Author: Sarah A. Hoyt

When I was six, I found out that people could yell at me, beat me, do anything they wanted to me, but they couldn’t get inside my head and PHYSICALLY make me obey.

Which of course MUST have made me the most fun child to parent ever.  At least my parents had their revenge as I think #2 son was born knowing I couldn’t “make him.”

The thing is, people still haven’t given up.  And they’ve gotten way more subtle in their attempts.

And it’s all being done in the name of “if you don’t do this, you’re the evil one who hates people and makes them subhuman.”

You know, I never even thought about “compelled speech” until I heard Jordan Peterson use the expression.  I was just locked in “You can’t get inside my head and make me think what you want.”

I don’t hate intersex people. I don’t hate trans people.  I don’t even dislike them as groups.  Honestly, I couldn’t care less if they’re trans or not, gay or not.  I don’t like or dislike groups as a whole.  I mean there are probably even some communists who are okay, though there’s probably some kink in their psych that makes them want to hurt people and take their stuff.  Or maybe they’re just indoctrinated.

People to me are individuals.

And for the whole trans question, I think that the idea that one is trans is being pushed on a whole lot of people, including people who don’t have the apparatus to fight back, like children and emotionally disturbed people.

This doesn’t mean I hate trans people or don’t believe there are people who are trans. Of course there are. There have always been, more or less, throughout the history of humanity.  And some acted on it, and some conformed and some lived some way between the two, as with any human who sticks out from the vast mass.

Yes, they are very few (and I’m not talking about intersex people, who also exist but are even fewer) which doesn’t mean they don’t exist.  Or that they didn’t have a really tough time when humanity lived in poorer societies which enforced conformity more.  This doesn’t make them special. Everyone had a tough time back then, one way or another.

Nowadays though being trans is a fad, and like all fads it’s being pushed on people who would not be trans in any other time or place.  This is not the first or the last time this happened.  Did everyone forget the child abuse (let alone satanic child abuse) fad of the eighties.  Dear Lord, if you had any problem at all someone would tell you that maybe you were abused as a child and suppressed it.

Again, not saying child sexual abuse doesn’t exist. Though repression doesn’t, at least not in the way we think (or at least recovered memories don’t.) OTOH the human mind is an imperfect instrument, so it’s perfectly possible that people who were sexually abused very young don’t remember it.  Most humans remember nothing before 7.  And a lot of people are iffy till about 19.  And as you get older, you forget other things and people, traumatic or not.

What I’m saying is that at its height it was deployed willy-nilly to explain all human traumas, problems, flaws and neurosis.  In the same way that “being trans” is now being deployed.

This is not an “if”.  We know it’s happening.  Most of the teens who decide they’re trans (having given no indication of it before) are kids who are unpopular, weird, stick out.  And don’t say “Well, that’s because they’re trans.”  Some of them, sure. Most of them? They’re Odds, and rejected by their age peers, though they’d be fine if they were in a place with people of all ages.  Most of us, I daresay, were like that.

And in the eighties they’d be told they were probably sexually abused as children and just didn’t remember it.  Which I’m sure some were, but not even close to all.

People on this blog, in general, know about sticking out. And it has nothing to do with abuse or trans or sex in general 99.9% of the time.  Those are just convenient excuses that become fads.  If you can convince yourself it’s that, it’s much easier than “I was just born weird.”

So, to recapitulate: I believe trans exist (duh) and I don’t bear trans any sort of ill will, or hate, or really anything. I just don’t care.  Each person must make his or her way through life as best they can and provided they don’t interfere with me and how I want to live, I don’t care.

So, you’ll say, why don’t I call them by their chosen pronouns?  Why do insist on making this a binary world that has no place for them?

[Puts thumb and forefinger on either side of nose and inclines head in a sinal salute.]

Look, bub, if the world isn’t binary, it’s the world inside your head, which I neither can know nor guess.  Hold on to that, okay, because we’ll return to it.

First, most people who are trans are “transitioning” that’s where the term comes from.  The vast majority of them is either male and wishes to be female or vice versa.

If there are no “binary” definitions, and if people are all the same inside, despite of what their body is, you cannot — CANNOT — by definition be a woman trapped in a man’s body or vice versa.  On account of our insides being all the same.

So the very fact there are trans people means that we’re something inside, as well as outside.  (Biology would tell you the same, due to how hormones shape mind and thinking, but that’s something else again and there are slips in that mechanism.)

If you say you’re trans but you’re really identifying as an ornate building which is also a wingless dragon, you’re not trans.  You’re not transitioning between anything to anything.  I’d say that you’ve just let yourself get carried away and captured in the world behind the eyes, but that’s neither here nor there.  Provided you’re polite and decent in your interactions with me, and don’t go around with your front door open and your claws showing, I couldn’t care less.  I might look at you in horrified fascination, but so is most of the world.  And that’s fine. I for instance suffer of the illusion that I’m a writer. It makes me happy and it bothers no one. (Much.)

But then we get back to the whole matter of pronouns.  Why am I so mean and cruel that I won’t call people xyr, xer, violin, little flower or purple octopus? They identify as that. Why am I mean.

Whenever someone says we should ban abortion someone hauls out the technicalities question. Having grown up in a country where abortion was banned the whole time I was there, I can tell you the technicalities are correct: you can’t know when a woman becomes pregnant, unless you police periods. You can’t tell if a woman suffering a miscarriage induced it. Even if you know she drank an herbal tea, you can’t be sure she did it on purpose. And we won’t mention how many people “accidentally” miscarried during “exams.”

To police that you’d have to become worse than the Stazi. So the law wasn’t perfect or anywhere near.  What it did by and large is keep abortions to very early in the pregnancy and — if a medical professional was involved — keep them safe and rare (because the professional wouldn’t want to get caught, and fubbing it would mean he was caught.)  There were also a vast number of unassisted abortions, which I suspect STILL go on even when it’s legal, because the woman didn’t want to be seen talking to an abortionist (yes, everyone knew who they were) or even didn’t want her husband/mother/neighbors to know. These were less safe, particularly because abortifacient herbs are often heart-attack inducing or worse.  For the record, though I heard a lot of things, I NEVER once heard of clothes hangers used. It always makes me wonder if that was even ever true. There are less crazy implements, and any woman wishing to open the cervix would have access to them, having (presumably) access to a kitchen.

So, now let’s apply the technicalities to “using the pronoun someone chooses.”

There were (we haven’t gone to a place recently, and the other the clerk has moved on) a wait person and a clerk at two places we patronized that I couldn’t place in terms of gender to save my life.

This BTW causes anyone to stare and gawp even if they try not to, because it’s an ape thing, at a deep instinctive level. If you can’t tell what a person are, now, you’re going to be embarrassed. In ape-days it called from completely different reactions and guessing wrong could cost you your life.

So not knowing what someone IS is uncomfortable, and you try to grope for clues.  These two people had no clues.  So I would catch myself telling my husband things like “Honey, just give her the bag.” or “I told him but he didn’t hear me, I think.” which was ….disturbing and embarrassing and caused these poor people to blush.

The fact is, I wasn’t trying to be mean, it just came out of my mouth, more or less randomly.  Would it be easier if I’d called them xer or xyr?  WHY?  How would I know if this person was actually some version of trans? They might be pretty males or ugly females who have no idea how sexually undifferentiated they are.  (Both were very young, so it’s possible.)  Calling them either xer or xyr under the circumstances would just be another way of being mean, wouldn’t it?

Okay, so call that person them!  Yeah, that’s brilliant.  Except that like xer or xyr, you’re saying “I don’t know what you are.”  Or possibly “I think you have multiple personality.” Or in certain circumstances “They’re seeing other people who aren’t here.”

The technical question is very important.  With all the good will in the world, in the real world of people, how do you know what someone wishes to be called?  How can you guess?

I don’t know about you, and maybe I’m horribly unusual, but I’ve been called “sir” and “he” while wearing a dress.  And so far as I know, the front mounted radar emplacements and all, I don’t think I look EVEN SLIGHTLY masculine.  And I have at least one female friend who when dressed in jeans and t-shirt, and if you don’t notice (or dismiss as fat) the breasts, you’d think “male” without a second glance.  None of my male friends are quite that pretty, but some are close.  (BTW none of these people, ever, were subjected to a panty check outside a bathroom. Hell, older son who is … the opposite of gender undifferentiated at least once (when I noticed) used the women’s bathroom at a cafe.  Not to make a point, but because he was thinking and walked into the first door.  None of the people nearby, or the woman who went in after him said anything.  I, who again am not even vaguely masculine, have made the same error while plotting or thinking of a story.  I usually realize I’m in the wrong place when I see urinals.  Sometimes I back out, sometimes there is no ah time to back out and I make for a stall fast.  No one has ever said anything or demanded a panty check. AFAICT the bathroom thing was a solution in search of a problem.)

HOW do you know what to call people, particularly when it’s a made up pronoun? Are you going to require people wear little name tags with their pronouns?  And if they leave the name tag at home and someone addresses the person by an unwanted pronoun, is that the speaker’s fault? Is he required to read people’s minds, as well as slice to an infinite amount which they might be today: an ornate building or a wingless dragon?

As for them, screw them. Them is plural. Yes, I’ve seen all the instances of “but it was used as singular before.”  Outside of making meter and rhythm all the circumstances are AT BEST ambiguous.

In writing even he/she is more elegant than “them.”  Not that it’s particularly elegant. And it gives rise to just plain bad grammar.  More and more I’m seeing people say insane stuff like “That man, they did this or that.”  Which frankly makes my skin crawl, because they are not “assuming gender” even when the person is A MAN.  Which for an ape means is crazy, a kind of paralyzing insidious craziness.  Bad crazy.

I came across this bad crazy of wanting to control what language people use, and the thoughts it enables was in the eighties reading how to write manuals: don’t use policeman. Use peace keeper.  Don’t use fireman, use firefighter.

The people who think that if they change language and thoughts they change the world aren’t wrong, precisely. They’re just crazy.  You can change the way people think and talk, but when the point meets flesh, nothing changes.  Sure, there are women in the police force.  There always were, at least in my lifetime. But when you need to separate two drunkards, a woman is far less effective.  Police detectives, police clerks and police secretaries can be either sex.  And as far as I can tell always were, even before the crazy got to the language.  Firefighters… The only “progress” I’ve seen is letting women into the force with lower strength classifications.  I don’t know about you, but if I’m trapped and unable to leave a burning building I’d rather be fireman-carried than dragged down the stairs by my ankles by a fire-fighter.  Which would probably kill me.

You can change the language all you want to.  It doesn’t change the world. It can just make people crazier and unable to understand the reality that’s about to bite them in the ass.

If someone is trans, I’ll call him/her what they look like. If that’s not their preference, so sorry, I’m not in their heads and I don’t give them right to be in MINE.

You don’t get to be inside my head and determine what I can and can’t think. And I despise that you’re getting me to use them for singular through its sheer ubiquitousness.  Because it’s wrong.

I won’t give in to your demands, not if you scream, not if you hit me, and not if you cry and tell me I’m mean.

The rest of the world won’t give in to your demands.  You can make western people unable to think, but I’d like to see you try this in the rest of the world. I’ll bring popcorn.  And yes, that comment is hateful, because I have nothing against trans people but I despise humorless scolds of any sex, gender of ornate building identification.

Here, inside my head, I can think what I very well please. Most people know that.  And the ones who don’t will wake up to it the more they’re called “hateful” by the people who want to control their every thought and speech.

Peterson is right. It’s compelled speech.  And you don’t get to compel me.  Or anyone, really.

The people being bullied now will eventually catch on.  You won’t like it when they do.

I’ll call you what you seem to be.  Yeah, sometimes I’ll be wrong.  Sometimes people are wrong with me, which my husband and I think is hilarious.

If you make it your point of making sure everyone always addresses you as you wish and think what you wish, you’re a budding totalitarian.

You’re also annoying and should prepare to be disappointed.

Because TECHNICALLY what you want is actually in point of fact impossible.

You don’t get to violate people’s individuality, there, behind their eyes.  No one does.

And that’s all.

I apologize to the vignette providers.  I didn’t get a word this week, which might be my email eating it, of course.  So I decided to give all you eager scribblers a visual challenge:

Sunday Book Promo

*Note these are books sent to us by readers/frequenters of this blog.  Our bringing them to your attention does not imply that we’ve read them and/or endorse them, unless we specifically say so.  As with all such purchases, we recommend you download a sample and make sure it’s to your taste.  If you wish to send us books for next week’s promo, please email to bookpimping at outlook dot com.  One book per author per week. Amazon links only.-SAH*

FROM MARGARET BALL:  A Revolution of Rubies (Applied Topology Book 6).

The CIA has embraced mathemagics, but only as a new way of doing the same old thing: Planting bugs. Thalia and the rest of the Center for Applied Topology’s research fellows have been dispatched across Europe with the mission of attending embassy parties, and teleporting back in later to plant bugs.

Unfortunately, academics are the worst possible variable in the equations of diplomats and spies. The resulting hijinks, escapades, and misunderstandings end up with Thalia on one side of a Central Asian revolution, and her husband, case officer Brad Lensky, on the other… And if they can’t figure out a solution, the entire country may go under water!

FROM D C TULLIS & J D TULLIS:  Through the Mirror (Book 1 of The Veil Series).

In Through the Mirror, Jason Whitelock and Ellie O’Connell are two high school seniors that live in the isolated and slightly mysterious port-town known as Eastmouth. The shocking discovery of a hidden room catapults Jason and Ellie into a clash with terrifying, lovecraftian alien forces and shadowy government organizations. Stranded in an impossible situation, the two must band together to survive the odds and find a way to escape back into the semi-normal lives that they had greeted with boredom only days prior.

This book should be of interest to fans of Jim Butcher’s ‘The Dresden Files’, Larry Correia’s ‘Monster Hunter Series’, and Rick Riordan’s ‘Percy Jackson and the Olympians’. It is the first entry in The Veil Series.

FROM LLOYD BEHM II:  Shadow Lands (The Shadow Lands Book 1).

A universe out of time…a land of no return…

Jesse Salazar is a priest of the Church Militant, who spends his days—and nights—hunting and re-inhuming the monsters that bump humanity in the night. He’s good at his job and gets paid very well to do it. But when the skies go gray, he wakes up to find himself in the Shadow Lands—the world an ancient Akkadian god uses to feed his minions their favorite food…humans.

Stalked by Abzu, the lord of the realm, and all his minions—including his wife, Tiamat—Salazar must figure out a way to stay out of Abzu’s clutches while assembling a team of survivors and putting together the clues to find a way home. With only limited weapons to protect themselves and no visible means of returning home, Salazar will have to use all of his God-given talents to keep everyone alive.

Especially if there’s no way back.

FROM C. CHANCY:  Pearl of Fire.

Bombs, fire, and murder….Caldera City. Stronghold and refuge, built by faith and elemental power in the heart of a volcano; surviving through magic, tactics, and a daring alliance with dragons. For Allen Helleson, Caldera was an escape from the lives ruined by his family’s hardline traditions; now he walks the streets as an Inspector for the Caldera Watch, defending the city other nations see as a pit of hell. For Shane Redstone, Caldera was the home she risked life and soul to defend as a Flame – until enemy curses blinded her, sending her away from the front lines forever.The war has come home again….Together they survive the first bomb. But Caldera’s enemies never stop with just one. Now a scarred yet deadly ex-soldier and a spirit-reading Inspector have to find and stop the bombers… before Wards fall, dragons die, and the caldera erupts in flame. One wrong move, and the city burns.

It’s been a very bad night.  I’m on about four hours of sleep (no, not my health. Just… stuff going on that’s not mine to tell) and I was going to write a rather innocuous post on the state of the writer.  Things like “I am almost over the cold and torn between finishing the fricking novel already and almost done with finishing the shelves and want to go assemble and set up my frigging library.  Also, the house must be somewhat cleaned today, and why doesn’t the day have 48 hours?”

But then I went to Facebook.  Which these days is mostly where I come across “real live leftists” who aren’t as stupid as Occasional Cortex (Yes, I DO know that bookworm room says she’s dangerous and therefore we should always address her seriously and respectfully, and without a hint of mockery.  I disagree.  Obama got that treatment and the presumption of intelligence on nothing much [you know we never saw a grade, an IQ test or any proof of his supposed brilliance.]  I think we should have mocked him relentlessly from the moment he opened his indoctrinated, unthinking mouth in public.) or as completely insane as Maxine Waters.  Okay, some of them are, but not the majority. They are just dupes, for whom it is infinitely easier to believe what the talking heads and their professors tell them and not to compare it to reality.  Some of them have even been sold on the crazy “personal reality” theory which of course excuses them from thinking and allows them to continue comfortable and happy as part of the herd.

So I stumbled on a thread where someone was justifying the abuse rained on the Covington boys, the provocation by a professional activist of a bunch of INNOCENT HIGH SCHOOLERS and the subsequent abuse in the media of innocent families and schools by saying that the MAGA hat stands for racism, sexism and oppression.

The thing is, I’m sure the MAGA hat stands for that in this liberal’s head.  Just like Trump is “literally” Hitler.

But can ANYONE point to a single instance of MAGA-HATTED crowds being racist, sexist, homophobic or oppressive?  Yeah, I’m sure there’s an individual somewhere (though curiously not so far caught on camera. At least not any non-false-flag individual) because in a country of 300 million, there are people who believe that Star Trek was real.  But seriously: in terms of policy (and don’t tell me excluding immigrants.  Being foreign or from a shithole country is NOT a race. And the fact you think it is tells us where the racist is) what has Trump done that is racist? Sexist? Homophobic?

WHERE HAS ANY OF THIS HAPPENED OUTSIDE SOMEONE’S HEAD?

So, I want to caution our countrymen (in the presumption somewhere deep inside they’re still such) to consider VERY CAREFULLY what standard they want to hold others to.  Because most surely, in the end, this is the standard they’ll be held to.

Remember that “judge not, lest you should be judged” it wasn’t against having an opinion, but against being careful what standards you use on others, because in the end, ALWAYS they will be used on you. Sooner or later.  And it’s way later than the left thinks.

Judging people by either what was inside the judge’s head (prejudice in its absolute meaning) or by the theories the judge has (which leads to all the happy fun psychoanalyzing of the right.  Sure, we could be afraid of people who aren’t like us, and that’s why we cling to our guns and Bibles.  Or we could have seen what happened to countries where people don’t/didn’t.  And not being completely stupid we insist on being prepared.  Oh, not against the people who don’t look like us.  It would be much easier if all leftists and their willing dupes had purple hair they don’t give to themselves.  It would make life much simpler. But alas, it’s not like that.  The left looks like us enough. But people who act like them are responsible for deaths upward of a hundred million and likely more) is responsible for genocide, massacre and most of the genuine MASS oppression in the world.  Certainly for the mass deaths of innocents.

It also allows someone to say that if someone wears a short skirt they totally meant to be raped, because that’s inside the head of the people saying so.

So, again, I ask the left: is that how you wish to be judged? I don’t have to have a iota of evidence that you personally support the genocide of a 100 million people?  I am allowed to look at your wearing a shirt emblazoned with a mass murderer’s likeness (Che Guevara) NOT give you the benefit of the doubt? I don’t need to go “perhaps this person is just an idiot, who’s been maleducated. He’s still a human being, and I shouldn’t consider hurting/killing him/her without proof this particular person is actually an evil commie who wants to kill me and mine?

Cool. Let’s dance to that music, if that’s what you want.  And note that’s what you’re saying with your actions.  Because your culture heroes are not only people that PROVABLY have hurt people and taken their stuff — Lenin, Che, Mao, Stalin, Ho Chi Min, Chavez, and the beat goes on — and taken countries to unimaginable poverty which secondarily kills and destroys millions more, but you, yourself constantly talk about killing people and taking their stuff.  Or you idolize people like Occasional Cortex and Elizabeth Warren who advocate this OPENLY AND IN PUBLIC.

So, is that the music you want to dance to?

Because you’re openly putting words in the mouth of more than half this country — yes, more than half. Probably around 75% judging by how hard your side pushes fraud and tries to prevent any fraud-stopping measures, not to mention the serfs you’re trying to import — and imparting to use crazy motives.  Wanting to make America Great Again is only racist if you think America was all white when it was great.  (Say, the 1980s.)  Again, I think we found the racist.

I know stepping out of the herd is difficult, and you’re afraid they’ll turn on you. (They will, but to be fair they will even if you don’t turn.)  But this herd is being led to an abattoir and Donald Trump’s election should have been your sign that most of us have had enough, and not that it would be a great idea to keep pushing.

I implore you to attempt to think beyond the shibboleths you’ve been given and to actually look around at the people you live near, who are not evil ogres that need to be watched by enlightened progressives all the time.

In fact, we’re by and large decent people which is why we’ve let your crazy get to this point, while you accuse us of the horrible things that exist only inside your head.

But we’re getting very tired of this game. Because the rules aren’t applied equally.  And even those of us who really don’t want to dance are getting to the point we wonder if there’s any other solution.  And thinking no there isn’t. Unless we want to allow you to take us all the way to Venezuela.

And you know, the thing is, if you hate us so much, there’s a million places you can go to: Most of Europe (if they’ll have you. Like most socialists they’re not very open to immigration from the first world. There’s a chance, after all, you’ll tumble to the game.) Pretty much all of Africa.  China. All of America from the Tijuana border on down.  All of them live by the rules you want to bring here.  If you really believe in them, pack your bags and go.

But if you are using those rules and the ideas in your head to gain power or money, or under the delusion you’ll be eaten last, I’m telling you to stop it.

We have nowhere to go. And we’re really, really tired of your pushing.

Any minute now, we’ll start applying to you the rules you apply to us. We’re going to assume you MEAN WHAT YOU SAY OUT LOUD.

We’re going to assume you both want to be judged by what’s in other people’s heads, and that you really mean what you say when you say you want to wood-chip innocent boys who happen to wear hats you don’t like.  We’re going to assume you really believe in fixed pie economics, and therefore want to steal all the stuff we actually worked for and built.  We’re going to assume you know Che’s biography and wish to emulate him.

And then it’s on.  And you won’t like this. We’re not the caricatures in your heads.  There’s more of us than you think, and while we might not be supermen/women we’re by and large, man on man and woman on woman WAY more competent than you are.

You see, we didn’t get the liberal-privilege help to get where we are, any of us. Instead we had to climb, build and make against the background of your prejudice and the lies in your head about us.

We have built that.  And we know how to build and make and create.  Which is a tad more difficult than the shitbird destruction and whining you engage in.

Which means if we turn us to destruction, we’ll be really, really good at it.

So, think about it.  This is the game you’re playing.  You’re begging us to engage with the same rules.  It might not be what you think you’re doing, but last weekend you made it very clear it’s what you’re doing. You couldn’t have picked more innocent people to attack, nor could you have fallen behind a more corrupt “activist” unless you know, it were Che himself.

The masks are off.  This is a good thing. With the masks off we can all see clearly.

Forgot what TV, your professors and your wishful thinking tell you about how stupid we are.  Consider accomplishments.  Consider that most of us not only survive but thrive despite everything you do to hold us back.  Consider for a moment that your lovely constructs of institutionalized racism/sexism/patriarchy don’t exist.  Not here. Not in the direction you think.

Then ask yourself: Is this really the game you want to play?

Because it’s way later than you think.

Once the game starts, you can’t back out.  And there is no arrow of history. There is no scripted end. That only happens in your head, and the world is not inside your head.  You can choose to look outside your head, question what you’ve been told, engage real people.  Or you can carry on in this path with the understanding that people not inside your head get a say.

So again, are these your rules? Is this the game you want to play?

The Truths We Hold—For the People – by Amanda S. Green

Two weeks ago, I started my commentary on Kamala Harris’ new book,  The Truths We Hold: An American Journey. Since then, she confirmed what we all suspected—she is running for president. Of course, anyone reading the intro to her book would have already known it. The intro and most of the first chapter are not even thinly veiled talking points for her campaign.

“For the People” is the first full chapter of the book. I’m sure she gave a great deal of thought to the chapter title. It refers not only to her work as a law clerk, and later prosecutor, but also to her political posturing as being the people’s candidate. In fact, if you go to her campaign site, the first page you see has a video of her and the caption of Kamala Harris: For the People.

Now tell me this book is anything but a campaign tool for her.

The chapter opens in 1988 on the day Harris reported to the Alameda County Courthouse for first day orientation as a law clerk for the DA’s Office.

I had a sense that I wanted to be a prosecutor, that I wanted to be on the front lines of criminal justice reform, that I wanted to protect the vulnerable. But having never seen the job up close, I hadn’t made up my mind. (TTWH,loc. 160)

Wait, what? She is about to become a law clerk for the DA’s Office and she wanted to be on the “front lines of criminal justice reform”? That doesn’t even make sense. Prosecutors don’t, as a general rule, worry about reform. They worry about making sure the criminals are convicted and do their time. Even remembering that day so long ago, Harris can’t help herself. She has to frame it all into terms that will help push her narrative today.

But it gets better—or worse, depending on your point of view.

Alameda County District Attorney’s Office is itself something of a legend. Earl Warren led the office before becoming attorney general of California and later one of the most influential chief justices of the United States Supreme Court. He was on my mind that morning as I walked past the stunning mosaics in the lobby that depict the early history of California. Warren’s words—proclaiming segregation “inherently unequal”—had taken a long fifteen years to make it to Berkeley, California. I was grateful they had come in time for me; my elementary school class was only the second class in my city to be desegregated through busing. (TTWH, loc. 167)

Suuuure that’s what she was thinking.

Not.

Think about the first day you reported for a job you thought might be leading to your career of choice. Were you thinking about what someone else did? Or were you thinking about how you needed to make sure you didn’t screw things up and get yourself fired your first day? I don’t know about you, but I just wanted to get through the day without screwing up too badly. Hopefully, I might even manage to impress those I worked with. But considering judicial precedent and social change? Nope, not even close to the top 10 things I thought about.

As summer interns, we understandably had very little power or influence. (TTWH loc. 173)

Well, duh. What did she expect? They were law clerks, interns. They were there to be quiet, watch what was going on around them and learn. They weren’t there to be movers or shakers. But, being Kamala, she has a point to make and it is to show she was different. She wasn’t going to just sit back and do as expected. The great Kamala is more than your ordinary intern.

The police had arrested a number of individuals in the raid, including an innocent bystander: a woman who had been at the wrong place at the wrong time and had been swept up in the dragnet. I hadn’t seen her. I didn’t know who she was or what she looked like. I didn’t have any connection to her, except for the report I was reviewing. But there was something about her that caught my attention. (TTWH, loc. 178)

Okay, first impressions of this paragraph had me doing a double-take. The first is her use of “individuals” in this context. It implies the police go around arresting anyone they want, without probable cause and without concern for the rule of law. It also shows that she no longer thinks like a prosecutor and probably never did. A prosecutor would use the term “suspects” because that’ what they were.

But looks at it a little closer. Here’s this legal intern, a student, reviewing a case file. Okay, that’s done in some DA’s Office. Once upon a time, I held that same position in another office many, many miles and states away. The ADA you work with will give you cases to review, usually with some sort of assignment attached. You’re to research some point of law or follow up with a cop or witness. But Kamala doesn’t tell us why she was looking at the case. Just that something about the woman caught her eye.

She goes on to tell us about the woman, painting a picture of someone truly in the wrong place at the wrong time. Oh, does Kamala tug at the heartstrings. It was late Friday afternoon which meant the woman would have to spend the weekend in jail before appearing before a judge. Our oh-so-concerned legal intern worried about whether the woman worked on weekends and might lose her job. Or what if she had kids? Would someone take them in or would CPS be called? Did the kids know their mama had been arrested? Oh the horrors! Kamala had to do something.

I rushed to the clerk of the court and asked to have the case called that very day. (TTWH, loc. 181)

Notice the problem here? She goes straight to the court and not to the attorney who told her to review the case. Oops.

I begged. I pleaded. (TTWH, loc. 181)

I’m sure that went over really well with the clerk.

If the judge could just return to the bench for five minutes, we could get her released. All I could think about was her family and her frightened children. Finally, as the minutes in the day wound down, the judge returned. I watched and listened as he reviewed her case, waiting for him to give the order. Then, with the pound of a gavel, just like that, she was free. She’d get to go home to her children in time for dinner. I never did get the chance to meet her, but I’ll never forget her. (TTWH, loc 188)

Oh. My. G*d.

There are so many things wrong here, I’m not sure where to start. This legal intern, someone who has not yet passed the Bar, decides she knows better than the supervising attorney and decides to take action. Again, without discussing it with him or his supervisor. She begs and pleads for a judge to come back to the bench on a Friday afternoon so this poor woman can be released. Then, she proves she is the champion of the victims by getting it all done.

Look, law clerks and interns just don’t do this. Not if they want to keep their jobs and want a hope of ever working for that particular office after passing the Bar.

While I can’t say she stretched the truth here, I do have doubts. As I said above, most interns doing something like this would find themselves getting a come to Jesus lecture they wouldn’t soon forget. You just don’t jump the chain of command like that. Then there’s the judge. If he did agree to sit down and look at the file and listen to her argument, the first thing he’d ask is if her supervisor knew she was there and agreed with what she was doing. Remember what she said earlier. As legal interns, they had “very little power or influence.” So how in the hell could she pull something like this off without having her supervisor involved?

It was a defining moment in my life. It was the crystallization of how, even on the margins of the criminal justice system, the stakes were extraordinarily high and intensely human. (TTWH, loc. 188)

Wait, what? She only then realized it. Had she been living under a rock until then? Had she not paid any attention in law school? She said she’d thought about former Chief Justice Earl Warren when she entered the courthouse that first day on her internship. Had she forgotten all the opinions he wrote she would have studied in her constitutional law or criminal law classes?

Or, as I suspect, was that written with her eye firmly on the Oval Office?

And I knew the kind of work I wanted to do, and who I wanted to serve. (TTWH, loc. 185)

I’ll leave it to you to decide who and what.

The rest of the chapter sets up her bona fides to run for office. Trust me, this chapter, like the intro, is little more than a campaign speech. We learn about her childhood, her immigrant parents, how their divorce impacted her. Then she tells us about her maternal grandparents and their social activism. Oh, she doesn’t miss a beat as she sets the narrative.

There is something about Harris, and this book in particular, that is troubling. I can read anything. Oh, I might want to plant the book against the far wall, but I can force myself to read it. This book is different. I found myself not just skimming but skipping paragraph after paragraph. My brain went into bullshit overload. It recognized what Harris was doing and finally said “enough is enough”.

Unfortunately, there are those who have been and will be pulled in by the emotion she evokes in her stories. They won’t/don’t look past that to see if what she says makes sense. We can’t laugh her off because she does know how to play the game. She is a master at manipulating public opinion. So we need to know what she stands for—other than herself. If that means reading this book, so be it.

Next week, we’ll look at “A Voice for Justice”, the next chapter in the book.

Heaven help me.

(Help Amanda drink enough to keep snarking the unbelievable twaddle that passes for deep political thought these days.  We’ll collect for her liver transplant later. Hit her Pourboir jar now! – SAH)

The evolution of living languages

Guest post by Nitay Arbel

The legions of Ancient Rome knew a collective punishment for particularly egregious offenses (such as mutiny) called decimation. One in every ten soldiers, chosen by lot, was to be put to death by his nine comrades.

The other day, somebody on Facebook bemoaned the fact that this or that writer had referred to a people being decimated by a plague — clearly meaning they had been reduced to a handful of survivors, rather than having lost 10% of their original numbers. Predictably, this “abusage” was  blamed on the lamentable (no argument there!) state of education nowadays.

This sounds plausible, except for two inconvenient facts:

(1) According to the Oxford English Dictionary (OED; full edition, behind a paywall), said “incorrect”, and indisputably ahistorical, meaning of the word has been around in English since the 17th century (look at the examples under (1c))

http://www.oed.com/view/Entry/48200

1c. More generally: to reduce drastically or severely; to destroy, ruin, devastate.

This use has sometimes been criticized on etymological grounds (see, for example, M. West & P. F. Kimber Deskbk. Correct Eng. (1957) 119 and quot. 1944), but is now the most usual sense in standard English.

(2) The above has also, for as long as I remember, been the meaning of gedecimeerd in Dutch, dezimiert in German, and cognates in several other languages. And yes, we did learn about the original meaning in HS Latin class, now almost 40 years ago.

The truth is: a living language, as actually spoken and written by people, is a living organism, and not a static construct (except perhaps in the most formal “static register” reserved for legal documents, laws, and liturgy). In particular, loan words imported from another language may undergo evolution in their meaning that takes them far away from the original.

Consider, for instance, a much more everyday example, “entree”. The original French word means “appetizer”, but in American English it universally means “main course” nowadays! (The original meaning survives in British English.) Does that mean everybody is using the word “wrong”?

And let me give a much more extreme example. The word ‘holocaust’ originally meant a wholly burnt [Temple] offering in Greek: holos=whole, fully; kaustos=burning. Holokaustos is how the Septuagint translates Biblical Hebrew olah, which is hence rendered by the anglicization holocaust in the King James Version.

It is probably not all that surprising that later in the 17th century, downstream from the KJV, we would see figurative use of the word to describe catastrophes, particularly those involving great fires and/or great loss of life. For example, in Milton’s Samson Agonistes (1671):

Like that self-begott’n bird In the Arabian woods embost, That no second knows nor third, And lay e’re while a Holocaust.

For more examples see: http://www.oed.com/view/Entry/87793 which even quotes a reference to “The general holocaust of civilised standards” in a 1940 House of Commons debate.

It is only after the carnage of WWII that the word (particularly capitalized) came to refer specifically to the destruction of the European Jews at the hands of National Socialism. This usage has largely driven out all other meanings, and indeed has been transferred to the deliberate genocide or democide of other groups.[*] (I myself generally use the Hebrew word Shoah [=“catastrophe”].)

The infamous “N-word” is another example. Etymologically, it refers to the Latin word for the color black. However, centuries-long derogatory use for people of Sub-Saharan African ancestry has ensured the word has no other meaning than a racial slur – with the notable exception of “linguistic reappropriation” by black people. “Qu**r” used to mean just “strange”, but nowadays is only used as a derogatory term for homosexual, or (again through reappropriation) as self-identification by a militant subculture among same-sex attracted people.

Such appropriation is itself one of the more amusing mechanisms by which language evolves: people who are being called certain pejoratives and decide to reclaim them as battle flags. “Tory”, “Methodist”, “Yankee”, “Redneck”, “Impressionist”,… all started this way. More recently, many proudly are calling themselves “deplorables”. (Dutch and German even have names for such terms: “geuzennaam” and “Geusenwort”, respectively. I have blogged about this phenomenon before: https://spinstrangenesscharm.wordpress.com/2017/01/20/deplorables-as-a-geuzennaam-linguistic-reappropriation/ )

Another amusing (or exasperating, depending on one’s point of view) mechanism is what Stephen Pinker has termed the “euphemism treadmill”. After a certain euphemism has driven out the original taboo term, it becomes itself taboo and a new “euphemism for the euphemism” needs to be invented, rinse and repeat ad infinitum. Thus, for instance, bog-house or outhouse -> privy -> toilet or lavatory -> bathroom -> restroom, WC, washroom.[**]

When foreign loan words get imported into English and the meaning does get preserved, the spellings may change inexplicably: for instance, the original French bataillon becomes, inexplicably, battalion in English (possibly via Italian battaglione).

Or — English is notorious for this — English pronunciation of the loan word may be mangled to the point native speakers of the source language don’t even recognize the word anymore. The first time somebody tried to tell me she owned a “Cay Shunt” I had no idea she was talking about the Keeshond dog breed (pronounced case hond).

Are all of these accepted contemporary usages “wrong”?

Actually, all of the above are examples of a broader question: whether language standards should be prescriptive (language as it should be spoken/written) or descriptive (language as people actually speak and write it).

French, Hebrew, Dutch, (Peninsular) Spanish, and (to a slightly lesser extent) German  are examples of the prescriptive approach. These languages have official, government-sponsored national language academies whose permanent mission it is to set the correct standards. (The Rat for Deutsche Rechtschreibung, literally “Council for German spelling”, has a more narrowly-defined mandate than the others.) Correct usage is whatever the language academy deems correct and publishes in official reference works. From the very beginning, national language academies have been watchful of “contamination” by other living foreign languages (through loan words or loan translations): recently, this has focused particularly on the struggle against franglais in French, Denglish in German, etc. For instance, French, Greek, Hebrew,… language academies have invested great efforts in coining neologisms for all sorts of scientific and technological terms from English. So a computer, software, and a printer in proper French become ordinateur, logiciel, and imprimante, respectively; in modern Hebrew machshev, tochna, and madpeset, respectively; in Standard Modern Greek, ypologisti, logismikou, and ektypotis, respectively. https://spinstrangenesscharm.wordpress.com/2018/08/04/language-registers-diglossia-and-the-greek-language-struggle/

In contrast, English has no such prescriptive body. Contemporary English has two major descriptive standards: the Oxford English Dictionary for UK English and Merriam-Webster for US English. The historical prescriptivist movement for English (spearheaded by, inter alia, the immortal satirist Jonathan Swift in this 1712 pamphlet: http://andromeda.rutgers.edu/~jlynch/Texts/proposal.html ) met with limited success at best. One of its legacy is arguably the UK English spelling of Latin-derived words, where, for example, Elizabethan –ize endings were turned into –ise following the Latin source words. (This development never took place in the USA, and hence the divergence into two competing spelling standards.)

Now where it comes to accommodating foreign loan words, I cannot think of a language more promiscuous than “our magnificent bastard tongue” (as John McWhorter’s book of the origins of the English language is called). There is, after all, no official body out there with the authority to say words like bungalow or coolie are not proper English: once the loan word becomes sufficiently widely used, it will show up in the major dictionaries just a few years later.

Which is better, prescriptivism or descriptivism? I must admit: I find the faddish millennial abusages [sic] of “like”, “awesome”, “literally”,… as grating as the grumpiest old man among you (perhaps precisely because English is not my mother tongue) — but this is the price we pay for the descriptivist tradition of English. Prescriptivist languages like French and German evolve more slowly and elegantly, at least in the formal register — at the expense of a widening gap between formal (particularly written) and informal usage that may eventually reach the point of full diglossia (the coexistence of separate “literary” and “street” languages, like Classical and Vulgar Latin, or Classical and Koine Greek).

“Pick your poison,” as the expression goes. English, for better or worse, has made its choice.

[*] On a related note, post-WW II German avoids certain words and phrases which are perfectly correct German but have forever been tainted by their use in the Third Reich. You would not speak of the Endlösung of a technical or mathematical problem, for instance, or the Sonderbehandlung of special cases, or the Selektion thereof. There even is an entire dictionary devoted to this phenomenon: https://www.perlentaucher.de/buch/thorsten-eitz-georg-stoetzel/woerterbuch-der-vergangenheitsbewaeltigung.html

[**] Relatedly, in Middle Dutch, “kloot” used to mean “globe” or “spherical object”: hence you have Vondel’s “zo draait de wereldkloot” (this is the way the world turns). In modern Dutch, however, “kloot” only means “testicle”, and “klote(n)” is in fact used as an all-purpose expletive much like the F-word in English. Good luck convincing any Dutchman he’s using the word wrong…

Humans are funny creatures.  Particularly now.

I think the biggest difference between us and our ancestors is not that we’re living way longer, that very few humans are actually starving to death, that we can talk to people around the globe in the blink of an eye, or that we don’t need to feel the changing seasons, if we have even moderate wealth.

Sure, those are MASSIVE differences, but the difference I’m talking about is bigger than that because it gets in the head and into what makes us humans.

It’s entirely possible that at some point, after much pondering, an anthropologist will define human as “The ape who makes up and believes stories.”  All other things that distinguish us from our relatives are a matter of degree, but at least that anyone can figure, lacking language they can’t package experience as story and story as something that changes how we interact with the environment.

Which leads us to two things: like anything that helped us become us it has two sides, the good in which the stories helped us build civilization (look, okay, without persuasive stories we’d not even be tribes as such. Even those were and are welded together by origin stories, most fictitious.  We’d be family bands if that.  And there would be maybe a one millionth the number of humans in the world.  Ad we’d be… slightly better apes) and the stories that take it apart.

The problem is the second type of stories is getting too much of a foothold.  And it’s getting it because stories have been so successful AND BECAUSE STORIES ARE EVERYWHERE NOW.

No, seriously.  You see above, where I mentioned that very few people die of hunger now, worldwide? Even fewer people go without story.

You might think that this is a silly thing to say, but it didn’t use to be like that.

Heck guys, I grew up in a strange land and time that was still hypersaturated with story by historic standards, but which was, by our standards, perhaps 1/3 as saturated.  And being a bookish kid who lived mostly in her head, I starved for story.  I used to make mom buy me tiny little books (about half the size of a paperback, but maybe 4 pages stapled together) they sold at the grocery store. They were printed with stripped down versions of traditional fairy tales.  That’s where I encountered stories like The Drunken Soldier.  The Goose Girl. Etc.  But most of them were better known. And I knew them already, but the chance to read a slightly different version made me beg and whine till mom bought it (think kids with candy bars.)  The whole thing read and re-read was over in minutes (at least after the age of 6) but it was still worth it.

Though even in my teens the plot made me roll my eyes, I used to time my walk from the bus down the village street so I could hear the currently playing soap opera (broadcast on the radio. TVs weren’t universal and only ran in the evening, anyway) in snatches through the front doors.  Because, heck, it was story.

Books… I bought all I could, but I still read most of the books I wanted to read standing up in bookstores.  Seriously. I’d read till someone noticed and chased me out, then walk to the next bookstore and resume. Then the next.

And yet, even with all that there were still VAST amounts of time where I was left bereft of story.

Then there were the lean years when we were first married.  Our TV broke down shortly after #1 son was born, and we decided to save for a better TV, but then the money was needed for something else.  So we re-read the books we had, bought when we could, and only bought another TV 8 years later.  (And currently, technically, have no TV, as we watch stuff on the computer.)

But in the wake of a move to CO and getting rid of all non-essential books (the ones I was less fond of, or which weren’t research.  I.e. all but about 300 of them) AND being broke as heck (technically but not really. Sigh. Part of the thing, see, is that if we were willing to live on credit we wouldn’t be so pinched all the time. But not only do we refuse to, but because we know my income fluctuates, we try to save when times are high. And then if we do fall through — I suspect will happen this year, just because of a concatenation of circumstances or to put it another way, everything went to hell at the end of 18, and indie is going to take me six months to get going — and have to borrow, we go insane and live like the refugees of story until we pay it back. That particular year from hell, we were paying back about 30k, between older son’s birth (on COBRA! Emergency caeserean with three surgeons) and being unemployed for 6 months, and moving expenses.  Yes, we paid it back in two years, despite the fact that it was about what Dan made at the time.  We lived as you expect.) story was really had to come by.  Sure, we subscribed to the daily paper and we got some story that way (no? Think about it.) BUT other than that, I was starved for story.  Yeah, we went to the library twice a week, but there were things I couldn’t even read, and… Yep, like a junky in search of a fix, I hit all the free books outside bookstores. ALL OF THEM. I read a lot of — heaven help me — gothic romance, which until then I didn’t even know was a genre.  I read old chemistry and biology school books.  You have no idea.

And sometimes I had to go without story.

But even in that state, I had access to about a million times more “story” than say your well-read medieval person, who might own MAYBE 12 books.  And these weren’t, in general, your goat gagger books, but relatively slim volumes.  I probably had access to more than Elizabethan readers, and they could buy books in stalls in the market (well, pamphlets, and chap books, anyway.)

Go back further than that, and you realize how scarce story must have been.

Which is why we’re wired to pay attention to it. Because the stories that got told (mostly oral) and retold and passed on were if not factual important.  In fact, a lot of the non-factual ones were vital: from welding together tribes with origin myths to convincing your warriors they were invincible, to getting rid of socially counterproductive habits like, say cannibalism, to convincing people to fulfill their roles in society, mythological or just-so stories were VITAL.

The problem is that story has taken the bit between its teeth. Ever since literacy became a thing — about at the level of Elizabethan England, say — we’re surrounded by story, some of it utterly persuasive and completely not only false but counterproductive.  As in “Some stories are against civilization.”

And with broadcast of stories, we can now soak in story even the vast illiterate and “don’t care to read” majority which before got their story second hand through some guy who’d talked to some guy who’d read it.  In fact, it’s easier to become addicted if you don’t read and don’t question.  And story is now served up in song, in movie, in broadcast TV, in (mostly unfunny) comedy every hour of the day to everyone within reach of civilizaiton.

You might be homeless on a sidewalk in a major city, but you probably have a charity-phone on which you watch movies/tv/youtube.

And our school has long ago stopped teaching just the basics and now teaches story.  One of the most prevalent is the story of “humans destroying the planet” and “America is guilty of all ills.”

That last one slots neatly into the entire crazy of the noble savage.  The noble savage is a myth as old as time.  No, seriously.  There are traces of it in the first preserved fables.  Perhaps humans felt some regret at leaving animality behind (some people think that’s what the garden of Eden is about. I don’t buy it, but people do) and tat is embedded in our mind forever.

But no “noble savage” became as noble savagy as the Amerindian.  Particularly in Europe, as far back as the seventeenth century, the tribes in America were invested with all the virtues of upright and exemplary Christianity.

If you read — I do — factual accounts of the frontier you see a different picture. One of my areas of fascination is the meeting of the west with other cultures, and the true tragedy that often ensued, which was a tragedy on both sides, btw. If you read it you can’t help see people with such divergent stories in head that massacres and destruction are inevitable. It’s not, as the Marx story overlay leads most of the world to believe civilized man exploiting/destroying native cultures.  “Civilized” when the cultures met was a matter of degree, and not far. Weaponry etc. were close to each other. The west tends to win because it has a story in the head that goes beyond tribe.  And the “noble savages” tend to commit atrocities and horrors because their story in the head is TRIBAL.

In tribal societies not only are those outside your tribe not quite human but — and this is important — the way to survive is to meet other tribes’ encroachments with the most horrific massacre you’re capable of.  That scares the intruder away and stops the bloodshed. And your tribe survives.

This led tribes like the Zulu or the various Amerindian tribes to commit such horrible massacres that Christian, post tribal, even well-intentioned Westerners wondered IF THEY HAD SOULS AT ALL or if they were beasts in human form.

That is what a true cultural clash is.  We are kind of in the middle of one with Islam, too, and refusing to understand that’s what it is (which is part of the tragedy of a cultural clash.)

Anyway, the real stories, first hand, written down, of what happened are… appalling.  And true tragedies in that it was going to happen no matter how people of good will tried to avert it.

But by the time the story got to Europe we had the noble savage.

Now go back and look at the original Covington footage, the one that had serious minded, supposedly literate people calling for the massacre… of the boys.

In your mind make old Chief Spinning Bull a blond woman.  Make the young man standing there black.  Not ghetto. Not disheveled.  Just a nice, self-contained middle class young black man (the idea those don’t exist is another story. Ignore it.)

Would anyone have seen that as anything but an adult being crazy at a kid who behaved admirably?

Ah, but this involved an Amerindian, the original Noble Savage of modern age (TM) and therefore everyone’s sympathies were instantly with him, and no one even questioned things like “so he was blocking you.  Why didn’t you stop beating the damn drum and instead elbow him gently aside?”  Look, I’m a woman in my fifties and not in the best of health (though the problem right now is JUST a bad cold) and I could politely elbow my way out of that IF the kid had been blocking me.

Of course, the kid wasn’t blocking anyone.  This whole thing was footage designed to hook into the now old story-in-head of the noble savage. And they threw in “Vietnam vet” to get the right. THAT WAS IT.  (True fact, if everyone who claims to be a Vietnam vet had served in vietnam, the human wave tactic would have been ours. Also, probably, our troops could only lie down on alternate days, when the other guys squinched against the trees. It’s another story in head, for complex reasons.)

Stories are insidious and sneaky like that. They get in your head and make you perceive things wrong.

The main reason many industries are rolling left and dying is not because people who run them want them to die (some do, but that’s something else) it’s because the stories in their heads are so dense and thick that they don’t let them see reality anymore.  And they’ve distorted what they’re supposed to do, so they think their job is changing the world, or speaking truth to power, or…. instead of selling entertainment, stories, facts, or razors.  Or you know, teaching kids to do jobs.  Just off the top of my head.

Marxism is a really powerful story in head.  I might have yelled at a few of you about that, in the comments to yesterday’s post.  Sorry. Part of the reason I yelled is that it has taken me so long to see through the Marxist indoctrination I thought I had completely rejected.  But it infects everything, including the way we perceive the world.  Partly because it hooks into the really old noble savage myth.  And partly because it is already old. The older a powerful story is, the more it has infected other stories.  Even those of opponents.

So, people in the western world tend to think of the Noble Savage or the dispossessed or whatever in Marxist terms, in noble savage, les miserables terms.

Perhaps it is the fact that I’m “racially indistinct” (as in, now the incredible pallor of extreme hypothyroidism is falling away, I can be perceived as anything depending on how I dress.  My friend Bill is the same, which is a bond between us) and the fact that — see above — I’m really insecure about spending money and hate to use credit which means our entertainments tend to be cheap, which means really high brow (museums. They’re good value) or low brow, like diners and cheap amusement parks and therefore I see a lot of “the poor”.  Or perhaps it is that I grew up “poor but honest.” But let me tell you that most things people in general believe about the poor — heroic or despicable — are the myths of the Noble Savage and Les Miserables.  Neither is correct.  Nor are even Dickens scrappy, slippery poor.

The poor right now are mostly lower-middle-class and people working jobs that don’t pay much.  In America it tends to be a transitory condition. (We’ve been there. Several times.) People either rise, if the stories in their head tell them things like “If I work hard I’ll get better” or they fall, if the stories in their head tell them things like “You’re special, and the world is against you, and the man won’t let you improve your lot. Here is a government check. Indulge your worst tendencies and uncle sugar will keep paying.”

I mean the left is convinced most of the “poor” have been “left behind by progress” and can’t do more complex jobs.  You don’t need to be smart to rise in America.

How smart do you have to be to show up on time, look clean, operate a cash register?  When I was working at that level, if you did that for a couple of months and wanted to, they’d lift you up to manager so fast.  And even that doesn’t require a ton of brains. Just check who’s supposed to come in, count money, etc.

Smart doesn’t come into it. You don’t need to be able to repair the register or the calculator. JUST run it.  People who say people are being left behind due to low IQ just betray how highly they think of themselves and also that they never worked a starting job, ever, in their lives.

Do you know what the main problem we had when I worked retail? Getting people to show up more than two days in a row. Getting them to pick up the paycheck THEY’D EARNED.  My main problem working retail? BOREDOM. Seriously, it was unrelenting boredom. I became “Super housewife” straightening and cleaning shelves, just not to go stir crazy. IQ? Oh, please. And yes, if you went manager you could make decent living, enough to support family.  No, not enough for two cars and a yacht and a condo on the weekend, so if that’s your measure of “living” yeah, it was brutal. But since I’ve never made that yet, I think of living as something more modest.

Ah, but the myth. “We must help because most people aren’t smart enough for modern society” is really big on the left. It powers most of welfare and make-jobs bureaucrat boondoggles.  And yeah, it’s racist and sexist. (Though probably not homophobic. I’ve never seen any leftist claim that gay people are dumb. Though I presume they, like straight people, have the usual distribution.  But it’s just not part of the myth.)  As the left and Marx have always been.

The vast underclass in America are not noble savages (dear left)or the dispossessed (dear right.)  They’re just people who are very human and have found they can live easy by exploiting the myths in other people’s heads.  Only after a couple of generations, it’s impossible to break out of it.

Looking at the footage of the Covington thing what occurred to me is that Phillips was in fact hemmed in.  Oh, not by the boys, who behaved admirably and who, my bet is, will grow up to be decent productive members of society.

He was hemmed in by his own stories.  Noble Savage. And “Great bad things were done to me.” (Which they weren’t. They might or might not have been done to his direct ancestors, who probably gave as good as they got. Some were done to “people who look like him.” but the possibility that either one of the Covington boys’ ancestors, or Phillips ancestors or anyone was involved in the true horrors of colonization are… minor. It’s a story. A pernicious one.) and of course the Marxist idea that class must fight class, and the neo-Marxist idea that race must fight race and that anyone who wears a MAGA hat and therefore declares he/she doesn’t believe in socialism is an oppressor.

That man is a prisoner of poisonous stories. Everything I’ve read about him shows him to be bitter, mean and full of anger towards… well, everyone.

The stories have him and they won’t let go.

As a purveyor of stories I tell you: Enjoy them. Use them when they’re helpful. Learn to discard them before they eat you and make it impossible for you to lead a joyous, productive life, or really do anything good or build anything that lasts.

Tearing down is easy. But it destroys everything.  And you too.

Most of our opponents are bitter, hopeless people, caught in the hell of their own vision of the world.

Don’t be like that.

It Is Later Than You Think

by

Bill Reader

“We thought we ranked above the chance of ill.

Others might fall, not we, for we were wise—

Merchants in freedom. So, of our free-will

We let our servants drug our strength with lies.

The pleasure and the poison had its way

On us as on the meanest, till we learned

That he who lies will steal, who steals will slay.

Neither God’s judgment nor man’s heart was turned.”

-Rudyard Kipling—”The Covenant”

It is only lately—and, I think, in conjunction with many others on the Right—that I have properly ascertained both the magnitude and the severity of the threat we as a civilization face. I choose my words carefully, here—as a civilization. Not just as a nation, but all of us in the broader western world. We have all fallen prey to something pernicious. And it is both exactly what Glenn Reynolds discussed in his USA Today column here—and then again it is something slightly different.

I’m not seeking to present anything new to you today. I will consider myself to have done well if I present what you already know together, without the soporific effect of lengthy times between stories, or the calming effect of great distances. This is not about the future. I am not even sure it is about the present, though I remain optimistic. But see it, and judge it, for yourself— and recognize it for what it is, because I’m lately afraid our time is much dearer than we’d suspected.

It is later than you think.

The world’s seven largest economies, in ranked order, are the US, China, Japan, Germany, the UK, India, and France. Traditionally, China, Japan, and India are considered Eastern nations. Therefore in a practical sense—and probably also, arguably (albeit at more length than I care to go into; I have bigger fish to fry), in a pragmatic and philosophical sense— the heavyweights and current stabilizing poles of the Western world, writ large, are the US, Germany, the UK, and France.

It would be troubling for me to write that there had been a coup in any of these. Yet increasingly it looks like there has been a silent coup—or certainly an attempted one, at all events—in all of these. Not because of grand conspiracy, but because of a kind of monoculture among what Glenn Reynolds refers to above as “the new class”. They are easy to identify, by their smug certainty that they know better what ought to be done with and for you than you yourself do. And they are beholden—as often as they can possibly make this so— to nobody, and are guided by nothing except their doctrinaire beliefs in what might charitably be called academic Marxism, and might more aptly be called simple totalitarianism.

Angela Merkel was the bellwether. Guided not by the desires of her citizens, nor by any apparent concern or understanding of its ramifications, but solely because it was pleasant to pretend that Germany could accommodate them, she opened Germany’s borders to vast hordes of impoverished denizens of the third world. As tends to happen with people imported from backwater nations using absolutely no filtering process to guarantee they are even aware of their host nation’s values— let alone support said values— they brought the cultures of their native motherlands along with them instead (not that this is topical in any way). And on New Years Eve, in 2015, “For all of Germany, police estimated in a document leaked in 2016 that 1,200 women were sexually assaulted and that at least 2,000 men were involved, often acting in groups”. These crimes, largely by ‘men of “Arab or North African appearance”,’ were the gratitude Germany got for its attempt at grandiose humanitarian aid.

A heavy price was borne for Merkel’s arrogance, though Merkel herself remained comfortably distant from what she caused, as is usually the case in these “for your own good” schemes. Her only meaningful punishment is that she is not planning to seek re-election as leader of the CDU or Germany—and even still, she fully intends to stay chancellor until 2021. Though not before making German politics decidedly more—interesting. In 2017, along with her ouster, suddenly the Alternative for Germany (AfD) party was a significant force, and her own party was on the back foot—to her shock and dismay. Her citizens chose the “wrong” answer, and the international press was sure to tell everyone as much. (As an aside: the “quality” reporting in the US and UK makes it utterly impossible for me to tell whether AfD is actually a concern in its own right, or just a correction to an overwhelmingly idiotic decision by the ruling party. Insofar as the MSM can’t tell the difference between Trump and Hitler and have reportedly been axing foreign correspondent positions for years, I tend to assume that the AfD would get called Nazis purely for holding stances the Left disagrees with. Actually being German is just icing on the cake. By the way, to any leftists reading, here’s a hint: Hitler probably wouldn’t even recognize Israel—given that a lot of the radical islamic groups in the middle east were originally funded by the Nazis in part because they both hated Jews. He would therefore be decidedly unlikely to favor Israel over “Palestine” by moving his embassy to Jerusalem. Oh, and he probably wouldn’t be Grand Marshall in a Salute to Israel Parade. But I digress. On the other hand, 2017 is also the year “Mein Kampf” got back on the German bestseller’s list, and you can spin that how you like, but it doesn’t strike me as a good sign. I would love it if someone who is near Germany could weigh in with their thoughts in the comments.)

Turn now to the case of Brexit. In a complete surprise to the British elite, a referendum on leaving the EU came back showing that the British don’t like absentee landlords from the rest of the continent telling them what to do. This had recently become especially important since, well, Germany had just attempted to commit suicide by taking a massive overdose of immigrants.

Now the EU was telling the rest of its members that it was no fair not also attempting suicide, and immigrants should be able to move freely into England from Germany. Not that the British press said it this way. No, the British press, curiously, decided to frame their opponents as being “anti-immigration”—which they say in roughly the same way you or I might say “satanist”—thus demonstrating that between Germany and Scandinavia, professional leftists the world over don’t really have a problem with rape, as long as the victim is a blond white chick.

Moreover, the elite in Britain were outraged, since many of their close personal friends happen to be absentee landlords from the rest of the continent, and their favorite hobby to bond over is making up absurd things and telling people to do them. Think of it as “Simon Says”, except to stop playing you have to emigrate—and you have to wait for Simon to say you can emigrate.

But, driven by a resolute belief in the power of democracy, they boldly decided to— not comply with the result. The people, you see, had once again gotten the “wrong” answer. So the British elite dragged its feet, and the EU threw an outright tantrum which made it easier for them to do so. (Not that the EU doesn’t have its reasons—England leaving is an existential threat to the EU, since it essentially destroys the current “rob from the rich and give to the dysfunctional” model it operates on by taking a massive cash source away. If you wonder why the EU is trying to rob Britain blind in Brexit “deal” negotiations, it’s because they can’t afford not to.). This culminated in a “deal” by Theresa May that was so ass-backwards many people think it was intentionally designed to be broken—and it went down in flames by a massive margin. The rest of this story hasn’t even been told, yet, but the smart money is that Britain’s elite is going to try to push another vote on Brexit, and this time encourage people, by hook or crook, to choose the “right” answer.

Say, do you notice a pattern?

Well, how about this story, one you know well. The MSM, to give the First Woman President (TM) the best possible chance, openly prayed for the person they considered the worst, most back-number conservative candidate, to run against her.

And when they got him—good and hard, as you might say—they proceeded to attempt to destroy him the way they’d always done with Republican candidates. EG, they called him Hitler (I always wonder how many Leftists who instantly played the Nazi card on Trump even remember that we endured probably six solid years of the “Chimpy McBushHitler” slander from them, personally, before Trump was even a major national candidate. If the Republicans could nominate Anne Frank to a major position, the Democrats would trip over themselves to call her literally Hitler—and a gender traitor, to boot.)

Trouble was, first, they didn’t factor in that they were still running one of the most unlikeable people on the planet—a person whose tagline rapidly became a single derogatory term for opponents, “deplorables”—that applied, essentially, to everyone from far right to moderate middle.

Secondly, they assumed that running footage of Trump discussing his beliefs and campaign promises would hurt him. To be honest, to the extent that I was skeptical of Trump at the beginning, it was because: A- Given that he was from New York and had pictures taken with virtually every notable Democrat you can imagine, I didn’t think he believed in or would even attempt his campaign promises; and B- I was partially caught up in the media response on the right, from outlets like National Review that, in retrospect, I think were themselves mostly people who couldn’t bring themselves to doubt there had to be fire behind the massive MSM smoke-bomb, and later felt they’d be seen as inconsistent if they changed their minds.

But for anyone else who was in my boat, I can’t imagine that seeing what Trump actually said was especially off-putting. There are things like tariffs I’m not in love with—but most of the platform is solid. Tax reform, an emphasis on border security (of any kind, actually, compared to the import-a-voter Left), reforming (rather than, as the single-payer advocates like Hillary would have it, further deforming) healthcare, deregulation, taking the boot off the face of American energy producers—there’s a lot in there that most of the right and many in the middle can agree on. Meanwhile, Hillary “Adult Fun Camps” Clinton basically offered European governance, except more corrupt. This rather extreme position, the MSM explained, was “moderate”, and they estimated that Hillary had a 99.9999999% chance of winning, with the remaining 0.0000001% being their estimated odds of her being tragically hit by a meteor.

But insofar as this was about five months after Brexit, where it turned out that even Britain had had enough of European governance, this went over about as well as you’d imagine.

Actually, it went over worse. Hillary Clinton went from impossible-to-lose to impossible-to-win so fast it had much of the  MSM exposing their true colors that very night. You remember the tears and shocked faces?

That alone should have put middle America on notice about media bias. And to the Democrats, this seemed like some kind of terrible miracle. I’ve talked about that before, and I won’t belabor it now, but I suspect that’s in part because the upper echelons of Democrats know they rig the game in their favor.

And if you don’t think they know it, first, I offer the examples of Arizona and Florida in the 2018 midterms. And second, I offer the very first bill the new House brought to the floor. And third, as an extension of their, shall we say, morally challenged ways, note the willingness to use the FBI on a fishing expedition against Trump, starting before the election and continuing, now, a full two years in. I’d say there’s very little that shows off to better effect that they want to win at all cost.

Because there patently isn’t any there, there. There never was any. At best it was about using Russia as a convenient excuse to find something, anything, real, with which to take down Trump and thus reverse the election results. At worst, they didn’t even want something real. They may well have simply wanted a string of tantalizing accusations that would then be immediately disproven. Note the unending barrage of Headlines in 30 point font and retractions in 6 point font a week later (if, indeed, any retraction materializes at all), which the media collectively calls “ethical journalism”. In fact, look at what has happened this very week—as we saw a “bombshell” about Trump so stupid it was dissolved by Mueller’s office within a day, followed by a “bombshell” about catholic school-kids disproven by more extensive video evidence than a murder on a movie set, some of it taken by the professional protesto—I’m sorry, I mean “victim”, himself. “You can bury a person just as effectively with potting soil, as you can with real dirt. You just need to buy enough of it,” is the new MSM motto.

And what is all of this ultimately for? Why do it?

Because you, American voter, chose the “wrong answer”. And your elites are here to “educate” that tendency out of you. But first, they need to violate a ton of laws, and take us well into banana republic territory (What else do you call government officials, many from the last administration, rebelling against a duly and legally elected leader and actively fighting everything he does, exactly? Contrary to what the Left likes to say, that is extremely unextraordinary behavior—from Leftists, no less—in those lovely South and Central American countries that are so well run, we need a wall in part to keep their people from coming into the US en masse. What it is not a legitimate part of, is the tradition of Western Democracy.).

Not because they want to, you understand. If you had simply surrendered like good boys and girls and submitted to your rightful masters, they could have done everything they wanted without breaking any laws. It was you, ungrateful peon, who forced them to use extra-legal means to continue upholding the status quo, and only because they are deeply #principled are they continuing to doggedly fight to ensure your rights are abrogated for your own good. And by the way, as with the EU in Brexit, the Left is fighting Trump tooth and nail because he’s threatening their nest egg.

They know that people from South of the border vote Democrat. If at all possible, the Democrats would like to integrate them into their welfare web (Because on closer inspection, it’s oddly reliable how the “safety net” seems designed both to trap people and make them prey to eternal predation by Democrats. One might begin to suspect LBJ knew what he was about, no?), and keep them voting Democrat for, well, forever. People call them out about flip-flopping on their stances, but of course in their mind they haven’t flip-flopped at all. They were willing to support border security only when there was virtually no chance of it being enforced. That’s why the Trump administration has noted that there are extant laws calling for barriers on the Southern border pre-dating his administration, which were curiously unenforced. Now that there’s a chance of border security being enforced, the Democrats are openly opposing it. But their position is consistency itself.

The only thing that changed is that before they were lying to keep you happy, and now you ungrateful oafs have forced them to acknowledge their actual beliefs.

And so, after all that, what do you do with a place like France? Macron, by all accounts, is only the proximal cause in a long string of abuses on the French people—and more specifically, its middle class.

You see, in pursuit of various personal goals—forcing people into carpooling and mass transit, environmental posturing, good old fashioned money and power—apparently France’s elites have, for some time, been enacting increasingly insane laws that benefit themselves while inconveniencing the populace. At some point, a tipping point was reached, and the people of France donned yellow vests and started protesting—say have I heard this song before? Sounds like it’s being done by a French cover band. At all events, the French government—apt students of history that they aren’t—have responded in the way any reasonable oligarch would: they’ve started talking about banning unsanctioned protests. Yes, this will go well. Obviously. How could it possibly not?

The people of France were successfully talked out of voting for Le Pen, but, mon dieu, they have still somehow fallen backwards and now, malheureusement, have picked the “wrong” answer. It is up to their betters in the elite class to make this gauche and ill-mannered display impossible by outlawing it, because outlawing behaviors the government dislikes has an excellent historical record of causing them to vanish, especially when those behaviors include protesting said government.

But you appreciate that, while we can laugh at this because it’s better than crying, it’s a sign of something deeply unhealthy and vastly widespread?

Every pillar of the Western world, it seems, has revealed itself to be infected with an extremely dangerous political class, formed of people who believe implicitly in rule by the enlightened, by the right people, even while mouthing obfuscating lies about “democracy”.

They believe in populism until someone plays the game of populism better. They believe in democracy, the more direct the better, as long as they think they’ll be in power under it. But mostly what they believe in is power.

The rest is window dressing. They are aristocrats in modern suits, and the government changes around them, but they remain the same. They believe in grand, stupid, and impossible visions that benefit them, and actively harm their people, and pursue them to the exclusion of all else. Oh, certainly they are the “new class”.

But they are more than that. They are a sign that Western Democracy has unofficially become Western “Democracy”. Now that the opinions of the people—in Germany, in England, in the United States, and now in France—have become inconvenient, the governments are finding they would like to dissolve the people and elect another. And they will do anything to achieve that end—”we let our servants drug our strength with lies”. France and England sound poised to commit to these brave new social experiments in their own ways, and the US won’t be far behind if the Democrats ever get enough funding to run a few more fraudulent investigations.

So look around you, while you still can. The sun is high in the sky. The last day of rule by the people—by the actual people, rather than by a “bolshevik” (literally, majority) minority— is half gone already. We’ve all been living in a very pleasant world, but it’s one that’s enabled us to relatively disregard politics, and that has let some very unsavory characters slip in while we were living in a dream. “The pleasure and the poison had its way”.

It is later than you think.

I have said before that I am unsure whether America will have another civil war, even though many of her people are—foolishly, to anyone who has seen one— spoiling for one.

The factors are myriad, but king of them all is geographical emulsification and the lack of clear battle lines. I’ve been trying, for ages, to think of how that might change. Now, I realize, it won’t.

What’s happened in France and is happening in Britain has made me realize that the conflict is fundamentally between normal people who are getting pissed on, and people who sympathize with—and often someday hope to become—the unelected or unremovable power brokers who are pissing on them.

I know of no true historical model for a civil war in a country that looks and acts demographically like America does now.

But—as Angela Merkel learned, and as I suspect France will soon discover—history is wall-papered, end to end, with examples of leaders uninterested in the well-being of their people who eventually faced deposition of one form or another.

I pray that somehow, the leaders of America allow the peaceful and existing processes that could allow that to happen to advance unabated. It will take surviving a bitter old guard and defanging a particularly idiotic new guard of Democrats. It will take acknowledging earnestly that whole departments of our government, just like our press, have largely fallen into the hands of people who hate the nation and its people, and re-evaluating our goals on who to elect and what to do in elected office from that perspective.

But we must rise, face the day, and try. It is later than you think—and getting later. Because, I maintain, part of America’s ability not to become the bloody quagmire that France did during its revolution was down to the people it was revolting against being on the other side of an ocean.

I think we are— all Western nations, and we, no exception— more at more risk than I had initially thought of our own French revolution, and that’s a thing we decidedly do not need, and a place we decidedly do not wish to go. The name might survive—but I fear that nothing else of value in our country would.

Hi guys, I feel like death warmed over.  This weekend was Cosine, the last con of  its kind in Colorado Springs.

Because we’d gone to the first, because we tend to take time to go — even though January is always both my busy month and usually a time I’m ill as hell — we thought we should attend the last. (My usual reluctance to attend is not cons only.  We also usually had a party with old friends for Superbowl and it was also really hard to make it, though most of the time I did, because January, busy and ill as hell. It seems to be off for this year and as soon as I kick this cold, we should try to get together with those friends for a dinner or something.)

If you saw me at Cosine and thought I was more lackluster than usual, sorry.  You see, the night of Thursday my ears started hurting.  I have what feels like a cold except I’m not really coughing, which is usually a problem, because that’s how I end up with pneumonia.  From other stuff, mostly my ears and throat are…interesting.  I might have to go to the doctor.  (Regardless of whether one son is training to be one, I really hate going to do the doctor.)

But none of this is important right now.  Well, not most of it. Except the fact I felt like hell, and would rather be home finishing a novel.  But because I felt like hell, I was probably better off, honestly, at the con in terms of what I produced which was nothing. Yesterday we were home, and other than church, where I sat well away from any kids or old ladies, and left asap, I got NOTHING done, save sit on the sofa and read a novel (which I’ll probably talk about tomorrow.)

Of course the con also produced nothing.

Look, cons used to be really important to build your career.  Because your only ways to become known were two: your publisher pushed you OR you went to places where fans gathered, got them to order your book, and if you were lucky your publisher saw you surrounded by fans and decided to push you.  Even when I broke in, 20 years ago, I saw people leap ahead of me in fandom and publicity because they had money and spent two years hitting a con every week.

Book tours worked too, on the same principle — from what I understand from my bestselling friends (well, the ones who talk business with me) — right now they only sort of do.  Their purpose is more to make your fans excited AND to have the book reps/bookstore people see it and report it, than any real sales extension.

Anyway, I know cons don’t work that way now.  When we ran the tiny all-friends group publisher, one of us regularly hit cons, and we know it makes NO difference. As in bloody none.  I can see a bigger spike in sales because I wrote a post for PJ and mentioned the latest book than because I went to a con.

And due to the “nothing is fun anymore” people cons have gone massively smaller and grayer.  Though to be fair, other than the books you sell in situ (paper books becoming more a souvenir of meeting the writer) comicons and big media cons don’t particularly help, either.

Years and years ago, I became aware I went to cons for two reasons: to see friends in the field who lived far away, and to meet my fans.  Which is why more and more I do Liberty con, though it’s not insanely affordable and this year — tears at hair — is going to come after two weddings and G-d willing not a funeral, but we have to do things with OUR parents, difficult on one side for health reasons.  But it’s a nice, relatively relaxed con, and the word seems to have gone out to my fans, so they gather.  And that’s okay.

I also try to have dinner with my fans once a month in Denver (ask and someone will tell you when and where.  I don’t like to post it on my blog, because you know how insane things have gotten.)  And as the kids fan out (At least one of them is thinking probably Texas in a couple of years, just based on where he wants to work, but of course it depends on what he finds when he looks) we’ll probably spend part of the year elsewhere, and have dinner there too once a  month.  So you guys in other states can cross your fingers and hope.  Neither of them particularly wants to go to the snow belt, but you know, it could still happen, anyway.

The point here, though, is that none of this REALLY matters.  Well, the dinners do, and my fans do. By and large I like my fans, which I understand is a strange thing for an author.  But what used to be major promotional efforts are now jaunts you can take for fun, should you choose too. In fact I was blackballed (if reports are correct) from a con this year, and my major upset over it is that I’d planned to meet with my inner group there, the few dozen fans who have become my extended family.  But oh, well, the timing wasn’t really convenient anyway, and we’ll always have Liberty con, where most of them are attending anyway.

Because careers, and the sense of what a career is have changed.

It used to be you had to be very nice to a variety of people, no matter how rude they were to you, or how much you knew they hated your guts and would like to eat you with a nice chianti: agents, editors, SMOFS, con booksellers.  Any of these, if he or she took a determined enough dislike to you could get the rumor mill going, and because these people all dined/gathered/(sometimes)slept together, one of them hating you hard enough could destroy your career.

It’s much harder now.  I suppose if Amazon personally and particularly blacklisted me, I’d be in a little trouble, but even that won’t really be FINAL.  (For one I know someone working on an alternative RIGHT NOW, and you’re going to like it, I promise.  Not a replacement. Not unless Amazon gets stupid. But an alternative.)

I think I mentioned here a month or so ago that normally this would be the time to retire. When the publisher that other houses think is the devil publishes you, you will never publish with other houses again (yes, that used to be different, but…) and when they decide to drop you, it used to be you had no option but to retire.

Now?  Oh, hell.  Even bad numbers won’t kill you.  Who keeps the numbers? The bookstores?  You mean Barnes and Toys who will probably be out the door by the end of this year?  Or do you mean indies which are nice, sure, but like everything dealing primarily in paperbooks, unless they host a ton of signings and “events” are feeling pinched as heck? (I know. I have friends working the field all over the country. And it’s not that you can’t make a living of a bookstore, but you’d best host parties, and author get togethers, and workshops, and writers’ groups, and–  It’s a venue, now, more than just a sales place.)

Selling to the net was a problem. But now it’s largely irrelevant.  Every book is your new book. Your first chance. Your brand new start.  And if the left (it’s always the left) starts a rumor campaign against you, you sidestep it, write something different, under a new name.

In the bad old days when what you sold depended on whether your publisher pushed you and your public image was just so, there were a number of cases — as quickly as possible hushed up — of a midlister or a low-selling writer who submitted under a closed pen name and became the new and hot thing.

Publishers hated when these became known, because it showed how much of success or failure was their decision, and they wanted to hold on to the fantasy it was ALL the writer.

So by the time I broke in, no agent who wanted to keep working in the field cooperated in this.  You HAD to tell the publisher that this was a pen name and who the writer really was, or the publisher would blacklist the agent and therefore cut his source of income. (Always remember who agents really work for.)

But that was then. This is now. I already write under THREE completely closed pen names, and no you can’t have them.  And for a while there, they were making me more money than my real name, though I haven’t written anything really for about a year, for… reasons.  But there’s a book almost finished, and others started. And a couple more almost finished. AND it has slowly sank in that I’m free.

In this case it’s not JUST “nothing left to lose.”  I really am free. What if my next three books fail?  So what?  The fourth could be an enormous success.  More than that, what is fail?  I know several indie writers none of you ever heard of who are making more than I’ve ever made per year of writing.

So what is indie? Indie is new beginnings. As many as you want. It only stops with death.  And that is in a way being forever young.  I kind of like it.  Welcome to the island of the blessed!

These are the good news.

The further good news is that cons don’t matter.

I’ll admit, partly this is good news to me because I’m an introvert.  Left to my own devices, I’d hole up in my office and write the clock around. Cons were and are always immensely stressful, which is why I usually get sick BEFORE them, because my immune system goes on the attack and it’s determined to kill me.

Now, I’m also aware that I still need to see people.  One of the ways I manage my depressive tendencies is to haul my ass out of the house once a day, unless it’s really, really cold.  And husband and I BOTH need to get a “fun day” a week on the schedule.  And if he can’t, you’ll probably find me drawing dinosaurs from the skeletons at DMNS; wandering dreamily around the art museum; watching elephants at the zoo.  All of which are ways for me to see people without having to talk to them, and all of which get me out of my own head and make it less likely I’ll become depressed.

We will also, for the foreseeable future, and unless we’re broke or health/family conspire (I’d say that won’t happen, but this year is going to be difficult, and I make no promises for future years, as parents get older and kids move away) go to Liberty Con.

But Liberty con is where I see my friends, and so many fans who’ve become friends, and my kids get to visit with their friends they grew up with.  It’s in many ways more like an hyperextended family reunion.

Cons used to be immensely stressful to me.  Not just because people, aaaaack, but because when I was in the political closet I watched myself all the time.  And even then I got snubs and cuts because, you know, I was not in vocal support, so I was always suspect.  And my panel assignments were ALWAYS weird. (That’s putting it mildly.)

But you couldn’t be rude, and you had to be pleasant and nice, no matter how crazy other people got.  Well, whatever.

I had a friend at the start of indie say “If this succeeds, I’m going to be very rude to a lot of people who deserve it.”

That’s fine. It’s the friend’s feisty way.  Me?  Bah.  I was raised in a part of Portugal that is soaked through with British cultural influence, and family was just well off enough (there might not be food on the table, but the table was CLEAN) that we had MANNERS.  Not that my parents were very good at instilling them, but kids acquire these from the surroundings. By the time I was ten I knew bragging was gauche, and by the same principle my good jewelry was tiny, both because we were poor and because “that is good breeding, that is.” (Of course, most good families in Portugal are poor as church mice. I had a friend from one.)

I not only don’t want to be rude to anyone, I have found that once they have no power over me, I don’t even particularly want to argue with them.

My focus was always the ideas, not the people. Yes, I got very angry and frustrated when I got put in assy panels or lectured in panels (this is me rolling my eyes) about how I like subtlety in my appreciation of literature, or whatever.  These days mostly I get bored. Panels are the price I pay to meet/talk to my fans.  And there’s no reason to be impolite, ever.  If I talk too much on a panel it’s mostly because ADHD and threatening to fall asleep if I don’t.

The only topic I really care about anymore is preventing young writers from falling in the clutches of scammers, large and small.  Oh, and preventing bullying of those who aren’t aware the gates are now open.

So imagine my surprise (and boredom, but mostly surprise) when Rose Beteem (I’m probably misspelling her name. I always do, being dyslexic. There are people in SF I have nicknames for, not because I’m mean but because I can’t spell their name right nine times out of ten. Which they then use to say I’m lying or the like.*) panel coordinator at Mile Hi did what I’m very sure she thought was “confronting” me after a panel two days ago.

Well, the surprise was because most people just talk behind my back and never try talking to me. So well done, her.  The boredom was because of what she thought was the important point in this.

You see, there is this post, now almost two years old.

In it I have a factual error, mostly caused by the fact I was on Prednisone which is sort of like being on speed, for me, but also sick — like now — which means I’m writing into the mind fog.

Because I wasn’t even sure what I’d written I read it before writing this.  And Rose is right.  I did say Charlie grew up with her in a small town in Colorado.  Actually we have two friends who knew her years ago, and one of them grew up in a small town in Colorado. I just agglutinated the whole thing. I am therefore issuing a retraction on that. She can stop hounding Charlie to “disprove” it publicly.

Charlie knew her when they were both young — and she has by the way unblocked him after that post, and spent the time since the post trying to get him to issue a correction and say he didn’t grow up with her in a small town in Colorado.  You can actually see him rolling his eyes can’t you? — but as he pointed out this was best said as “not in a small town FOR Colorado.” Consider please I grew up twenty minutes from (and after 7th grade spending 90% of my time in) a town of over a million.  Even Denver was small to my mind in those days.  Which matters. In large towns you don’t know people very well. Which is why I mentioned it, but honestly, none of that really matters.

And we have another friend who knew her when HE was young and who tried to exculpate her nonsense like saying I want to suppress voices in SF/F and am therefore racist, sexist and homophobic (rolls eyes) by saying she’s the most gullible woman in the world.  I kind of believe that. Note that what she obsessed about in that post was that she didn’t grow up in a small town because, she told me, that was easy to disprove, and to her mind invalided the whole thing.

Note that I’m sure she has by now erased/retracted that post/comment (and I don’t even remember which it was, honestly, and it was incoherent, even at the time), but I assure you she was stomping on puppies and claiming we were suppressing different voices, etc.  BUT the important thing was a minor error in my post, which, of course, invalidated everything else she might have done.

Which is why several people on the left in my field are addressed by nicknames, because of course, if I forget a w or an l in their name it means they’re saints and I’m the devil.

Bah.

I’m also willing to say perhaps I jumped to conclusions too fast.

Okay, her comment was probably because she’d just heard that, and can’t think through to figure out it’s nonsense, because none of us had the power to suppress ANY voices.  Saying “I don’t like this book” or even making fun of a story is NOT SUPPRESSING VOICES.  I’ve had worse done to me over and over, and that I know I’m not suppressed.  It’s entirely probable my panel assignments and bizarre things relating to that were because she’s not malicious, but merely incompetent, or simply strange.

It’s easy to attribute to malice what can simply be explained by “what?”  I might have done that.  Maybe.

Who knows? Who cares?

You know what I realized?  I realized this woman — thank Bob — has no power over me. None of them do.

I’m quite capable of f*cking up my career on my own, thank you so much, but I no longer have to be afraid anyone will f*ck it up for me because I looked at them sideways, or failed to look at them, or they heard from a third party I didn’t want to look at them, or, as in the case of a legend of SF, in a scene worthy of a comic movie, she overheard a friend and I in the bathroom AUDIBLY rolling our eyes at her dearly held political opinions….

Whatever. Yeah, I’ll make enemies.  Hell, another legend in the field hated me on name-sight on boards even before I came out politically. And I never figured out why. (Later I gave her reason and plenty to hate me by wiping the floor with her at Heinlein panels across the country, with much glee and malice, because… well, because there are topics that still matter to me, even if the personal doesn’t. And I am not a NICE person. I try to be good, but that’s completely different.)

But the good news is THAT DOESN’T MATTER ANYMORE.

More importantly, there’s always a fresh start over the hill, and I can FINALLY at long last do what newby me (the poor duckling, that she was) THOUGHT was the job: tell stories, and perfect the stories, and get better at them, and compete with myself to reach ever higher.

I don’t even want to be rude to anyone, or tear anyone down.  That only seemed important when they had power over me.  How much I wanted to strike back was a measure of they’re power.

I guess now, they have none. Now, I’ll mutter a quiet “excuse me please,” as I go around.  And that’s all.  That’s all I want and that’s all I need. I just want to do my work.  And they don’t MATTER to it.

I’m issuing the retraction because, well, I messed that part up.  And I’m also saying “Who the heck cares, anymore?”  I don’t.  No bad feelings, because none of this even warrants FEELINGS.  There are important political battles.  Most of them aren’t in my field.  Oh, they’ll continue hitting. Good for them. It’s nice to have a hobby.

Though I will reserve the right to point and make duck noises, because I have a low mind, of course. But what the heck. Sometimes I point at MYSELF and make duck noises, because like Jane Austen’s character, I dearly love to laugh.

What I’m finding is that even relationships between writers are much more healthy in indie.  You no longer look at someone getting a lot of push and think “oh, that’s where the publicity money is going” and worry for your own book coming out next month.  Or have an argument with a colleague and worry he’ll bad mouth you to the publisher.  To the extent I talk to other writers, it’s all fan letters and “I can help you this way.”  And that’s fine.

Not really caring what people think of you is a beautiful thing. It gives you the mind space to care about what matters: the stories.

Many, many great story tellers seem to have been at best socially awkward.  I do my best. But I’m not going to win any prizes. Introvert, remember?

However it doesn’t matter.  Only the stories matter.  And those, I’ll write.  And now, if you excuse me, I’m going to take ibuprofen (yes, I’m that ill) and get to work.

There’s a novel almost finished, you see?

And it turns out I’m a writer. That’s all I ever wanted to be. I’m glad most nonsense has fallen away from that job. Now I can roll up my sleeves and work.

Sunday Book Promo

*Note these are books sent to us by readers/frequenters of this blog.  Our bringing them to your attention does not imply that we’ve read them and/or endorse them, unless we specifically say so.  As with all such purchases, we recommend you download a sample and make sure it’s to your taste.  If you wish to send us books for next week’s promo, please email to bookpimping at outlook dot com.  One book per author per week. Amazon links only.-SAH*

FROM LAURA MONTGOMERY:  Fractional Ownership.

Perpetual plaintiff Lewis Ostrow needs a ticket to Mars. His litigation profile renders him ineligible. Lewis, however, always stands ready to fight the system.

A legal fantasy.

A short story.

A bit of science fiction.

FROM SPENCER HART: Bert Henderson Double Adventure.

DEATH RAYS & DAMES are all in a day’s work for company troubleshooter Bert Henderson.
CONTAINS 1 SHORT STORY (7500 words) & 1 NOVELETTE (15,000 words)
“When trouble needs shooting, eccentric industrialist Mr. Phillips has just the man for the job – Bert Henderson.

Bert’s boss runs Phillips’ Atomics, builder of atomic-powered planes, spaceships, and industrial tools. These high-tech inventions are revolutionizing the world of 1949. So when Mr. Phillips’ interests are threatened, Bert can find himself traveling anywhere on Earth – or beyond.

Criminals and foreign agents are in for more than they bargained for, when Henderson is on the case.
And if there’s a gorgeous dame involved along the way, that can bring its own sort of trouble…”

Contains Bert Henderson’s first and second adventures: “Death on the Moon” (short story, 7500 words) and “Fire in the Andes” (novelette, 15000 words).

DEATH ON THE MOON: The first ever murder on the Moon brings Bert to Roosevelt Base to find the killer. Mr. Phillips is financing an observatory on the Moon, and construction is halted while the murderer is loose. Can Bert find the killer and prevent more death on the Moon?

FIRE IN THE ANDES: One of Mr. Phillips top engineers has gone missing in Argentina, and Bert is sent to find him. But the investigation leads to the discovery of a greater threat. Complications ensue from encountering a lovely senorita. Can Bert deal with both the case and the dame?

“Pulp Noir Action Thrillers set in an Alternate History with atomic spaceships and ray-guns”

Vignettes by Luke, Mary Catelli and ‘Nother Mike

So what’s a vignette? You might know them as flash fiction, or even just sketches. We will provide a prompt each Sunday that you can use directly (including it in your work) or just as an inspiration. You, in turn, will write about 50 words (yes, we are going for short shorts! Not even a Drabble 100 words, just half that!). Then post it! For an additional challenge, you can aim to make it exactly 50 words, if you like.

We recommend that if you have an original vignette, you post that as a new reply. If you are commenting on someone’s vignette, then post that as a reply to the vignette. Comments — this is writing practice, so comments should be aimed at helping someone be a better writer, not at crushing them. And since these are likely to be drafts, don’t jump up and down too hard on typos and grammar.

If you have questions, feel free to ask.

Your writing prompt this week is: embrace

Recently Dan and I both ran into books and movies that made us grit our teeth, because in all of them, there was what I call ” magic wand” solutions.

One that the rest of the books were really good, and I actually read those but this one I couldn’t read dealt with the problem of homelessness.

I can’t tell you if this woman never actually bothered to google any homeless issues up on line, or if she never met a homeless person, or ever heard discussions between homeless people, (I did. I used to live downtown and walk across a park where they gathered), or has no friends in the professions — city planners, social workers, medical workers — who work with the homeless.  Or if she’s one of these people who only read and believe what fits her narrative.  What I do know is that the book — very successful, btw — was so silly it wasn’t even in the real world.

Her setup was something like this: you lose your job as an executive, and your wife divorces you, and the next week you’re living in a homeless camp, unless of course you get a good samaritan who gives you a job, and then you immediately become middle class again.

Head>desk.  You know what step she missed? METH.  Or some equally destructive illness or addiction.  Why? Because when you lose your job, you don’t lose all your abilities.

I have a friend who was laid off from his high paying job on his sixtieth birthday.  As Steve has alluded to in the comments here, this is increasingly more common. Partly because the companies can’t afford (okay, some can but are assholes, but don’t judge until you know what profit they have to make to keep solvent.  And remember that a lot of the investors are pension funds and people’s retirement money) to pay the increasingly higher old-age health care (and ironically — ? — the ACA by mandating a lot of crazy things that the clients can neither use nor want — for instance, our family with me who am post-menopausal and had an ovarectomy and hysterectomy and three males are all BY LAW covered for abortions.  Because, you know, the aliens could impregnate one of us. It also mandated a never-end of paperwork so doctors had to hire scribes to do it.  Older son worked as an ED scribe for over a year.Minimum wage, mostly would-be medical students getting help with their resume, but seriously, another expense.)  Weirdly, my friend didn’t roll over and become homeless.  He’s had his low points. He’s had his high points.  But his skills and abilities didn’t vanish with his job.  So, he’s writing, teaching and working on computers… as a contractor.

He doesn’t need a poliannish savior to give him a hand when he’ll automagically become respectable again, because he never stopped being respectable.

But over and over again, we see people writing characters that lose everything because of ‘greedy corporations’ and become entirely dependent on government services, until some sweet good samaritan believes in them, and then they’re fine.

Real social problems, be they homelessness or illegal immigration, be they child mortality, or the increasing of the dependent class, aren’t like that.

There is a strong component of real people who behave in the ways they want to.  And thinking they will be solved by just someone “being compassionate” either with government money or their own.

There have always been people who don’t thrive. The poor not only will always be with us, they have always been with us.  And even if our homeless are better off than the hard working middle class of the sixteenth or seventeenth century, yeah, they’re living directionless and pointless lives of self destruction, and destroying others on the way.

Part of this is because people aren’t all alike, and they don’t all prioritize the same things.  This seems to be something the social engineers can’t make themselves believe.  In a way they’re the ultimate narcissists.  Their imagine of the world is an immense mirror.  Since they don’t want to live in a certain way, no one does. Since they try to be productive, everyone does.  Etc.

But there are people who are perfectly happy living at the bottom of the ladder, and enjoy their addictions and their illusions.  Even in the strictest dictatorships, humans can always choose to self-destroy, to not behave as they want, etc.

Is this the only reason people fall?  Well, no.  One of the real contributors is the economy.  Now this is often caused by social engineers of one kind or another, the other being things like free trade that’s… um… not free on the other side.

Then there’s what I’ll call technological forces.  Whether we want to or not, the first world is going to hurt in the next fifty years, no matter what we do.

Why? the ability to work from a distance, and travel ability is going to equalize the world’s economics a lot.  If you can live in the middle of nowhere and make NYC money, why wouldn’t you.  But at the same time you don’t need NYC money, and someone who lives there will undercut you.  They just will.  Now go international on that.

Living standards and cost will equalize to some extent (the extent limited by being able to be secure, etc) which means the first world will hurt. Has to. It’s just what’s coming down the pike.

Plus tech isn’t done with us.  It will change. It will improve.  It will do things we can’t antecipate.

Will there be victims of this? there always is.

A lot of the people like my friend, who get fired because they’re 60, get despondent and broken and just sit around, living from social security and getting bitter.

And a lot of people will do that.  A lot of young people will do that, before ever working.  They’ll just sink under the waves.

What’s the difference? The picture in the head.  Is there hope for the future?

I get accused of being overoptimistic.  I’m not.  Some of my ideas of the future are horrible, and they could happen. They might even be the more likely.

And there’s things I can’t do no matter how much I try.  I’m not a world power.  Yeah, I know, I’m stompy, but not that stompy.  I’m just one person.  Each of you is just one person (all apologies to any hive beings reading this, but individuals are more likely.)

Also, we truly suck at organizing. Because the individualists failed to organize.  And the collectivists will get some wins in. You can’t stop it. You just can’t.

OTOH…

It’s all the individual.  You can choose to fall.  You can choose to rise.  You can choose to go down fighting.  Not even the greatest dictatorships of humanity managed to stop that.  In your head, you can always be free.  You can go down fighting.

You can create rather than destroy (even just self-destroy.)  You can build rather than wreck. You can pay your own way and that of your people, rather than become a dependent on the public purse or on charity.

It’s harder. Of course it’s harder. You can coast and indulge your pessimism and your inclinations.

Or you can choose to fight.  Fight for the non-dystopia future.  Fight with words and deeds (however small deeds.)  You can remain free.

This is not a story. A happy ending is not guaranteed. But neither is the bad ending.

You can’t control it, but you can make a difference.  Square your shoulders.  CHOOSE to not surrender.

Sure, it’s harder.  But in the long run it’s the only thing that will save civilization and humanity.

There is a time when you are so tired, so out of it, that stopping breathing is easier. Going under for the third time is easier.  You just let go and you die: in person or as a civilization, or as a nation.  It’s easy.

It’s also death. It’s the end.

Some people will choose it.  I won’t.  The waters are turbulent ahead, but I intend to keep above them, even if it’s “just” by floating in the grand piano.

I’ll take the hard way, thank you.  I’ll choose to continue fighting.