Month: April 2013

I’ve written before on the state of racism in America saying that of course it exists – it will exist so long as America is populated by human beings – but it’s not racism as defined by law (or news, or entertainment) nor even some kind of thing that can be identified and mitigated by law and/or social processes.  It is also, at any level it can be defined, less than in practically any other country.  (At least any country I’ve lived in/visited/have friends from – which covers most of the world.)

“Racism” in the sense of “he who doesn’t look like us will be kept out/killed/denied” is part of the makeup of the human brain.  It just is.  It is part of the brains of our fellow great apes, too.  And most other mammals.

Experiments have been made with not only getting a mother (of whatever species) to accept offspring of another species, but also with changing one of her own cubs – scent or look – to see if it’s still recognized.  Most of these experiments end with the death of the cub.

It’s actually easier to take a cub of another species, rub the other cub’s scent on it and get the mother to adopt it (this produces some completely insane squirrels-raised-by-cats.  Look it up if you have an hour to spare) than to remove the identifying characteristics and get the mother’s own cub to be accepted.

It is of course a necessary mechanism.  Well, think about it.  Posit gradual enough evolution from our pre-human ancestors that the mothers didn’t kill the babies.  It still needs to be that our ancestors preferred each other (possibly their siblings) for a good long time, or speciation would never have happened.  And given our species proven ability to screw anything that moves, what is amazing is that we DID speciate.  The preference was marked enough for us to leave the old species behind.

The preference, of course, must have been for “more like us than not in a pinch” too, considering the humanoid species they keep finding in our ancestry.  (Actually my theory on the extinction of all these other human species is not one of the popular ones, like “we killed them” or “we ate them” [though doubtless there were instances of both.  There are instances of both within our own species and not that long ago.]  I think we genetically overwhelmed them.  I think for whatever reason we were more fertile [perhaps the having lost estrus or season] an idea immortalized in our legends, of other human species with trouble reproducing, and we just had more kiddies than they did, intermarried, had kids who looked more like us, and they sort of disappeared.  Only they’re still there in our  genetics.)  And of course at times and in certain places things like mountain ranges might have intervened to isolate our ancestors from the parent species.

But given how many human species emerged it can’t ALL have been great floods and sudden mountain range (!).  It MUST have been preference for “we like those like us more than those others.”

That seems to remain, by and large.  People pick companions who are more like them than not.  How many of us prefer to associate with other Odds on line, (even when we fight) than to hang out with our perfectly normal (and often polite) neighbors?

And that’s where the law and social correctives go wrong.  Because “racism” is both much “finer” than just skin-color, slicing a dozen different ways, and far less defined.  First, who do you think my kids have more in common with?  A geeky, black science fiction fan, or a white kid who was raised on a steady diet of TV and reality shows?  In that context “skin color” is the last thing on their minds and it counts for absolutely nothing.  (And btw, both of them of in circumstances where those were their choices not only formed lasting friendships with kids of other “races” but – and this is important – completely failed to see the race, to the extent of giving me descriptions of how to find this kid in a crowd to give them a message which included “He’s tall, and he’s wearing a red jacket.  I think his backpack is blue” but COMPLETELY ignored “this is one of the five black kids in the school.”  (No, it was not self-consciousness.  Not in family.  They just honestly completely forgot that part.  When I said “Oh, for the love of Bob, why didn’t you…” the answer was “Oh.  Duh.  I didn’t remember.”  — interestingly my husband pulled a similar one on me with someone who worked for him.  I was expecting a tall blond guy, because of his name.  Never mind.)

Second, the “racist” – let’s call it “exclusionary” impulse just means “if you stick out, we’ll exclude you.”  It could be you’re the only red head in a room full of brunettes.  But actually at least in America your exterior characteristics are likely to matter for far less than your internal characteristics or your behavior.  You’re far more likely to be shunned if you’re the guy who comes in for a baseball game wearing a tuxedo or who wears a t-shirt to a formal (though these days people will try to pretend they’re not shunning you in the latter case because you’re being “natural” and “unstudied” and those are supposed to be god things.  Never mind.  Talk for another time.)

In fairly uniform countries, if you stick out, you get it.  I’m not sure how much of my sense of discomfort in Portugal came from the fact I was 5’7” when I finished growing (I’m now 5’5” due mostly to issues during first pregnancy.  Long story) and that my hair was that shade of very dark red that lit up as flame in the sun, (now I’ll figure out what color it is if Clairol factories are ever shut down by government order.  I think it’s mostly white and has been since my twenties) but looked brown-black indoors.  People routinely assumed I was a tourist and addressed me in other languages, and though I was (till aforementioned first pregnancy and six months bed rest from which my figure never recovered) a size seven, I grew up with nicknames like “whale” and “mastodon”

Now, if you look at my school pictures, you’d think I look exactly (well, close enough that in the US it would be considered “family resemblance”) like my classmates, only in a bigger scale.  But to them I was definitely “weird” and “strange” enough in appearance for it to matter.  (My husband about choked when someone referred to me in public over there as “blondie” – I had to explain to him that “blond” is anything short of very dark brown or black.)

Does this account for my growing up weird?  Maybe.  I’ve looked at my ancestors, even the ones who presented physically normal and I’m not convinced.  A strong streak of “You may go to h*ll, I’m going Odd” seems to run through.  OTOH it certainly worked to convince me that I could never fit in, so why try?

This too is a form of racism that can neither be identified nor ameliorated by law.  I mean, okay, I can see our bureaucracy TRY “If someone is more than two inches above median and more than two shades lighter/darker than the group, he or she must…”  I can see them try because these are people who try to regulate how much salt you can eat.  I can also see them try because if we let them they would have paperclip inspectors, making sure the paperclips on every desk were properly stored.  Let’s face it – they don’t trust us to cross the street alone.

On the other hand it CAN’T be done.

And I’m not even going to say that there was never a racism problem in America – of course there is/was/would be.  “Racism” defined as the exclusionary impulse responds to “Shared background” as much as to “sufficiently big external characteristic” and when groups had been kept legally separate (first by slavery, then by legal separation laws) they wouldn’t have much in common and also the appearance would be a novelty.

So I can totally see where the government thought it had a reason to step in.  (Usually same reason as always – having caused the problem, they now claimed they had to step in to solve it.)  The problem was their assuming the problem would persist forever and ever and that they had to step in forever, because left to their own devices, people would care more about ONE characteristic – skin color – than about shared background or interests, or even proximity.

This is puzzling because at the same time they are creating quasi-racial groups out of cultures.  I don’t know who it was who said that if Irish and Italians had been treated as we’re treating those of Latin origin, not only would they never have assimilated but their criminality and other dysfunction would be through the roof.  They were, nonetheless, right.

I say this as someone who grew up thinking of herself as white (with whatever fell in the pot along the way) and who, upon entering this country found out she was “Latina” which some people seem to think is a separate race. (Or just confuse race with culture.  To the extent that Europeans used to talk of the French race or the Spanish Race, this has been going on a long time.)

Even before I was officially “Latina”, due to the fact that most people think that Portugal is somewhere in South America, I found myself being treated weirdly.  Complete strangers told me I’d come here to avoid starving (!  Mom would have been offended.  There were four in the family.  She always cooked for fifteen.  Honestly if I hadn’t made untoward efforts to slim, I’d have been 300 lbs by 12.)  Other complete strangers told me I came here so I could be liberated and not have to obey men in everything (I’d have liked to introduce these darlings to mom or grandma.)  Others told me my culture was of course more emotive/fun/colorful/just/interesting/diverse (!) in touch with nature (!!!!!) or rich (?????) than American culture.

I have said before that my first publishing house thought the interesting bit about me was not that I could write stories, but that I was born in Portugal and was “Latina” – hence the exhortation (yes, I spell extortion funny) to write my biography when I was less than forty (that it was assumed I was oppressed goes without saying, right?)

And that’s what you have to look at to figure out “white privilege” to the extent it exists.  If someone else named Sarah Hoyt (who didn’t go to cons, and get asked about how she got to have such a name/accent or) someone who grew up here, and possibly was born here, wrote science fiction, what would you care about?  How good the science fiction was, right?  Actually for this lot, that’s what you care about anyway.

BUT not to people who took the “we must always be inclusive” and “culture is race” thing to heart.  To them the most important thing about me is ALWAYS that I was born abroad/have an accent (yes, I know, but when I came through you HAD to go to cons.  It’s when I made most of my sales for anthologies, and some books, for the upcoming year.  Certainly where I made most of my “for hire” sales.)

It took me flat nothing to realize that because I was female, had a degree in literature, spoke with an accent and came from a Latin country not only were certain political and social views EXPECTED from me but I was supposed to have been oppressed…  And those expectations WERE oppression.  If I tried to be just myself, I’d get smacked in line or treated like that bird who leaves the flock.

Which brings us to the irony of white privilege in the US today.  The misnamed “White Privilege” which could simply be called “Normal Privilege” for whatever is normal for that area, is the ability to not have expectations and ideas pushed on you.  (The reason I say this is “normal privilege” is that you can be lily white, but if you’re a Southerner in NYC, you too will find that they’re trying very hard to put you in a specific box.)

No one who hasn’t experienced the attempt to make you be what other people THINK you are, can know how bothersome it is.  Of course the only people who’ve never experienced this are people in the least diverse (and culled to be that way) environment in the world: people who run in North Eastern intellectual circles.  The rest of you have probably at least experienced this briefly.

In the end you’re left with either living up (down) to the stereotype because it’s less trouble than fighting it and/or going completely against it, and having people resent it.  It takes a lot more effort, if you’ve been classed as a stereotyped category to be yourself, than it does if you’re not put in a category to begin with.

And again that’s the ironical part. The government’s definition of “protected race/culture” fixating on certain (largely irrelevant) characteristics and the armies of political correctness (like the armies of darkness, but more evil) led by the mass entertainment have created both classes of people who feel aggrieved and set aside (without realizing what aggrieves them and sets them aside is large the weird expression to being afraid of offending them or setting them aside) and an untold, never before found privilege: the ability to move through life with a minimum of stereotypes attached.

I sometimes envy those people greatly.  But then I realize that NO ONE is ever free of expectations.  (Most people just don’t have the honor of having them governmentally pre-defined.)  My small, youthful-looking husband, for instance, is not expected to have vast knowledge and experience in his field.

But I do resent the government’s attempt to solve a problem that no longer exists in the shape they think it does creating a bigger and odder problem.  I just hope they don’t try to solve this one too.  We all know how that would end up.

*In which the book acquired a cover.  Sometime this weekend, and the creek not rising, it will also acquire a tab, while its older brother (Witchfinder) will say up a couple more weeks, as I finish edits to go to professional editor/friend. Now the standard stuff:  This is the new free novel I’m posting here a chapter at a time.  For previous chapters, page back to previous weeks.  This is pre-first-draft, as it comes out.  It is a sequel to Witchfinder which will soon be taken down (once edited) and put for sale on Amazon.  Meanwhile, if you donate $6 or more, I’ll get you a copy of Rogue Magic, once finished and edited, in your favored ebook format.  Of course, if you’re already subscribing to the blog at a level at which you get whichever books come out that year, you don’t need to worry.   Until I give this a tab, you can find older chapters by paging back to Friday (or the first, I think Sat/Sun or simply searching Rogue Magic.*

cover image credit © Ateliersommerland | Dreamstime.com

Not Portsmouth

Miss Helen Blythe, Sister of the Earl of Savage:

I didn’t know if this was Portsmouth, but I rather doubted it.

Betsy and I landed with a thud and a blast of light and – understandably – there was a time when I couldn’t breathe and I couldn’t think.

The problem came after the light vanished, and the sound of explosion had vanished from my head, there was still the feel of being unable to breathe.

The reason for this was clear enough, since we were, in fact, immersed in water.  The moment I realized this, I held my breath, containing my desire to open my mouth and gulp in what was available.  I didn’t think a lungfull of water would help.

Betsy started to open my mouth and I clapped my hand it, holding her with that arm sort of around her.  She was struggling and whimpering, and it was much like holding an oversized heel.

Fortunately I knew how to swim, something Mama says no well brought up girl will know, since it is impossible to swim with your petticoat on.  She’s not quite right.  You can swim with petticoats on.  But I’d much rather swim naked, which was how I’d taught myself on the lake on our property, summer nights.

Breeches were not as easy to swim in as naked, though they were far better than petticoats.  So, I kicked to the surface with all my might, pulling Betsy along.  I knew where the surface was – I thought – because there was a great light that way.

Wherever we were – it couldn’t be Portsmouth, not even off the coast – there were fish of ever color and shape and if my chest hadn’t felt like it would presently burst, I would certainly have admired them.

As was, I was only aware of my head bursting through somewhere into air, and I took big gulps of air, and moved my hand from Betsy’s mouth – and then had to grab her under the arms, because the silly git was trying to lose consciousness and go under.

After I’d breathed in and out several times, I became aware that this was definitely not Portsmouth.

Look, I haven’t travelled much, and I’m not even very aware of where Portsmouth is.  Yes, my governess tried to make me learn geography, but like almost everything she taught me, this was done by making me learn lists “the seven best kings of England”, “the ten most tragic queens” and such.  All I’d retained about Portsmouth was that it was a nautical location, with shipyards and that I could hire as a cabin boy there, and eventually make my way to captaining my own pirate ship.  I had no doubt I could do that, as I’d read plenty of sea stories and biographies, and I knew plenty of people more dull-witted than I had made such a trajectory.  So why shouldn’t I?

Mama would say that piracy was a sin, but of course mama would say that.  Mama said all manner of pious and not very significant things, and besides look at how papa had preached morality all the time.  But I’d heard Jonathan and Seraphim Ainsling speak once, when they didn’t think I could hear, and what papa had done was no better than piracy and might be worse.

So, those were my reasons for choosing Portsmouth.  And I was willing to concede that the streets in Portsmouth might be made of wet cobblestone.  They probably were.  But I’d seen pictures in books, and those same streets were surrounded by tall buildings, and filled with people

The place we’d emerged…

A few steps from where we’d come up, there was a set of wet cobblestoned steps, leading up to…  It could be a cobblestoned street, only it wasn’t.  More like a cobblestoned plaza.  Only when you blinked and looked again, you realized it wasn’t cobblestones, really, but polished grey granite.

But it was what surrounded that … plaza?  Room? That made it unbelievable.  I was aware of Betsy first gasping and moaning, then making a startled little cry, as she doubtless also paid attention to what happened around us.  But I was too busy with my own wonder.

You see, above the plaza, above us, above this entire space, there was something like the gigantic inverted keel of a very old boat.  It shone with a diffuse light, which is what made me think I was swimming towards daylight.

Hanging from the keel – cavernous and black, and just barely recognizeable as wood – hung … strings of pearls.  Masses of them.

When we were little, nursie would let us make daisy chains, in spring, and sometimes I would festoon the space over my bed in loops and loops of them.  This was like that, but more so, with loops and loops and long ropes of pearls.  All manner of pearls, from the small and rosy to the huge and white to the ivory tones in between.  They all shone, perfectly visible by the deflected light.  And I thought if I could get even a yard of those and go back home, I could set up as an independent lady of means, and no one – No one – would be able to make me marry anyone I didn’t want to, nor die in child birth, as Honoria had.

It was because I was looking up that I missed them.  I didn’t hear their steps, which is odd, and I wasn’t aware of their approach until one of them said, “Swim towards the steps, and come up.  You are under arrest.”

Then I did look in the direction of the voice and my first thought was that the two men standing on the granite plaza, right in the center, were Roman.  This is because they were mostly naked, save for a white loincloth, and carried tridents and a net.

After the first shock I realized that I was confusing with the pictures of Roman Gladiators in the naughty book that Papa kept on the very top shelf of the library, which had all sorts of other Roman things.

But they couldn’t be Roman because… things were wrong.  For one, I was fairly sure that Romans didn’t have green hair.  And they certainly didn’t have little fins along their arms.

“Don’t make me fetch you with magic, land-heel,” the taller of the two barked.  “Come up the steps.  You are under arrest.”

I had no idea what he meant by fetching me by magic, though from the feel of him, I suspected he could.  But since this was not Portsmouth, it behooved me to find out what it was, before I made him use magic on me.

Though I could tell right away I was going to dislike him excessively.

I was thinking back on what I said about how mom would have been in real trouble raising kids in a country with no extended family, and that’s probably true.  (Though I’ll point out raising kids with no extended family around is a trial of the “I wouldn’t wish on my worst enemy” kind.  It was nine years before I could go to the bathroom with the door closed.  Fortunately the cats had trained me for that.)

And then it occurred to me she might have been okay with that (I’m not sure any of us are more than okay) but she couldn’t raise a kid the way laws are now in the US.  I’m sure of this because mom’s biggest thing was to yell at us.  She has an operatic voice and she could go on FOREVER.  I know for a fact this would have got her in trouble.

I have a friend who is one of the sweetest men alive, but whose method of blowing off steam so he didn’t get too mad at one of his five children was to yell at them at the top of his lungs, usually in the “moral sermon” vein.  You know “What did you think was going to happen?  Are you an idiot?”

Well, once he did it in the backyard.  (I’m going to guess the sermon was about the dog.)  A neighbor called the police that he was “abusing” his child – who was then, I think, 17 and as tall or taller than his father.

We’d not have lasted with my mom ten days.  When she was mad the entire village could hear it and she said things that the busybodies would hate, like “I swear, I don’t know why I don’t boil you in oil.”  (This must be hereditary.  If I had a dime for every time I’ve told the kids or cats “Butter, and onions, you’d be much better with butter and onions,” usually while I’m cleaning some mess.  Alternate is “I’d cook you, but there are no pots large enough.”)

Keep in mind that, whatever her opinions about my existence, pre-birth, she was the person who spent years of nights awake willing me to take the next breath (asthma, bronchitis and tuberculosis) and that she brought me alive through what was either the last small pox epidemic to sweep Europe (from a strain escaped from a lab in Germany) or an unusually virulent chicken pox (the word in Portuguese is the same for both and no one seems sure) which took 2/3 of my generation in the village (the mortality seems unusually high for chicken pox, and also they didn’t vaccinate my cohort for small pox when we hit school.)  Okay, she did it partly through incredibly close-in nursing; partly through folk medicine (everything covered in red, including the lamp shade); and partly by pointing out in no uncertain terms that if I died I wouldn’t get to go to space and by giving me a bit of old clockwork and telling me it had fallen from the Sputnik.

But she yelled a lot and therefore the busy bodies would intervene.

Now, was she a perfect mother?  Oh hell no. Particularly not for me.  Mom has problems – the reason she decided she should not have children – and I have a temperament that, as she puts it “would rather break than bend.”  From about the age of eight on, we had epic fights, sometimes lasting for weeks and pointing dad to draw the Chinese symbol for War (two women under one roof) on the edge of his newspaper.

But what other mother would aid and abet me (and go out with me, and hold the paint bucket) when I had an absolute necessity to go out at night and change the names of newly renamed streets.  (Silly?  Well, imagine that the cross streets near you had just got renamed Che Guevara and Lenin.  See how it was an absolute necessity?)  What other mother would get me a weighted umbrella, so when I got into street fights, I could hold it by the end and use the handle like a mace.  (Tactical combat umbrella.  It was nice.  Lost it in one of the moves.)  And what other mother would take me to the best deli in town and order me “The Viking” , which was a dish of ice-cream bigger than my head, then sip tea while I ate, with occasional amused comments of “I feel ill just looking.”

What I mean is that I could give you accounts of my childhood that would make you go “Poor thing” and others that would make you go “Oh, wow, I wish I’d had that.”  They’re both true.  It’s the same childhood.

I suspect my kids have the same thing.  I suspect all of us have the same thing.

Yes, I’ve been known to be rash and harsh with the boys, though the only really bad one I can think of is when the school accused Marsh of horrible stuff and it took us almost a month to figure out it was made up out of whole cloth.  (And we only finally figured it out because they accused him of stuff on a day he was home sick – I mean, who would expect a group of girls to make up stuff, and the administrators to believe it if there was no proof?  Yeah, I know.  Okay, we were stupid.  We know better now.)

But did I sometimes punish them for things they hadn’t done?  Oh, heck yes.  I can’t read minds.  I’m still fairly sure that the person who drew all over the wall and signed his name to it was Robert, no matter how much he says it was the (then one year old) Marshall.  He STILL says it was and that Marshall DEVIOUSLY signed Robert’s name to it.  Marshall says he doesn’t remember.  Is it possible?  Barely.  I doubt it, because Marsh was just starting to talk.  I don’t think he could write.  But his intelligence is visual, and he MIGHT have seen Robert’s signature and remembered the shape.

Did I yell cruel and unusual stuff at them?  Oh, heck, yes.  I even (gasp) spanked their bottom (mostly while they were still in diapers.  After that we could take the computer cord away, though the 10 year old oldest won himself an epic, chase-him-out-of-the-kitchen by smacking his behind twice, because he came in and tried to tell me how to cook.  (I wish I were joking.  He actually knew nothing back then.  And that’s when he started learning because if I was going to be lectured, at least he’d make sense.  But not that day.  We had a dinner party and I was sooooo late.)  Is it cruel spanking someone who can’t think ahead or plan yet?  Well, yes.  It was also the only thing that stopped older son doing things like melting his crayons on the heater, eating the cat’s food (though I didn’t watch so closely that I’m not SURE he ate a lot of it,) running out the door naked, etc.  Our younger son had a different temperament and with him “distract him with something else” worked.   BUT for the older one it didn’t.  The people who say “never hurt a child, ever, ever, ever” fail to realize that sometimes you hurt them to prevent greater hurt.  I don’t know any properly-sane parent who enjoys even the butt-smack.  All the great apes spank – and there’s a reason for that.  Yes, of course, after the age when they’re more than little monkeys, there are other methods.  (I think if consulted Marsh would much rather I’d continued spanking him after three, rather than taking his computer cord away for periods of days or weeks, depending on the severity of the crime, which is what we did from the age of three on.)

But on the whole the boys turned out all right.  The cats didn’t, but cats never do.  (And they don’t get spanked, either, only bottle sprayed.  Which goes to show you.)

What I’m trying to say is that we’ve let so many things fall under the aegis of regulation that there is now this idea that to raise children you must be “perfect” and you must always do things “perfectly.”  Because they have these regulations, see?  You’re not supposed to spank the kid, even if you have one of those kids who can’t be stopped in any other way.  And you’re not supposed to leave them alone — even when your six year old is as mature and clear-thinking as most 18 year olds – not even for two hours.  And you’re not supposed—

It has made parenting a strange burden.  It makes  adopting a child the equivalent of inviting a bureaucrat into your home which is like inviting a vampire but not nearly so pleasant.

And it condemns most unwanted or semi-wanted children to the h*ll of foster care forever, because either more responsible people don’t dare adopting, or they get moved out of the foster home they start getting attached to, due to something stupid.

Like all the other regulations, these get applied according to someone’s idea of “perfect” so that someone who is considered “perfect” by race or culture or whatever for the child gets a pass or not watched at all; meanwhile someone middle class (because all our movies have taught us that’s a pool of inequity) gets watched very closely indeed and can have the kids pulled away on stupid stuff.  Meanwhile, there is the Rousseauvian idea of the “perfect” vitiating the cycle and mandating that kids stay even with markedly dangerous natural parents rather than saner adoptive parents.  Because that’s “natural” and therefore “better.”  (Contemplates the fact that this very morning she saw an ad for “organic cotton sheets” and wondered if they were supposed to be eaten.)

There is a tendency when writing rules and regulations to think of what would be “perfect” –No child shall ever be spanked! No child will ever have to eat something he doesn’t like!  No child shall ever hear harsh words!

What people tend to forget is the old saw “the perfect is the enemy of the good.”  If you concentrate on making things absolutely perfect, this being an imperfect world, it will just put the onus elsewhere.

The onus is now on parents, both real and adopted, and a great part of the reason we’re failing to produce the next generation is that we’re afraid of the bureaucrat and his clipboard.  We’re also contemplating not having a life till the younger kid is ten or so and no one can blame us for leaving them alone for more than 2 hours.  (I mean, a friend and I started a writers’ group that allowed you to bring kids to it, because we couldn’t afford the – then six dollars an hour – babysitter for the meeting or the coffee klatch this group considered mandatory afterwards.  We couldn’t afford $50 per week for a writers’ meeting.  BUT if our husbands hadn’t been okay with having the house invaded on alternate weeks, we’d have been stuck.)  We’re contemplating child-proofing the house, and/or being brought up on child neglect if we don’t and the kid has to go to the hospital.  And if you’re the parent of normal boys, you’re contemplating being treated like a criminal whenever you have to take him to emergency.  (Marshall.  Dancing in socks on the edge of the bathtub.  TWO MINUTES.  I was vacuuming the floor.)

What I mean is that raising children (and many other things in life) are the sort of unpredictable endeavor no one can be perfect at.  My mom had reasons for her imperfections, but she fought them too, and all I can say is that compared to her childhood, mine was a dream come true.  And hers was considerably better than her father’s.  And sometimes that’s ALL you can aim for.

But laws and rules and bureaucracy don’t recognize that.  They want us to be PERFECT and that’s why the more they invade places in life where the light and dark twine, the more IMperfect – and often downright hellish – things become.

Because the law deals with black and white, and life isn’t.

 

Pardon the scattered post, for reasons unknown to me I was awake from 3 am to 5 am.  Dan was too.  I put it to good use (!) and edited another chunk of Musketeer’s seamstress.  I’m going off my last page-proof copy and let me tell you, I’ve compared, these people introduced more errors than they removed.   (Though they got the punctuation, which is why I’m going off that.)  Why didn’t any of you who’ve read these tell me how bad they were?  One example: they turned all the sought into thought – which means several sentences become word salad.

On purpose?  Probably not.  But honestly, I’m surprised at still getting fan mail on these, as many sentences as I get to and go “uh?”  I guess the “book preparation services” for the NY publishers are up there with “layers and layers of fact checkers” for the media.

The only reason I can imagine for the wakefulness was a phone call from mom yesterday, and her conviction Portugal is headed to bankruptcy or collapse.  It truly doesn’t help being this far away.  And I wish we were in a more stable position (and economy) that I could tell them to just come here if things get too bad.

I finally fell asleep after five am, and I dreamed I was interviewing to teach languages at a huge private school, only the interview was at three am, and the boys and Dan had gone to see a movie called Father Malachi’s Baby (!) and I had to walk home (can’t drive at night) all alone.  Fortunately one of the students at the school lent me her GPS.

My take on this is that it was (clearly) a school for the undead.  I have nothing on the movie.  If I’m now invoking horror movies that never existed, there is no hope.

Anyway, as you can imagine this left me a little uh-ish.

RES  yesterday made a comment that came darn near that sort of simple profundity that touches a fundamental truth of humanity.  I’m not going to page down to find it verbatim – sorry, guys, while I slept well, I literally spent all night working in my back brain.  I now have the next four writing columns for PJM, as well as figured out the hole in my plotting for Through Fire.  OTOH I woke up late and have only had one cup of tea – but it was something about how mass entertainment creates an impression of “normal.”

What he didn’t say – but was implied – is that all human beings want to be normal.  Yes – probably – even us.  At least I remember a time – before at 14 I decided (I almost typed I remembered – I’m not assuming responsibility for that.  More mystical people than I can figure it out) my real name was Sarah – when, beyond feeling that the name “Alice” – pronounced Uh-Lease – didn’t belong to me, I also wished my parents had named me what a good half of my classmates were named: Paula, or Ana, or Cristina, or one of those “normal” names.  I also remember in middle school being profoundly vexed that I couldn’t play the elastic game.  I simply lacked the coordination (likely the result of being born too premature, but maybe not.  My kids suck at that kind of thing, too, though their dad doesn’t.  Maybe we simply are descended from very uncoordinated Neanderthals.  They went extinct because it’s hard to hunt when tripping on your feet.)  This excluded me from all the fun games and talk, and made me sit in a corner with my SF book.  (Of course, then I got to liking the SF book…)

That wish for normality, that desire to belong to a group is what causes the whole concept of “normal.”  I don’t know anymore who I was reading the other day, when a character says “What if nobody really is normal?  What if everyone is just pretending?”

I’d say it makes no difference, really.  Partly because the concept of normal and people acting externally normal makes it easier for rulers to control you and particularly to hold over you the threat of exclusion form the group; and partly because eventually you internalize what you pretend to be.

The first threat was worse, of course, in more primitive days.  Lacking mass media to control the people, rulers had to be very black and white about it.  “If you don’t eat your peas the way we do, you’re one of THEM and we’ll kill you/throw you out.”

In the modern age, this has become less harsh – in most places.  Communist regimes, like all theocracies, are still very harsh.  On the other hand Mass media – even mass dissemination of books, has made it easier to make people fall into line of themselves.

You see, the human desire to mimic and fit in is one of our strongest instincts.  We are social apes.  And we take our cues from stories, whether those stories unroll before our eyes, are in a sacred book, are passed down in the culture, or are poured at us in books and TV.

Now, here’s the thing – the Marxists understand this all too well.  A few of you, before, when I called them a religion (there is no such thing as a secular religion, btw.  Believing in afterlife is not needed for a religion.  If I’m informed correctly some older forms of Judaism are at least mum on the subject.  Communism is a mystery religion, relying on “something happens” to make their paradise come about right here on Earth.  To their credit they work towards the ‘something” that is to transform man.  To their lack of credit, both their goal and their methods are repugnant.)  But they are.  They have created their fantastical past paradise – the supposedly communitarian past/female dominant option not included, though they let the feminists run with it – their fall from grace – the introduction of private property – their sin – “greed”, meaning wish for personal improvement in circumstances – and their hope of paradise – the emergence of the homo Sovieticus, though I suppose they don’t call it that now.  After that, of course, it would be the return to the communitarian paradise.

(They fail to understand that their communitarian paradise is actually a h*ll of individuals being treated as things, and that, because the collective can’t ever decide things as a collective, an individual ends up taking control.  Which takes us right back to feudalism.  But let that pass.  And having told a commenter not to trust enemies of a religion as information on it, I’m bound to say I’m not.  I was taught by true believers.  It just didn’t take.)

In the same way, they’ve been quite good at looking at how Christianity permeated and changed culture, and then how modernity did.  Which is why they took control of the means of disseminating stories, both supposedly factual stories (news) and imaginary stories (fiction.)

It is my authorial mind that hopes that they managed their full control just a little too late, and that the distributed media will take them down, but I’m not the Author of this story.

At any rate, a lot of what we now consider “normal” is exactly a creation of that complex of story telling.  To an extent, it might always have been, from the sagas retold by the camp fire to Shakespeare’s plays which got such wide audience, in so many languages that in many ways they might have greatly contributed to the idea individuals and their personal choices mattered; then there’s novels.  The reason that good mothers in the eighteenth century didn’t want their children reading such trash is that girls would try to model themselves on heroines who would do anything for love – when it was far more convenient for the daughter to take the sensible idea of learning to love the man the family chose for her.

In modern age…  Until we take the TV outright, we won’t fully be there, because – insert thing about schools producing illiterates and, worse, smart people who can’t read well enough to read for pleasure and don’t know what they lack —  a lot of people still get their entertainment from it.

I stopped watching  Married With Children, which seemed intent on making sure people thought of marriage as H*ll on Earth.  And because I could see my friends modeling it.  (I couldn’t get them to see it, though.)

While I’m glad the treatment of homosexuals on TV has been softened compared to what it was before, I wouldn’t mind if it became realistic.  One doesn’t become a saint because one is gay.  One doesn’t become a devil here (As Card said, homosexuality does not destroy the good or brilliant in a person.)  In the fifties and before (I read a lot of stuff from that period) saying someone was “an homosexual” or “invert” was a cue to hate them.  Now it’s a cue to regard them as victims.  Inevitably the pendulum will swing again.  I will know real progress has been made when they’re treated as people – just people.

At the same time, I’m really tired of the “White male did it” or “Christian did it” or “Father did it” or “business owner did it.”

And what appalls me most is when I see people in those categories modeling those stereotypes they see on TV.  This baffles me.  I keep seeing Christians in public act like the caricatures presented on TV (please don’t tell me where I’m going after death because of what I write.  I am doing the best I can, and I think He’s far more understanding and encompassing than that.)  Particularly when I know these people in private, and they’re not like that at all.

So why do they act that way in public?  And do they even know they’re doing it?  Probably not.  It’s “normal.”

In the same way the slow, trickle, trickle, trickle distorts our impression of normal too.  It’s become impolite to say in public you’re a Tea Partier, for instance.  The slur of sexual innuendo, followed by never substantiated rumors of violence, have stained the name, though there is no truth at all in it.  At the same time, unless you are with friends and know them well enough, it is against politeness to refer to Occupiers as “Louse infested would be communists” – though it is true of the vast majority of them.

Because that’s not how the stories present those groups.  And people want to belong to the majority – to the “normal.”

Even outliers, people who step out, can break and fall back into the norm.  A great example is that blog that shall never be mentioned, but which has turned completely around in the last 5 years or so.  I was talking to a friend about that and wondered if it was always a false flag operation, designed to turn before 08 and confuse the issue.  He said maybe but – and he’s a right outlier, by virtue of what he is, the same I am – he thought what it actually was just pressure.  Because the owner of that blog is an artist in a leftist community.  The pressure to “return to normal” just broke him at last.

In my case, of course, the more pressure to return to normal the more I explode in weird directions, but growing up when and where I did with non-pierced ears and wearing pants (for the UK visitors that means trousers) I was sort of like the boy named Sue and learned to fight before I could walk.  The shock is not that I won’t return to “normal”; the shock is that I managed to semi-pretend for ten years.

Of course, the most effective strategy would be to pretend to be of them and change it from the inside, but I’m not sure it’s possible.  Religions take time to subvert and cultures take time to change, and we’re nearing the end of that time.  (No?  Look at our economy.  Or our feral children.)

Christianity, while it was replacing the old culture, at least was aware of how the world works.  The culture the Marxists seek to impose doesn’t fit ANY real world with real people, not even the places where they won.  To be “normal” people are going around pretending to believe things that simply aren’t so, like that anyone wanting to look after himself and his is “greedy” and must have stolen what he has; that women are physically stronger than men, and more independent in spirit; that children are wiser than their parents; that everyone must have sex all the time, or they’ll go mad; that every culture in the world is superior to ours.

No one sane can believe any of these even for a minute, if they examine it.  But people don’t.  They just try to “act normal” – which is bringing down Western civilization.  That part might be a feature not a bug, except that communist regimes in the end are like all the old empires: they must feed off healthy societies near them.  If they destroy the healthy societies, the world will go down to a long darkness, until the culture changes.

This is why I keep saying “I wouldn’t mind their winning, if their model could work in any way.  It doesn’t.”

We have to at least try to stop their final victory.

Write.  Write stories.  Write news.  Write.  Even if only a few people see it, it has a ripple effect.

And if you have any talent at all in that direction, look at the tech and the possibility to start video-stories: blogs, discussions, panels and most of all fictional stories.  (I haven’t yet watched Courage, New Hampshire, though I have the first season waiting a bout of ironing – that’s when I watch TV – but I understand it is done very professionally on a shoe string budget.  Something to emulate, perhaps.  I wish I could convince my nephew with the film degree to move here and join the effort.)  There’s also animation, and if I had more time, that’s what I’d be learning.

The solution to the narrowing of “normal” to “What the Marxists think is proper” is to fight back.  To present better stories.  Ours have the advantage of being more plausible.  Also we’re more creative than the people now resorting to an endless stream of remakes.  (Fanatical religions always squash creativity.)

Go.  Create.  Be Free.  Be not afraid.  (Not even of not being normal.)

UPDATE: There will be another post at MGC on writing in about an hour or so. I must get caffeine first.  Post up and tangentially related to this.

It occurred to me during the night that the problem is that we live in an age permeated by story and that all that story has a uniform voice.

“Is this another of your Human Wave rants Sarah?”  “Sort of but not really.”

I’d actually like to talk about the problems of a society in which the mass media goes through the same set of gatekeepers – like a camel through the eye of the needle – with roughly the same opinions and who went through the same colleges and to whom the others’ opinion of each of them is far more important than the opinion of the public.  Because they never see the public, the public doesn’t invite them to cocktail parties, and in general – grosso modo – the public won’t put out for them.  (Or perhaps will, bedazzled by the fame and the er… glory.)

You know, I think that is one situation that the Founders genuinely didn’t anticipate.  I think they knew, as do that most people were toadies, ready to abase themselves to appear to belong to the “in group.”  They had to, because they knew human nature and it hasn’t changed that much.

But the time they lived in – if I have it right (it’s entirely possible I have it wrong.  My interest in the founding of the country is less than ten years old, and most of you have been studying it your entire adult lives) – they lived in a time that was much like our own.

The press composed of newspapers, broadsheets and such was just coming into being and there were a million voices.  The official publications of the official organs might still have more imposing pedigree, but they were drowned out in the babble of voices.

It is now widely believed that the French Revolution turned into what it turned in, and the executions went on because of the broadsheet equivalent of  Thinkprogress.  (Or not, since that’s more or less co-opted by our authorities.  Oh, dear.  What a tangled web.  Because I can’t imagine anyone else, on the other side making up crazy lies about “let them eat cake.”  OTOH though the sovereigns were a bit gauche and perhaps mostly innocent, there is every reason to believe the court was every bit as debauched as the most lurid broadsheets.  Or at least had been a generation before.  Which brings me to highly recommend The Black Count – though I haven’t finished it yet.  I’m about halfway through, having got interrupted by work.

What they failed to imagine, and who can blame them, given the size of the country and the transportation available in their time, is that a free press, with no government interference, would choose to debase itself for …  the sake of a foreign and discredited ideal.

Partly they – at the dawning of the industrial age – failed to realize where it would take us, in terms of transportation, in terms of broadcast, in terms of communication.  They failed to understand that a few newspapers in decisive regions could control all the other newspapers both because those who failed to make the cut for them fanned out across the country, and because the other journalists aspired to working for the big coastal newspapers, which meant that they would have to fit well in the newsroom – i.e. speak with a single voice.

I have a friend who went almost all the way to employment with the Chicago Tribune and then, naively (how could he be that stupid? Well, better that than be fired a week in) sent them clippings from his work at PJM.  The offer was withdrawn because “you wouldn’t fit well in our newsroom.)

And of course J schools taught Marxism and Marxist analysis, because it was what all the cool kids believed.  Only those dumb people who didn’t go to J school believed in capitalism and all that crud.  You don’t want to be like them, do you?

No government on Earth ever could hold the leash that tightly, so tightly that otherwise intelligent people never examined the premises of what they learned, or – if they did – never spoke against it.

BUT that’s only half the problem.  Even though most people still keep an eye on the news, there is the growing feeling that they’re not particularly reliable.  Not reporting the Kermit Gosnell case, for instance, while giving the impression that roving gangs of maniacs are roving the countryside shooting down school kids with high capacity clips/magazines/rifles/whatever in hell they’re called, not that our representatives know, is one of the trickles, lodging somewhere in the back of people’s brain. They don’t QUITE distrust, but there’s that feeling that perhaps you should trust but verify.

No, the real problem is story.  Stories told for fun, most of them on TV, though the books too, until the advent of indie (and even now most of what’s being published) give a uniform view of society, for much the same reason newspapers and tv news give a uniform view of society.

Oh, no, writers didn’t all go to the same Marxism-spewing schools (though a good number of them did) but editors did.  To be an editor, you mostly live in New York City and your particular genre (and “literary” is a genre in publishing) tends to be sort of like an inbred village.  You’re likely to work down the hall from someone you went to college with, live across the street from the guy you first dated in college (and his new boyfriend – never mind.) Your boss got references on you from the person you did a summer internship with, who is her BFF, and that’s how you got hired.  A lot of the authors you really put push behind are either the children of fellow publishing professionals/were your roommates in college/slept with you.

You’re overworked, you’re underpaid, you live in substandard housing, and your only hope of advancing is to ape the manners and beliefs of your “betters” as quickly as possible.

This means you buy the “right” (left) kind of authors, and as vocal as possible.  Even if they fail, your boss will nod and say “it’s the ignorant people in fly over country.”  Take a chance on a dissenting voice, though and what you get is  “What were you thinking?” even if the book is a moderate success (perhaps particularly if the book is a moderate success.)  Because your “betters” confuse politics with religion, they’re likely to react as if you’d preached Satanism.

From the other side of the table, the writers also get the impression any non standard opinions they have better be kept VERY quite, and they’d better tout the standard opinions they have (opinions, I have a few!) as loudly as possible.

This means that, to quote Reiner Kunze, “to the wind they all speak the same.”

The viewing/reading/listening public on the other side – I’ve been there – starts thinking that if all these people, many of them highly gifted and artistic, believe this stuff, then it must be true.  It MUST.  There’s not other choice.  These people who tell these wonderful (some people have a low threshold for wonderful, m’kay) stories, must know something the receiver of story doesn’t.  The receivers countervailing experiences must be wrong.

I was stuck there for many many years, until the trickle of counter experiences pushed me out of that comfort zone and, alas, made me stop reading some of my favorite authors and reduced my movie/tv watching to maybe two hours a month.

But I’m not typical.  I’m an Odd.  I poke and prod behind the veil of seeming reality for who is cranking the show.  It is what it is.

Most people aren’t like that.  They have other interests.

I was reminded of this by one of the “patients” at Gosnell’s saying she first tried a Planned Parenthood but was afraid to go in because of all the protesters and what they might do to her.

The article I read (sorry, I can’t remember where now) pointed out that no user of abortion services has been attacked; that the number of abortion doctors killed is so vanishingly small that they might have better statistics than the rest of the population, and he thought this woman was afraid to go in past the messages that told her she would, in fact, be taking a human life.

I think he was wildly optimistic.  While he’s right about statistics, I’d bet you this woman never looked at statistics in her life.  What I bet she looked at was a never ending stream of chick-talk-shows and movies and soap operas, and sitcoms, where again and again, the crazed anti-abortionist who kills people comes up, as the murderer and central villain, or simply as inference.

You’d have to sit this woman down and talk to her for hours to pierce the veil of what she “just knows”.

And she does.  She saw it with her own eyes.  On TV.

This is what we face, not just electorally (and the way a war on women was conjured out of nowhere in the last election is itself immensely amusing.  If your taste in humor runs to the very sardonic and three steps from tears. The race war they tried to start flopped – which tells you who the most gullible media consumers are and puts paid to any ideas of racial superiority, doesn’t it?)   This is what we face as a culture.

The problem is not that our media and our entertainment were passing through a very tight ring of gatekeepers who had mostly echoing opinions.  The problem is that those opinions were in large part formed by our opponent in the (mostly) cold war.  The problem is that though their regime has proven completely unworkable and reprehensible, there was no shaming and no naming afterwards – partly because our intelligentsia wouldn’t let that happen.

And this is why this battle had to finally be fought here, on our soil, and the way it’s being fought.  Either we win or civilization goes down forever, for having allowed a central diffusion point for opinions and never having vetted the opinions that were in positions of power – not even in the name of the much vaunted diversity.

We never did that because of course, we believe in freedom of opinion, and once you start, where do you stop?

They say viruses can be highly targeted to the patient.

And like blogs are the anti virus for news, we – indie authors, those who refuse to bow to platitudes – are the anti-virus for entertainment.  We are small yet, and not very visual, but we’re here.  And once the tech goes a little further, we’ll be in visual too.  (Oh the screams, they shall be like smoke in the nostrils of the gods, shan’t they?)

Is it too late?  I don’t know.  I tend to believe in a G-d that won’t let freedom perish from this Earth.  But I could be wrong.  And it’s not like He’s going to do it without us.

Perhaps like the old Norse, we’re doomed to fight against evil and perish in the end.  Or perhaps we’ll win.  We’ll never know until we try!

(I just hope the writers’ bar in the afterlife has something other than mead.  I shall hope for single malt.)

I’m a Usaian (read A Few Good Men if this term confuses you) – I believe in Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness.  For humans, of course.

But what is a human?

The feeling that we need to answer this question and answer it definitely has been growing on me since before I wrote Darkship Thieves.

Actually, the question – if you also read my shifter series you’ll see what I mean – seems to be central to my writing.  It’s one of those things I can’t help letting drop into the “soup” of a novel, whether I intend to or not.

The reason for this is probably that, according to the current means of determining what and who is “human” I’m not.  And yes, I’ll explain this, but let’s leave this angle till later.  It’s personal and I think this is bigger than that.

As I said this has been growing for a long time, and I think advances in science – manufactured humans; enhanced humans; the possibility of growing anencephalic human bodies for brain transplant – none of it is here yet, but none of it is so far that we can’t see the place they exist.

And then the question becomes “where is that line?” Because see, when you’re drawing that kind of line, it moves.  If you say manufactured humans aren’t human because they were created outside the woman’s body by an artificial process, what does that make IVF babies?

And the problem with such lines is that whatever you use can rebound and include far more than you expect – or it can give people license to act according to their basest instincts, which is what all of civilization is designed to stop.

Right now, that line is blurry and moves.  Different people have different opinions.  And that gives the opportunity for incidents like the Kermit Gosnell mass murder spree to occur AND FOR NO ONE TO DO ANYTHING ABOUT IT for years.

If you know nothing about it, you should click on that link.  If you are a wussy and don’t want to, then let me tell you the general outlines.  In PA abortion is illegal after 24 weeks (I think) but for years, this creep was giving women “abortions” almost up to the date of delivery, or not asking how far along they were.  “Abortions” is in parenthesis because this unspeakable monster was delivering the baby and then cutting the spinal cord… of a fully viable baby.

There were other horrors, horrors that we’ve come to expect in this sort of thing, the same sort of horrors on any mass murderer’s den, or as a side effect of the camps in Nazi Germany.  It seems to be fairly common of the human mind to slide into things like body parts held for souvenirs, grisly jokes about the murdered and ultimately a devaluing of everyone else – Kermit Gosnell also used unsterilized instruments, perforated women’s uteri, left patients to die lying on filthy tables, covered with filthy blankets.

This type of devolution seems to be common to the human mind.  Yes, I know, you stand there and you tell me “Not me, I’d never do that.” But in fact, while it takes a special kind of evil (I almost typed “or insanity” but I won’t.  That’s me flinching from the truth.  I don’t think he’s insane at all.  He’s just evil.) to be Kermit Gosnell, it takes simply being normal to go along with it.

The thing that shocked me more than Kermit Gosnell’s actions, even his keeping of body parts in various containers, was his assistants.  These were mostly young, untrained, and their answers to why they did this were eerily familiar, “I was following orders.”

Look, let’s forget Hitler for a moment.  Mao.  The cultural revolution.  Millions dead, millions starved.  Yes, Mao was a mad man who will rot in hell (and to my atheist readers, rest assured if there ISN’T a hell I’ll make sure there is one just for him and Stalin.)  But Mao didn’t fan out to the countryside following his deranged orders, turning on his fellow man, forcing people to stop doing what they’d always done to grow food, reducing them to feral behavior and even cannibalism.

No, those were mostly “normal” people who’d lost their mooring on what they were and what their victims were and what made what they were doing monstrous.

Terry Pratchett says the only sin is treating people like things.  (Terry Pratchett is a secular humanist and therefore is clearly not properly trained in the ways of shame and guilt.  I could list a lot more sins just sitting here. Yes, this is said tongue in cheek.)  Robert A. Heinlein said that sin was hurting others.  Hurting yourself was just stupid.

They’re both right if not fully right.  Pratchett is right that in ultimate analysis, the last sin, the one that will rob you – yes you – of your own humanity is to get used to treating beings like you as things.  Heinlein is right on the hurt thing, which is another distillation of the Pratchett thing.  He is wrong that hurting yourself is just stupid.  Because when you treat others like things, it rebounds on you.  You start thinking of yourself as a thing.  And then you become… what humans become when they’re not trying to hold themselves up to any sort of ideal.  At the end of it the most normal human will end up snipping baby cords.

Christian,  Atheist, Agnostic Animist or  confused human beings who stop respecting humanity end up recreating the more lurid nightmares of Hieronymus Bosch.  It just happens.  It’s horrible and it’s human.

Which is why it’s important not just for us to decide where the line between human and non-human is, but to decide and to make it stick fast and bright.

Right now, it’s an individual line.

For instance, what Kermit Gosnell did was already against the law in Pennsylvania.  Pennsylvania doesn’t allow abortion after  what is considered a viable age.  (And they’re out of date.  It’s been 20 weeks for at least twenty two years because I counted that very carefully in my first pregnancy.  Yes, explanation of that will come later.)

It is not however against the law everywhere in the country.  There are states, where it is legal to do what he did (except for the filth, etc.)  with one minor change – the baby can’t be DELIVERED when you cut through his spinal cord.  So doctors will turn the baby so it will come out feet first, so they can snip the cord while the head is still in the birth canal and therefore the baby isn’t LEGALLY born.  Yes, women have this done.  Yes, doctors – presumably psychologically normal human beings do this.

And this is why Gosnell’s associates didn’t know there was anything wrong going on.  And this is why the authorities turned a blind eye.  Yes, it was illegal in PA – but I mean, it’s a minor thing and it can’t be intrinsically WRONG because it is LEGAL elsewhere.

In essence, any baby – in practical treatment in the US – until its head emerges from the birth canal is only a human if the mother says so.

Hospitals will go through untold effort to save a pregnancy at sixteen weeks because the mother wants that baby very much.  The same hospitals will go through untold effort to make sure another one ends, because the mother says so.

Yes, I’ve heard the justifications.  One of my friends who was horribly abused as a child is very pro-abortion because (she told me) “if my parents had aborted me, they wouldn’t have abused me.”  This is insane in more ways than one.  I shocked her and surprised her by telling her “They’d never have aborted you.  They wanted you very much.  They needed a scapegoat in the family.”  I shocked her and made her think, but as with any such deep-set convictions, it wore off.

That’s essentially the justification for believing that those the mother wants (BTW this is very similar to the Spartan culling system, where the father chose which babies would be exposed and therefore weren’t human) are human and the others aren’t.  It is believed wanted babies are happier or better cared for.  In this it’s forgotten that mothers can want babies for all sorts of reasons, and that “wanting” is transitory, if all the ads to give away 1 year old, 4 year old, 7 year old dogs on Craigslist are any indication.

When I was eight years old, my mother – and no, she’s not a naturally cruel woman, but you’d have to have known me at eight.  I’m sure I tried the patience of a saint – in the middle of a screaming argument, told me that I was only there because my father had found her appointment for her SECOND attempt at aborting me.  He’d told her if she succeeded he would walk out. (Yes, there was a first.  Yes, it might or might not have killed a twin, depending on what hint and mumble you believe.  Unless pushed beyond endurance, mom will not discuss such things.)

So, you see, as far as “mother’s choice” goes, I am not human.  Or does the choice change because when I was born extremely premature and riddled with the normal issues of such babies who are not given the most up to date assistance, she fought and spent a small fortune to keep me alive? (Because she doesn’t believe humanity is mother’s choice.  And for the curious, there are extenuating circumstances.  Mom believed – justifiably – that she should not have children.  She also lived in a place and time where there was no contraception.  It might have been technically available – I’m almost sure that condoms were – but if anyone bought them in the village, the ENTIRE VILLAGE WOULD KNOW.  In a Catholic – it’s in the constitution – country like Portugal, back in the sixties, this could lead to ostracism or worse.  So mom had an excuse for desperate measures.  I don’t have to like it, but I admit it was there.)

Does it do something to you to know you were not wanted?  Well, yes.  It’s not helped by hearing things like asthma, which I had until I was 12, called “the illness of the unwanted child” which they did when I was small – apparently believing it mostly psychological.  Thank heavens they don’t do that now.  (And I can assure you it’s wrong.  My second son was desperately wanted.)

However, even if the relationship with mom was always fraught until recent years, I LIKE being alive.  I think even mom would agree that it would be a pity for her to have succeeded.  (Well, she would agree now, I’m not a teen.  But that’s sort of normal, right?  I spent most of the boys’ teen years going “I should have stuck with cats.  They can’t be mass murderers.  No thumbs.”)

So, there’s my bias.  I think I’m human.  My mother would not have chosen me.  Am I human?  If you cut me, do I bleed?

It is of course, ritually required, at this point to say “of course I’m pro choice.”  As with other ritual observances, I’m not going to that church.

“Pro-choice” is a nice, bland affirmation, avoiding all sharp jagged questions of the “who is human?” debate.  Who isn’t pro-choice?  I like choosing my clothes, and how I do my hair, and I like choosing what I eat and drink.  But when it comes to choosing who is human, who chooses?  And why? And does it make any sense?  Does it make a bright, bright light so we know “this is like me.  This I must not devalue, lest I devalue me”?  Or is it hidden under the bed, and secretive, and case by case?

Mother’s choice of course evolved out of “women’s rights” because, well, doesn’t a woman have a right to her own body?

She most assuredly does.  What she does not indeed have the right to is someone else’s body.  I don’t particularly care where that body is.  You can’t say “but it isn’t right to have a woman enslaved for months to bear some child” unless you have some other way for humans to come into the world.  You want women not to be “enslaved” bearing children, you invent an external bio-womb.  What you’re raging at is nature.  It is inescapable.   And please for the love of BOB don’t tell me “What if it’s a rapist’s child?” – we will go into that, but for now just rest assured (I’d bet you money) that you’re descended from hundreds of rapists.  I guarantee it.  Does that make you less human?  No?  Then why is a child less human because he or she was fathered by a scumbag?  Let me assure you the tendency to rape is not hereditary, unless you believe the worst feminist claptrap where all penetration is violation.  Every man alive is descended from rapists.  And yet rape is a relatively rare occurrence.  (Anyone bringing statistics from NOW which consider “I changed my mind” rape, will get hit but hard.)

Part of this is looking at pregnancies with the hysteria of adolescence.  We all become crazy teeny boppers when we talk about it.  “I don’t want this child in me foooooooorever”.

Yes, I’m fairly sure my first pregnancy (I HATE being pregnant.  Yes, I love babies.  Shut up.  Are you always consistent?) lasted a geological age, give or take.  But now, twenty one years later?  It was a quick thing.  I mean, you hear people say stuff like “We’ll have to live in this place till our house is built.  Doesn’t matter much what.  It’s a few months.”  That’s all a pregnancy is to the mother.  A few months.  To the baby it’s life and a chance at liberty and the pursuit of happiness.

“But Sarah,” you’ll say “What about when the life of the mother is at stake?”

Well, that is different, isn’t it.  These are the dilemmas that try men’s souls.  There the decision would have to go to the mother, being sound of mind, or the nearest relative if not.  THAT is a case where it’s case by case.  And for the record, with #1 son I made that decision.  I had pre-eclampsia.  BAD pre-eclampsia for which I spent much time in the hospital and the rest of the time flat on my back.  I was told – argued at, cajoled – to have an abortion.  I chose not to.  I chose not to even though my husband would probably have chosen otherwise faced with losing me (The funny thing here is that every medical professional assumed he was the one not “letting” me have an abortion.  Apparently abortion is such an unalloyed good that women will NATURALLY want one, if the husband doesn’t stop it.)  It was not rational.  I risked both our lives, for nine months (PLUS THREE DAYS. – yes, I resent that) in order to chance that he’d come through all right.  It was what I had to do, because I wouldn’t be able to live knowing I’d killed him to go on.

Because that is the thing, see?  I couldn’t fool myself what I was killing wasn’t a human being.  We had worked too hard for that pregnancy, had ultrasounds from eight weeks in, KNEW he was there and was human.

So – am I saying all human life is human and therefore inviolable from the moment of conception?

I am and I’m not.  My friend Kate is very afraid that if abortion is made illegal there will be a period police making sure that if you missed a period, you don’t abort.  She says there are already laws criminalizing “bad behavior” while pregnant.  Well, all right.  There are laws criminalizing big gulps too (or were, in NYC) but there was no police measuring the cups.  There wasn’t because it’s physically impossible.  Even in a dystopian future, where a probe is inserted in each woman to notify you if she has bled, it would be impossible to correlate all the data and for human agents to take notice.  (Now if law enforcement is all done by robots it can be done.)  And the “mother’s bad behavior” thing is sort of like “hate crime” – persecutors will do that.

There is a time in every pregnancy where you can’t tell if it’s there.  I don’t know what the timing is NOW, but in my day it was “before the second missed period” you’re not officially pregnant.  I know that, because I miscarry early, and the only time I could get a doctor to intervene when it started, I had older son.  BUT the doctor intervened because I was at a specialized infertility clinic.  If I’d been at a regular hospital they’d have laughed at me.

I’d even go so far as to say that before the third missed period, a woman who wishes to fool herself (my mom, for instance who is, btw, anti-abortion) can say “I wasn’t really pregnant.”

And there are ways to stop a pregnancy WAY before that.  Yes, contraceptives fail, but there’s the morning after pill.  And if that fails, after the first missed period there are other interventions.

So, do I believe abortion should be illegal?  All the time?

I believe we have enough laws in the books.  I also believe murder is already illegal.  Whether it should be illegal or not is something else.  I can see reasons not to make it illegal.  BUT legal or not, (yes, there’s legal murder — self-defense) when murder happens, we know the person killed was a human.  That’s the important thing.  It’s not done lightly even when justified, the person killed is not robbed of his humanity.

Should we do the same with abortion?  Yes, there are justifiable causes (if the father decides to keep his wife and not the baby, say) but is the baby human? Until a woman gives birth to a litter of kittens, what a woman carries is a human being.  After that penumbra of the first two months (when most miscarriages occur, many of them unknown) if a woman aborts a child, yes it is murder.  It might be justified, but it is STILL killing a human. (It is the same in the first three months, but it is possible for people to fool themselves, and illusion is necessary for functioning human societies.)  What did you think she was killing?  A cabbage?  It’s a human, made of the same stuff you are – and don’t give me brain function or not being able to survive on his own.  By that definition, depending on who moves the line, you end up including everyone up to two years old.  The Chinese do.  Google China and dying rooms – to devalue him or her is to devalue yourself.

“Mother’s choice” is not working because it’s internally contradictory and nonsensical.  How can a woman be pregnant five months, and then suddenly the baby in her stops being wanted and therefore stops being human?

What makes you human?  Are you human?  What if your mother changed her mind?  Oh, you’re out of the womb?  Why should that matter?

Science is forever pushing back that line at which the baby is viable.  It’s also making other nightmares possible.  I’m not linking it here, but a commenter sent me a link to a blog talking about how it’s either already being done, or it can be done, that the ovaries of aborted babies can be grown to maturity in a few months, outside the body, and then the eggs can be used for “infertility therapies” – yep, egg donors.

So, are the babies born of those eggs human? Why?  Because their adoptive mother wants them?  Their real mother never got to be human.  How is that possible?

On the other side of that lies a chamber of unspeakable horrors.

We don’t need more laws.  I grew up in a country where abortion was illegal.  Page up to where mom tried to abort me once and had an appointment to do it again.  It was illegal. I have reason to think mom had several others.  I went to school with a girl who – at 17 – had had ten. (BTW, stories of coat hangers are mostly that.  Oh, it might have happened once or twice.  There are always the stupid and the isolated.  Most abortions were administered by doctors, quietly, and they were very careful because they didn’t want to get caught.  Most of them were also before the three month mark, for the same reason.  If people already knew you were pregnant, no doctor would do it.)

Laws against abortion won’t stop it, until the culture changes.  (Though at this point to stop the horrendous abortion mill-lobby, it’s almost worth it.  Almost but not quite.)

Abortions will still happen if we teach people what makes you human is your mother’s choice to have you or not.

Humans are funny animals.  RES said in comments “Oh, it’s easy to know what humans are.  They are people like me.  Not humans are those other people.”

This is at the basis of every human society.  “We’re human.  Those so and sos over there aren’t.”

The problem is, we’ve gone past tribes and we’re now looking at all of humanity.  You don’t have a dividing line between “human and non-human” that hinges on facial features or how they eat or where they live doesn’t apply.  And so the line has receded to “those who can’t fight back; those who can’t defend themselves.”

It’s a bad line.  If you can’t tell why let me explain.  As assuredly as I stand here, you too, no matter how vital, how strong, how full of assurance you’re human, had a time when others made decisions for you.  And as sure as I stand here, unless you’re very lucky, there will be a time they will again.

Who is human?  Make a decision that doesn’t hinge on case by case choice.  Decide whether it’s “before ten weeks there’s a high likelihood it won’t stick, anyway” or “We can kill them till they’re eighteen if they don’t park the car right.”  Make a decision and stick to it.

But before you do beware that people – normal people – will commit unspeakable crimes against those declared non human.  Be sure it’s something you can endure and that seeing their remains won’t break your heart and twist that which IS human in you.

I’m a libertarian.  It’s no part of my métier to tell you WHAT to choose.  I’m not pro-choice because when I DID have to choose, there was no choice.  It was “I can’t continue living with myself if I have him killed.” – that is me.  When I have to choose I will choose life. And not even (just) human life.  I’m not such a chowder head that I believe we must respect meat animals, (well, I wouldn’t be unnecessarily cruel.) The why of that is a discussion for another time.  BUT until then, I am the woman who will drive hours away in a snow storm to pick up a litter of orphaned kittens who probably won’t survive even with the best care I can provide.

That’s my bias.  I will choose life for humans and those animals which (living with us) partake a little of our humanity.

Your bias might be different.  But don’t fool yourself that it’s obvious, that we have the only system that makes sense, or that “of course” it’s this way.

Choose carefully between human and non human.  The wrong choice will leave you on the wrong side of it.  And no one will help.

Human societies hanker towards conformity.  This is the result of us being a social ape species.  Whether you think we were created out of the “clay” of Earth or you think we just growed, that’s the basis we’re built on.  If you’re a believer, it affords all kinds of cool commentary and speculation on the difference between fleshy self and divine ideal, and if you are a Christian more speculation can be added on the fall and Eden. None of it will be new, but it passes the time.  It’s useful when you’re all dead tired and want to talk to stay awake.

A comment in passing on the last post about how most of us Odds have been bullied as kids, and about how I like science fiction cons because I can be my own weird self was misinterpreted by a commenter (and incidentally, that commenter’s name comes up again and again in regard to White Supremacist, Holocaust revisionist sites.  Might be just a coincidence, but he/she/it bears watching.)  He decided I want to go to SF cons and be as outré as possible, and that you know, all of science fiction fandom is like that, and also that all of us should just have sucked it up and made ourselves normal.

I daresay most of did, in adolescence, or at least most of us probably can fit in daily conversation as grown human beings, with no issues; most of us have jobs; most of us have kids and managed them through school.

There is a difference between fitting in externally and breaking yourself to fit in.  This is why I compared it to being gay in the old bad days.  Most people could pass in public, but from what I understand from friends, it was good to have a place you could go and just talk normally without watching every word – even if the place wasn’t about sex (And yes, a lot of them were but a lot of them weren’t.  What Card missed about the gay community, possibly because he knew it best when he was young and so were his friends, is that a stunning lot of it is not about sex, but about acceptance.)

Science fiction and fantasy fans tend to be the same.  I’ll leave it as an exercise for the practical psychologist with time on his hands to determine whether we’re attracted to the genre because we’re odd, or if we’re odd because we’re attracted to the genre.  What I mean is, most writers and readers of science fiction are – to my knowledge “outliers.”  We do tend to be more creative – not a brag, for a lot of the fans and even some authors it’s largely undirected creativity — and more bookish/studious/interested than most “normal” people.  We also tend to be strange in another way.  People call it “spectrum” meaning autism spectrum, but I’ve found the correlation less than 100%.  My affect is not at all autistic or aspergers, and neither is my kids’ or my husband.  (Of course, for SF/F we’re almost scarily social, across all types of people including non-fans.)  What we are is people who are, as I indicated in my other post, likely to think about stuff no one else bothers with because it’s “normal” or “everyone knows.”  We will go “Okay, so everyone wears hats on their heads and shoes on their feet.  Why not the other way around?”  Now nine times out of ten the answer is immediately obvious and the fan over the age of 10 will get over it.  But sometimes there REALLY is no good reason.

My husband accidentally once found himself working in a group of all sf/fantasy fans.  The manager who didn’t read the genre once speculated that might be why they were the most creative and out of the box group he’d ever managed.  (They still couldn’t convince him to read it.)

What I mean is we consider and study stuff that other people would think is insane.

I’ve had moments of inducing sheer terror in total strangers while just hanging out with the kids.  Like the time Robert and I were discussing – purely in the b*llshooting mode, whether Neanderthals could be responsible for the legends of elves.  We were stuck somewhere for two hours, had to keep awake, and yep, the conversation went from theology and legends through biology, to anthropology and the latest archeological finds and back again.

Showing off?  Oh, heck no.  Most of it was qualified with “I haven’t kept up this year, but—”  We were JUST talking.  I noticed the couple stuck in the room with us looked first alarmed and then hostile.  (I’ll point out we weren’t being loud but neither were we whispering.)  Robert didn’t notice it until we were about to leave and the lady shrunk away from us, as though we were contaminated.  Then he asked me why and I explained.  A) they thought we were showing off.  B) they thought it was for their benefit.  C) they might have thought we wanted to intimidate them.

Robert’s reaction to it was “WHY WOULD WE.  THEY’RE STRANGERS.”  I pointed out to him that was why I’d let it go on, and not stopped it.  They’re strangers.  Their opinion doesn’t matter (due to circumstances, the chances of us ever meeting them are zero, just about.)  BUT learn to be aware most normal people have that reaction to our chit chat and avoid it when you want to avoid hostility from people you’re likely to meet again.  This too flabbergasted the young one “But mom, we weren’t even serious or deep or anything.  I mean, we couldn’t be without references.”  Then I had to explain his “odd meter” is calibrated wrong.

So, that’s our people.  I’m making no mention of weird costume (I dress appropriately to the occasion.  At steampunk cons that involves as close to Victorian attire as I can get without making a whole new costume.  Street clothes stick out.), Odd makeup (that’s mostly the young kids, unless it’s for a costume show), Odder piercings (the new normal in my kids’ age group), or bizarre tattoos (ditto.)  Some people decide if they’re not going to be accepted, they’ll go the other way, but most of us remain normal enough to hold jobs and look decent.

What I meant was that at a con, I get to say “Well, you know, I wonder how this or that would change if we went to the stars” and no one looks at me like I’ve just grown a second head.

Also, most of us were REALLY bullied in childhood.  I might be the exception.  I was outsized for a Portuguese kid of my generation and because my parents had a policy of “no tale bearing.  Deal with it yourself” I learned early to fight back.  This meant that people DID try to make me fall in line by shaming/beating/stealing, etc and got it right back with interest.  (And btw, as a kid my oddities that led to attempted bullying were as follows: I was too big.  I didn’t have pierced ears.  And I wore pants (I was very sickly and mother thought I was better in pants than in the skirts all other little girls wore.)  So, as you see, my weirdness DID indeed need to be curbed – rolls eyes.)

The commenter was right this is in fact “normal.”  When an ape cub is too different, the others kill it – and that’s if the parents don’t do it first.

What he fails to explain is how this is desirable, other than maintaining genetic cohesion.  He/she/it also fails to note that in fact had this not slipped now and then, there would be no humans, only apes.  Perhaps he thinks that’s better.  I mean, apes are more normal, after all.

To those who try to make SF fans fall in line with the rest of the world because it’s “normal” as well as to the new arrival making vague accusations and trying to shame me to fall in with the rest of science fiction  (Check out, what?  I’m not going to spend the day googling.  I’m not an aut’eur.  I work  for a living and I have books and stories to finish.)  my answer is the same it was to the bullies in school: you’re insecure and small and therefore try to control the thoughts and behaviors of others.  You can’t.  You can only control your own.  DO try it, for a while.  It will be healthier for all concerned.

When any government, or any church for that matter, undertakes to say to its subjects, “This you may not read, this you must not see, this you are forbidden to know,” the end result is tyranny and oppression, no matter how holy the motives. Mighty little force is needed to control a man whose mind has been hoodwinked; contrariwise, no amount of force can control a free man, a man whose mind is free. No, not the rack, not fission bombs, not anything — you can’t conquer a free man; the most you can do is kill him. – Robert A. Heinlein.

That goes double with sugar on top for any fandom (even when referring to other author’s blogs) and any enforcer of normalcy in or out of it.  You can’t win here, and we will not back down.

Weirdly, this is not a post about national politics.  Yeah, I know, I’m deceptive that way.  It’s on account of being one of them unreliable science fiction authors.  We won’t go into all the other kinds of unreliable I am, either.  That is likely to come out during this post and most assuredly you shall have to deal.

First of all the links on this post are going to be nonexistent, except for the original one, though I don’t object if people supply them in the comments.  I’m not linking them because just revisiting those sites will have me reaching for the blood pressure medicine I don’t got.

For those who are not of my people or who are and have been living under a rock – I was, until someone enlisted me by rubbing my lamp three times.  The rock is called novel writing.  It’s what I happen to do for a living.  It puts groceries on the table – there is a civil war going on in science fiction.

It started when one of the icons of the field, Orson Scott Card wrote something FOR HIS CHURCH MAGAZINE saying that you couldn’t be a practicing homosexual and a member of the church.  That’s where he started.  I don’t know what he said since, when provoked – I had occasion to witness on this very blog rational people who have more in agreement than not going after each other with rapiers once the “your mama too” started, so I think what people say once an argument starts should not be held against them.  (If it were, my 28 and change year marriage would have ended at the one month mark.)  In fact, if it’s someone I’m arguing with, I try to forget the unforgivable things we BOTH said.  I’m pretty good at it.

Anyway, I don’t know if Mr. Card got more vociferous and general as he went on.  One of my gay friends told me he had advocated having all gay people killed which, having read the original article and Mr. Card’s fiction, seems HIGHLY unlikely.  I trust my friend, but I think she got something at a third or fourth remove.

To begin with let me say I disagree with Mr. Card’s premise in his article.  His premise is the idea that if someone belongs to the “homosexual community” one will not be able to belong wholeheartedly to another.  I’m not disputing how he came to that conclusion or that the conclusion was right for his time and circumstances.  Part of it is that he identified the “homosexual community” as one that “gives access to sex.”  While it undoubtedly is that, I can tell from my friends who stay in it when they’re in monogamous relationships, or whose community includes homosexuals of the other sex that this is not it.  It’s “a community that grants you acceptance” and “a community where you don’t have to pretend.”  (Keep those key phrases in mind, they’ll come up later in a different context.  Also, there will be a test on Friday.)  And this is the difference between giving that community all your allegiance and considering it just a part of your life, and not incompatible with your religion.  When any community is excluded, goes underground, it becomes an all consuming milieu, reaching out to confuse your other allegiances.  See, for instance, Catholics in Tudor England.  It doesn’t however make that an inherent characteristic of whatever caused the community to appear.  Presumably, in a world in which homosexuality is universally accepted with a shrug (whether such world is ever possible I leave for the science fiction writers in our midst.  I doubt it) it becomes just one of those things.  “My friend Mike is a nice guy.  He likes cats and he reads science fiction.  He makes cute sculptures of dragons.  His husband is trying to get him to enter a con art show.”

BUT all that is to our purpose nothing, because the point is not whether I agree or disagree with Mr. Card or whether or not homosexuals are unable to participate in other communities because of dual loyalties.

No, the point is that as people talked more and more about what Card said, Mr. Card – who is to the left of me by some miles – became a pariah in science fiction.  No, wait there.  People attempted to make Mr. Card a pariah in science fiction… for saying that he didn’t think homosexuals could be good practitioners of their religion.

This would be like my writing an article for my church newsletter pointing out that you should pray daily and people coming down on me like a ton of bricks saying I wanted to force atheists to pray.

Wait – what?

A magazine devoted to a faith, saying who can or cannot – according to this person – in good conscience practice his faith while being true to his orientation has made a storm in science fiction as people posted defending and attacking him.  HOW does that even happen?  WHO CARES what the man thinks about who can and cannot practice his faith?  Most of science fiction is atheistic, with some form of Wiccan running a close second… so far as I know.  (That too will come up for discussion later.)  For years I assumed being devout in one and steeped in the lore of another traditional religion I was an odd being and it was best for all if I kept my lip buttoned up in public.  What do they care – truly – if Mr. Card believes that homosexuals can’t be good LDS members?  I’d assume the LDS homosexuals among his readers would roll their eyes and go “place and time, and the man comes from it” – i.e., his opinions belong to a certain place and time, and then wonder when his next book will come out.

If I told you that those among you who have split fingernails cannot now nor ever join the Holy Church of Ritual Martian Flogging, would you go nuts?  Would you engage in ritual cries of “kill the witch”?  No?  Okay, maybe it’s because the church is made up, so let me try this again with something not a church.  How about if Orson Scott Card had said in a Chess Fanciers magazine that unless you knew how to play chess you shouldn’t join the club.  Is that reason for outrage?

I mean, you can disagree with him, and with his analysis of the situation, but would you call him names over that?  No?

Then why has this ignited a civil war, that has caused people like Brad Torgersen to be considered very bad for defending Card?  What has caused the rift splitting the increasingly more irrelevant SFWA?

First of all, this civil war is a sign of a very sick community.  Second, like the spike of fever that kills the virus, it’s a good thing, even though it looks like it might kill the patient.

We’ll start on how science fiction has been sick – onto the death.

Brad Torgersen says that science fiction should be a place to explore ideas, even (particularly) offensive and outrageous ideas, and that recently we’ve become bland.

It’s the particular way we’ve got bland and boring that is weird.  REALLY WEIRD.

Science fiction is a literature of the Odds.  That’s central to who we are.  Most people don’t think about the technology and society they’re steeped in, for the same reason most fish (if they were sentient) wouldn’t think about water.  But we do.  We think about what societal what causes this, and how technology changes that, and then we foretell how it would change things.  Or we say “in a society with magic, how would that affect—”

It’s our job.

At its inception science fiction gave free rein to all thoughts of weird thoughts.  To this day science fiction allows a great leeway to personal behavior.  If there is a place on Earth you can show up wearing a live duck and have people ask you about the technical details of the costume, it’s science fiction.  To that extent, fans and other authors are “my people” and it’s a place I can decompress.  Like gays in the bad closet days finding a place they could be themselves, science fiction conventions allow me to be my own weird self without people shying away from me.  As a friend of mine puts it “we are the plaid sheep of our families.”  And the best place to hide is the flock.

The problem is that any community – ANY community – but particularly an excluded community (see what I did there?) will tend to try to form cohesion along the lines of common thought and common belief.  You might think that Odds would not try to enforce a rigid conformity, but you would be wrong.

It happened gradually.  Part of it is that most of us are used to be looked at askance and treated like abnormal.  A stunning number of us were bullied as children.  This means we tend to have an over developed empathy with any group identified as “victims.”  That, plus the fact that the publishing gatekeepers are the result of the long march and are – no, this is not under dispute – varying shades of red going from slightly to the right of Lenin to slightly to the left of Stalin. (Why is this not under dispute?  Because of the number of authors who identify themselves as communist.  Because there is in Science Fiction a young communist authors group.  People OPENLY identify as communist, and there’s no repercussion in their careers.  People don’t openly identify as conservative UNLESS they came in at a different time and their careers are secure.  If you think that’s because only leftists are creative or that this means the community is becoming more enlightened, you are part of the problem.  Go to the corner and meditate how identifying with a regime responsible for the death of a hundred million is “enlightened.  Or how any community EVER has achieved uniformity of opinion, unless it is EXTERNAL and enforced by authorities.  Good Lord, even today we have flat Earthers.  BUT you think that everyone who writes science fiction just is magically “left”?  I hope you are a fantasy author.)

I swear the eighties was a long slog of abused women in science fiction and fantasy books.  They were always abused by their fathers, too, who were tyrannical evil sobs.  The idea that mothers can be horrible parents too, never seemed to occur to these female writers. There was always a sisterhood of women.  As someone who has known any number of ‘orrible mothers, and who went to an all girls’ school the whole “sisterhood of those who possess vaginas” made me want to shred kittens.  (Shuddup.  I didn’t do it.  I’m just saying how mad it made me.  You know how I feel about cats.)  Even when the books were somewhat acceptable otherwise, it annoyed me to the point a lot of them went unread.

Then came the every woman a hero every man a wimp movement.  (Yes, Athena is more than normal.  Yes, she is strong. She is also hotheaded and foolish and, btw, Kit is far more than a match for her.)  And then…

Well, every fad of the left falls into science fiction and fantasy books, even the patently, absurdly ridiculous.  Like, oh, for instance, the idea that all male sexuality is dangerous, the idea that a society of women would be peaceful forever, the idea–  Too much to go on.  Suffice it to say the most awarded short story in our history – receiving every award in the field – posits that life in an American Suburb is more exclusionary and worse than life during China’s cultural revolution.

HOWEVER commentary by someone otherwise respected in the field, in a CHURCH magazine to the extent that homosexuals might have conflicts with being good LDS members occasions cries of “kill the witch.”

Oh, my people!  Not only are you trying to enforce conformity, but you’re trying to enforce a conformity so out of touch with the rest of society that what you think is right and worthy to publish strikes most people as “OMG, kill.”  Which probably explains the spiraling down print runs.  Those of us already fans and writers yawn, the rest of the world backs away screaming.

This too is human – any excluded community will become more and more extreme – but is it art?

It’s been like this for years.  In a way I’m gratified to know that indeed what we say and do even in other contexts is being tracked.  Those of us on the right (to the extent a libertarian who, in the words of the Professor, believes it’s a good future when married gay couples have closets full of assault weapons and their kids once of legal age can buy pot at the corner store is “right” – which by itself is a mind-blowing idea) have long suspected this.  Now that we see the enforcers of conformity publically turn on an icon in the field, all the stories we heard of silent blackballing at publishers, of whispers campaigns among fans seem starkly plausible.  Likely even.  Which is good.  You’re not paranoid when they really are out to get you.

Again, the fact that to get published we had to go through a funnel of ideologically left editors and publishers (with the obvious exception) didn’t help.

So in a way, the civil war in the field has been going on forever.  It’s only that it was a cold civil war.  The rest of us wanted to get published.  We kept our mouths shut.  If we opened them only Baen would take us, and Baen has a limited number of author slots.  (Plus some of the stuff we wanted – and by that I mean I wanted – to write is not Baen-like.)  And baby had to have shoes.  (In my case baby always wore specialty shoes because… well, at 21 he wears size seventeen.)

At World Fantasy, in 2003, the speaker, apropos nothing, assured us that Howard Dean was our next president.  I can’t speak for my fellow righties in the closet (when a community is excluded it goes underground) but I could literally feel my face freeze at that.  We were a captive audience, and there was no reason on Earth to bring in politics.  Except the speaker could.  And the establishment approved of it.

Think – would this be tolerated at any company dinner?  Unless the company were “ye old factory of Democratic Party Buttons,” probably not, and even then, you know, supporters of other candidates might feel abused.

But in science fiction and fantasy, it was expected.  It garnered applause.  And those of us who were sick to our stomach had to applaud too.  (In North Korea Dear Leader has a hundred percent of the vote and is applauded at every parade.)

So what has changed?

You know we’ve found that revolutions happen not when oppression is at its worse, but when it starts to liberalize.  THEN, when people have options, they show what they always felt.

And so the civil war has gone hot, at least to the extent of heated words.  I should mention here the kerfuffle between the Locus April Fool’s Day article and the ever more stereotypical Wiscon, in which the April Fool’s article having suggested that every con goer should have to wear a burka (which would be available up to size 5x) the feminists of wiscon became determined to prove they are in fact stereotypical feminists (how many feminists does it take to screw in a lightbulb?  That’s not FUNNY!!!)  The last I heard that particular sub-branch of the civil war had devolved into feminist whining (yes, I’m going to get crucified.  One wonders if they ever hear themselves) that this is just bullying and that noooooo one should say anything mean about either Islam or feminism.  (What the h*ll makes THEM out of bounds?) and that besides, it stereotypes every feminist as fat (apparently this is based on a lack of reading comprehension.  They missed where the burka was for BOTH sexes.  Size 5x?  Likely.  Look, guys fandom is hefty.  Maybe ebook readers that require us – yes, I said us.  Could use losing sixty pounds — to run to keep them on would help?)

The beautiful thing?  Despite the “that’s not funny” foot stomping, the “right” of the isle is not stopping.  That Locus article got published, which I don’t think it would have been even five years ago.  And authors are taking to the internet to mock the screams of “bully” by the people who don’t want EVER to be the bout of a joke.  (Dear ladies, and particularly gentlemen, welcome to humanity.  LEARN to laugh at yourself.  It makes other jokes less likely.)

A lot of my colleagues who are engaging the left are DEPENDENT on traditional publishing other than Baen, which makes their stand even more brave.

However, even for those not engaging in it, there is already the awareness indie is there.  Opening your mouth the wrong way doesn’t mean the end of your career.

Which means the war isn’t going to stop unless one of two things happens: one side emerges victorious; an armistice is reached.

News for my colleagues on the left: For years we’ve put up with whatever you dished out.  We had to.  We didn’t scream, we didn’t complain.  We are even tolerant enough to like your books and admire your artistry, EVEN when we think what you’re proposing is wrong and perhaps evil (a world of all women.  Communitarian worldwide societies.)  We understand the difference between ideas and those who have them.

It’s harder for you.  Politics is your religion.

However, I URGE you to come to terms as soon as possible.

Up till now given a limited output, already pre-veted, it was easy for you to freeze out anyone who outraged you.  But indie has opened the sluice gates.  You might (for all I know.  Again, when a community is excluded, it goes underground) be a majority in sf writers now for all I know.  I GUARANTEE you’re a tiny minority in the population.  Now that the gates have opened and anyone can write SF and sell well and be admired, it probably won’t be long before you’re a minority in sf/f writing.

Do you really want to put what “we don’t all agree on” out of bounds.  Is that what you want to do?  Do you want to have horrible things said about you in the future because your character isn’t religious?  Or heterosexual?

As someone who believes in equality before the law and definite differences between the sexes, someone who is – furthermore – a religious, heterosexual woman, I have found myself writing a super gurrrrl and a gay hero.  Much to my own shock.  Art is like that.  It comes out of nowhere, womps you on the head and, if you’re lucky, the truth you write is bigger than yourself or your times.  (I’m convinced Shakespeare thought he was writing regime propaganda and bawdy jokes.  BUT his subconscious or his muse or G-d or whatever you wish to believe is behind it, had other plans.)

I don’t want to have stones thrown at me by the right OR the left because whatever I wrote doesn’t fit the message.  You want a message?  Use Western Union.  You want art?  You have to allow it to happen.

Which means you have to allow people the right to think freely.  Yes, a lot of them will have stupid ideas.  (What, you think your sh*t don’t stink?)  Yes, a lot of them will offend you.  (Communist ideas offend me, but do I come and shut you down?)

Unless someone actually has the power to send police to your door to enforce their stupid ideas, you can learn to live with it.

You do not in fact have the right to stop people thinking thoughts you don’t like.  No, it’s not unfair and bullying if people laugh at you.  Yes, it hurts like hell but there’s a reason for the old saying “Sticks and stones may break my bones.”   And besides, ladies and gentlemen, you’ve been aiming ridicule at the other side for years, in the firm belief there was no one here but us chickens.  (Some of us are dragons.  We just also happen to lay eggs.)

Now, either shake on it, shrug and go “the other side is a bunch of loons, but heck, some on my side are too” and then go write a novel or continue your fight to the death and make cons a lot more entertaining (I’ll have to attend more!) as you reenact the Hatfields and the McCoys.  I’m fairly sure which side will win.  And in either case, I don’t much care.  As long as no one physically stops me from writing my own odd stuff, I couldn’t care less.  And with the gatekeepers down, who is going to stop me?

The civil war turning hot just means one side is not being iced out.  It’s a sign of freedom, and a sign this field might yet become healthy again.

And I have a novel to write.

UPDATE:  Hey, look, I remembered to press the publish button!  Kudos for me.  I think that novel writing should come with a label “Warning, writing a novel might make the writer unfit to operate heavy (or light, like blenders!) machinery, mind small children, tie his/her own shoes or cross the street unaccompanied.

UPDATE: to subscribers, there will be content up this evening.  This is tax-weekend and I just had “unexpected errands” tm as the tax preparer in the family is in the office dealing with the numbery (totally a word) things.

I WAS WONDERING WHY THIS HAD NO COMMENTS.  DERP.  IT’S BEEN HERE SINCE 9 am.  I THOUGHT I’D PRESSED PUBLISH.  DERP DERP DERP.  I’m sorry.

*This is the new free novel I’m posting here a chapter at a time.  For previous chapters, page back to two weeks ago.  This is pre-first-draft, as it comes out.  It is a sequel to Witchfinder which will soon be taken down (once edited) and put for sale on Amazon.  Meanwhile, if you donate $6 or more, I’ll get you a copy of Rogue Magic, once finished and edited, in your favored ebook format.  Of course, if you’re already subscribing to the blog at a level at which you get whichever books come out that year, you don’t need to worry.   This book will acquire at least a temporary cover soon, I swear.  BUT not this week, because I’m still working on my website, I have a couple of short stories to finish and — this being the last weekend before a bunch of busy weekends, I’m going to take sometime off too.*

The Devil’s Child

Wolfe Merrit, Overseer to the Earl Of Savage’s properties and manufactories:

I guess my problem has always been birds with broken wings.  When I was little those were real.  There were any number of birds with broken wings, and of sad naked things fallen out of nests that I’d brought home, all wrapped in my handkerchief, and which my mother let me nurse by the kitchen fire.  Most died, of course, though that got less so as my powers came on.

And what can any man who is a cottager and the son of a farmer want with magical power, much less a magical power that’s bent on healing, who’s to know?  I misdoubt me that my dear mother was ever unfaithful to my father, besides the fact that I have my father’s same identical face. So, wherever the magical power comes from it must be from very far in the family.  Some Lord’s daughter that fell from grace, or some cottager girl who strayed with a Lord.

That was shame enough, that I had the magic, but you couldn’t hide it, and if we tried to then the village was more likely to say that there was something shameful in it and that it was my mother’s fault or my father’s mother even.  And so, I was sent to magic school proper, though that meant going to classes at the local elf-orphans home.  But I was treated right, as an out pupil, and my mother paid for it with the money from taking in washing, and when a position came up with the Earl of Savage I was ready to take it.

We’d just never told anyone that it was healing magic, because, as my father said, that’s woman’s power, and what did a man want with a woman’s bend on his magic.  Not as bad as foretelling, but bad enough.  And there was no point making people talk.  My marriage was bad enough.  And the child.

The thought of Jimmy, as I sat here, across the desk from the Earl of Savage made the doubt come up in my mind again, but I tried not to think of it.  I sipped the brandy to steady myself and said, “Yes, sir.  It’s gone rotten.  It comes apart and it does things as it was not meant to.  And that’s the long and the short of it, milor’.  And I think the strain comes from another world.”

Which of course, brought to mind Jimmy again, and Jimmy’s mother too.

It was the bird that falls from the nest thing, all over again, that is what my mother said.  And she was right too, even if she said it with her temper flaring up and that tone in her voice, like she disapproved.  Which she undoubtedly did.

Because what business a farmer’s son has either bringing home a naked elf lady he found wandering the forest, all out of her mind, or marrying her either, no one knew, not even myself who’d done it.

But we’d kept it from the Savages, and the marriage had lasted so little – she’d disappeared right after Jimmy’s birth – that there was no reason they should know.

Except Jimmy.  Fairyland was another world, wasn’t it?  And couldn’t they be tainting the savage magic through me?

“What did you use to determine that?” the Earl asked.  He’s a well setup man and some would say handsome, though as I thought that I heard my mother say in my head that handsome is as handsome does, and right enough, and what the Earl of Savage looks like is his grandfather, and what his grandfather done wasn’t handsome by any description.

“I used the Vanal variations,” I said.  “And I ran the Terobynian formulas.  It all points to magic from another world, milor’”

He looked at me, his eyes narrowing in speculation.  When I knew his grandfather he was an old man, leastwise when I knew him as an employee.  I knew of him since my birth, just about.  The women in the village called him old Nick and not just because his name was Nicholas, and cautioned any comely young girl – or boy, the old soot not caring much – to keep away from him.

He had been a handsome man, even then, well set up, with a full head of dark hair, and that unlike his son as would make anyone else doubt the relation, particularly since the village – and other villages around – were full of cottager children with that same handsome physiognomy.

The thing was, the old man wasn’t bad.  Not when you considered his son.  He was a lush and a lecher, and he didn’t do repairs to the cottages, and he didn’t care for the land and let it go to rack and ruin, and it was said he spent more on a pair of horses than a family would make in ten years, and he didn’t care, but he wasn’t bad.

You could sit – I found – and talk to him, and if you had a real problem, he would help you.  He had magic enough, and he did a magic examination of me when he hired me, that he must have known about the healing pull in my magic, and he’d never cared.

Yes, I understood I was lucky enough that when I was hired at eighteen the Good Lord had already blessed me with a face that would make no one weep but my mother and that not for joy, and that I was built like the men of the land, squat and blocky and not lank and graceful as old Nick liked them.  But to me, in his dealings with me, he was a fair master and a good one.

His son, on the other hand—

It had started with “I like to have the distinctions of rank preserved” all from that pale, tight lipped mouth, with those eyes that looked at you like you were dirt.  And while I’m not some kind of radical, nor meaning to overturn the order of society and magic, there is no reason to behave as though you’d like to trample others under your boot, that there isn’t.

So, now I watched the new Earl.  I hadn’t exactly cried big tears for the old Earl, not I, but my grandmother used to say “the devil that comes after me will make you fond of me” and that had been the truth right enough with the last two earls, and I wondered if it would be true again.  He hadn’t treated me scaly, and he didn’t seem high on the instep.  His verifying questions were what any man might ask, faced with the problem.  And he looked like his grandfather, though that might not mean anything.  He and his sister, Lady Helen, were the only ones in the family that looked like the old devil.  I’d caught a glimpse of her, once, long ago, going around a corner, and I remember thinking as you’d never know such a face as the old boy had could flatter a woman but it did.

The Earl of Savage turned from fiddling with things on his desk.  He looked tight controlled, like his father, and high strung, and very much in command, but then he looked at me.

I’ve seen a horse look like that, once.  He had broken a leg and lay, in pain till we could give him mercy.  Only there wasn’t anyone with a pistol, no one who could shoot him, and we didn’t want to hack at him with a knife, and he lay there so long that his screams ceased, and he was alive, but looked like he’d rather be dead.  His eyes had been stony with suffering, and that’s what the earl’s eyes looked like.

First you might think they were proud or closed-off, but when you looked close it was just he had gone through so much pain that at some time he’d quite shut off.

He dropped to his chair, behind his desk, and looked at me with those stone-suffering eyes, and said, “Well, what can we do?”

And I said “Milor’” because the man was only ten years or so younger than me, so I couldn’t call him “son” which was a good thing.  It would be a right mess if I had, and besides, an Earl is rather too large a naked bird to be wrapped in my handkerchief and brought home to mother’s fireside.

“If we don’t do anything, the manufacturies will close.”  A shadow crossed the suffering eyes.  “I don’t suppose we can live off the land.”

I shook my head.  Old Nick had done for that and well enough.  Too many years of selling off any piece that wasn’t entailed.  Too many years of taking it all out and putting nothing in.

“No,” he said.  “I didn’t think so.  And my sisters must have their portions.  My brothers, too, must have something to start in life.  I suppose I could sell myself on the marriage mart.  A title must be worth something, even with my reputation.”

I didn’t say anything.  I’d heard some of his reputation, which was that he was following in old Nick’s footsteps.  But his tender concern for his siblings was something I’d never heard from Old Nick.  No, and not from Old Nick’s son, either.

He rubbed at his nose, a gesture that made him seem all of three years old.  “Well.  What can’t be cured, must be endured.  We’ll do what we can, and hopefully get enough at least for my siblings’ needs.”

Which is when we heard the running steps outside the door and someone burst in, behind me.  By the time I turned around, I’d already seen the Earl’s expression freeze, and when I turned around I realized why – the person who’d come running was a maid.  Truth be told, she was probably a twinnie, somewhere between kitchen drudge and cleaning maid and no more than 13 or so.  That she’d burst running into the Earl’s office bespoke a lack of firmness on the Earl’s part that made me want to throw the whole thing over and go back to the land and be a farmer, like my father.  Only at the price corn was bringing…  And besides, my older brother Tom had the land.

But the girl bobbed three curtseys in turn, one after the other, then said in a fainting voice, “It is this letter milord.  It was on Lady Helen’s bed when I went to make it.  And… and her carpet bag is missing, and I thought–  I thought you’d want it right away.”

I wasn’t so stupid that lady Helen, the carpet bad, and the letter didn’t add up to an awful picture.  My mouth dropped open as the very pale earl of Savage reached for the letter.

It was a whole family of birds with broken wings

Mike Resnick once got in horrible trouble for saying “Poor f*cked up Africa” in public.  I wonder what “poor f*cked up Western Civilization” will get me?  Probably nothing, because as a culture we love to beat up on ourselves.  Which is rather the problem.

Humans are tribal.  We in the United States tend to forget that, mostly because any family can have about ten different shades of skin and because we all (okay, not me) have at least a grandparent who spoke another language.  So we think of ourselves as tribe-free.

We’re not, of course.  Our tribe is not defined by blood but by the words of the Constitution and the birth certificate that is the Declaration of Independence.  (You should see the VERY puzzled emails I get from friends abroad who read A Few Good Men.  “I like the story, and I love the characters, but it’s so… so… political… and American… and Political.”  And for the record, no, I wasn’t even trying to be political.  It’s Nat and Luce’s book, and they MADE me write it.)

The tribalism in the US is loose, and it has always been.  We’re a nation of scraps.  We can – and do – condemn the actions of our own country rather vigorously.  They weren’t necessarily (or probably) our ancestors.  But it is still there.  G-d help us if it stops being there.

But we tend to forget tribalism abroad. And h*ll EUROPEANS who should know better tend to forget tribalism.

Part of the reason I’ve been foretelling doom for the UE since before its inception was three fold: Economic – part of the issue is that the meetings I was present at, they assumed what made the US successful was size.  (No, seriously.  Of course, we’re now on our way to proving that what made the US – once – successful was no central micro management.)  Demographic – population had already started falling with my generation, and it’s gotten worse since.  Tribal- this was the most important.  I’m shocked it is not the first one to hit.  Europe can be tribal at a level Americans can’t even understand.  While you guys who grew up here had grandparents who zipped in cars the length of the country (okay, zipped might be an exaggeration, but while at the Naval Academy, Heinlein bought a car and drove cross country with his friends) I had parents for whom a trip to the next village over was an all-day endeavor.  Oh, they had buses, but the schedule as iffy, the stops frequent and…  My mom will still say, in complete lack of irony “Those people from that village, they’ve always been—” even though these days that village is mostly a dormitory for the big city, as is ours.  (Sometimes the reasons for this are literally tribal and can be inferred from the name of the village.  For instance we had a very poor opinion of Alfena.  Americans are now all too familiar with that first syllable, so I don’t need to explain.)

The reason – as I understand it, but correct me if I’m wrong and if one of you is a specialist (not even rare on this blog) – that Indo Europeans, which we now think were not a race but a conglomeration of peoples, a loose federation of culture if you will, did so well was that they could somehow set aside tribalism.  It was a mental hardware reboot.  Instead of taking over the fallen enemy, killing all the males, raping all the women, making all the pre-pubescent boys slaves, they co-opted them.  In fact, they co-opted people who weren’t even enemies, but just at the periphery of their expanding area.

Now, the theory – my favorite, for obvious reasons – of how this happened, was stories.  There were the old men of the tribe, who stood up and told the sagas of heroes.  It’s hard to tell exactly, because that we know (this might change.  We’re discovering far older writing than we knew existed in various regions all the time) these people had no written language.  HOWEVER so far as we can tell from remaining fragments of sagas and poems (which stayed in the culture long enough to be written down) the culture was based on and expanded through great big banquets at which long sagas that made the Iliad look tame were told.

I like this idea, because it means western civ, at its oldest implementation was ultimately based on a story.  On the story of who we were.

Unlike all those little tribal societies, based ONLY on shared blood and the amount of shared blood, at that, Western Civ existed solely based on the idea of western civ.  Christianity added to this. It created a supernational identity.  But it was still a Western Civilization identity.

And it evolved, as Christianity gave way to enlightenment, as the divine right of kings gave way to republics, because the story remained.  The story went something like this: “We are the biggest, baddest fighters around and the most civilized too.”

The two were intertwined.  Partly I think because of that Christianity overlay, though probably going back because of a tribal G-d overlay.  “We conquer because we our gods kick their gods’ asses.” Became “We conquer because we have the G-d of Christianity on our side.”

Military victory was proof of righteousness and vice versa.  This not only gave you the ability to deal roughly with the other side (though Western civ was NEVER as rough as the more basic, tribal civilizations) but to impose our laws on them mercilessly.

The fact that by and large Western civ is the most successful (in terms of bringing about prosperity and unlocking individual potential) of the human mental hardware we call culture isn’t invalided by the fact that in certain times and in certain places we were more brutal than the savages.  (To believe so is something College Professors do, but they themselves are a weird primitive tribe full of strange and atavistic beliefs and we need not regard them.)   Atrocities are part of being a human beast.  Christianity both teaches that, and makes people want to deny it.  As it filtered through the culture it changed “We’re good because we beat the other guys” to “we’re god because we’re kind and merciful.”  This is not a bad thing, as it makes international commerce easier.  Or at least less explosive.  It meant, though, that Western Civ started self criticism.  What allowed us to beat our swords into plowshares, also set up a deep cultural conflict over war.  (We can debate whether or not communism hooked into this as a virus hooks into a healthy cell, as a way to destroy us.)

It was perhaps inevitable that eventually the new ethos would go to war with the old ethos.  What was not inevitable was that it would rip the culture apart.  Though it was inevitable once the power of stories had taken to the news press and started being in the hands of a small elite who had their own principles and purposes (and here we come up against the aims of international Marxism abroad.)

I’ve said before that we were still suffering from WWI.  In fact we’re suffering from both wars, the long war of the Twentieth Century.  As RES has mentioned in comments before, the war paused just long enough to grow another generation for the butcher mills.

Part of it was that the early twentieth century was the end diffusion of Christianity.  Which by itself tells you how long an idea REALLY takes to diffuse through a culture.  Look, we see it in the US with Political Correctness.  Does anyone really believe all their shibboleths? (MAYBE the organizers of Wiscon.  Sorry, ran into a post yesterday in which they screamed outrage (again) at the April 1 post and justified EVERY stereotype about feminists.)   No sane person could.  “Women must always be free” can’t mesh with “Muslims have the right to put women in burkas and treat them like chattel.”  (And sorry, Wiscon feminists.  While not every Muslim does that, the culture DOES devalue women.  And every country that falls under the sway of a Muslim government does that.  They also kill homosexuals, which meshes badly with “everyone must be allowed to be who they are.”  Personally I have a pact with a gay friend.  They’ll push a wall over him the minute after they put me in a burka (which will take killing me) and vice versa.)

People can pretend to believe the strangest things and go along to get along, but that’s not how they act when they can get away with it, and…  Things don’t always match words.  So, Christianity was accepted because the king had accepted it (most places) and it made life easier.  But the old “we can kick their asses because we’re us” ethos of Indo European culture remained, beneath.  It is as I said what created “We win, because G-d is on our side.”

This was a reasonable compromise while the enemy wasn’t – largely – Christian and part of Western Civ.  When it was – WWI – it set up a bizarre splitting reaction.  Part of Nazism – besides bad economic ideas and crisp uniforms, which are also a penchant of the human race everywhere – was a return to the ethos of paganism and tribalism.  “We can beat their asses, because our race is superior.”  It can’t have been taken seriously by most people.  It just can’t.  Even Germans knew they had many races within their country.  (As “races” were defined then, in which definition, I’m a different race from my husband.  I’ll note my family refers to our kids as “mixed race.” Tribalism.)  BUT it was a reaction to “we’re the same people and we just killed masses of each other.”

And because Germany was point-man for Western civ the revelations of what was really happening after WWII didn’t help the self-image of Western civ.

(And it’s no use at all saying “every German knew.”  You know that’s bs, and I know that’s bs.  How many people in the US do you think know about no-knock raids or drone killings?  Some, sure.  But we live in a world with internet.  Never underestimate the power of a compliant press.  We did that in November.  We’re still doing it.  How much worse was it without the net and divergent voices?  Yes, the people down from the death camps knew – PROBABLY.  But what were they going to do about it?  Storm the camp on their own, yes?  How?  Remember they had the most efficient army in Europe, and the internal image was more so. Yes, some people were utterly despicable.  Maybe as many as half of them (though I doubt that.) but most were just human. Humans go along with the group, in general.  Humans try to survive, in general. The same, btw, goes for every country occupied by this malicious idea.  I have my own dark opinion of the French character, having read literature of the time.  But it is perhaps worth noting I have had a bad opinion of the French since the French revolution.  My opinion is biased, and I know it’s biased.  Remember too if genealogy is true both my husband and I have a decent peppering of French blood.)

Now… now we’re in a position where the majority of Western Civ – Europe, by and large, certainly the educated classes (the plebes are saner.  They have to be, or they wouldn’t survive) – hates itself and bares its chest and pounds on it every chance they have.

Part of this is because they’ve been taught Western Civ is UNIQUELY despicable.  A lot of human traits are being taught to them as uniquely a problem of the west: expansionism; imperialism; triumphalism.

Brother!  The reason that other civilizations haven’t conquered and gone forth is NOT that they’re “cute little brown people, who live in a kind of primitive Eden” (when this is applied to me, it always makes me scream, because I feel like “you’re saying Portuguese are too stupid to be oppressors” which, beyond betraying a stunning ignorance of history, is bizarrely dysfunctional.)  Look at the way they treat their own people – you can find out, though our press won’t report it – and imagine what they’d do to the defeated.  (Vae Victis) and all that.

But because our children have been taught that way, and because since WWII we’ve lost confidence in the story of who we are, and lost the idea that we triumph because we’re the best, we’ve acquired the idea that “we triumph because we’re the worst.”  Therefore triumphing or doing well in general is considered proof of how bad we are.

Yes, Marxism – which btw, in practical fact, under the name of “liberation” acts like the empires of old, putting all to fire and sword – has made things worse, with its pious mumblings about how all property is theft (unless a party apparatchik has it!  Because then it belongs to “the people”) and how all war is evil (unless we’re liberating the oppressed) makes things worse.

But Marxism and the insanity that was the USSR wouldn’t have survived long if the trauma wasn’t already there and the pain already there.

Maybe there is a limit to how large a civilization can get.  Maybe for humans to eschew tribalism is already a form of madness, violating the creature we are, and the end is foretold.  Or maybe we’ll yet find a way around all this.

The one thing certain is we can’t go on as we are.  We’re still bleeding from the wounds of the long war – not because it was unique, people here mentioned the 100 year war before that – but because it was brutal AND well propagandized.

Our efficiency at telling stories increased just in time to publicize self doubt and self hatred.  At some level all of us still know our civilization is the best thing ever.  (No?  Would you voluntarily move to Algiers?  Or let’s go to parts of Western civ but more unsteady, like Portugal?  Mexico?  Yes, some people do, but not many.)

The stories that made us have turned poisonous.  Note they’re now going after not just western civ but humanity itself and, in some cases, life itself.  Can we fix them in time to save ourselves?

I hope so.  But first we need to know that the problem IS in the stories, in the image of ourselves.

Yes, the long war of the twentieth century was terrible.  So was the 100 years war, the French revolution, the Napoleonic war (I was listening to bios of the time the other day, and let’s say that there were reasons Napoleon is called The Monster), the American Civil War.  I suspect that the Roman invasions were no picnic, and BOY could I tell you stories of the Moorish invasion and the Spanish occupation and…

War is what our species does.  No, we can’t study war no more.  Unless a miracle occurs and the entire world can love each other as brothers and sisters (ah) war shall always be with us.  And often its justified.  Atrocities happen in every human culture.

And the abattoirs of WWI and WWII were – like the Roman invasions, if you think on it – more the result of what the technology was at the time, than a problem of western culture.

Yes, wars will happen.  We are human.  Yes, as civilization gets better at other things, it gets better at war, too.  Yes, this is bad.  But removing civilization doesn’t remove death, pestilence and famine.  It just makes them more constant, more local, and the peace times worse.

Regardless of what my colleagues think, it is unlikely, short of a religious redemption, that there will ever be a utopian civilization where there is no war. (And OMG, a civilization of all women is the worst way to achieve this.) We’re not designed that way.  And war is not always the worst thing.  Look at North Korea.  A civil war might be preferable to that.

Yes, going to space might reduce the instances of (at least) intercultural war.  It will also reduce at least the destructiveness of civil war, at least while the population is sparse.

Western culture, as mental hardware has the best chance of getting us there and of getting us to the point the human race doesn’t become extinct.  (Yeah, we have problems.  But I’m human.  What species would be better? Angels are not in the running.)

Can poor f*cked up western culture figure out a way to get there?  Who knows?  Things look rather bleak right now, don’t they?

As I’ve said before, though, it’s always darkest before dawn.  Tech is now going towards less centralization.  And we’re changing too.  The centralism and Marxism many people mouth are less than skin deep.  Beneath it is a roll-up-the-sleeves-and-get-to-it ethos that goes well with the new distributed tech.

We are a people of stories.  Stories have turned against us, but they can be changed.

Let the best saga-writer win.  Our ancestors told the stories that made people want to join them.  Can we not do the same?