individually, we forgot that everything has a cost.  Back in the fifties the idea of negotiated pensions and comfortable retirements must have seemed great.  Heck, it seems great to me.  Given a chance I’d bargain to have my publisher promise to pay my upkeep for thirty years or so at the end of my productive life.

No one is offering me that bargain, because my employers must make the money they pay.

And again, here comes the rub.  If you thought “so do all employers” you forgot that a lot of people work for the government.  The government doesn’t make money.  It can only confiscate it from those who make it.  As such, it can lose touch with what is reasonable to promise employees.

Yesterday I found myself listening to one side of a conversation with someone who wants to vote in a way that will assure she can retire at fifty with her pension because she was promised, and 10% has been taken out of her paycheck her entire working life.

Well, yeah.  And I want a pony and a magic unicorn.

The money isn’t there.  The state in question is stone cold broke.  We can argue till the cows come home about where the money went or if it was a good idea.  Most of it went up some government’s hole and got lost in the gigantic game of bureaucratic pass-around.  What it got nominally used for is irrelevant.  As is whose fault it is.

The money isn’t there.  And part of the reason it isn’t there is that all these programs, union or not, private or public depended on one thing: More people.  In the early twentieth century, everyone knew that every generation would be bigger than the last.   It is baked in all the sf books, even Heinlein’s.

Except we made it hard to have and raise children.  And it didn’t happen.

The multitudes that were supposed to keep us safe and warm in retirement aren’t there.  (This also has an adverse effect on investment but that’s something else again.)  The money we paid in was spent on the current generation of older people.

Importing a whole lot of illiterate or uneducated immigrants won’t solve this problem.  Their wealth creating ability is limited.

Which is when you must step back and examine things.  SHOULD you have guaranteed retirement pensions for twenty, thirty years of your life?  Why?  And don’t tell me you paid into it and you’re entitled.  Why are you?  Other generations weren’t.  And just because you paid into a Ponzi scheme that promised you a return of several billion, doesn’t mean you’re entitled to get it.  Not even if you were forced to pay.  It just means things suck and life isn’t fair.  (My generation by and large never expected to be paid social security.  Apparently we were more credulous about other plans.)

Look at it realistically: How much does a thirty year vacation cost?  Why should you have it if we’re broke?  Aren’t there bigger needs for that money?  More importantly, doesn’t each individual family have bigger needs and know them better.

This applies not just to retirement, but to everything the government is promising us: free health care, free child care (what do you think schools are anymore?), free this, free that, and a pony on top.

What you have to ask yourself is “where is the money going to come from?”

No one is lending to us anymore.  We’re printing money and lending to ourselves.  This is sort of like cutting off your leg and making a roast.  That money is devaluing the money in every saving account throughout the land.  It’s making all of us poorer.

But then, if we’re broke, don’t we need free healthcare?  And free contraceptives?  And free—  Do I want people to die?

I’m all for free everything.  What, you think I’m stupid?  I’m no more industrious than the average person.  Okay, I like writing, so I’d probably still write if I won the lottery, but I promise you I’d also spend a lot of time listening to music, reading, and walking around in pleasant surroundings.  I’d love to have stuff just fall in my lap.  And I want all my friends to have free stuff too.  Most of them work way too hard.

BUT EVERYTHING HAS A COST.  LISTEN TO ME.  EVERYTHING HAS A COST.

Where is the free stuff going to come from if we’re broke?  No, don’t tell me rich people should pay more.  Most of us have some idea of the imaginary rich person with a money bin like Uncle Scrooge’s.  I’m fairly sure government employees think that way too.

It’s not true.  Most rich people invest their money.  They start companies.  They invest in other companies.  The money is in motion.  Yes, they still live very well but… here’s the sad news: if you confiscated all of their money – all the money of everyone making over say 100k, ALL OF IT, you’d run our country for a couple of months.  And that’s at present rate.  Forget giving out more free stuff.  Also, if you tax rich people and companies to the hilt, they move.  France is learning this now.  (The countries who’ve made it illegal for the rich and businesses to leave, like… oh, North Korea, for some reason don’t get richer.  Go figure.)

And if we consumed all that in a grand spree, after that we’d be even more broke, because there would be no money for investments.

Look, guys, it’s none of our faults.  Most of the policies that led to this were created a LONG time ago.  Some of them – the Universal Rights Of Man – were spearheaded by the Soviet Union as a weapon against the free world.  Marxism has been distorting the minds of people longer than any of us have been alive.

It was the idea that wealth is finite, fostered by Marxists, that led to policies that discouraged having children, because children were viewed as a drain, not as wealth creators.  (Yes, every human is a wealth creator in potential.  When there were only a dozen humans in the world, they were all much poorer.  If that’s counterintuitive to you, you must study real economics.)

The best things in life aren’t free, not unless the best things in life are air, whatever water you can find, and the occasional lame squirrel.  Everything must be paid for in money, or in what money represents: work, effort, knowledge and yes, blood, sweat and tears. As for the “But France has a pony” argument – yes, other countries have “free” healthcare and stuff.  It is free for them because they were willing to stifle their development and innovation and, yes, their population.  It still worked, because we do this thing called Foreign Aid.  This is where we bought France a pony.  And we stood by to keep other kids from stealing her pony.

That is not just crazy, but it’s also on the way out because – again, guys, from the top: we are broke!

This means when all those kids er… countries for whom we’ve been buying candy and toys don’t get them, they’re going to get mad at us.

Because of this, though I disapprove of adventurism abroad, the only program I’d keep is defense.  We must be ready to keep what we have, little though it is.  And we must build more.   And we must spank anyone who tries to attack us quickly, effectively and without remorse.  And then we must come home and work.

The time of walking around waging war on FOREIGN poverty is gone too.

When government offers you free stuff while at the same time demanding you pay taxes on the penalty of jail, all it’s doing is taking your money, removing its cut, then giving it back to you.  (“Nice economy you got here, shame…”) Which means in the end you’re poorer, but bureaucrats have more power.

Of course, perhaps that’s what you want.  Perhaps you want to vote for revenge.  One thing that free government stuff is good at is killing people.  What am I talking about?  Oh, from guaranteed income (yes, it’s been tried) that let people spiral into depression and addiction, to well… free health care where they make the decision of what the treatment will be and you have no say, to the “free contraceptives” in the Soviet Union, which, in the end, were JUST free abortions performed in substandard conditions, because the Soviet Union was so broke it could not produce enough condoms, let alone anything more sophisticated.  (Or where did you think everyone adopted from Russia came from?)

Perhaps you’re making a calculation that the people before us got all the good stuff, and if their life is shortened a little, there will be more stuff for us.  It’s sort of a rational decision, except that the maw of government rarely gives back that which it devours.  You too will eventually be caught by the bear, after you throw the baby from the sleigh.  But … it’s a strategy.  Immoral and possibly imprudent, but it will give you “revenge.”

But if that’s not what you want, think carefully before you vote for free stuff.  There is no free stuff.  Everything that involves the work, effort or knowledge of others must be paid for.  Either out of your own pocket or out of the pocket of others – which in the end makes us all poorer because that money isn’t used for mega-squid farms and colonies on Mars.

Yes, you were promised.  Sorry.  They lied to you.  They can continue to lie, but things will only get worse.  You might think you’re saving yourself at the expense of future generations, but unless you’re VERY OLD now, you won’t die before the collapse comes.  At the rate we are going, you’ll be around when all the free stuff stops because there IS NO MONEY.  Only you’ll be older and less able to cope.

Better to rip off the bandaid now.  Prioritize those who need to be taken care of – say those over sixty – and let the rest of us build at least a very little head of steam before the time comes we can’t work.  Me?  I’ll be here at eighty with my hands on the keyboard.

And if your goal isn’t revenge on past generations – when you go to the polls, remember that we are broke.  Whatever they promise you, those are just promises.  Like money printed out of nothing, it means nothing.

You can choose to embrace sanity now, or it will surely be forced on you later, at great cost in blood, sweat and tears.

There is no cake.  The cake is a lie.  We’ve come to the end of cake.