Month: May 2016

Lately I’ve been fretting about my memory.

First I should explain my rather confused relationship with my own ability to remember things.  One of the first coherent memories I have is of my parents being very proud I remembered a trip we’d taken.  I know I took that trip at three, and I still remember that trip clearly.  We were visiting my aunt at a hot-baths-place (you know, medicinal, from the time of the Romans) and took a train up to the mountain.  It was the first MODERN train I’d seen (though I’d taken trains before, I think they were all coal.  I have a vague memory of people complaining about sitting the wrong way and getting a face full of ashes when you open the window) an electrical one, which had a heater running the length of it, on the floor.  Now, it was summer, so the heater wasn’t on.  However to my three year old mind this was self-obviously a child’s seat.  So try as they might, my family couldn’t convince me to sit on the normal seats, but I had to seat on the heater.  All the way up.

That is the beginning of a coherent chain of memory.  I have memories before that, one of being carried outside in my crib and set under the vineyard, which I don’t remember why any more, I thought had happened in March.  One of my aunt singing me a song in my crib, that had to be (because of other things) before I was one.  I have disconnected memories of grandma holding me, of feeling her face, as babies do.  I have a memory of grandma holding me and saying “It’s like she understands everything I say” and I did, but I couldn’t get my mouth to form words (one of the most frustrating things ever.)

But those aren’t coherent memories.  That trip was the beginning of my coherent memories, the ones that don’t float in a memory-soup, the ones that are daisy chained in some way to present-day Sarah.

My brother had an eidetic memory, or close to it.  In a country like Portugal, where most learning was memorizing, this meant he was considered a genius.  He remembered sports statistics, and music lists, and book lists, and… everything.

I wasn’t like that, or at least I thought I wasn’t.  I got acting parts in the school plays and star parts in school pageants because I never forgot my lines, but I certainly couldn’t remember sports or music or… any of that.  I was actually very bad at names and for a long time thought Bob Dylan and John Denver were the same person because the names seemed identical to me.  (I just couldn’t imagine why two such different musical styles.)  At the same time, even then, I think my memory must have been good, because while I don’t remember learning to read, I remember HOW it happened.  You see, my brother had a ton of Disney comics (every house with kids in Portugal does, unless your parents are snobs) and I was very sickly.  So I used to ask him to read them to me.  And I remembered the sounds.  I even remember when I put it together — it was the Seven Haunts story with Mickey Mouse.  Finding it when I was buying the books for my sons was like finding a lost friend.

By the time I was six I was also memorizing a ton of “irrelevant” stuff.  You see, I was — though I didn’t have a name for it yet — world building a parallel world for the stories I told myself at night.  When I was fourteen, that world became a science fiction/fantasy (I was shaky on the concept) world, which became the setting of the first eight books I wrote (unpublished, though I’d like to write the book, now in the context of my secondary universe, what I’m calling my “Human Universe.”  So far I have a short story out in it, but I’d like to start work on it in the next two or three years.)  Being a sci-fi/fan world it required tons of research.  I memorized vast swaths of my brother’s school books, and my cousin Natalia’s too.  (Most of that was wrong, of course, and had to be scrapped.  I was building a world with outdated highschool physics and biology and a 14 year old mind.)  Since they’re both engineers, this meant I was memorizing stuff that my colleagues didn’t dream about.  I was also keeping in mind a bizarrely complex genealogy, and about a thousand characters, give or take.

But I still thought I had a bad memory because I couldn’t memorize soccer players and musicians.

In high school I became known for being able to reel off entire pages of the book, then pull in other stuff I’d read years ago: mostly history.

BUT I had major trouble with French verbs (which weirdly still cling to me like barnacles) and with remembering the gender of German words.  (Be fair.  The Germans do that to annoy everyone else.)

It wasn’t until I was actually writing for a living that I realized I had an unusual memory, because I could remember details I hadn’t touched in ten or twenty years.  Planners happened to other people. And the number of times I remembered stories my friends didn’t remember telling me led me to have the rule of never telling them that.  That’s not what friendship is about, anyway.

(As an aside, someone did a study and I wish I could remember where I read  it, and the reason modern man has a generally worse memory is not “because we have more to distract us” but that we don’t require very young children to memorize stuff.  In retrospect, my once-amazing memory was the result of being required to memorize vast swathes of things like poems and the railway schedules for every line in Portugal — which was required in school when I was very little.  And a good thing, as published schedules were spotty — Apparently, we should be surprised, memory is like a muscle that needs to be trained up, and tedious as memorizing is, it prepares us to memorize things as an adult, things we REALLY need to memorize.  The elimination of rote learning has created generations with the memory of gnats.  If you have the raising of children, make them memorize things (I’d start with Kipling.) and praise them extravagantly when they do it.  You’ll be helping them in their future studies.)

And then 13 years ago I fell and hit my head.  This is in my medical records as “blanked out while blowing nose” btw, because they could never find out what caused it, and asked me questions until they thought the silly foreign woman was confusing momentary blankness with concussion.  The ground was swaying under my feet as if I were drunk, and words were coming out one every minute.  But hey, I have an accent, so that must be how I talked normally.

It wasn’t till six months later I went to my normal doctor and my reflexes were off, and I told him and he said “Um… I wish they’d done a CT scan then.”  He told me I could have a stroke at any time, pretty much, from that type of closed head injury (cheerful) and that the greatest risk was five years (thank heavens now past.)  Then I went to my eye doctor and he said the damage to my eyes (from falling and hitting my head on the sink, in a tiny bathroom) was that of someone who was in an head on 60 miles per hour crash.

That was the first time I experienced the annoying effect of sending my memory for something, and having it return a blank.  It had never happened before.  For one I lost five to ten minutes after the concussion.  Because the last things I remember are: blowing my nose and getting up to wash my hands.  Next thing I remember, I was on the floor, my head under the pedestal sink and my legs up the wall.  I remember staring at my legs wondering not WHO I was, but WHAT I was.  I eliminated cat, because those weren’t cat legs.  No, I have no clue how I even got in that position, short of a tractor ray lifting me, then dropping me straight down.  Also, breathing had become voluntary and too much effort, but I could hear a voice calling me names and saying I had too much to write to die there.  (We won’t go into what the voice sounded like or what it was all about.  In my mind the voice was “daddy” but dad doesn’t have that accent or speak English at all.)  This led us to the emergency room, and you know the rest from there.

The concussion did some permanent remodeling to the way I work, at least two god things.  Well, one good and one shake the magic eight ball again.  The good one is that I became far less emotional and far less prone to mood swings.  The “maybe good” is that I developed an interest in art, which I had abandoned at 14.  I very much doubt it will ever be a significant source of income, but it is, for now, a nice relaxing thing to do to focus my mind and to get out of the word-mode when stuck.  And it does help me do covers.

But the bad part of that was the “holes”.  I’d suddenly come up to something I’d known my entire life, and there was nothing there.  A hole.  Parts of my own universes started crumbling or dissolving or something.  There was a character I knew, had worked for years, and suddenly his name and description were gone from my mental file.

More alarming, I started forgetting books I’d read.  This had never happened before, but I now found myself re-reading a book I’d read and enjoying it — happened just the other week — before having a vague suspicion I’d read it before, and going to check my paper books (this was on kindle) and realizing, yep, read it 15 years ago.  While this is helpful in terms of saving money on new books, it is disquieting, like losing a piece of myself.

Same goes for languages, and suddenly finding myself unable to understand German, or Italian.  (French, for some reason shall always be with me.)

Now, when I started taking thyroid supplements, those episodes of “blank” became less frequent, and I’m just taking OTC thyroid supplements (I need to have those tests done, which means scheduling, which means… yeah) so it’s possible the problem lies there.  Maybe.

But lately — like the last month — the episodes are back and galloping.  I lose things I’ve known forever, and become upset with whomever is asking me to remember because I feel so utterly stupid.

But more than that, I feel scared.  There’s early onset Alzheimers in my family.  I’m hoping this is just what I went through once before, when the kids were little.  They gave a free screening for Alzheimers and I went in and was told to stop being silly and go home.  (I was around 37.)  They said that I had “mommy’s memory” which meant I was keeping track of so many lives that I couldn’t remember it all.

Now the kids are older and by and large “go by themselves” which means that shouldn’t be a problem, right?  So why am I getting holes?

I think it might be stress: the forced move, the house hunt.

But what if it isn’t?  The prospect of sliding back down into that soup of disconnected memories is terrifying.  And so many of my favorite writers: Enid Blyton, Terry Pratchett, went just that way.  Did they finally dissolve into a mix of potential universes?  I don’t know.  I don’t want to find out.

And I worry.

*As a veteran Volunteer in exchange student organizations, libraries and the like, and an habitue of Austen fan groups, I DID.  But Chris is young.*

Nobody Expects the Fannish Inquisition!

By Christopher M. Chupik

 

While I had been watching SF and Fantasy stuff since I was a wee Canadian lad, I made my jump into the larger world of fandom the late ‘80s when I went to my first Star Trek convention. It was just a small, local affair with no guests, a few people in costumes and The Voyage Home playing on the VCR. For some reason, there was an entire fanzine dedicated to Tribbles. I think I still have it somewhere in my files. In later years, I went to ConVersion, a Calgary-based con which is now sadly defunct. I was there mostly to meet authors, sit on panels, buy books, meet with my friends and party hard on Saturday night. I have been content to leave the actual running of said events to others.

So, I find it fascinating, in a train-wreck sort of way, when fandom goes wrong.

Fans of the rebooted Battlestar Galactica may recall a certain uber-troll (who shall remain nameless for the safety of this blog) who got himself banned from every single forum he ever posted at with his crazed ranting about the NBC-Universal conspiracy to suppress the Original Galactica and his over-the-top hate of everybody connected to the remake. I have it on good authority he is still ranting, in blogs and message boards where he is the only poster and only commenter.

To say that some people took the J. J. Abrams Trek reboots badly is an understatement. I’ve been rants, name-calling, boycotts, death-threats, etc. There is one anti-Abrams page on Facebook which strictly prohibits anyone pro-reboot from posting there because only “real Star Trek fans” are allowed. Anybody ejected from the group is declared to be “working for Bad Robot” (Abram’s production company).

But whatever you thought of the rebooted Trek, one thing that I noticed was how it revealed just how many Trekkies there really were. Friends and coworkers who had I never suspected of being fans of the franchise suddenly revealed themselves. It was quite a revelation, especially if all you had seen of Trek fandom the past few years was the increasingly small, insular online communities comprised of the same people who had been complaining about everything new since the late ‘80s.

It’s sad to see Trekkies becoming snobs. You would think that a group who has endured mockery for decades would be a little more sensitive to this kind of behavior. Who are we to set ourselves up above our fellow fans like this? This is, however, increasingly a problem with fandom as a whole, with geeks behaving exactly like the elitist snobs who once looked down on them.

To understand the divide, we need to understand that there are two broad categories of fans.

First, there are the regular fans. Maybe they’ve watched/read all the episodes/books of a particular series, maybe not, it’s no big deal. They might go to a few cons, maybe volunteer for a few panels, or even sit on a con committee. More than anything, fandom is fun for them. Let’s call them the Casuals. Most fans are varying degrees of Casual.

Then there are the True Believers, a much smaller faction. They will wage bitter flame-wars over the minutia of imaginary canons. Fandom is not merely a way of life, it is the One True Way, before which all others are inferior. So much of their self-image and worth are wrapped up in fandom that they measure their worth by how much power they’ve amassed over a message board, blog, or con. And no, I don’t mean everybody who runs such things, obviously. I know a lot of people involved heavily in fandom who don’t let it go to their heads.

Eventually, even the thing they claim to revere so much can’t measure up to the idealized idol they’ve constructed in their minds. Fun? Trek isn’t supposed to be fun, it’s supposed to be deep and serious! Those stupid Casuals can’t appreciate how super-serious it is and therefore cannot be true fans!

Fortunately, most fandoms are not ruled by True Believers. Those that are retreat inwards on themselves, becomingly increasingly paranoid and insular, attracting no new members and alienating many of the older ones. Dissenters don’t merely have differing opinions, they’re The Enemy, agents of hostile powers who have defiled the holy relics. Infidels must be expelled. Safe spaces must be created.

Where have I heard this before? It sounds so familiar . . .

Of all the hateful things said about Sad Puppies and its supporters, perhaps the worst of all is the notion that we’re “interlopers” and an “outside force”. As a digression, I find it amusing that we’re also accused of being gatekeepers. Somehow, Sad Puppies are both the watchers on the walls and the barbarians at the gates. How we manage this amazing feat of bilocation is unclear.

Oh, the rote incantations of “racist/sexist/homophobic are bad, but I’ve come to realize they’re just the Left’s knee-jerk response to anyone who disagrees with them, spouted regardless of the race, gender or sexual orientation of the person they are denouncing. At best, they are background noise. At worst, they trivialize real bigotry by conflating mere differences of opinion with expressions of legitimately ugly viewpoints.

Hey, how did I get up on this soapbox?

Ahem.

It doesn’t matter if we’ve been part of fandom since the ‘80s, or the ‘70s or even earlier. We aren’t the True Believers. We don’t know the secret handshakes and haven’t been initiated into the Sacred Mysteries of Fandom. A streak of disheartening elitism was exposed in the hysterical reaction to Sad Puppies. Even among those who did not engage in the mudslinging there was an air of condescension. Who let these Puppies in, anyhow?

While it was disheartening to see I am glad the masks slipped and revealed their true faces. Personally, I can’t imagine why anyone would want to lord it over fandom. But human nature ensures that there will always be people who crave to be masters of their own tiny domains. They may talk about defending the noble traditions of fandom, but what they’re really defending is their own power.

We Sad Puppies jokingly refer to ourselves as “wrongfans”, but there are no wrongfans. Not even the crazed trolls or the elitist Trekkies or even the people who chortled at the display of A-holery at the 2015 Hugos. We all belong to the big, dysfunctional family known as fandom. There’s a lot of Odds in fandom, and for many of them — myself included — fandom was a place they found where they could be themselves and let their geek flag fly. So when we hear a bunch of older fans saying that we don’t really belong or never belonged to begin with, it hurts.

I know who I am. I know where I belong. And it’s here, in fandom, where I’ve always been, where I always will be, in spite of the efforts of a few to make me feel like an invader.

Ultimately, the ones who are most hurt by such words are the ones who speak them. Fanaticism is not the way to make friends and influence people. And then there is the vastness of the community to consider. Last year, when the outrage over Sad Puppies 3 was beginning to get nasty, I went to a convention with 100,000 attendees, approximately ten times the number of people who attended WorldCon. I suspect most of those would be Casuals. I also suspect that if I asked them about the Hugo Awards, most wouldn’t know anything about the Sad Puppy controversy. Quite a few probably wouldn’t even know what the Hugos were. Fandom is just too big to be completely controlled by any one faction. David Gerrold may think he’s a big shot, but to most people — and most Casuals — he’s just the guy who wrote that Tribble episode which inspired that fanzine I bought back in my youth. Certainly, that is how I try to remember him, and not as the man who libeled my friends and turned the Hugo ceremony into a travesty.

The Casuals won’t notice or care when the old order rages against the new. They’re too busy enjoying what they love.

And that is the worst punishment I can conceive of for those who have set themselves up as the Fannish Inquisition.

It’s very hard for people born and raised in a country to actually see it as it is.  It is even harder for people in a country and in a culture to have a dispassionate view of their own culture and the state of it.

This is particularly hard for the US because we’re such a great big country, (as a friend said about my older son, once “larger than life in all directions.”)  Our pop culture even projects outward, appealing to people who frankly don’t get most of it save for the fact that it’s “new” and “cool.”  Our language is spoken — for varous values of spoken, and particularly UNDERSTOOD — the world over.  We can leave our enormous country and still be home, as the people talking to us are to a great extent influenced by the image the US has created of itself in the media and everywhere else.

As for history: we are a nation of fanatics. I neither know nor care whether there is a higher incidence of aspergers in the US than in the rest of the world.  There is however an almost “aspergers” culture.  Part of this is that the people who came here by choice are the kind who are more likely to take principles seriously.  yeah, sure, some came for the economy or someone they married, or a well boiled egg, who nows?  But assimilation is hard; until recently it was required, and people who came here and STAYED had at least some interest in principles and how things were run.

One of the things we’re fanatical about is our history, but unfortunately history is very badly taught in the US.  It’s a memorizing of dates and events, with no informing of what was really happening there, what the public sentiment was, etc.

The teaching of other countries’ history is even worse.  I don’t know if this has been endemic since the founders.  It would seem to make sense not to expose our kids, THEN to just what a purple elephant with polka dot stripes the US is.  Now…  Well, it would be nice to channel all those constructive impulses constructively.

Both of the above, the isolation of the culture and the complete lack of historical perspective contribute to everyone’s impression the US is in an irreversible decline or “doomed.”  Both of the above, from the point of view of someone who’s been all over the world and grew up elsewhere are slightly more than fruitcakey.  They’re batty.

Look, I first came here in 79, the last year of that golden age that was the Carter presidency, when everyone in the US was homeless and in soup lines.  Yeah.  That was what I got from media coverage in Portugal.  Both that Carter was teh awesome and that the US was circling the drain.  I felt a little sad I was coming here for a year in the twilight of the gods.

What I found: yeah, things were tight.  My host mother had to get a job because my host dad hadn’t had a raise in a while.  However, I understood for the first time my aunt’s saying (she immigrated to Venezuela.  I wonder what she’d think now) which was “I’d rather the worst there than the best here.”

The US “circling the drain” was more wealthy than anywhere I even knew of in Europe.  Oh, perhaps not in reserves or in factories, or in who knows what, but in the day to day living.  People here lived better, easier, and had more modes of entertainment available to them than anywhere in the world.  My host mom, who’d gone back to work to help with groceries, spent a little of that money and bought a little TV for the dining room.  (Yep the family watched TV at dinner.)

In Portugal my parents had spent eight years saving for a TV, an effort ended when a friend gave them a TV.  And also even if you wanted to get a job to supplement income, there often were no jobs.

We’re now arguably where Portugal was, re: jobs.  Not really, though, because our laws are still looser on starting something small, and while it’s a problem to grow a business, by and large you can still feed yourself and your family.  And we still live better than 90% of the places on Earth.

I want you to consider that and also the fact that during the regency, England, both people and the supposed government were in crisis.  They had a hell of a time finding an heir with a legitimate heir. People were drinking too much, the lower classes were in crisis since those values that made the British countryside such a great place, had been replaced with those of the city slums.

Idle, hard drinking, wenching and worse was the lot of their “upper classes.”

Any Englishman would be right to give up.

England’s greatest days lay ahead.  This is not isolated, but it’s the best example you will know.  In similar circumstances, Portugal was absorbed by Spain for 60 years, a thing only reversed with revolution and civil war. There too its greatest days were ahead.

In all these cases both the elites and the government were in crisis and often the people were dealing with undigested immigrants and a break down in culture (weirdly in regency England, Portuguese and Spanish Immigrants.  A common sentence in a letter to hire domestics was “please no portuguee.  Eh.)

They recovered.  Will we recover?

I don’t know.  We are not in the same time, in the same place.  And each episode of national decadence is its own self.

All I can tell you is what Richard Fernandez told me yesterday on face book (and keep in mind he’s depressive, as am I, so any time he’s even vaguely optimistic, even twisted and backwardly optimistic, it’s a great thing.)  So.  What he said was “I have no doubt they will lose.  They destroy all they touch, because their principles are toxic.  In the end they will lose.  The question is, can we survive till then?”

I enjoin you, very strongly, to do whatever you can and more to survive till then.

Remember they worked for DECADES to take over the media, education, the writing and entertainment establishments.  They dissembled and betrayed to get control and power.  That’s their strength.  And then someone created a way for anyone to reach the masses directly and instantly.  Because that’s what builders do.  They build.  (Even if some of those builders mouth the platitudes of the left, but then rich people do, because it’s a positional good.)  Just that is making all their gains shaky.  So may it always be.

Build under, build around, build over.  Have our structures ready so that when the official ones collapse, it defaults onto ours, which are ready to take the weight.

Be not afraid.  In the end we win they lose.

Now go forth and build.  It’s what we do.

 

 

Everything is Coming Up Promo- Freerange Oyster

J.M. Ney-Grimm

Skies of Navarys

When the king’s geomancer announces that a tidal wave threatens Navarys – the Atlantis of the North-lands – every citizen on the island springs to action. Amidst the uproar, the aeromancer Palujon steals unique and magical lodestones.

Mago, son of the lodestones’ creator, vows to retrieve his father’s precious artifacts. But Mago’s friend Liliyah questions Palujon’s motives.

Why would a man of his stature break the law? Is he truly a dastard? Life and death hang on her answers.

Henry Vogel

The Counterfeit Captain

A Coloring Book

Captain Nancy Martin expects a lonely death.

Passing out as her battle-damaged starfighter bleeds the last of its air, she comes to in the cavernous and deserted docking bay of an unknown starship. Leaving her crippled fighter to seek help, she finds she’s been scooped up by a gigantic generation ship inhabited by the descendants of the original crew and passengers—people whose entire universe is the ship!

Mistaken for the vast ship’s long-lost and near-mythical Captain, Nancy is welcomed as a savior. She believes she’s found the allies she needs in her desperate fight for survival. But an even greater menace lurks in the shadows of the ship—one that controls every inch of the ship and every life aboard it. One that will stop at nothing to destroy—

The Counterfeit Captain.

Set in the same universe as Vogel’s best-selling novel, The Fugitive Heir, The Counterfeit Captain further expands the stage for Vogel’s exciting brand of star-spanning science fiction adventure.

Mary Catelli

A Diabolical Bargain

Growing up between the Wizards’ Wood and its marvels, and the finest university of wizardry in the world, Nick Briarwood always thought that he wanted to learn wizardry.

When his father attempts to offer him to a demon in a deal, the deal rebounded on him, and Nick survives – but all the evidence points to his having made the deal.

Now he really wants to learn wizardry. Even though the university, the best place to master it, is also the place where he is most likely to be discovered.

Also available from these fine booksellers:

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Madeleine and the Mists

Enchanted pools, shadowy dragons, wolves that spring from the mists and vanish into them again, paths that are longer, or shorter, than they should be, given where they went… the Misty Hills were filled with marvels.

Madeleine still left the hills, years ago, to marry against her father’s will. If her husband’s family is less than welcoming, she still is glad she married him, and they have a son, two years old.

But her husband’s overlord has fallen afoul of the king. And all his men fall with him, including her husband.

She sets out, to seek the queen and try to bypass the king – and the Misty Hills.

Some things are not so easily evaded.

Also available from these fine booksellers:

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Recently, in a fit of my own form of quixotic insanity, I posted the following in my facebook page:

What did I want? I wanted a Roc’s egg. I wanted a harem loaded with lovely odalisques less than the dust beneath my chariot wheels, the rust that never stained my sword. I wanted raw red gold in nuggets the size of your fist, and feed that lousy claim jumper to the huskies! I wanted to get up feeling brisk and go out and break some lances, then pick a likely wench for my droit du seigneur – I wanted to stand up to the Baron and dare him to touch my wench! I wanted to hear the purple water chuckling against the skin of the Nancy Lee in the cool of the morning watch and not another sound, nor any movement save the slow tilting of the wings of the albatross that had been pacing us the last thousand miles. I wanted the hurtling moons of Barsoom. I wanted Storisende and Poictesme, and Holmes shaking me awake to tell me, “The game’s afoot!” I wanted to float down the Mississippi on a raft and elude a mob in company with the Duke of Bilgewater and Lost Dauphin. I wanted Prester John, and Excalibur held by a moon-white arm out of a silent lake. I wanted to sail with Ulysses and with Tros of Samothrace and to eat the lotus in a land that seemed always afternoon. I wanted the feeling of romance and the sense of wonder I had known as a kid. I wanted the world to be the way they had promised me it was going to be, instead of the tawdry, lousy, fouled-up mess it is. I had had one chance – for ten minutes yesterday afternoon. Helen of Troy, whatever your true name may be – and I had known it and I had let it slip away. Maybe one chance is all you ever get.Oscar Gordan – Glory Road – Robert A. Heinlein.

That passage stirred me when I read it at about 14 or 15, sitting at the kitchen table in my mother’s kitchen.  That’s what I wanted to.  Oh, not the harem as I had no use for odalisques, but perhaps a group of oiled barbarians to carry my chaise over the heads of my adoring subjects.

I knew I was a reprobate, steeped in sin and malice from early on — I don’t lie to myself as much as most people.  I try to be good.  It’s much harder than being nice.  But I also know what lies beneath my attempts — but I didn’t realize how much of a reprobate until I posted this on facebook.

Before the metaphorical ink was dry on the post, I had realized that I was — apparently — a dinosaur come from a much freer past into a Brave New World.  (Which, btw, was NOT an instruction manual, no matter how much people want to make it so.)

Among other things, it was pointed out to me that odalisques didn’t consent, that wanting an harem was sexist and that dust beneath your chariot wheels meant you weren’t a nice person, or an elected ruler or something.

In the Don Camillo books by Giovanni Guareschi, there is this persistent scene, when the village priest is engaged in a feud with the local communists, or the local, ammoral gentry, where he spots one or more of them in the front row, turns the crucifix on the wall so the Christ faces the wall (and doesn’t hear him, is the understanding, though the character has enough depth we realize it’s a respect thing, not a literal thing) puts his hand on his hips and speaks in his own way.

I am now turning the portrait of Heinlein to the walls and putting my hands on my hips.

What a generation of mewling babies, with the intellectual rigor of a drunken sot.  Their inability to even imagine something that might potentially be offensive to someone, somewhere has so restricted their little pea brains that they are functionally historically illiterate.  They not only are unable to imagine that someone, somewhere, might not have believed as they do; they don’t think anyone should try to imagine believing or living differently than the morals of our times.  This at the same time they enjoin us to respect as our equals cultures that are far worse than those imagined far-off ones.

My grandmother used to say “There’s willfully blind, and then there’s those who erase the place where the eyes go.”  And that’s them.  A willfully blind generation of moralist scolds, stumbling blindly towards a future they refuse to comprehend is different from their imaginings, and does not, in any way, care about their scolding.  They wander around the world in a cloud of self-regard, unable to comprehend that other people don’t see them as brave pioneers but as crazed censors with nothing to contribute to either culture or society but a hand held up and  wagging finger and the word “no.”

They don’t realize they are midgets, standing on the shoulders of giants.  Because they can piss down, they imagine themselves superior, unable to see their product is nothing but a yellow streak on the face of civilization.

They’ve built nothing and understand nothing.

So, I’m saying it’s okay to portrait slavery and sexual abuse, war and criminality without making it clear in the books I disapprove?

I’m saying that most of the history of mankind is slavery and sexual abuse, war and criminality, and that in those times, and in those  days there were degrees of evil.  Sometimes a man made a very small advance towards what we now consider a better world.  A tiny one, by the skin of his teeth, and that was enough for us to consider him a hero, and to remember him through the ages.

A friend once pointed out that by our rational, present day morals, Ulysses was a despicable human being.  And my friend is right.  He was a brigand and a thief, a killer, a sea raider.

On the other hand he was in tune with the morals of his time, where hospitality was sacred over property or even self-determination, and he stood out from his time as a cunning one.  In a place and time where most people died within five miles of their birthplace and never broke the rules of his time, this fictional hero had traveled the world and outwitted supernatural enemies.  So.  He was remembered.  His adventures were chanted around fires for millennia and gave the pulse of those who heard it a pleasant rush.  “What if I did? What if I could?”  Even in the nineteenth century, as distant from his morals as from ours, his adventures thrilled many a school boy.  In the sixties, now as distant from us as the face of the moon is from the Earth, his story translated into Portuguese even thrilled a very small girl who’d just learned to read and who didn’t know this was the legend of a lost civilization.

Odalisques?  Well, when I was little, some of the still preserved legends from the Moorish occupation  spoke of good harem masters and bad harem masters.  Everything is relative.  The good ones were often remembered for centuries.  Which in turn helped a new generation of boys grow up with the idea of “what was acceptable.”

Yes, sure, women were always equal to men and blah blah blah.  And if you believe that, I have a bridge to sell you.  It leads to nowhere.

Sure, women have the same rights as men, and are their moral equals.  Unfortunately, human civilization doesn’t proceed wholly in a world of spirits.  While there are undoubtedly some beliefs and conditions that are better than others and while by and large the civilization of humans — with some truly disgusting back sliding — proceeds to freer, less violent and generally better lives for all, in primitive conditions, or even very difficult ones, men tend to revert to the law of the jungle.  This is not ruled by some imaginary noble savage, but by physical force.  And in physical force women drew the short straw.  Meanwhile we’re also the producers of babies, the resource that gives a tribe a future.  Throughout history this combination made us THE most valuable resource, something to be stolen and hoarded and kept captive.  Yes I used “something” because caught in endless pregnancies and vulnerable to attack, through most of human history women weren’t treated as human.

They had a power of a sort.  A power that I’ve seen in action, and which is used — I understand — all over the Arab world.  While there was no such a thing as solidarity among women, each being too interested in the survival and prospering of their children, and therefore often helping in the virtual enslavement of other women (or worse. The history of China is … eye opening) women could and did have power.  A woman with a strong personality could influence a man all the more as she was held to be incapable of it.

If you don’t see the inherent dramatic tension of a story on such lines, it’s because you’re too busy shouting slogans.  Take off your “A woman needs a man like a fish needs a bicycle” and take your foot out of your mouth and the plugs from your ears, and try to actually pretend you were born and raised in such a society.  No one is going to listen to you if you preach feminist power, and the men of the time will knock you about if you attempt to.  But you can have power by whispering in his ear.  And if you don’t see yourself as the woman who controls the empire with your whisper, if you don’t understand the power of it, your imagination is dead.  Put away the paddles.  Stop trying to restart it.  If it weren’t nailed to its perch, it would be pushing up daisies.

But isn’t it immoral to think, write, create such art?  Wouldn’t it be better if we wrote only about the world as we wish it would be, where men and women are completely alike save for some externals, and where there is no such thing as non-consensual sex or slavery?  Or at least, if we have to write about such a time, shouldn’t we condemn it loud and clear?

Ah, you lotus eaters.  You have no idea how most of the world lives even now, much less in former times.  You don’t understand the GLAMOUR of evil, even as you feel it — or do you really think your little witch hunts are inspired by loving kindness?  Do you think we believe you don’t feel the thrill of the hunt, the joy of sadism? — and you can’t comprehend not scolding when something is not right in tune with your quite up to the minute “morals.”  You lecture us on tolerating “the other” while completely incapable of grasping what “the other” is.  You think if someone is a darker tan or comes from far away, they are moral imbeciles who must be tolerated because they’re too stupid to reform.

And in that way you tolerate the unthinkable, even while refusing to think it or to understand how your ancestors built the civilization you’re now gleefully tearing apart.

You’ve been so rich so long you don’t realize your willful mind-castration is taking you back to a place where YOU will be dust beneath some barbarian’s chariot wheels.

But wont reading about such things make people do them?

Really?  You think your fellow humans are so feeble of mind they’ll be unable to help themselves but will do something because they read about it?  Honestly, is this projection?

There was this theory about movies and video games, both of which being visual probably have more chance of doing that.  It turns out Tipper Gore was wrong.  Actually kids who play violent video games and watch objectionable movies tend to be — on the whole — less violent than their generation.  The operative word is “their generation.”  If you have an entire generation raised by hired strangers who are not allowed to teach them morals, you are going to end up with more violence and amoral behavior, regardless of what they play, watch or read.

As for violent reads: between the ages of ten and twelve, I was fascinated with a book on the Adventures of Captain Morgan, which I BELIEVE had belonged to my great grandmother (unless dad bought it used in one of his ubiquitous old book stores, or as they’re known in Portuguese, Alfarrabios.)  It was a set of leather bound volumes, with original and rather bloody litographs.  I remember particularly Captain Morgan, trying to kidnap a princess, cut off the head of her slave sleeping in the antechamber, while the slave slept, with a blade so sharp the poor woman never woke up.

I mean, these were nineteenth century books.  The killing of innocents was part of the thrilling adventure and you read that scene thrilled that his sword was so sharp he could pull off the unbelievable.

You didn’t read it for the blood, though that gave you a range of the danger he faced, for others tried to do onto him what he did to that salve, but for the fact that the man for his time had an inflexible if idiosyncratic honor and, as written, was a protector of the weak and the oppressed.  (No, not in real life.)

Strangely, though this inspired many dreams (and a very bad novel written at 16 or so) about being a female pirate in the age of sail, I never actually felt the need to cut someone else’s head off as they slept.  Even as a pre-teen, I could get a sense for “that was a different time and place; they did things differently.  Didn’t mean they were right or that I should do them now.”

People who demand either whitewashing or preaching against the past in their stories, lose that sense.  They turn the vast and interesting history of mankind into a flat canvas with themselves in the center dictating what is light and what is dark.

The hubris of it is only half of the evil in this.  The wilful blindness is worse, because by losing sight of the past, they can’t see the future they’re shaping.

 

A Modest Proposal – Kate Paulk

A Modest Proposal (With apologies to Jonathan Swift)
Given the appalling decision-making powers of the political elites, and the equally appalling spectacle displayed by the recent primary contests in this nation, it becomes essential to propose a simple solution to the destruction of our essential liberties by means of a simple proposal designed to respect the disabilities of those responsible for such poor choices while enabling those of us retaining the capacity for independent thought to continue to enjoy our freedom without doing harm to any other free person.
Whereas the Thirteenth Amendment forbids involuntary servitude of any form save as penalty for commission of a crime, it becomes us to enact involuntary servitude as the penalty for the following crimes:
The offering of; and acceptance of bribes, be they in the form of lobbyist ‘gifts’, financial remuneration, quid-pro-quo understandings, or any other action commonly understood as corrupt.
The use of blackmail; such that a person would reasonably fear for his reputation upon public knowledge of an act that is both legal and meets common understanding of ethics.

That the blackmail of an unconvicted guilty party should expose the guilt and enable prosecution may be considered a fortuitous event.

That the act of knowingly accumulating debt for which payment in full can never be made be considered an act of fraud, and as such, subject to penal servitude similar to that for corruption and blackmail seems only reasonable, and may, with judicious use of auction facilities, assist in the reclamation of this nation’s alarming foreign debt.

We understand that this may cause hardship to those unaccustomed to labor, yet we consider this to be advantageous; in that those most likely to find themselves sentenced to auction are those who, by their decisions and actions, have demonstrated that they are wholly in favor of slavery and desire nothing so much as a benevolent master to serve.
We wish them good fortune in finding such a paragon.

Because I’ve been busy with house (groan) matters and trying to write short stories in the cracks between (they’re due) I have been reading one of those interminable collections of traditional fairytales.  See, I need to read something while cooking or walking on the treadmill, or such, but it can’t be anything long or engaging, because otherwise I won’t get my work done.

One of the things that struck me about the fairytales is that people are born to be what they are.  Sure, sure, there are tests (usually three) sometimes (not always) but even then it’s never at doubt that the chosen one will manage all trials.

Some time ago I was talking to a friend about this (no longer remember whom) and he said yeah, in Heinlein books the kids/heroes had to work for it.  And were often very bad at it (Johnny Rico and math, for ex) but in modern fantasies (Harry Potter — though at least she put him through trials), and even most other YA, you are “the chosen one” and therefore it falls to you without being a “battler” as Dave Freer puts it.

Which brings me to the topic of this: it used to be America as a pioneer culture admired the battlers.  The from-rags-to-riches story was the American story and people at least pretended to it, even if not quite true.  People admired those who sometimes fell a lot of times in the effort to reach the summit (say, Abraham Lincoln.)

I don’t know when this started changing.  Look, the fairy tales are a reflection of the society they were created in, a society where though social mobility existed (particularly after the Black Death) it wasn’t supposed to.  The idea was that G-d placed you in the strata of society you were supposed to be in, and your qualities fit that place.  So the stories talked about the naturally brilliant son, the beautiful daughter, etc.  And though they were often born poor they were “blessed” and “Fated” to succeed.  (Which might also be a way to cope with sudden social mobility.)

The US not being that type of society had different stories.

But in the seventies, when I came here, after I’d read all the SF and the mysteries in the local library I branched out into popular psychology.  (At the time I had an interest in maybe taking psychology.)

I remember one of the books going on and on about how people were either “winners” or “losers” and the one you were was set early in infancy (they went on and on and on about potty training.) They believed that time set the tone for your life and after that you always won or always lost.

This entered the popular speech in the epithet “loser” applied to someone, as though losing were a permanent thing you were “fated” to.

To an extent the whole current mania with “alphas” and “betas” and “omegas” follows the same thing.  You are born in a place in a hierarchy.  You can’t fake it, but you can’t change it.

Does all of this have a basis in reality?  Well, the alpha and beta and such have a base in primate studies.  This is and isn’t somewhat applicable to man.  The loser thing only has a basis if people CHOOSE to be losers; i.e. if they’re convinced that they lost once so they’ll always lose.  It is a narrative thing.  If you internalize that narrative then you do indeed become a “loser” i.e. a permanent f*ck up and dependent on the charity of others.

But in a way neither of them apply very well to man.  Most of the characteristics that make a primate a “alpha” would make — to an extent do make — a man a criminal.  The largest population of alpha males is in prison or (in countries that go for it) killed.

In fact that’s sort of the whole point.  If humans still adhered to that ranking and followed it, we’d live in small bands, hand to mouth (literally.)  The whole process of civilization is  a process of breaking out those ranks.

This has nothing to do with the pick up artists or the games.  For them learning to emulate an alpha male works. Because human mating instinct hasn’t quite caught up with civilization and women more willing to go with irrational choices will prefer alpha males or those who can fake it.  That’s valid.  Of course you’re appealing mostly to women who prefer not to think, even if they can.  That’s fine.

My problem is with stretching it to everything from business to politics.  And judging people that way, mostly erroneously.

Human society is FAR more complex than any simian band. This means you might have the alpha characteristics of your group, but not of “primate alpha.”

Some people just have charisma.  They enter a room and fill it.  That is a quality.  Is it a quality that means they’re a “Winner?” Or should be?

Um… no.

While these people have an easier time getting on, particularly in the liberal arts and other fields that are mostly bullshit and spin, it doesn’t make them GOOD at what they do.

Our worship of charisma means that we often will hire the idiot manager who looks good, and talks a good game, but who has no freaking clue how a business runs. We believe they are “fated” to be great.  Anyone forgotten Obama’s pantleg?  How well did that work out?

But worse than that, and what I’ve noticed, is that from this idea some are winner and some are “losers” people started worshiping and responding to outward signs of success as though they were reality.  You know “Nothing succeeds like success” and all that bullsh*t.  Which led to Fake It Till You Make It, which ONLY works if people AREN’T looking at accomplishments, but at “signs of a winner.”

Humans and life are WAY more complicated than that.  I mentioned Lincoln above.  Love him or hate him (and I do both kind of in equal measures) he had a long history of losing, before he won.  (And then he died, because it was that kind of story.) Robert A. Heinlein had tried his hand at just about everything and failed, sometimes through no fault of his own, before going on to become one of the most influential SF writers of all time.

There are a million other examples, but it’s early morning for me (don’t judge me) and those are the only two that come to mind.

But the point is if you’re a battler, you battle.  You might end up not succeeding, but you might also succeed against all odds.

Once at a very BORING party, I found a book of “Arab horoscopes.”  I know it will shock you that instead of cute animals like the Chinese or mythological symbols like the west, they use weapons.  They also — if this book was accurate.  I never looked further — make more sense in casting your “horoscope.”  What size town were you born in, what status was your family, how much education do you have take the place of when were you born, and what planet influenced you?

In a society that’s still very traditional, the end result should be very accurate.

Of course I plugged my data in.  (DUH.  REALLY.)  What came up was “deep Sling Shot”.  “Someone whose life conditions have no reflection on the result.”  Most “deep sling shots” get nowhere, but it’s possible for some to make it from beggar to king — or something like that.  (Not sure.  It’s been 35 years and it was the once.)

At the time this impressed me, because it amused me.  Which is why I remember it.

However, remember these “horoscopes” were designed for people in a deeply traditional society.  Thinking about it, the mixed, confused “original conditions” are far more common in America, and what’s more more prone to change.

So what we need to do is stop fawning over the rich and the successful at the moment and look at the person themselves (at any rate that success is often “Fake it till you make it.”)  We need to stop “respecting the office” when the person in it is a total f*ckup.  (This now extends to teachers and policemen, btw.  People continually tell me about those, “You have to respect the office.”  No, I really, really don’t.  This is not the military.  I don’t owe even external honor to anyone.  They can earn it or not. If THEY don’t show any respect for the office, why should I OWE them any.)

Our tax records, even in these diminished times show that Americans move from top to bottom percentile with amazing rapidity and frequency.  And back again.

We are Americans.  We’re the nation that beat the odds to exist.  We’re all deep sling shots.  How deep and how far we go is not totally under our control, but it is to a great extent.

The greatest determinants of success are application and perseverance.  Even if you lost every time till now, there is no fate dictating that next time you won’t win and win so spectacularly that it erases all former losses.

Battle on.  Illegitimi non carborundum!  We are not winners.  We’re not losers.  We’re battlers.  Win some, lose some.  The important thing is not to give up the fight.

 

I’m going to be a spoil sport.  Fortunately that’s easy.  You see, I raised two children, and boys at that.  Once you get the mom knack, you never go back.

This is the third post I wrote.  In the other two I got impolite and unseemly.  I had decided to take time away from all social media, but while having coffee — the stuff to make me sleep yesterday made my head ache this morning, though it had the advantage of amusing younger son who’d never seen me tipsy — it came to me that getting impolite and unseemly was all wrong.

This morning I was faced with the expected gloat from those to the alt.right (not the right, right, you know?) of me, and those to the left of me (because now they can get Hillary) and from those stuck in the middle (hey, when did unrepentant libertarian/classical liberal become the middle?) with me, I met with various flavors of defeatism and “burn it all down.”

I’ll be honest, the last ones are the ones who annoy me the most.

Do let’s suppose there’s nothing we can do.  Hillary or Trump there isn’t an ‘aporth of difference between them.  (Yes, I know respected people on the right say Trump will be fine.  I respectfully disagree.  His entire life he’s been a spoiled rich boy with only one interest: onanism.  Sometimes he uses others for his sport, but the world is a vast canvas in which only Donald Trump exists.  No, the type of business he does, in our current business climate requires neither intelligence nor common sense, only that one be born rich and with the right connections — there’s a whole post on that and the pernicious concept of “winners” and “losers” who are born so — and even then he’s not half as successful as he portrays himself.  Now, is it possible that someone like that can turn on a dime and be a great president?  Sure.  If you believe in miracles.  And no one would be more grateful for one than I would.  Unfortunately, I don’t see that happening and find the firm belief that it will akin to that of the child who closes his eyes and wishes for a pony in the firm belief it will appear.)  So, one of them wins and–

What precisely?

Yeah, there is a good chance it will precipitate us into civil war. Because frankly they’re both paranoiacs who will try to crack down on those who dislike them: i.e. most of the country.  Yeah, there’s a good chance of an economic crash.  Yeah…

So let’s suppose all those happen.  They don’t happen the way you think they do.  We’ve talked about that before.  Even Lebanon at its worst did not revert to the stone age.  It’s just slow immiseration and life becoming massively more difficult.

So, life becomes more difficult and the US keeps electing dumb asses.  And you’ve given up, because you know they’re dumb asses.

Now what?

Please understand that unless you’re very very very lucky you’re not going to get a glorious martyr’s death.  You’re not going to set yourself on fire in front of tank.  That’s not how these things work.  You might die in a reeducation camp.  You might get shot while resisting arrest.  Even those are unlikely.  The most likely thing to happen is that you live in a world that is increasingly grayer and more despairing, and in which you have less and less of a say.  That’s the way Europe has gone, and this election is turning out very European.

So, what are you going to do?

Give up?  Giving up is for a long time.

Shoot them up?

And then what?  There’s a million insurgences around the country every day that you never hear of.  You won’t even be a statistic.

So — I’m looking at you — what are you going to do?

Put away the bottle and the defeatism.  Give me the Kalishnakov.  Yes, siree, running around the hills with an AK-47 is way more fun than what I’m going to propose.  It’s also how you get Cuba.  So, put the machine gun down.  Take a deep breath and listen to the mom-voice, the voice that tells you that you must do unpalatable things like wash behind your ears, and eat broccoli, not because I’m forcing you to do them, but because you know in the long run you have to.

The country didn’t get where it is in a day.  Or a year.  Or ten years.  Or twenty years. The take over that destroyed our youth’s ability to read, our government’s ability to leave us alone, and our populace’s ability to reason took at least a hundred years.  And it was so slow that until about thirty years ago most people were in denial of it.

Yeah, things are pretty bad, sure, but none of the works of Man are permanent, and what others did we can undo.

What it will take is a lot like eating broccoli, but it’s the only thing we can do.  The alternatives are death in one form or another.  So, here it is a modest program to take back our country. Note I not only don’t expect to see the fruits of it, but my grandchildren might not see them.  On the other hand, our great grandchildren might get to live in freedom and prosperity.  It’s worth a try.  What do you have to lose?  (Other than the AK-47, and I’m keeping that safe till you cool down a little.):

1-  If you’re out politically, enjoin people not to give up.  Provide encouragement and support for those who can’t be out, and who will often be discouraged.  Be aware in either case your career is going to take a hit.  It’s going to happen.

2- If you’re not out, take a dramamine and infiltrate.  Infiltrate the alt.right.  Infiltrate the left.  Seek positions of power and influence, and start subverting.  Remember to take it slowly.

3 – If you’re an artist, create.  Particularly if you’re subtle enough to get under people’s shields.  Remember Heinlein had thousands of children, some of them overseas, where we read him in translation and his words were so STRANGE.  But we kept reading, because the stories were good, and little by little our minds change.

4- If you’re a teacher, teach.  Teach as much of the truth as you can.  I realize you’re hemmed in, but there are ways.

5- Anywhere else, gird your loins and educate others.  Around the coffee machine at work, or in the park, watching the kids — cast doubt on the narrative, and be prepared with facts.

6- Whatever you are and whoever you are, take care of yourself and those you can “carry.”  Times are about to get very, very (very) rough.  We’ll have to step in and keep things going as well as we can.  Sure, monetary help, if you can, but also knowledge and emotional support and… all of it.  Find out what you can do and do it.  Immiseration from the top down only works if you let it.  Find ways to get around destructive regulations and crazy enforcement, and build/create/make it work.

7- If you’re a parent, homeschool if you can, but if you can’t, consider what I did “homeschooling and deprogramming” after school.  It can save your child’s sanity, it can save your child’s life, but more importantly, it will assure the work keeps going another generation or three or ten.  As long as it’s needed.

This is not the end.  This is not even the end of the beginning.  We survived Woodrow Wilson, we’ll survive Trumplinton or Clinrump.

Our flag is still there.  Teach your children well.

Now go and work.

This seems appropriate just now:

BUILDING UNDER – A BLAST FROM THE PAST FROM 2013

So, we’ve established that revolutions don’t do much except make things worse, unless revolutions are the blessing of an order already in place and already functioning, in which case, the overpower vanishes and there it is.

This works best, of course, in Colonial situations, though for the record, most of the anti-colonial revolutions ended disastrously.  Even when the colonial power was as unorganized, hapless and… well, devil-may-care as Portugal, the result… oh, just read the recent history of Mozambique and Angola, or, better, talk to someone who was there.  As for Zimbabwe, its fall from the breadbasket of Africa is… well…

Of course there are other factors for that, including but not limited to the fact that the colonial powers had infected – via their intellectuals – these poor people with Marxism, and also that the Soviet Union used them as cat’s paws to keep the US occupied, to keep its people in goods (it’s curious that while capitalism is accused of this, the communist powers are always the ones who work like ancient empires.  They have to keep invading and stealing, because they simply can’t produce, having long since killed or scared away their producers.) and to kill off a lot of the young males who might otherwise cause trouble.

Leaving all that aside and since space colonies don’t seem to be forthcoming in the next 20 years or so – though I wouldn’t count them out.  Like with ebooks which were talked about forever and finally dismissed as “never gonna happen” I suspect if it does happen it will be suddenly, over about five years, and probably involving some new technology or a will to use the old ones. – what do we do, those of us who don’t wish to live under the boot of a progressively (eh!) more authoritarian regime?

We dig under.

I’d like to point out the regime we are currently living out is the result of just that strategy.  They occupied all the positions of power that lead to government control over about three to four generations.  (It’s what “the long march” is all about.)  Those of us who grew up in unstable countries know what the nexus of power a new regime absolutely must conquer to maintain its grip on the population: radio, TV, Newspapers, as much of the bureaucracy as possible, from your local DMV to whatever passes for a deliberative body – and then you can take the president, and then you’re home free.

The genius of the current take over is that they knew they couldn’t do it South American style and come in with tanks and machine guns, take over all these places by force and get away with it.  That can’t be managed in the country with the best military in the world.

Instead, they went exactly for the same centers, but one by one, and with replacement strategies.  In this they were helped by two of their characteristics and the characteristics of those they view as domestic enemies (No?  Listen to them sometime.) and who are anyone who isn’t to the left of Lenin.  For our purposes we’ll call them “conservatives” though a lot of us aren’t EXACTLY that and though at this point in time “conservative” is a misnomer for people who want to change the current form of governance.

They took over by stealthing it – that is by pretending to be “establishment” until they were secure.  I actually tried to stealth it for years in publishing, and I have friends who are still trying to do it now (All the best boys and girls, you’re better than I.)  I couldn’t do it for reasons that lots of other conservatives can’t do it.  First, I couldn’t STEALTH well enough.  We, liberty lovers tend to prize truth and it bothered me greatly to fake it, so I was never vocal about supporting stuff I, in fact, abhorred.  Second, (vile) progs once in control which was well before I broke in, started demanding VOCAL adherence to their nonsense.  So if you weren’t screaming about the patriarchal, capitalist regime every other line, you simply wouldn’t get the push and the promo.  Or, as a friend of mine said “they watch what you laugh at, and they watch for how you respond in conversation”  and since even professional meetings turn into extended political rants with quite unimaginably offensive things said about everyone not extreme left, keeping an impassive face is difficult enough, let alone faking enthusiasm.

The reverse of this is that liberty lovers have this habit of fairness (which is why it’s so hard for me to wield the troll hammer) so even if we took over, the take over would never be absolute, and it would never, ever, ever be permanent.  We tend to go “Yes, he’s a communist, but that’s a stupid quirk.  He’s a good worker.  Look at what he did with this or that – give him the promotion.  It is by this process that most conservative institutions become far left.  The reverse doesn’t happen.  It’s not that the left is much better at stealthing (though they are) it’s that the right is much worse at excluding ideological opponents and/or viewing them as “the enemy.”  At least quase-ante, before the last few years, we tended to view them more as poor fools.

And this is how they took over all the media, all entertainment and most corporations and boards and anything that was a group of people, that needed “leadership” and that could be manipulated.  It also helps they’re the side who want power over others, while we mostly want to be left alone.

So to propose that we start our own crawl through the institutions is misguided – it’s not something we can do, something we’re good at or something even particularly productive in the current state of affairs.

However, the power-lovers, no matter what the regime have one fatal flaw.  They love to seize power.  They’re very good at wielding it – as in pounding down all opposition – what they suck at, because their temperament makes them not empathetic at all, is figuring out how people work.  And trying to rule (which is what they do) or worse, govern, without understanding people leads to disaster.  It is worse if they are communists, because communism is a religion at odds with reality.  They continue believing it, even as it fails, like those poor cult members whose end of the world is forever postponed one more month, and they continue doing more of what fails, which is why their utopias turn rapidly to hell on earth.

This leaves the rest of us stuck in a situation where EVEN if we could do the reverse of their strategy, even if we decided to crawl through the institutions for seventy years, we don’t have that kind of time.  The people who were so hot on getting into the cockpit, are flying the plane right into the ground because their little (red) religious book tells that that’s the way to gain altitude.

We don’t have seventy years before gravity asserts itself explosively.  We don’t have seventy months.  Sometimes I think we’ll be lucky if we have seventy weeks, and frankly I wouldn’t be surprised if we crashed in seventy days.  Sometimes I feel as if I’m locked in the painting “the scream” shrieking soundless and I can’t do anything.

Wait.  Before you head out to the bathroom to slit your wrists in a warm bath – listen.  I didn’t say there’s nothing we can do.

Like the left we have our own strengths and our own abilities.  And they are things they not only don’t have, but they can’t fully understand.

To wit, the reason we tend to be really bad at politics is that there are things that are more important to us.  A lot of people have complained that people aren’t focusing on the politics because they’re busy making a living, raising a family, figuring out how to survive.

But, listen, that’s a strength, too.

See, the reason that they’re self-devouring is that they see politics before merit.  It’s never “we’ll promote him even though he’s a political idiot because OMG, he can write.”  It’s always “She can write all right, but she’s not “one of the good people” so we’ll not only do nothing but thwart her if we can.”

Over time this allows them to take over ideologically.  And it makes them REALLY dumb about anything else.

Here we have to go back to the publishing industry.  Because ideology was more important than anything else (though they promoted some books with no overt ideological tinge, because the author – they were satisfied – was one of them.  They tolerated these books more anywhere else rather than sf, which is why sf crashed harder and faster, except obviously at Baen.  Because SF is the projection of the present into the future, no “incorrect” politics would be allowed.) they needed to control not just what got published, but what got distributed and what got push.  This meant not only taking over the bookstores, (ideologically, not the publishers) but setting up a system which was determined by pull, not push.  By the end of their reign and just before ebooks hit, they could “publish” a book and make sure it sold nothing (it was never on shelves.  EVEN if people asked for it) and thereby end the career of anyone whom they’d found out was ideologically different – or suspect.  At the same time, of course, someone on the “right” (left) side got push, even if the work was otherwise undistinguished.

This worked to an extent – the reading public simply assumed ALL authors were leftist, and read the least offensive ones.  However, as the houses lost feedback (because this was all push, no pull) they lost track of “what the market will bear.”  Printruns were shrinking every year (the excuse being “people don’t read anymore.”) and they were starting to feel the pinch.  The bookstores, in particular (their fault for buying into “to the net” and the publishers’ push model) were caught in the middle and imploding.

All it took was the emergence of a free market in electronic books to send the whole thing into a tail spin.  (Most of the houses are dead, just still – somehow – walking.)

The houses reaction to ebooks was classic too – they reacted just like cultists whose UFO/prophet failed to bring about the end of the world on the appointed date: cover up, ignore, and hope the whole thing goes away.

Well – this is basically what we’re seeing in government, in finance, and anywhere that the left has got its big foot in, including “big science.”

They have been promoting people on the basis of faith, not intelligence for years.  And that’s no way to run a civilization (the problem goes beyond the USA, though I suppose, as usual, it will be left for us to solve.)

So – you want your second American revolution and your second American republic?  Fine.  Start building a structure that works, behind, beside and beneath the official one.

In some cases this will be very very difficult.  For us writers, for instance, it’s almost impossible to work for anything but US dollars.  (Though, who knows, that might change.  Will for sure if the crash comes.  I will of course work for gold, if anyone wants to cover me in a pile of it!)

On the other hand, we’re going around the publishing establishment, more and more so, yay us.  I’d advise every liberty-minded writer, even the traditionally published ones, to look into indie.  At best you can use it to support and promote your published work (I have brought a lot of people to the Darkship Thieves universe through the short stories.)  At worst, if something happens to your publisher (No, I don’t expect anything to happen to Baen, but a lot of it rests on ONE WOMAN’s shoulders, and while she’s younger than I and I hope she outlives me, sh*t happens.  To everyone.) you have a fallback and something to build from.

At the same time, I urge artists to find other ways to market their art.  Both of these will take stepping outside your “validation” comfort zone, but a lot of us had to do that with politics anyway, and it’s not that different.

If you’re not there – I urge you, urge you – to use your skills to advance the building of a parallel structure.  If you’re a computer maven, build a game engine that will allow indie game writers to compete with the big houses.  If you’re a computer maven, again, think about animation tools and others that allow indie movies to do what the big guys do for one percent of the price.  If you’re a teacher or interested in teaching, study how to do it on line.

We have it worse than they did.  We can’t just take over a few strategic points and hope the whole thing keeps running but now under us.  They’re destroying everything because of their anti-reality beliefs.  We have to take over everything just to prevent a terminal collapse.

Fortunately, most of us are “people who do things.”  I urge you to do things.  I have a friend who is studying brewing and welding, in case that’s all he can contribute.  In fact, I’d urge all of us to do that if we can.  Even if you’re a writer an artist or a scientist, if you have a hobby that can be turned into a part time job – growing vegetables, refinishing furniture, cooking, cleaning, sewing, brewing, etc – and bring in some money, do so.

I knew a family in Portugal who were educated and well to do, but when everything went upside down, they arranged with a textile firm to get the scraps of material that would (otherwise) have been burned at the end of the day.  The wife and daughters then fired up the sewing machines and started making pot holders, placemats and aprons (fewer aprons, most pieces were tiny.)  They sold these at the fairs which are at best gray market (the stalls require a license, so you have to declare some income.  But most of the business is done in cash.  You do the math.)  By the time things stabilized, they were living better than ever.

I don’t think that in most places the system will collapse that completely.  I DO think that things like making a living on line – provided you’re either selling something useful or something people find entertaining – will work for most of us.  But if your area goes bad, that second skill will help.

And meanwhile – hat tip to Dave Freer – network.  Network with those in your area, and network with those out of it who can help you on line.  Build connections with like minded people.

Yes, this means we will ALL have to work our tails off for the next – if we’re lucky – seventy weeks.  But work is what we do.  Building is what we do.

You see the current society is like a beautiful building that has termites in the support beams.  We’re working very fast to put up new support beams along side them and to encase the current support beams in strong concrete.

The goal is that when they give out and turn to powder, there is a shhh sound and then, nothing, because our support structures step in place and keep things going.

And THEN we can argue whether the bit on the roof should be round or square and – hopefully – termite-proof the new structure.

But first, it has to be in place.  So go forth and build.

 

Okay, the lasers are just for show.  I’m in the middle of multiple crisscrossing crisis(es?) and can’t even think straight, much less write a post.

The short version and for public consumption is that both houses (short sale and other) under some tenuous contract to us are likely to fall through/have to be rejected which puts us back to square one.

The long version is ARRRRRRRGH.

That’s all.  Back when sane.  It could be a long time.