Month: May 2016

*So I managed to decide that my driving lesson — to get me back on the road after being sidelined for three years for various reasons — was tomorrow, not today, which means I missed it.  Subconscious avoidance?  Getoutoftown.  It’s like I have a mild phobia or something.  Yeah, okay.  This is going to make it very hard, as I’ll have to have lessons after the move.  OTOH it gives me the day to work.  I’ll be back.  Tomorrow – SAH*

Pocket Full of Promo – Jason Dyck

Cedar Sanderson

Twisted Mindflow: A Collection of Stories

This is a collection of seventeen stories, with author’s notes and a foreword by Sanford Begley, the author’s First Reader.

A collection of seventeen shorts, flash, and oddball stories, twisted as they flowed out of my head and onto the paper.

Some may seem familiar, others appear here for the first time.

Get into my head…

Currently available for free

Ben Zwycky

Nobility Among Us

“Still, this process does not sit well with me. Letting the people think they are in control of these proceedings, having them vote for their chosen candidate as if they will change the way things are done, these are dangerous ideas. Furthermore, these are actual lowborns we are admitting to our ranks. What if something slips through the filtering process, what then? I have this nagging feeling that this whole enterprise will come back to haunt us one day.”

Brought together by a reality show designed to pacify the people of Gandria, Viscount Marcus Draishire and his low-born wife are secret devotees of the forbidden book. This could get both of them imprisoned or worse. Marcus hears a case of a cattle farmer suing his baron for unfair taxation. Should he follow the king’s decree, that all nobles are immune from criticism, or judge the case on its merits? Marcus chooses the latter and gets himself some unwanted attention. He now has to balance acting in the best interests of his subjects against antagonising his superiors, who tend to express their displeasure with a bomb, bullet or knife.

The people under him have their own struggles and the nobility itself is walking something of a tightrope, the need to crush dissent weighing against that of projecting a benevolent public image; no-one wants another uprising.

Beyond the Mist

The Chara Series Book 1

Am I falling or flying? Powerless or mighty? Imprisoned or free?

I have nothing: no possessions, no memories, no reference points or even solid ground to stand on; just falling (or is it flying?) through an endless mist. A voice beside me says this is the last free space in a world of slavery and suffering; another that it’s a self-imposed prison from a world of beauty and adventure. Who should I believe? What is waiting for me out there?

I make my choice and begin to discover what lies beyond the mist.

Today is the last day for Kindle Countdown on this book

Selected Verse – Faith and Family

A series of love poems that gives glimpses into the magical process by which a lonely and shy young man transforms into a husband and father and how the love in his family grows. This is followed by verse that look at aspects of wider family life, then at the ways in which the divine has revealed itself in history, both in ancient and modern times, how these clash with a fallen world and call us to something higher and grander than ourselves.

Selected Verse – Heroes and Wonders

A collection of poems dealing with heroes and wonders of the grand type we see depicted in our favourite epics as well as inspiring everyday examples that only a few ever notice. Beauty to enjoy, courage to inspire, wisdom and folly to admire and avoid.

Highlights include a heartfelt celebration of a life well lived, the story of a survivor of China’s brutal one child policy, an uplifting appreciation of nature’s cycles, and a grand tale of a beast that haunts the hearts of men.

Awake the hero within you, and stand in awe of wonders that never cease.

J.M. Ney-Grimm

Resonant Bronze

Lodestone Tales Book 2

The warriors of Torbellai brought back a prize in the night, and young Paitra wants to see it. Even hidden away in the armory, the artifact changed the whole mood of their mountain citadel from dread foreboding to hope. But the warlord hid the fighters’ plunder for good reason. Forged by trolls and radiating magic, it presents grave risk to any who approach it.

Through death into magic and sound, Paitra confronts… resonant bronze.

Heinlein, towards the end of his oeuvre concluded that reality was not logical but whimsical.  Given various things going on right now, he might have had a point, but not quite.

Pratchett talked about a force “Narrativium” holding reality together.  And he was right, at least for humans.  The problem is that the rest of reality doesn’t really much care what humans see, and also that Narrativium can be an unwittingly deceptive force.

Pratchett played it both seriously and for laughs.  I.e. he was aware of how the “narrative” affected him, and he poked it in the eye with a sharp stick, even while making it work.

So, yeah, the one chance in a million is a guaranteed thing.  And the young man adopted by dwarfs really is the lost prince, but would rather be a policeman.

Which is how to treat this form of subconscious, pre-formed narrative in our heads.  Be aware of it.  Be amused when it works.  Use it for comfort when you need comfort.  BUT don’t think that impersonal reality really cares what the narrative thinks should happen.

We are more surrounded by narrative then ever, and I don’t mean “carefully crafted narrative.”  We have that too.  The left here, the inheritors of Soviet Agitprop HAVE indeed sold a bill of goods to a new generation.  Part of owning education, and mass media and even entertainment.  So people who are raised in this bubble, and whose work or real life never take them out of it — a minority for sure, but still a significant group — tend to see everything through the narrative.

This is how you see Sad Puppies and our supporters, with people like me, and Larry and Kate in it called “neo nazis” and accused of being “racist, sexist, homophobic.”  That poor little duckling was told in school that anyone who opposed the commands of the “intelligentsia” who gave their orders on “diversity” (of color or what you do with your pee pee on your time off) were neo nazis and hated women and gays and people of color.  She couldn’t even see the people on our side, but had to go with the narrative, because she’s been watching the world through it for her whole life, and if she let it go she’d have nothing.  Her sense of self would disintegrate.

And so, the Sad Puppies revolt must be NOT about taking down a small, insular corrupt group who use the sacred cows of their class to keep control and profit from a once-venerable award.  It can’t be about the fact that we’d like stories which will captivate the public and grow the field, as opposed to the current pseudo-literary and indigestible pap.  No.  It must be that we want to prevent women and people of color and gay people from being in the field.  Which, you know, is SUCH a powerful narrative that they can’t even see those holding the assterisk and trying to force it on others are the most powerful house in the field, or that those fighting them are largely outsiders, and, yep, some of us people of tan (or married to them) and women.

That is the force of constructed narrative.  But constructed narrative has its limits.  When people leave the bubble (for most of us end of college) or face something that really doesn’t fit it, it has a tendency to shatter like glass.  (If you can’t avoid facing it, of course.)  Which leads to sudden reversals and changes that seem crazy-fast.  Black swans and the avalanche started with a few grains of sand and which lead to those are the best way to understand how such narratives crack.

The more dangerous narratives are the ones that are so old that they have become part and parcel of the human race.  Yeah, they’re now part of our entertainment, bu they were part of fairy tales, they were part of … probably tales told by hunters around the fire in the Neolithic.

And the stories we tell ourselves.  Both of those sets will lead you astray.

Let’s start with the stories we tell ourselves.  Humans are designed to see patterns in things.  It’s how we managed to learn and become a successful enough species that we could invent and create and become what we’re now.

The ability to discern patterns is evolutionarily favored, because if you know that by the river you’re likely to find both easy hunting AND predators who might eat you, you’re more likely to be aware enough to come back alive AND with prey.

However, once you go past the little patterns that reflect directly on your life, they are crazy-making.  Hence the whole Trump-is-Reagan narrative that most people who support Trump have told themselves.  It ignores how different the two men are, and the policies that Trump defaults to, which are usually leftist, and the fact that the man’s word can’t be trusted as he says and unsays and dances all over the place.  It also ignores the fact that Reagan was the successful governor of a very large state, while Trump excels mostly in the wheeling and dealing of crony capitalism, which is very different from the side of the government than the side of the crony, and which will bite him in his fleshy behind when he catches the car he’s been barking after.

Instead it fastens onto “former leftist, claiming to be Republican [which Reagan had proved, but never mind], hated by the left” and then heaps on this unlikely vessel all the qualities Reagan possessed including a deep religious faith. Because that’s how the stories we tell ourselves work.  We fill in the blanks with what was there before.

This is most often seen in private life, when a man has been treated very badly by a brunette who yelled at him  and therefore fastens on a blonde who is all seeming sweetness, without noticing they are both equally manipulative.  He knows through the narrative in his head that if he looks for someone who looks and sounds totally different, he will be rewarded.  Alternately when someone loses a mate looking for one with similar superficial characteristics/circumstances.  “My Betsy was a secretary and I met her on Thursday.  I met Mary on Thursday and she’s a secretary.”

All these might seem foolish, but they’re not. As I said, this is how the human brain is supposed to work, and why so much of Marxism seems persuasive.  So many fairytales have conditioned us to “Poor but honorable wins in the end” that it’s easy to buy the idea of a sainted proletariat that gets rule and makes everything perfect.  In the same way, the search for the perfect leader (instead of one who will do and be our employee and get kicked out if he doesn’t perform) has its roots in the countless stories of the long-for king who restores everything.  Even the idea that poverty causes crime or that the destitute are only “forced” into crime by “society” is part of those narratives, some older than civilization.

And sure, those things probably happened that way at some point.  And perhaps third sons (the first inherited the house, the second was usually his second-in-command and stand in if something happened to the first) often made good better than the other ones.  Certainly, forced to leave and seek their fortune, some of them returned fabulously wealthy.  What story has forgotten is those that died, or were lost by the way side, which I’d guess was the vast majority of them.  But since they never returned, it’s easy to imagine they became rich in another country.  And perhaps the guilt of their brothers in having made them leave made them feel more desperately that something good must have befallen the youngest one.  And thus long-standing stories are born.  And story has a weight of its own, so perhaps the third son tried harder, and had an idea he must be more innovative. Which in turn increased their chances of doing well.

And perhaps the poor orphan girl with no dowry also had heard the stories, and was extra nice, which improved her chances of marrying, if not a prince, someone of substance … who had also heard the stories.

The modern era has added other narratives, some designed to make a necessarily short visual narrative more thrilling.   “One chance in a million” and “when all hope is gone” and “out of the ashes.”

Yeah, sometimes one chance in a million comes true.  And yeah, sometimes things turn around when all hope is gone.  And yep, sometimes groups and people come up out of the ashes.  However, there’s survivor bias in those tales, as in the tales of third sons  who make good.  To count on them, or to make things worse so they can come true is not only foolhardy but counterproductive.

Which brings us to the SINGLE most destructive myth of movie and narrative, part of it I think encouraged by the left and Marxists (but I repeat myself) to justify and help along “revolutions” around the world often promoted and pushed by the Soviet Union, covertly from behind the scenes.  But part is simply that it makes a better story.

This is the myth that revolution occurs when poverty and oppression is at its strongest.  In fact, from the French Revolution to the Russian revolution, to other spontaneous revolutions around the world (NOT helped by the USSR), revolution happens when an oppressive regime liberalizes and tries to moderate itself.

If revolution happened when oppression is at its worse, North Korea would now be a democracy.

That’s not the way it works.  Truly oppressed people have neither the strength nor the ability to rebel.

And why is this the most dangerous myth?  It encourages “burn it all down” and “the worse, the better.”  (Which was Lenin’s great piece of nonsense.) It encourages otherwise sane people to want to bring about collapse and destruction, because they’re convinced something wonderful will rise from the ashes.

It never has, it never will, except in Hollywood works not known for their relationship to reality.

But Narrativium doesn’t have to make reality obey it.  Only the minds of men.

Beware of what narrative controls you.  Beware of the infiltration of narrative into your thoughts.

Narrativium, like government and fire, is a good servant but a poor master.

 

 

Okay, I’m sick and tired of hearing in every group I belong to that “Doom, gloom, the end is coming soon.”

Now, I join with you in thinking that we’re on a difficult path and with the pool of two joker-Americans to pick from for the presidency, it might be a mighty step for joker-Americans, but the rest of us are going to suffer a worse economy, diminished prospects and likely, in either case, because hyenas smell blood, war at home and abroad.

The severity of all of these could range from a continuation of the last eight years or to much, much, much worse.

How far worse?

Well — sigh — we stand to lose a lot of our liberties. This will slow down the rate of improvement in the sciences and tech, or bring it to a halt all together.  Our children will face yet a more diminished world and eventually, sometime around our great grandchildren, if this goes on, they’ll be about as poor as the rest of the world.

I mean, let’s be real, okay?  I’m more than sick and tired of people envisioning a plunge down into the middle ages, or the stone age.  I’m more than sick and tired of people imagining that tomorrow we’ll be Venezuela.

There is a lot of ruin in a country, particularly a country as rich as the US. And no, you have no idea how rich you are.  Nor do Europeans guess how rich we are.  They tend to think it’s “about like them” or worse because less government assistance, but take it from someone who’s been all over Europe and a great part of the US: you have no idea.  I once read that the equivalent for Europe was about two social levels down.  So, if you’re a secretary in the US, you live as well as doctors in Europe.  And that’s by and large true, with adjustments.  For instance, in the US things are easier to find, particularly specialized gadgets/food/clothes are much easier to find and take less time.  OTOH in Europe, (at least in the Southern part of it) you’re more likely to find cheap household help.

But what I’m trying to say is that the crash rarely comes the way you expect it.  Oh, sure, civilizations in the world have been destroyed suddenly and no two stones have remained together, but that was when the world, and civilization was smaller and more easily squelchable, and even then I wonder if life changed that much between the before and the after for the average peasant on the outskirts of the city.  We know that when we dig beyond the historical accounts of fierce battles and entire populations of cities put to the sword, what we find is far less radical, far less scary and often far less heroic.

Even Rome, we think now, fell not in one great glorious invasion, but because the d*mn barbarians kept trickling over the border, and the Romans found them too useful to kick out, or even defend the border from (stop me when the tale sounds familiar.  Never mind.) Sure there were military invasions, but Rome qua classical Rome was already long gone.

And then there was the rest of the Empire.  Did Rome really fall?  Come walk  the streets of Portugal with me sometime, and tell me that.  And then we’ll both laugh at how things change, without changing.

There is, I’m trying to tell you, an inertia to good things as well as bad.  As hard as it is to change society for the better, it’s also difficult to change it for worse.   Sure things can get worse, slowly and incrementally, but even with horrible management, with terrible presidents, with laws restricting our freedoms, your wealth won’t vanish overnight.  Barring a cataclysm of epic proportions, you’re not even going to go back to the days of two tv channels, much less to the days of tube radio, or of no mass entertainment at all.  Barring a cataclysm of epic proportions, computer programmers won’t become farmers.  Barring a cataclysm of epic proportions, instead of really a lot of small cataclysms and difficulty obtaining things, you’ll find that you’re better off in a somewhat suburban community near the city, where you can get the best of both worlds than in the middle of nowhere, where there are no jobs and food is hard to come by, unless you grow it yourself.

Look, things are going to get worse.  We are so rich you might not notice it for a while.  It’s more a matter of less new stuff, fewer vacations.  Then they’ll get yet worse.

In the seventies, we stopped baking at all, unless it was someone’s birthday because baking used too much fuel.  Even for birthdays, things like “pancake cakes” where you fried each layer on the stove top started being popular, because less fuel.  VISUALIZE having to consider how much gas/electricity you’re using to cook a meal and adjusting your lifestyle accordingly.

There’s a long way for the US to even get to that, much less to compounds and growing your own food, and shooting intruders.

Yes, I know, you’re going to say “what happens when the welfare checks fail?”  Supposing that happens, instead of them just being diminished or devalued?  The recipients will prey on their own neighbors and riot.  And then they’ll die.

Most of what we’re seeing about Venezuela, which is a LOOOOOOOOONG way from where we are (yes, richest country, blah blah, yeah, sure but FAR more uneven than here) is about the POOR.  My family there which is anti-Chavez and solidly middle class is AT MOST being inconvenienced.  Sometimes they can’t find what they want in the store; the choice is smaller; they have to contrive. The black market starts figuring BIG in everyone’s life.

But isn’t there a lot more crime?  Well, yes.  There has always been, also the idea that crime is caused by poverty is a Marxist thing.  Crime is caused by criminals and people constitutionally not inclined to obey the law.  If I understand Venezuela (and I claim no more knowledge than what I overheard from relatives, then policing was always like in any Latin country, dependent on bribes and on “if you commit a crime but pay me” — that has just gone more out of control, as, I’d guess, the police become less zealous.

BUT crime can be way worse before life dissolves.  People tend to imagine welfare recipients becoming destitute and descending on other neighborhoods.  This is not the way it happens.  The way it happens is that they mostly sit in place and lament and try to use their victimhood to get stuff (from charity, from politicians, from…) A few of them will spy targets of opportunity and strike, but that’s just an INCREASE in crime, not total lawlessness.  It means fences go up and people hire neighborhood security patrols.

Look, I’m not saying any of this is GOOD.  I don’t want a diminished future for my children and grandchildren.  I don’t want greater crime. I don’t want medicines and electricity and the comforts of civilization to be irregularly available.  And I definitely don’t want us to lose our freedom. Not only because that’s the real engine of our growth, but because it is our hope for a better future.

BUT what you’re imagining is not what’s likely to happen.  Compounds out in the middle of nowhere, as Ferfal pointed out, never work out.

Don’t quit your job and become a goat herder.  This is not the way to survive.

If you can stay in place.  If you can’t, find a place where you can be safer and still keep your job/get groceries/etc.

We’re more likely to get hit with what happened in Argentina, and is happening in Venezuela and Zimbabwe than with the “no two stones together” thing.  And the strategies are different.

Your first priority should be to maximize your income or your wealth.  In collapses, it is the poor that suffer the most.

Your second priority is to make sure your home is safe, even if all it means is installing an alarm, getting another gun, or putting a bigger fence around your home, so you don’t make yourself a bigger target.

Your third priority is making sure you’re safe.  This might mean guns, but self defense courses are also encouraged.  AND most of all being situationally aware.

Your fourth priority is to have enough supplies laid by.  Not the world in supplies, but enough that you can survive a week or two of disruption.

There are other things you can do, like lay by a supply of used gold and tradeables.

In the end these will see you better off than the armed compound in the middle of nowhere.  (Though if that’s an option/you don’t have a job that requires attendance, and you feel you will enjoy it, go for it.)

However, even as you prepare for the worst — or at least the very very bad — keep fighting.  This is no time to go wobbly.  Fight in culture and civil society before you have to fight with weapons.

Be not afraid.  And don’t give up.

 

 

 

 

Over the last few days I’ve been reading endless numbers of fairytales — in effect all of the fairy “color” books.  Not on purpose, precisely, except insofar as I downloaded a compilation of them from Amazon and at this time they’re a useful thing to read.

You see, I’m trying to finish two books before the end of the month, which means I can’t afford to get captured by a story and end up sitting and reading all day.  the (mostly Andrew Lang-compiled) fairytales are very short, about three pages tops, which means if I get captured it’s no time at all to get to the end of them, but they’re involving enough to keep me reading.  Well, most of them.

One of the things it is doing is replenishing my imagination.  It’s amazing, when you only remember the core fairytales, and those often disneyfied, how you forget some of the unbelievably difficult trials that the characters in the original fairytales are put through.

The other thing it is doing is reminding me of the “structure” of western (which most of these are.  The others often “taste funny” depending on how westernized they have been or not) story telling reminding me of things like “when it’s almost won, often turning back for good and sufficient reason will almost cause the loss of the whole expedition, and lead to a more epic battle than ever.

There is something about these fairytales, particularly the older ones, that seems to tie in to the place we dream from.  And like dreams thy often have the strangest contradictions.  I’m struck, for instance, by the weirdness oft repeated in stories that a fox that doesn’t have the strength to take its own tail off a trap can command several other foxes to build her savior a whole palace in a day, or to chase cattle out of the tall grass, or whatever.

It’s also funny how often people change personalities completely, which is another thing that seems to come directly out of dreams, good or not.  For instance, after a great battle, you throw your bridle over a troll and it becomes a beautiful horse (or princess) who is grateful you rescued him/her.  But also it’s amazing how often the beautiful woman the main character, or the character’s father marries turns out to be a horrible person who will try to kill the whole family.

That has the feel of dreams, where people often change face in the middle of a conversation and you realize that all the time you were having this involved conversation it was with a long dead relative, a cat, or the cow on a field next door.

Russian stories are harsher and there is more strife within families themselves.  Japanese stories often feel like elaborate allegories I’m not equipped to understand; Arab stories involve an untold number of acts of treason, often by the women in the family, German stories often revolve around food and it is astonishing how often the dim witted fellow or the idiot succeeds due to being an idiot.

There is a slightly different flavor to each.  But they all taste of the place humans go in their dreams, a place in which the collective thought of mankind was formed and forged.

Some of them I remember from when I was very young, when the stores kept, in the place now reserved for candy “cockroach books.”  These were little chapbooks about the size of a palm that reprinted mostly moral tales or fairytales.  I wasn’t very fond of the moral tales — not that I objected to the moral, or at least not often but — because they were annoyingly preachy and reiterated the moral loudly and in virtue signaling tones. I never had much patience for that…  BUT if there were fairytales for sale I almost always whined till mom bought me one.  (Mom was also much more likely to buy me that than a candy bar or even cough drops.)  Thus I have read MOST of those fairy tales at one time or another.  (My favorite remains the one where the princess refuses to marry until the father in despair gives her to a drunken soldier.)

As I said, it is wakening some thing in me I thought was long dead, and which is probably dormant, a place where stories form unbidden, a place where magic can happen.

I’m not absolutely sure where it will take me, but I will do my best — promise — not to fall into the inconsistencies where a carp cannot possibly jump back into the water alone but can manage to commandeer enough fish to deviate a stream for its former benefactor.

 Do You Kipple? – Alma Boykin

 

Asking Huns and Hoydens if they’ve ever heard of Rudyard Kipling is a bit like asking a fish if it knows how to swim. You’d get a blank look (assuming you spoke the right dialect of Fish) and a response along the lines of “Doesn’t everyone?” At some point in our lives, the majority of us were introduced, stumbled into, or discovered Kipling’s poetry, and probably his short stories. I suspect fewer of us have read his novels, especially Kim. The Light that Failed is interesting but not as good, in my opinion. The Nauhlahka was co-written with a friend and ahm, er, is pretty terrible. Captains Courageous is pretty good.

 

He got me through very hard emotional times in Germany, sustained me in grad school, and if I were forced to rebuild civilization from scratch, the Authorized translation of the Bible (aka the KJV) and Rudyard Kipling’s Complete Verse would be on my short list of works to start with. I love some of his poems, I flinch from a few, and a very few make me wonder if he were having an especially bad day, or was under the influence of something especially good.

 

 

So, a question: do you recall what your first introduction to Rudyard Kipling’s work was? And what is your favorite poem or story of his?

 

I first met Kipling when I was five or six and my parents read the Jungle Book and Just-So Stories to me. This came after seeing the TV cartoon of “Rikki-tikki-tavi,” but before the movie of the Jungle Book. I read Kim as a teenager, once I knew enough about the Raj to understand what was going on with the Great Game.

 

 

My favorite Kipling is a lot harder to pin down. It changed over time. I locked onto “Baa baa Blacksheep” when I was a teenager and the target-of-choice for jerks in Junior High and High School. “The City of Brass” both appeals to me (when I’m angry at society) and terrifies me (because of society). Most of us know the “Gods of the Copybook Headings” at least in part, and probably mutter under our breaths on occasion, “As surely as water will wet us, as surely as fire will burn/ The Gods of the Copybook Headings/ With terror and slaughter return!”

 

For the wild excitement and bravado of the story, “The Ballad of East and West” ranks up there with Banjo Patterson’s “Man from Snowy River,” and I can recite large chunks of both from memory. “The Way through the Woods” and “Bridge Guard at the Karoo” both evoke nature and emotion so well, and I’ve used “Way through the Woods” to introduce the Romantic Movement to my history students, even though Kipling is not officially considered a Romantic poet. He did a lot of Romances, in the sense of heroic tales of kings and princes and warriors and last stands, but he’s not Longfellow. On the other hand, soldiers in the US and British armies (and probably others) don’t use Longfellow as teaching tools the way they use “Arithmetic on the Frontier” or “Soldiers of the Queen.” Leslie Fish’s setting of “Puck’s Song” makes me smile every time I sing it, in part because she peels back the history of Sussex in a way I love to do with other places.

 

Kipling’s verse is finally coming out of copyright and is becoming more available, for which I give great thanks. If you can find a copy of M. M. Kaye’s edition of Kipling, The Moon of Other Days, snatch up a copy. Her notes and the illustrations are absolutely magnificent.

 

So, do you Kipple?

There seems to be in human civilization a great seesaw like movement between forward movement and a great forgetting, a shedding of the fetters of civilization.

Normally this takes extraordinary measures by the country’s rulers.  China’s history is infuriating to read, because they advanced so far so fast and then got caught in this cycle of civilizational forgetting, of running away from everything they’d known and been.  Honestly the last one, the Cultural Revolution, was less successful than the others because the rest of the world remembered for them.

But when studying a civilization, you shouldn’t have to say “The Emperor who burned all the books?” and be answered, “Which one?”

Those emperors usually also set a death penalty on story tellers and grandmas who told stories were persecuted.

But the mania isn’t only Chinese.  The French Revolution not only tried to install all new things, but it was part of its mandate to forget the past.  Forget, ignore, forge forward and remember nothing.

In Portugal, I had the haziest idea of the past, from around the Napoleonic invasions to the time I was born.  It simply wasn’t taught, and instead we were sold a carefully constructed narrative of a forward movement culminating in the — current till the end of elementary school — national socialist government that promised cradle to grave care, and also to protect us from all pernicious foreign influence, disruptive ideas and just about everything they deemed bad for us. It wasn’t until I was in the States as a young married woman that I could study that period in depth and find that in many ways it consisted of several waves of erasing the past and replacing it with an idealized one, always pointing to whatever the current regime was as the culmination of all hopes.  It was also the only way to make sense of some of the stories grandma told, which seemed to refer to a different country altogether.

Note that no books were burned — I think the last ones to attempt that were Hitler and his ilk.

You see, I suspect — no way to prove it — that when books were scarce and few knew how to read each new king that arose, each new policy was hailed as a brand new beginning and the best ever, and people living through it were willing to be convinced it was the best ever.  In Europe of the time, most books wouldn’t need to be burned as they were — as I said — few and far between and those who could read them — mostly in the church — were either cloistered and separated from the people or the sons of noble families who did their best to support the power for the sake of their relatives.

And there hinges all these attempts at forgetting: you see, if people remember the past, if they can compare the present to the past, then the new ruler is judged more harshly and real signs of progress — or at least not of regress — are demanded.  The attempts the ruler makes of taking power and doubling down on it, and doing the same stupid thing under another name are repelled.

It is only when people have forgotten the past that they are all too willing to remember they live in the best time ever, that they are better off than their parents, that society is “advancing towards a perfect future.”  That arrow that our counterparts are so fond of.

This means instead of advised and often careful changes, or even the carefully thought out and past-grounded framework the founders lay down for the USA, we have people who want to erase the past, to change the names of the days of the week, to change the units of measurement, to merrily go tramping down the path of insanity like the blinded fool stepping into the abyss.

(But days of the week and measurements aren’t that big a deal, say you.  True.  It’s just an example from the French Revolution.  And it might seem trivial to you, but to a largely illiterate society not only did the changing of the names erase the memory of Roman times — which might or might not be intentional; the memory being hazy — but it also erased the way the year had always been lived.  Medieval peasants — subarbanshee in the comments can slap me if I’m wrong, but I’m going not only on what I’ve read but on how the traditional/fairly illiterate parts of society behaved when I was growing up — lived their lives by rote, anchored into the feasts of the church. Stuff like “plant thy wheat by such and such feast.” The feasts of the church were anchored in turn to things like “second Tuesday in May” and there were rhymes and ways of remembering, should the church forget or not be around to remind you.  Removing the days and the length of the weeks left the peasants floating in a context-free time, in which they had, in self-defense to rely on their betters, the self-proclaimed revolutionary leaders, to do the simplest things in life.  They also lost contact with the past.  Their older relatives, afraid saying the wrong word would get them beheaded as royalists, had to avoid talking of the past.)

So, how do you do that to a society, how you give it a forgetting drought, when society is permeated through with books and filled with other records of the past?

I think the idea might have come about from seeing Japan (or even Germany) remake itself after World War II.  The idea was magnificently employed by the USSR’s propaganda arm, but also encouraged by the facet of our society that thought that communism was inevitable, knew that it wasn’t ideal, but thought it would be better if they eased people into it by degrees without their realizing where it was going.  It also, to be fair, promised them great power, which is usually the reason for the great forgetting.

The instrument employed was a culture change, in which not only did everything old and the opinion of any one (older than 30, if I remember) not matter, but also it was “uncool” to think of those times and ALSO the apparatus of remembering: mass culture, entertainment, movies, books, everything else was deployed not to pretend the past didn’t exist but to give a different view of it.  The fifties (to take an example) were not paradise.  They were the culmination of a rather authoritarian time.  On the other hand, they were not nearly (save for certain, mostly upper class people)as authoritarian and restrictive as we have been told.  The Victorian era, perhaps suffers most greatly from this remaking (because in many ways in terms of individual liberty, it afforded more freedom than any of the twentieth century.)  Read any biography of the time, and you emerge realizing they had more freedom.  Yes, life was brutal and short, particularly for the poorer classes, but not as poor as it had been for their parents, and besides that was a function of technology, not government.  You also find that these people were a lot less… racist, sexist or homophobic than they’ve been portrayed.  Sure there was a pose, but in their dealings with individuals they were often more remarkably enlightened and humane than our contemporaries.

This great forgetting was essential.  The sixties and seventies were sold as liberation.  To an extent, as I said, this was somewhat needed, particularly in the workplace.  The men who had fought WWII under military regime came back and established the work place under the same sort of discipline.  Fit in or get out.

While this worked greatly, it would have stifled innovation, which is why the sixties was viewed as liberation.  It allowed unconventional thinkers in, and while a lot of what they created was “an habitat for lizards, because lizards are full of wisdom maaaaaaaaaaaaaaan”, the entire computer revolution and the admittedly non-showy progress in biochemics is the result of people who wouldn’t have/couldn’t have fit into corporate culture.

But for that we paid a great price, because most people who aren’t put together a little funny — hi guys! — are eager to fit in and generally need a structure.

The only structure our society really offers to those conformist minds is the “counterculture” which has long since become THE culture, even though its only purpose is the continual destruction of what remained of Western Civilization.

And because most people really want other people over there to stop doing the things that annoy them, this counterculture has set about merrily not only recreating but — devoid of reason for what they do, and thus devoid of barriers — making those restrictions even worse than those in the imagined past.  Sure, they are now forbidding men and women from consorting in public not for some religious reason but because Patriarchy causes micro aggressions and women are so special they must be protected from males’ previlege.  Sure they’re demanding modest clothes because someone’s beauty might oppress the other’s ugliness.  And I’ll warn gay people that they’re coming for you too and soon.  Consider it a shot over the prow that some feminists think gay males are discriminating against them by refusing to have sex with them.  Oh, and temperance is not the way because of religion, but because alcohol is bad for your health and it is totally our business because we want to pay for your health care.  Which leads to, under Obamacare, a woman who has a glass of wine with dinner every day being considered an alcoholic.  And don’t even think of smoking, hater.  Your fifth hand smoke on the walls will affect my unborn child.  (Even if there is NO evidence for this, real or imagined.)  (And pot smokers, they’re coming for you next.  If you don’t believe it, you didn’t see the tizzies our college administrators and other people with impeccable “progressive” credentials threw at legalization.)

The problem with this is not the every day restrictions.  Sure, they’re a bit crazy, and if it weren’t for people being sure that history comes with an arrow, thus both restricting parents’ willingness to talk and childrens’ willingness to listen, we’d already have realized we’re losing all individual autonomy in the guise of “respect” and “not exerting privilege” and “health” and “science.”

But worse than that is that this all encompassing movement, unmoored from the past and rooted only on that great stupid fable of Marxism, which never applied to anything in the real world and which is now being used for everything from economics to literary analysis, to, possibly, a theory of nursery rhymes, has caved in to mankind’s greatest longing for conformity and belonging.  The “Progressives” accept only one way of thinking (well, two if you believe in the image they project onto their enemies.)  If you don’t fit either of those, they want to destroy you and they succeed often in shunting you out of public and professional life.  (Not to mention politics, where, via the media, they’ve seized a complete hold.)

But as the stories of the Emperors-who-burned-books show, these great forgettings always come to a bad end, as the future becomes much worse than the past.

There is now, in the minds of those who want to belong, a command to forget everything/discount everything more than twenty years old.  Every generation, ill-taught and believing they’re the first true “free” one forges forward as wild children, trampling vestiges of freedom and civilization underfoot and believing they’re doing something QUITE new as they find themselves and everyone they can in bigger, stronger, heavier chains.

I don’t need to give examples.  Those are recent and you remember them.

The problem is that devoid of memory, the gods of the copybook headings are forgotten.  Things that have been attempted, and failed, and destroyed civilizations are being tried again and again.  One need only look at Venezuela to see that.

In a forum I’m in someone said it’s time for the adults to come home.  This is true, but in many cases that would require necromancy.  Most of the people who remember a western civilization that wasn’t ashamed of itself and that thought the past was only 20 years old, and beyond that was some great unimaginable oppression, is long gone.

I hate to quote Obama, and of course he said it only to enforce the idea that the new, new generation was doing something new-new and everything would be wornderful in the future.  (Free beer tomorrow!)

However, it is time for the adults, and there are no adults.  We who grew up raised by the “neglected children of World War II” about whom Heinlein was quite concerned, must now in our middle years become the adults we’ve been waiting for.  We must examine the past — the real one, not the media construction — discard what’s worth forgetting, listen to what’s worth keeping.  We must be serious because those older than us weren’t.  We must replace the capital both human, social and wealth, discarded in the great forgetting.

The adults have come home.  And they’re us.  The hat might be big, the high heels falling off our tiny feet, but we must take the Gods of the Copybook Headings for our teaching text and march on, recreating what’s been lost and slapping down the idea that destroying freedom and giving bitter people power is the way to freedom.  We must above all enshrine both self-ownership (yeah, I know, but if you view G-d as your master, that’s on you.  What I view is on me.  We do not have the right to impose it on others.) and self RESPONSIBILITY (sure you’re not going to follow these ancient dictates, fine, so long as you don’t harm your neighbors and don’t try to enslave them to your new dictats.)

It’s late and there’s trouble and war coming.  Do you hear the doorbell?  It’s the adults coming home.  Now take your finger from the button and cross your arms.

There are some children who need structure and discipline, who need teaching and grounding.  And some of them are older than us.

Adjust that too-big hat.  Learn to walk in much-too-big shoes.  We might not be the ones we’ve been waiting for, but we’re the only ones we have.

Go in and do the best you can.

 

*Sarah high-jacking Jason’s microphone for a sec.  Yes, Royal Blood will come out this month.  Might be the last day of the month.  We were delayed by cheese, laser, houses.  However we’ve settled on the short sale, even though it’s way more than we’d decided on, and even though the repairs will cost us more.  It has that undefinable quality of being “ours” which other houses don’t have.  Which means I must work like a demon to pay for the repairs and help with mortgage.  So, when I’m not here one day or two a week, you guys know what I’m doing.  Right now finishing Darkship Revenge so I can finish Royal Blood.  I guess that’s good news for you guys.  There will be books.  And now getting out of the way – SAH*

 

If I Had A Promo – Jason Dyck

Oh, wait, I do!

Alma Boykin

Alexi, Ivan, and the Hidden Heart

Alexi’s Tale: Part 5

“Firebird is eating tomatoes. Make stop.”

Alexi Zolnerovich has enough trouble keeping Colorado School of Mines ROTC cadets out of trouble: now his grandmother wants him to chase away a firebird that’s making a mess of Babushka’s garden. But Russian fairy-tale creatures, in Alexi’s experience, never go quietly.

Alexi discovers that the firebird is the least of his problems. Up in the mountains, a palatial house appears as if by magic as Babushka vanishes.

Alexi, Ivan, and Babushka must free the firebird, without burning down the Front Range. And if Alexi fails, his wife will kill him!

Mary Catelli

The Witch-Child and the Scarlet Fleet

Trapped in a pirate port…

Caught between pirates who would force him to use wizardry in their aid, and a king who would force him to spy, Alik will need every scrap of wits and wizardry to forge his own path.

Also available from these fine booksellers:

• Barnes & Noble
• iTunes
• CreateSpace
• Kobo
• Inktera

Winter’s Curse

Who but a fool would linger after Zavrien laid his curse? Ill luck can kill – and all the more in Zavrien’s enchanted, endless winter, haunted with ice giants and frost fairies.

When the soldier Gareth is cursed, the young wizard Perriel learns how dangerous lingering can be.

But she can hold out a sliver of hope for breaking the curse – if it doesn’t break them first.

Also available from these fine booksellers:

• Barnes & Noble
• iTunes
• CreateSpace
• Kobo
• Inktera

Treachery And Spells

Two novellas of magic and adventure…

Caught between pirates who would force him to use wizardry in their aid, and a king who would force him to spy, Alik will need every scrap of wits and wizardry to forge his own path.

A curse of ill luck leaves Perriel and Gareth trapped in an endless winter, with only the faintest hope of breaking free.

Also available from these fine booksellers:

• Barnes & Noble
• iTunes
• CreateSpace
• Kobo
• Inktera

John Van Stry

Kaiju

Portals of Infinity

For years now the Kingdom of Barassa and the Kingdom of Hiland, have been at odds. Two years ago they engaged in a war, which Barassa lost. While Barassa still stands and is still too big a nut to crack for the Hiland army, the northern kingdoms see the weakened Barassa as a target ripe for the picking.

Sent to keep any eye on the invading armies, William has a front row seat to the drama playing out across the river as Barassa finally finds itself on the defensive, facing an army that may very well be able to finally tear down its massive walls. Faced with what may be the end of their state religion, the priests of Tantrus panic and perform a final act of desperation, unleashing a horror unknown to the world.

But one William finds eerily familiar.

Suddenly the concern of every god and every kingdom in the world is the destruction of this new monster, before it destroys them all. Immune to the weapons of this world, William must join with the Champions of friend and foe alike in a race to defeat the monster before it can destroy his adopted home.

Years ago I was talking to a colleague from Sweden, and he was complaining about their insane tax system which makes it impossible for anyone to really consider more than two kids, unless they’re very rich or destitute.

Being a libertarian and all around evil person, I took the opportunity to point out that’s what socialism does.

And then he surprised me by coming back with “Yeah, but capitalism doesn’t work either.  My great grandparents remembered cannibalism in famines.”

At which point I tried to explain that his great grandparents had never experienced anything like free minds and free markets, but, in the 19th century (he was about my age) lived under an absolute monarchy.  Which is not the opposite of socialism, but its close cousin (as well as the end stage of every communist experiment ever.)

I couldn’t get it through his head.  I just couldn’t make him understand the opposite of socialism is NOT absolute monarchy

I see this kind of dichotomy EVERYWHERE, and it’s crazy.  It’s not just that they want you to choose between cake and death, is that they seem to assign cake and death arbitrarily.

For instance a colleague of mine (no, you don’t have to think very hard who) on a panel referred to the confrontation between Stalin and Hitler as the confrontation between socialism and capitalism.  My reaction (after my head had spun around and I’d spit up pea soup in sheer shock) was “Those words don’t mean what you think they mean.”  I mean, it wasn’t just that he was WAY maligning capitalism, he was even taking a hit on normal, run of the mill socialists, who are deluded and economic illiterates but not — as a normal thing — homicidal maniacs.

Then there is the snowflake in my comments yesterday.  Apparently the opposite of “be an idiot national-socialist, who thinks that America belongs to anglo-saxons and capitalism is evil” is “be like Sweden and force people to accept unending hordes of unassimilated hostiles.”

Part of what makes my head hurt in that kind of statement is not even the distortion, it’s the simplification.

In fact, both of the behaviors are a subset of socialism, which assigns people a value at birth, which is dependent on the group they are identified with.  Both national socialists (with extra racial identification sprinkles!) and international socialists think human beings are widgets.  The ONLY difference is the values they assign to the groups. If you’re born with skin in a certain paint chip range, and you have hair and eyes this color, then you’re either extra evil or extra good.  What you actually ARE as a human being doesn’t matter.  It’s either cake or death, and what you do, what you think, what you choose don’t matter.  Cake or death, and stay in line, and do what you’re assigned, peasant.

And this is why I’ve been sounding the alarm about kids being so maleducated in our schools they rebel against the status quo by embracing what is pushed as its opposite, but which is ACTUALLY another facet of the status quo.

Whenever people start saying they’re revolutionaries and what they’re actually doing is inverting the categories that the government “should” assist, instead of doing away with government assigning people “value” according to color, creed, orientation, I hear the refrain from A Canticle for Leibowitz  “Yes, we’re simple.  And we shall have a great simplification.”  This of course ushered in a millenia long dark ages in the book.

As it does.  Because it’s another of those things where if you’re not seeing reality and what is inside your head is so at odds with reality as to be another world, you’re not going to get the results you expect.  And then you have to come up with conspiracy theories to explain why the world doesn’t conform to the pretty picture inside your head.

QUITE my “favorite” of those for lunacy as well as longevity is “the Jews done it to us.”  It’s a hoot.  And a  scream, when you see what it leads to.

BUT my second favorite, far and above, is that “The US done it to us.”  I first heard it expounded in ninth grade, while a classmate’s father, who was driving us somewhere, took it upon himself to explain to me why Portugal should throw in with the USSR.  I can’t remember the entire chain of logic but it went something like this: Portugal doesn’t have its own computer manufacturers because the Americans won’t let us.  We didn’t invent the computer because IBM put it in a treaty we weren’t allowed to.  And then with America controlling the price of rice, the USSR is our only choice.

I wish I could assure you I’m exaggerating, but I’m actually not.  It was the above, with a lot more shouting, and exclamations.  It devolved into how the evil Americans were keeping Portugal from being the leader in scientific research.

It’s easy and simple to blame an “enemy” particularly when it’s one the press hates.  It’s much more complex to analyze the real reasons, which in Portugal for a long long time are that regulation, bakshish and nepotism corrupt all possible good in the country and stifle all possible development.  It has nothing to do with innate capaciy (Portuguese abroad tend to do very well) but with how screwed up the culture and government are and — alas, if you read history you find — since long before the US existed.

In the comments we got into the “US made us do it” part 194, give or take a million, in which we’re APPARENTLY forcing Sweden to open its door to Muslim refugees, give them full benefits and believe they’ll become Swedes without a century or so of concerted integration.

How and why we’re responsible for that, is a perfect puzzle, since you know, last I checked the most we’d do is give or cut subsidies, and frankly, if you’re a grown up country you should have moved out of the US basement long ago.

I could have taken an argument based on Obama said because heaven knows, the man does say the stupidest things. I could even take the “the influence of American media which is fundamentally socialist is distorting people’s thinking abroad” — though the solution to that is, of course, to have a media industry of your own.  Again, take your Star Trek posters and move out of our basement.  We’re tired of paying for your music and toking lifestyle anyway.

BUT the argument seemed to be “the USSR no longer exists to force them to do stupid things, so it must be the US.”

To quote an old friend long ago “The US doesn’t generally force people to do things.  Not with weapons.  Because you can’t sell to dead people, and that’s the source of our power.”

Also, ignored int he great simplification is that Russia seamlessly took up the agitprop that the USSR had implanted/arranged in… well, most of the west but particularly in Scandinavia.  The fact that Sweden and the rest of the Scandinavian countries were uniform enough prior to the current lunacy that they could ALMOST make socialism work, because it was a great big family.  (Almost.  The immiseration happened slower and people didn’t seem aware of it or thought it was cool, hence “enough” or “just right” being praise in Scandinavian countries.)  Other things ignored: those countries have been socialist for many years, and don’t actually get the concept of free minds and free markets and a government that is used to treat people as widgets doesn’t understand it can’t bring in more widgets and make them like other widgets.

But what we get is the crazy dichotomy: if you think Western civilization was built by people of many skin shades, that humans are far more mixed than anyone gives them credit for BUT that nonetheless however created Western Civ is the last greatest hope of man kind and should be preserved, then you want unlimited Muslim immigration, socialism/communism, and to destroy Western Civ.

This makes so much sense, that I feel tempted to run down the street with my underpants on my head, as a way to understand it better.  “This thing you love and must protect at all costs, you really want to destroy, because you think individuals can swear allegiance to principles and also that what is inside your head has nothing to do with skin color.”  Hey, it’s crystal clear and amazing reasoning.  Cake or death?  Want some Qaalude with that?

And meanwhile what the frigging marching morons are actually doing is forwarding the things that ARE actually destroying western civ: tribalism; group think; large government; government defined minorities.  All the while patting themselves on the back for having rejected socialism and the errors of the 19th century mind.

Can you argue with people stuck in this dual mode?  Sure you can.  But like arguing with liberals, whose mental frame work they stole, it’s exactly the same as arguing with a wall.  You can hope to salvage the uncommitted who can still think and listen to it.

But as Kate Paulk is fond of pointing out, 99% of the population would rather die than think. They like their simple dichotomies.  So, cake or death.  If you’re not with us, you’re against us.

They lurch through history repeating the mistakes of the past under another name, but utterly convinced this time will be different.

And they insist on taking the rest of us along for the ride.

Teach your children well.  What can’t continue won’t.  And changing the names and hierarchies won’t make this big government hierarchy thing work any better.

In the end we win, they lose.  BUT the water is going to get mighty choppy on the way there.

This ain’t no pleasure cruise.  Prepare whatever you think you need in the way of a life vest, and hold on.

Be not afraid, but be wary.  The over-trusting do not survive.

House, lasers, plague of locusts.

Will post later, or not depending on how long I’m out.  Just wanted you to know I’m not dead.

When I was 14 and in ninth grade, my form and I had a teacher we loved.  In my memory she was communist, but maybe I’m wrong about that and just inferred it.  Certainly unlike all the other communist party members, she never tried to make us sign up for Our. Very. Own. Communist. Party. Card!  (Be the first kid on your block NOT to own one.)  Maybe she was just some shade of pink short of full red, which meant she was average for that time and place, particularly for teachers.

Where she stood out is that she was definitely an Odd.  It’s funny that I can’t remember her name at all, but I remember she had one leg slightly shorter than the other, which probably sealed her as not belonging.  Which made her fit very well with us, a gang of misfits.

Now I’m not going to make claims about IQ — an imprecise and not fully understood measurement — and I’m not going to event try to guess at what the heck was going on there.  I’m just going to say my 8th and 9th grade form were the only place I ever felt normal.

It was created (and it was the same form though they changed letters in between.  I think we were 8th H and 9th N, but don’t quote me on that.  Anyway) because Portugal used to have, as England used to have “grouping by ability.”  What this means is that the “forms” (a group of students who goes through all the classes together.  The form colonizes a classroom and the teachers come to them.  Sometime when I’m not talking about something completely different, remind me to tell you about our second semester 8th grade classroom.) were grouped by ability, ability usually being inferred by the grades people brought from “preparatory school.”  The curricula could be almost bizarrely different.  My brother and my cousin (male, older) were at different “ability grouping levels” and while they covered the same material, it was done at completely different levels.

I’m not going to argue for the rightness of grouping or not grouping.  I’m not sure there should be twelve strata anyway, and I’m aware people change in their abilities and some very smart kids present as dullards in middle school or younger, which could get them stuck in the dummy class and bored sometimes literally to death.  I’m just going to say there ought to be a middle ground between “you’re on stratum one of twelve” and “everyone learns the same thing and let the devil take the topmost and the hindmost.”

Anyway, one of the curious forms of blindness of central planners is that they think that their word is law.  They dictate from above, and that’s it.  Apparently the concept of Irish democracy eludes them.  This is more so when the country is very old and respects tradition and “we’ve always done things that way.”

So the edict came from above, before I entered 7th grade that we weren’t culling people by ability anymore.  This was about as effective as “study war no more.”

I don’t know what happened, not having been on the other side of this, but my guess is several teachers who were used to more or less uniform classrooms had quiet breakdowns.  Or, being Portuguese and a lot of them female, not so quiet.

Which meant that… someone… I’m going to guess the clerks, telling no one in administration, did what they do.  Instead of keeping forms intact for our second year in high school (8th grade) they … shuffled.

I realized something was up when I entered my first 8th grade class, languorously and fashionably late.  The class was Portuguese, and this was my preserve.  I was the kid who lived for creative writing assignments, the literature nerd who had read everything in advance.  I had all the answers and was smug with it.

So I smiled at the scold for being late, sat down.  The teacher was reading a poem I’d read before.  She put the book down and asked a medium tricksy question.  I waited to make it clear that no one else knew the answer and that I was the undisputed queen of the classroom… and then realized every hand was up.

There followed the two best years in my schooling.  We gave some teachers’ nervous breakdowns (no, really.  Three quit for various reasons, not counting the one we locked in the secret closet and who emerged praying the rosary and convinced we were possessed.) but for the right kind of teacher we were a dream class.  The right kind of teacher was one who kept up with us, gave us more work than anyone should be able to handle, and let us teach ourselves and each other.  The right teacher ALSO pretended she didn’t see the competition hangman or battleship games taking place between different rows of the class, or the fingers being snapped behind me, so I’d pass back the pink exercise book in which I was writing the current novel (in installments.)  Or the pink exercise book making its way around the classroom.

The right teacher ignored the fact we’d once put a rubber snake in the supplies drawer knowing full well that she had a phobia of snakes.  The right teacher ignored the fact we were in the habit of playing with the school’s electrical system to get out of late afternoon classes in winter.  And she’d go to the beach with us, and spend the time playing mastermind and chess.  (Yes, on the beach.  And us girls — it was an all girl school — wondered why we didn’t date.  On the train we had competition physics problem solving.  Again, you know, we wondered why we didn’t date.I remember being very jealous of the girl who had a planned arranged marriage with her cousin, because at least she didn’t have to figure this mystery out.)

This teacher was very much the right teacher.  I don’t remember what set this incident off but you have to understand the class were by and large libertarians who didn’t have a name for themselves, or perhaps the true definition of anarchists, not the travesty the left has made of the idea.  (Though possibly more libertarians.  this is the class that passed things like the Federalist Papers, Animal Farm and Gulag Archipelago back and forth covertly.  Mind you, the books weren’t exactly forbidden, but we had feeling that was only because the authorities hadn’t thought we’d read them.  They certainly contradicted a lot of things thrown at us by our lords and masters, teachers included.)  So I don’t remember what set it off.  It might very well have been some attempt to make us conform to new regulations on what to read or to teach us in order to meet a new test.  I don’t remember.

What I remember is next time the teacher entered the classroom, we all stood up, as a unit, and treated her to a (probably off key and shouty) rendition of “The Wall.” I remember she sighed, sat down and said “Let’s talk.”

Which brings us to Odds and the way Odds cope with being Odd, and the way only Odds really understand other Odds and, by definition, most people aren’t Odds.

My former form (eh) was exhilarating to be in because until this blog I’ve never before or since found myself in a group of “my people.”

You know who you are, even if you don’t know why.  You’re the people who given a choice between vanilla and chocolate say “strawberry” and if you can at all set about making it happen.  You’re the people who don’t fit in, and all of you at some point read the story of the pink monkey, torn apart by the brown monkeys.  You’re the people who either learned to go away from normal human intercourse, or else learned to fit in — often not perfectly, but well enough. — In a world of sheep and dogs and wolves, you’re the goats.

Dave Freer, a gentleman and a scholar tells me such a population is normal in every primate band.  Maybe one or two of them.  Maybe more.  Obviously there is a sweet spot.  Back when Robert and I used to take long walks through downtown Colorado Springs, (when he was about 14) we used to discuss stuff like this, and one of the things we found hilarious was the concept of an entire nation — or even band — of Odds.  Any such band that existed in the dim and distant past, for sure selected itself out of existence.  We’re not good at following orders (by and large) we’re not good at giving orders, and we get wild hairs on a routine basis.  In a subsistence economy our numbers would be kept down without any effort on anyone’s part.

Look, when someone says “Come on Ogg, we need go hunt” and the answer is “F*ck you, you’re not the boss of me.  Today I’m exploring basket weaving” the tribe will survive (and if they tolerate the goat, they might yet end up with advanced basketry far in advance of other tribes.)  BUT if every member in the band answers that, at best the tribe will starve to death.  At worst, the predators in the neighborhood will eat well, as each person disperses his or her own way and gets eaten.

A band with no Odds, one that doesn’t tolerate goats, one that enforces conformity, probably turns into those tribes that we meet sometimes, where they have no concept of time.  Or numbers.

We know the civilization-wide forms of that from various societies that have stagnated.  When conformity is strictly enforced and your weirdos are not allowed to contribute, we become … oh, sure stable.  And dead.

So there is a need for a balance.  The reason that form worked is that even if many of the teachers were also Odds they were Odds who had made compromises to work within the system.

America seems to me — at a glance — to have and tolerate a higher range of Odds than anywhere else in the world.  Partly because we are so large and so diverse.  (Really diverse, not the stupid leftist classifications.) Even if you stick out like a sore thumb in some place, there’s always a chance of going elsewhere and fitting in better. Part of it is because the people who came here broke the cultural bonds holding them in place.  Even if you acquire new ones, if “assimilation” is enforced (and I think it should be, at least with societal approval, not with laws) you have broken one set of rules, and you know how arbitrary they are.  And what needs to be adhered to.  And what can be ignored.

Which makes Americans the “Odd” among nations and despite the fact that since colonial times EVERYONE, us included, have decried our education system and results, results in America being the engine of the amazing expansion in technology that has fueled the unheard of prosperity of the last 100 years or so.

But if you look at histories and nations, Odds are more tolerated in prosperous times.  There is enough to go around, and people are more willing to tolerate that guy down the street who decided to shack up with another guy, or that woman who talks to herself during her walks, or even the guy who lives and dies for mathematics.

When a society feels threatened, when each individual is struggling to survive, people revert to where we cam from: the band. The familiar.  The people who eat like us; talk like us; look like us and by gum dress like us.

I’ve heard idiots applauding tribalism as the way of the future.  They might be right.  What they’re missing is that they’re using “Way of the future” in the Marxist sense of of the term.  They’re using “tribalism is the way of the future” int he conviction that the future leads to some sort of utopia.  Or that it’s desirable.  Like the idiot leftists with whom they share a lot they keep opening their yaps and letting completely unreasoned, stupid crap fall out.  The stupidest being “The future belongs to us.”

It did, of course, for the Nazi youth of the 30s.  What they didn’t know is that that future would be short and horrific and that many of them would die in unspeakably bad ways.  In the same way the communists were right in the early twentieth century when they said the future belonged to them.  That future was about 70 years long and filled with mass graves.

The future is the future.  History doesn’t come with an arrow in the direction of “this is better.”  That is a stupid thing we internalize from our schooling.  The future not only isn’t set in stone, but it can be bad as well as good. And no matter what it is, it will pass.  It will become the past.  Another future will pass.

It is entirely possible that tribalism really is the future of the next fifty years or so.  I hope not, because tribalism is a shock-condition of the human race, a reaction to very bad times, and when it takes hold it can, by itself, retard any form of betterment, any innovation, any freedom.  Because as my dad is fond of saying, people aren’t measured in handspans (being unable to help himself, he’d then add they’re measured in centimeters.  But that was fooling.) What he meant is that people aren’t measured by externals and what looks like your tribe might be, in internals, very different.  And eventually tribalism turns on that.  “You have to behave like the rest of us, or you’re wrong, wrong, wrong.”  Eventually it ends in walls and crab buckets, and the one who are odd because they’re brighter, or more creative, or able to approach situations from a different angle are forced to pretend they’re like the rest of the herd.  Or die.

This doesn’t last, of course.  Which is why tribalism might be the short future, but eventually a place that makes use of the best and the brightest surfaces.  It’s been Rome, and Alexandria, and France and Italy, and England, and us.  There will be another place that accepts just enough odds to be the engine on the train of human progress.  (And maybe next time we can get to the stars, to give human freedom a little more leeway, too.)

I’d prefer to avoid it, of course, because in the end tribalism — while the most fundamental of human instincts also — is a dead end.  A cull de sac.  And I don’t say this because my people tend to be the Odds and wouldn’t fare well.

I say this because if we’d stuck to that tribalism thing, we’d still be small bands roaming the savanna and sleeping on branches at night to avoid the predators.

I say this because the end run of this tribalism thing is giving Brave New World and 1984 a try, and making everyone live in conformity where all the square pegs will be pounded into round holes till they either splinter or become another brick in the wall.

Not the future I want for my descendants or even yours.

So build under, build over, build around.  Build the structures that will preserve the prosperity our betters are determined to erase; the tolerance people are all too willing to throw away because they never understood it applies to them too.

Go forth and have no fear.  In the end we win, they lose. We’re in it for the long game.  Teach your children well.