There is something that all writers are cautioned against (if they are lucky) is “drinking your own ink”, that is start to believe your own fantasies.

Look, when your stock in trade is making up lies so convincing that people will suspend disbelief at least for the extent of a novel, you’re going to be good at telling yourself lies, too.

I’m probably less at risk than most writers, just given the nature of what I write.  If I suddenly start believing that Darkship Thieves is prophecy, it doesn’t really affect my day to day life.  It might drive my family nuts (insert question of how we could tell) but beyond that, it’s no big deal, right?

And if I really believed the Musketeers investigated mysteries, how would you even know, unless of course, like Dan brown proclaiming the “truth” of his “history” I gave interviews to every cat dog and pony show?

For the record I don’t believe either of those, mostly because I’m aware of the danger of drinking your own ink.

But the problem is that normal people don’t get that warning.  Theirs is not to tell compelling lies, so compelling that they might be believed.  And when they hear something a lot, particularly from respected institutions and channels, they don’t always realize it’s fantasy.  And they don’t always ask the questions I always ask “Uh?  Why?  And what sense does that make?”

Which brings us to the fact that right now, not just in this country, but world wide, some portion of the population (impossible to know how many, given that the media kind of amplifies their voices) is drinking the ink of their own fantasies and spinning further and further from reality.

Which brings us to the derp of the day.  You thought that women accusing gay men of misogyny because they won’t sleep with women was crazy?  Ah.  There’s someone who wants you to hold their beer and watch this.

So, if you don’t want to follow the link, this is the gist of it:

From BET:

Singer Ginuwine has sparked a heated debate on Twitter after a recent episode of Celebrity Big Brother UK. In the latest episode, Ginuwine seemingly rejected fellow housemate India Willoughby.

The controversy stems from a conversation between Willoughby and the “Pony” singer, in which she asked whether he would date a trans woman. “You would date me, yeah,” Willoughby, who is a trans woman herself, asked. “Not if you were trans,” Ginuwine replied. After Ginuwine replied that he would not date a trans woman, Willoughby attempted to plant a kiss on the singer. When her advance was rejected, Willoughby stormed off.

Let’s leave aside the fact that someone tried to “plant a kiss” on someone who didn’t want it, which less I checked is sexual assault.  And that this then went public and incited hatred against the victim of sexual assault, which, last I checked, is sexual harassment.

Let’s talk sexual orientation. I don’t want a fight against this in the comments, and will shut it down if it starts, so let’s just establish that right now we down’t know what “causes” sexual orientation.

I don’t suppose it’s a simple matter of choice (though it might be, for some people) because homosexuality existed throughout the ages, even in places where it was forbidden, and it exists in fact, in all species where sexes are not radically visually different (No, I mean like peacocks and peahens, for instance.)

It used to be believed to be a matter of raising, now it’s believed to be genetic.  I believe like most persistent, complex traits we share with a bunch of the animal kingdom “it’s not that simple.”

But the left is full on, invested, all in on “it’s just genetic, it’s always genetic.”

And yet….

And yet, in one of those stunning contradictions only the left is capable of, they just believe there are no innate differences between the sexes, just different “social constructs” on how the sexes — oh, pardon me, genders — behave.  That is, your “gender” is what you learned to be, and there are up to — what was it? — 50 of them?

What this does in effect is deny sexual orientation.  I mean, you can’t say you’re gay — or straight — if there is no real difference between the sexes, except behavior which is learned.  No, not even genitalia, because as we’ve learned over the past several years, it’s what you feel “inside” that counts.  So, even if you still have the genitalia of one sex, you can dress as the other, do cosmetic stuff, and claim to be the other sex.

I UNDERSTAND body dysmorphism, and I always assume those who have surgery should be called by their new “sex” and treated as such.  No, it’s not right, and there are limitations to it, mostly because our sex change operations aren’t.  They’re more like sex-pretend operations, cosmetics and hand wavium.  And of course there are limitations, like in sports, otherwise “transwomen” will sweep all the women’s sports, because one of the differences that “don’t exist” between the sexes is that men are stronger and faster.  (And women endure pain better.  But there’s no sport for that.)

However over the last few years we’ve been told people are what they say they are — and dress as — so that we have people who are “gender fluid” and their gender varies depending on what they choose to wear that morning.  I would call that “clothing obsessed” but whatever.

Now, if you drink that ink, and put yourself in that reality, straight men should be attracted to anything in female clothing, right?  And gay men…. oh, man, they must be having such a hard time, now that women wear pantsuits too…   It’s okay, sweeties, you really don’t have to be attracted to Hillary.

If you’re inside that logic and drinking the ink till you’re poisoned, then yep, Ginuwine is transphobic, because he’s attracted to women, so he should be attracted to anything wearing women clothing.

But you say, how do we know that the transwoman hasn’t gone the whole way and had the operation?

Remember the thing I said above?  Right now all we can do are cosmetics.  And the perfection of the cosmetics varies, for that matter.  For instance, one of the ways to construct a vagina is with tissue from the colon, which brings with it issues of smell and others.

Also, there are a million ways of things not being “quite right.”  Even if the physical stuff is done flawlessly and everything looks right, there’s a ton of ways you’ll ring the wrong bell with the other sex. Including the fact that someone who grew up as a member of the other sex, with mannerisms and ways of moving, might not ring quite right to the back brain.  And back brain is where sexual attraction resides.  You really can’t argue with that part of the brain.  It is what it is.

There are mannish women, and men that acquired mannerisms from their mothers, who are straight and have a heck of a time attracting mates, because they have the hook baited wrong for the kind of fishing they’re doing.

Then there is the fact that someone might exclude all trans from the dating pool, not because they’re bothered, precisely, but because they don’t want to have to explain to family and friends, over and over again.  It’s a valid thing.  If you’re going to choose your life with someone, you’re allowed to choose the “least strife” route, particularly if your life is complex enough as is.

Or it could be a man wants biological children with his potential wife, something transwomen can’t provide.  This too is valid.

In the end, what people are attracted to is their own business.  You can’t really say if you’re not attracted to something you’re “phobic.”  I have yet to manage to see breasts as anything but bags of fat on the chest, or to think of vaginas with any kind of interest.  And yet, you know, I manage not to run screaming when I see myself in the mirror, and to take care of basic hygiene tasks without recoiling.  I’m not afraid of vaginas.  I just don’t want to sleep with people who have one.  (Well, I don’t want to sleep with anyone but my husband, but supposing I did.)  And if the person who has a vagina can grow a beard, this doesn’t make it anymore attractive.

Maybe it does for some people.  Maybe it’s all about the secondary characteristics.  There are even people who fall in love with a certain type of mind, and forget the wrapping.

But for the vast majority of people, sexual attraction is something very specific and in a very narrow band.  I’m not even attracted to everyone who has a penis.  Not even to everyone who has a penis in the right age group.  Not even everyone who has a penis and is a geek in the right age group.

If you now start demanding I also be attracted to transmen, or be shamed and reviled, you are out of your frigging mind and have been drinking your own ink too long.

If you claim there is absolutely no difference between the sexes, and we can all take on random characteristics of either sex or none, and then demand that everyone put up with us sexually assaulting them, or worse, show enthusiasm for it, you might be straight up insane.

And just because the insane are running the asylum, it doesn’t make them sane.

Sanity is that which accords mostly closely with and works best in reality.

And this ain’t it.

*Sorry, but I’m just coming up — I hope — from bronchitis, and I’m so far behind work it’s not even funny.  Also, this post has a lot of food for thought and it’s something I often struggle to explain to people- SAH*

Betraying A Little – A Blast From The Past From June 2011

This post will seem to be about translation. It’s not. This is a metaphor. The post is a continuation of yesterday’s on writing minority view points: who should do it, how it should be done, and why the establishment gets it wrong, of course. (Also on whether there is some special virtue in doing it. And on who wants to read this.)

The discussion here and at Mad Genius Club yesterday reminded me of when I was sixteen and embarked on a class called “Techniques of Translation.”

Although I had studied French and English and German, the translations I’d done so far were of the “I took the pen of my neighbor” variety. I thought the class would teach me to smooth out the sentence to “I took my neighbor’s pen” and that would be that.

I was wrong. Oh, it taught that also, but that was a minor portion of it. The class mostly hinged on the moral, ethical and – most of all – professional dilemmas of being a translator. I know any number of you are translators, formal or informal, but any number of you are also not. So, for the ones who are not, let me break the news with my usual gentleness:

There is no such thing as translation.

The French have a proverb “to translate is to betray a little” – or at least that’s the closest meaning in English. It’s fairly close to the true meaning, but slightly askew, of course. Every language is slightly askew to other languages.

The idea that there exists in every language a word that is exactly the equivalent of other languages is sort of like assuming that aliens will – of course – live in houses, go to school, ride buses, understand Rebecca Black’s “Friday”.

Language is how we organize our thoughts, and each word, no matter how simple, carries with it the cultural freight and experience of the specific language. Oh, “mother” will generally mean “the one who gave birth to” – except for some tribal, insular cultures where it might mean “the one who calls me by her name” or “my father’s principal wife” – but the “feel” behind it will be different, depending on the images associated with “mother” in the culture.

So, when you translate, you’re actually performing a function as a bridge. Translation is not the straightforward affair it seems to be but a dialogue between the original language and the language you translate into. If you’re lucky, you meet halfway. Sometimes that’s not possible, and you feel really guilty about “lying” to the people receiving the translation. When on top of language you need to integrate different cultures and living systems (which you do when translating anything even an ad) you feel even more guilty, because you’re going to betray, no matter how much you try. At one point, a while back, I had my dad on one phone, my husband on the other, and I was doing rapid-fire translation about a relatively straight forward matter. And even that caused me pangs in conscience, because my dad simply doesn’t understand how things are done here. I had to approach his experience and explain our experience in a way he wouldn’t think I was insane or explaining badly. That meant a thousand minor lies.

Okay – now, what does that have to do with yesterday’s topic?

I am, as I tried to point out, a woman who grew up in a different culture. I am American – please don’t dispute it – because one of the wonders about America is that it doesn’t matter where you came from, you can be one of us. However, my past is Portuguese.

Portugal is one of those odd countries, about which most people know nothing while thinking they know a lot. Nine out of ten people think it’s in South America. Heck, a Yale liberal arts graduate once ARGUED with me about this. An international operator once informed me that it was a city in Spain.

People tell me we have ancient wisdom; that we’re standard white westerners; that we’re Hispanic (closer, at least when it comes to our experience in America because most of us ON SIGHT look Hispanic); that we’re passionate and hot blooded; that we’re (at least women) repressed and obedient, and a lot of other things I DON’T KNOW. I don’t know because it’s impossible for me to know, because a) everyone seems to have a different stereotype of what “Portuguese” means and b) because people assume I am this, without telling me.

Portugal is, in fact, obscure enough to be used for “hot strange minority” in comedies or “exotic place” in TV dramas. The way it’s used (a “swinger” couple in Friends, really?) usually makes me laugh my head off.

So right now, those of you who think that literature needs more minority view points or whatever are going “but, that’s exactly what we mean. Why don’t you write your amazingly different culture and enlighten us?” Oh, you’re so lucky you’re faraway enough I can’t hit you with a dictionary.

I’ve been taken to task on this blog before for not writing “about Portugal’s 900 years of history” instead of stuff set in Tudor England. (Portugal is very proud of 900 years of history, which reminds me of Heinlein’s dictum on people who are proud of their ancestry. Never mind.)

So, Chilluns, gather around and let me tell you a story. Imagine a Sarah newly deplaned from Portugal. I knew next to nothing about the US. I’d come here to do my 12^th grade, so I sort of kind of knew what it was like to be a senior in high school. Sort of and kind of, because of course exchange students are a species apart. Even that was four years in the past, as I left after my exchange student year, went back, finished my degree, then married the nice boy who’d lived down the road from me in Ohio, thereby managing the feat of marrying the boy next door across the ocean, which is par for the course for my weirdness.

I wanted to write, of course. I particularly wanted to write because for the first time in my life I was living with someone – my husband – who not only didn’t disapprove of it, but encouraged it. On novelty alone, I wanted to write.

The problem is you can’t always write aliens. You can’t always write fairies. And I didn’t feel qualified to write Americans. And there’s only so many people without a past you can write. (I was hit over the head, I swear. I remember nothing but two minutes in the past.)

I decided to do the sensible thing and write stories set in Portugal and/or with Portuguese characters. It did not go WELL.

The BEST response I got (it was personal!) was a rejection informing me I was a narrowminded pain, who clearly had never been outside the US (this, btw, for a story I didn’t think was in ANY WAY critical of Portugal. Yeah, there are things that drive me nuts about the place, but I also love many of those things. Kind of like you’ll love the way your kid always looks scruffy. I thought that was clear in the story. The thing this person objected to? The fact that no one refrigerated anything and the fact that TO THEM the place sounded icky.)

It was that rejection that opened my eyes. I realized I was up against the “betraying a little” dilemma again. It wasn’t going to be as easy as writing WELL about Portugal. If I wanted to write about Portugal, I had to choose my lies carefully, but I was going to HAVE to lie. Or write non-fiction, dry as dust and twice as boring.

That is, to write about Portugal, I had to know enough about the US to know at least what was LIKELY to be in the editor’s head when the word Portugal was said. I had to know what they expected. This wasn’t as easy as say your picture of Australia (Crocs and big knives) because Portugal is not that well (mis)known. More importantly, I needed to know what people wanted to get out of reading about Portugal. Did they want to experience the exotic, in which case I should emphasize that? Did they want a sense of history, in which case I should push that? Or did they want the feeling that they were enlightened and kind for reading about this small, barely second world country, in which case I should emphasize the victimhood and struggle? What did they want?

It was a hopeless case. I realized I couldn’t cram the whole organic culture as I’d known it in there. I couldn’t even put in the warts (because Portugal is a small country, even if I come from there, if I put in the warts, publishers will perceive it as bullying and myself as a “narrow minded pain.”) Worse, I didn’t know what they thought were warts (what? Really? Lack of refrigeration? Mankind lived for millennia without it, you know?)

Worse, at best anything I wrote about Portugal to be halfway accurate would need to be between whatever Americans could accept (exotic, Latin, etc.) and the truth and I didn’t know America enough to get there. It was like trying to translate when all you know is classroom language on one side. You can’t do it.

So I gave up on that and wrote historical (mostly Rome and England because there the stereotypes I had weren’t that far off) and eventually became comfortable enough to write American characters.

I think at this point I could write Portuguese set/Portuguese characters. I’m accultured enough to reach Americans I THINK.

The problem is, I don’t really want to. We come up against those moral and ethical dilemmas again and it makes writing SUCH a pain.

First, we come up on the reason I moved here at all: I always felt like a stranger in a strange land. Part of this was me. Part of it, though, is that my family – I’m reminded of this every time I go back – is odd. Oh, not in any bad way, but I continuously meet other Portuguese who assume they know how… my family interacts; what I was taught at home; what we ate; what we believed. They’re wrong on almost every count. And the weird thing is they’d be right for ALMOST every Portuguese of my class, age, and upbringing at least as far as I can tell. I’ve come to the conclusion my family (and to an extent the village I grew up in) is just a bunch of outliers. Which explains why going to friends’ houses for vacation was like being an exchange student. No, I don’t know why or how this happened, but I know if I portray “real Portuguese” it will feel profoundly weird to me.

Second: Most Portuguese in the US – for the few people who actually KNOW Portuguese people – come from the Islands (Azores and Madeira) which makes them about as much like me (from the North of the continent) as a native of NYC is like a native of the deep south. No. Less so. In the states, you’re more likely to have had schooling rituals (prom/homecoming, etc) and chain stores in common.

Third: I have been away from Portugal for twenty five years, save for brief visits. In that time everything has changed, perhaps more so than in most places, due to integration into EEC, huge immigration from Eastern Europe, etc. I SIMPLY don’t know how things work now. Even the schooling system seems to have been reinvented from the ground up. There are a LOT of private universities, for instance, while in my day there were two and they weren’t taken seriously. There are also more grades and arranged differently. People’s shopping has rearranged with the introduction of supermarkets and not always in ways I understand. And NONE of it makes sense to me. For instance, my parents’ house was near a train stop. Not a station. Usually not listed in anything, just a place on the line where the train stopped. You could get in and get your ticket onboard from the conductor. Over the last twenty five years, the “stop” has acquired shelters, clocks and announcements. Also graffiti and loiterers. Okay fine. But this time, when I went back, I found out you now have automated machines where… you get a ticket to get a ticket on the train. Yes, that’s right. You buy a ticket from the machine, which allows you to buy a ticket on the train. Why? I don’t know. My mother couldn’t explain it, and the stuff on the machine made no sense. Even HOW to do it made no sense. My parents have started using the bus, which is more uncomfortable and takes longer, simply because they don’t get HOW to do it. I’m sure there’s a reason for this double-blind ticket purchase other than the Portuguese love for bureaucracy. Or maybe there isn’t. BUT I don’t know. And that’s a minor example.

I realized I knew nothing of Portugal when my husband, my kids and I found ourselves in a sizeable village at lunch time, starving, and I couldn’t figure out WHERE to buy food. (In villages it’s not necessarily marked, and besides you can buy food at any of the following: grocery stores; restaurants; taverns; coffee shops; improvised for-the-season cafes. Or all of those might NOT serve food. The ones I found I couldn’t determine if they did, and had no idea how to ask.)

I know you don’t believe that last, and that’s an example of why it’s hard for me to write about Portugal – because I don’t know what’s in your head and now half the time I don’t know what’s in Portugal, either.

So, to pull it all back – insistence that minorities only must be allowed to write minorities MIGHT seem like it makes sense. Kind of like translating “I got my son’s pen” makes sense. They know how their culture/lifestyle works, so of course they’d write it better.

But it’s NOT like writing it. It’s not an account. Because novels are – at least supposed to be – entertaining, it’s more like translating. What you write must not only be accurate. It must sound accurate to the reader. The two are antithetical. So at best it’s a compromise and a small betrayal.

Are minorities/foreigners/etc. capable of doing this? Of course. As I said, I think at this point I am at least for short stories (not sure about trying a novel.) But can they do it better than a non-native/non minority who studies it really well and writes about it?

Well… yes. No. Maybe. It depends on the individual writing and how willing they are to take out their own experiences, unpack them, and then betray them a little to match what’s in the reader’s head, so they can make sense of it all.

Portugal is hellishly difficult to research from the US – great regional variation, for instance (coming from the fact that it’s only in the last twenty years that they’ve started defeating tribalism, and that not well. Not real tribes, but the different regions ARE different ethnicities.) Also no one has written a “Daily Life In Portugal” – though there is a “Daily Life in Medieval Portugal” which I haven’t read, though I’ve bought it. Portugal is hellishly difficult to research from Portugal, too. I had trouble finding a good, comprehensive history when I visited. And because their distribution of books is insane (the concept of back list was alien when I was growing up at least) and there’s no amazon.pt, it’s very difficult to get history (or other) books on specific narrow topics. You might go to the story looking for an history of Roman Portugal, but what’s on the shelves right then is an history of Port Wine; an history of Celtic Portugal; and an history of shoe laces.

However, I think I’d at least consider reading the book if someone were dedicated enough to wade in and read all the books (many of them in Portuguese) you can read to get the complete-enough picture to write about Portugal and did it without either condescension or too much clean up (Portugal… well, dears, let’s just say when I was growing up there we considered Italians and Greeks organized. And Ireland has almost Germanic precision as far as we were concerned. And we were PROUD of this. We should be. Looking from the outside it’s a minor miracle anything works enough to keep up a technological society to the extent it exists. BUT I understand this – it must be genetic because not only do I fight it every day, but so do my kids. HOWEVER most people would, I think, clean most of it away) and without implying Portuguese are victims because they live in less materially comfortable circumstances (and have a guaranteed month of vacation in Summer, a week at Easter and Christmas, plus the most holidays of any country in Europe.)

Do I hunger for such a book? To be blunt, no. I worry that the betrayals made would spin the book even further away from my admittedly odd experience. I worry I would for the rest of my life be meeting people who go “Oh, you’re Portuguese, so you’re exactly like…” (I wonder if Greeks feel that way about “My Big Fat Greek Wedding.”)

I prefer to read about interesting people, no matter where they come from. Oh, I’ll give a try to the exotic, if simply because it’s a change of pace. Stuff set in rural South Africa for instance. And I absolutely ADORED Paul Mann’s Indian mysteries, one of those series I don’t think lasted long enough.

HOWEVER if I start a book set somewhere and it’s all about “victimhood” it goes against the wall so hard it leaves marks. Oh, sure, some people have it really tough (Paul Mann’s description of the underclass in India was responsible for my donating more than I should to various charities) but for books to be entertaining they can’t just be about oppression and misery and taking it. Good authors get over plotting by dropping walls on character. And most readers don’t view fiction reading as an exercise in self flagellation where you must suffer to understand how bad other people’s circumstances are.

And when I say I’d read about exotic locales, those can be in Europe, too. Small town England in the present day would be fascinating. (The latest I’ve read set there was Agatha Christie.) It has nothing to do with stealing victimhood, only with me being an SF geek, forever looking for the alien – even when I’m aware it’s “translated” and “betrayed.”

So, that is the ultimate conclusion: I’d be willing to read anything, written by anyone, as long as it’s interesting. I don’t want to read about people “like me” and I’m not angry there aren’t more of us as characters. (One of my characters has a series about a woman with my background. I don’t want to know. No, seriously. I’d have to kill him in a horrible way. And don’t say “what do you mean one of your characters has…” Any explanation would land one of us in the loony bin.) I don’t object to reading about people like me, though, if done in a way I find entertaining. And I don’t care about the background of the author, provided he/she can write the story convincingly.

Exciting, uh? Aren’t you amazed? I know I am. That this is shocking to the establishment explains why they’re in trouble.

I was discussing the Worldcon follies with husband and he said “it’s always the Gulag, with these people.”

I was struck by the wisdom of these words, because… yeah, it’s always the gulag.

I remember P.J. O’Rourke describing the older cousins of our present progressives — the ones smart enough to read the communist manifesto and know that if they agreed with every point, yep, they were communists — as being like the children of strict religious ministers, fanatic and afraid to put a foot wrong.

He might have been right for that generation.  The current generation (and this includes the older people who have lost their minds and are acting like teens) remind me of nothing so much as the “perfect little girl” at religious education.

I just heard the rest of you groan.  At least those of you who were ever in religious education.

You know exactly the girl I mean.  She’s always more pious than you, and always ready to denounce you for telling Jesus jokes in the back of the classroom.  (What?  Like you didn’t.)   She always tells the teacher more in sorrow than in anger.  And she really doesn’t want you punished, she just doesn’t want you to detract from her piety and earnest desire to learn.  And oh, yeah, she always has a smile like that picture of Hillary as a little girl: the perfect sweet smile that doesn’t reach her eyes.

And she’s always so protective of the other kids who want to “earnestly learn” and so ready to tamp down any form of unapproved behavior.

Of course Jesus jokes were very far off approved behavior.  (“Lord, why don’t you turn the stones into bread?”  “No need I brought ham sandwiches.”  Okay, I was 10, okay?) But they really weren’t disrupting anyone else, and also the teacher was so boring it saved us from the indecorous behavior of falling asleep at our desks.  But, more importantly, the group of us telling rather innocuous jokes (trust me) might have been more sincerely religious than the perfect girl.  Part of the reason that we made the jokes is that we’d gotten the point of the lesson and we were bored senseless.  The perfect girl never listened to the lesson ONCE.  Instead, she sat there practicing her pious expression for the world.

We met a more secular version of her in high school, where she always had the perfect makeup, the perfect hair, ran little errands for teacher and in my case, considering the times I went to high school in, was often “impeccably leftist.”

She was, of course, always ready to denounce and isolate you.  In the US that ran to “you can’t sit at the cool kids table.”

I’ve long ago said the “new blood” in established science fiction fandom (not that new, not that young, they’re maybe ten years younger than I)are liberal arts graduates who found it tough to get anything published much less noticed in “literary fiction” and thus moved to the larger pond of science fiction, all the while lecturing us about our pulpy short comings.

They arrived among us like missionaries from England, landing in Papua New Guinea (Hi Joe) in the nineteenth century and demanding all the natives wear pants, as that would greatly improve them.

They ignore everything that went on before, including the many women who were published in science fiction before 2000.  They’re storming the ramparts, and SF was all princesses and bug eyed aliens before them.  (Has anyone seen my eyes?  I think they rolled out on the carpet.)

(I have a mild fever, so I’m trying not to get in facebook arguments, but I honest to Bob heard someone say that if there were no discrimination against women, J. K. Rowling wouldn’t have used her initials.  Yeah, sure.  Shame about J R R Tolkien.  Seriously, guys, if she did choose to hide her gender, and didn’t merely think her initials sounded better, it might have been because she was writing a boy character and was afraid that editors would complain of her “betraying her voice” as I’ve had happen to me.)

And once they’re published, these bunnies decide they’re the cool kids.  They’re civilizing the savages, after all, and making science fiction “respectable” and “Socially relevant.”

Of course, then, the cool kids must be “safe” in the conventions they neither started nor popularized, undisputed in their piety and their “suave” geekiness.  And the rest of us?  To the Gulag with us.

Over and over again we get messages we’re not welcome and they don’t want us.  They tell us to go start our own awards, then rage at the Dragons.

I’m fairly sure that if we take them at their word and stop showing up for religious ed—  worldcon and other traditional literary conventions where we’re not welcome, they’ll find out that the thing is mighty thin of company.

It’s okay.  They’ll attract more people like them, who are there for the virtue signal.

Fortunately these days, our gulag is not so gulagy.  Sure, you can ban us from your spaces, but it’s starting to sound about as “bad” as being declared persona non grata by the old soviet union.  Well, dang.

You guys go on and enjoy the lines for boots and cabbage.  We’ll be over here having fun with fully stocked supermarkets… Metaphorically speaking.

It’s always the gulag.  But no matter how technologically illiterate the “cool kids” are, the rest of us can get together, establish relationships on line, and even, you know, attend conventions (like Liberty con) where they don’t try to exclude us.

Fear not.  Eventually the cool kids will want to “distance” from us and will call themselves something like “relevant science fiction” or (can we persuade them) Woke SF or something.  And the rest of us will continue writing and reading stories that are fun, and frankly not much caring about thought crimes.

The fun part of the left’s “perfect girl” obsessions is that they care so much about appearances they often discard the gift and hold on tight to the wrapping.

They never seem to catch on it means nothing.

Sunday 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: linen

Hi, my name is Havelock Vetinari, though I’m usually called Havey — I think they mean heavy — and sometimes Captain Floof McFuzzy Pants.

As you can see from my picture, above, I’m QUITE the most handsome of the Hoyt cats, far cuter than Greebo who is all black except for some little white patches, and whom mommy calls her little bulldog.  I’m certainly not a bulldog, though daddy sometimes calls me his puppy, since I come when he calls me.

I’m not sure why I shouldn’t come when called, for you see, I love pets more than anything else.  It’s why I let the Hoyts bring me home from a golf course when I was really little.  They petted me, you see.

Mom says my head is full of fluff.  This is not right.  It’s fully of me.  And I can see very well when mom is avoiding the computer because she has a headache. So I’m going to let her sit in the chair and read her kindle-thingy, while I fill in.

I don’t know what I can fill in with, but I can try.

Let’s get acquainted.  I like being petted and playing with things — though mom and dad both yell at me for playing with their robe belts — and I like eating.  I really like eating.  A lot.  Before the Hoyts there wasn’t much to eat, so I’m very happy to have a lot of food now.

I also like my friend Euclid-cat, but he’s getting very old and forgetful, now that he’s almost 18.

What do you like?  Do you have cats of your own?  Are any of them made of floof?

So, anyway, that’s it.  Mom has a headache, so I did this post.  I’ll let her know it’s taken care of, and then she can rest a bit and see if the headache goes away.

I will admit right now that I’m a very bad libertarian.  I AM a libertarian and think that in any dispute we should come down on the side of individual liberty.

You can get me to swoon by saying “taxation is theft” in just the right voice (ask my husband.  He knows.) I’ve mumbled about financing services with lotteries.

But I do think there is a place for both the army and the police in our society.  Seriously, now.  To believe there isn’t, or that we can do without is the equivalent of believing Marxism will make men into angels.  We’re not that deluded, are we?

Both Dan and I have/had relatives in law enforcement, and both of us have heard discussions and followed law enforcement enough to be uncomfortable defenders of the police force at times.

For instance, I was once kicked out of jury by the defense lawyer for pointing out that no, rounding up the “usual suspects” is not unfair.  Most shootings for robbery are a case of known wolves, and few people jump straight from being angelic school boys to full frontal armed assault.  (Or any kind of assault, really.)

(I also once got taken out of a jury for pointing out — quoting PTerry — that all babies look like Sir Winston Churchill.  On second thought I should give lessons on how to get out of Jury Duty, except I wasn’t even trying, just being me.)

We need police, unfortunately, for the same reason we need the army.  There are bad actors out there, and no matter how peaceable, peaceful and inoffensive you are, someone/some country is going to try to hurt you.  And yeah, sure, I GET my more militant libertarian friends saying everyone should defend him/herself.  In theory that’s great and a super idea, but guys, some people shouldn’t have a gun.  And I’m not talking about the mentally ill, I’m talking about people too blind to know what they’re shooting at or similar impairments.  And then there are the too young, too old and too stupid.  And people who don’t understand they have to protect themselves.  And, and and….

It’s all fine and dandy to say “Too bad, strike them off” but that’s not realistic.  Realistically if each person has to hire a protection service, you end up with dueling gangs.

But the police is an uncomfortable solution, because it has the power of government behind them, and while it works for the people it doesn’t always remember that.

This week brought both the news of someone killed during a swatting, and of a young officer killed on the outskirts of Denver.

There is this thing they do in Colorado where they have massive processions and funerals for officers fallen in the line of duty.  It is as it should be.  It’s important to understand the debt of honor owed to those who fell doing a difficult and often thankless job.

When a Colorado Springs Police officer on his first week (I think) of work got shot in the face for what he thought was a routine traffic stop (the guy in the car was escaping from the scene of a murder and thought he was caught) the funeral disabled North Nevada for hours, and since it was near our house at the time, I took the kids out to watch the hundreds of police cars from everywhere in Colorado.

Because it’s right and meet to honor those who fell doing a difficult and thankless job.  (Even if traffic is treated as a cash cow by city officers.  Never mind.  The kid was doing what he should be doing to keep the streets safe, since the guy he stopped WAS driving erratically.)

But it’s a knife’s edge.  When you have sheep dogs, some will lose their minds and bite the sheep.

The Denver police department apparently ran a burglary ring in the seventies.  The new craze for militarizing the police and for the police treating every house-call like they’re entering Fallujah is a problem.  Yes, I know, in the swatting, the man made suspicious gestures.  You know what?  Someone breaks my door down, I’m not going to stop and ask if they’re the police.  And as someone who HAS been threatened with swatting (who on our side hasn’t been?  When we were renting between houses, our insurance agent refused us rental insurance because I’m a conservative blogger, so vandalism, arson and swatting are all risks.  (Frankly this surprised me.  I never thought it was a serious risk.  Wonder what statistics she was looking at)) I get terrified at the idea of the door being broken down and the stupid cats running out and being lost/run over/eaten.  I could see me getting up to check on a cat, or to tell them to not let the cat out, and being shot.

And sure, the police should do a lot more checks, particularly when the SWATTING call is over the top.

OTOH as the shooting while responding to a complaint of a domestic dispute proves, sometime the risk is real, and police officers do have to protect themselves.

There is a knife edge.  Go too much on one side and you’re risking your life.  Go too much on the other and you’re killing innocents, and being used as weapons by bad actors.

Again, I want to make it clear most police officers are decent, hard working people.  Do you get the occasional thuggish brute?  Sure.  You get them in every profession where you give people power.  You screen, you try to eliminate them in training, but you know, humans being humans one or two will slip through.  Eliminating them is like eliminating the very rare man who is disposed to rape.  Can’t be done.

The problem is this: the last administration simultaneously armed the police to the teeth and instigated the population against the police.

This is a familiar playbook.  Almost all revolutions from the left started when law enforcement over-reacted.  I have a private theory (somewhat proven by sound recordings released a few years ago) that Kent State was the work of agent provocateurs trying to use that playbook.

It didn’t work, but if the left abandoned things that don’t work they’d have discarded Marxism decades ago.

So we got the whole myth that police (many of them people of color) are stone cold racists, shooting minorities for no reason.

And the police became defensive.  As you would, if some of your colleagues around the country were shot merely for being in your profession.

In Colorado, a couple of years ago, a couple of police officers got killed by stepping into traffic on the highway, while responding to an accident.

So now we’re told we have to move two lanes over, which frankly makes it more likely to get more accidents and causes untold resentment.  When you cut a four lane highway down to one (one for the accident, then two for police officer protection) there’s a whole lot of shoving and slowing and confusion going on.  Add to that that all this is done in the GLARE of lights so bright they’re probably responsible for the accidents to officers, because at night they blind the drivers for minutes.

It also causes resentment.

Which brings us to today.  We went to Colorado Springs yesterday to deal with a lot of accumulated business.  We still do our personal banking, most of our health stuff, and such in the Springs, because we’ve patronized some establishments for 20 years and don’t feel like finding new ones.  Also, younger son lives in the springs, and we decided to have a leisurely dinner with him, and then stay over night.

We knew there was a funeral for the officer, closing I-25 at 8:30.  It was on signs all over the highway.

So we got up really (REALLY) early (as in, husband is napping now) and headed North to get ahead of the procession.  We made a mistake.  We were so early, and doing such good time, we got off the highway to grab a diner meal.  We were done at eight and tried to get back on the highway…  and the entrances were all closed.

Every single access to I-25 was blocked WELL ahead of the announced 8:30 time.  (They were actually not supposed to start till 8:45, but were supposed to close at 8:30.)

There are a ton of people who work in Denver.  Some tried to argue.  The police all had that look of “tough.  You’ll suffer for what you did.”

I get it.  Look I GET IT.  They’re hurt.  Law enforcement is one of those professions where the only people who GET you are those in the same job, and you think of them as brothers.  And when one of you is killed, you want to punish “all them bastages” which translates as “everyone else.”

But it’s like the “pull over two lanes to ensure safety.”

All you’re really doing is making a whole lot of people resentful, because they won’t get to work on time and will spend a ton of time on the road.  (The alternate routes were chockablock and we finally got home an hour ago.  In our case it was stupid and blame it on “we needed coffee and some kind of food and made a poor decision.”  If we’d continued on we’d have saved three hours.  BUT a lot of the people caught in the mess with us have no other choice.)

It loses sympathy for the police.  It disgraces what should be a respectful and solemn occasion.  And it avenges itself on people predisposed to be on the side of law enforcement.

All of these are bad.

It’s no big deal in our case.  We were on vacation, this was a jaunt, and the only inconvenience (I know.  GRAVE inconvenience) was making this blog late and delaying husband’s nap.  BUT for many people it ruined their day, set their teeth on edge, and made them predisposed to believe the police don’t care.

This us versus them mentality will lead to trouble.

I get it.  I really do.  I understand both sides.  It’s a side effect of the job itself.  Except for the intentional provocateurs trying to set sheep against sheep dogs, it’s a delicate balance and sometimes it fails.

But because of the intentional provocateurs, both sides are predisposed to misunderstand and pre-judge each other.  And this will end very badly.

I want to honor men who fell doing their duty.  And I want their comrades to understand that the rest of us have lives that have to go own around the ceremony, that the rest of us not only didn’t shoot an officer, but WOULDN’T shoot an officer, and are per-disposed to believe most police officers are the good guys with no more rotten apples than any other profession.  Punishing everyone just because they’re not on the force is… daft.

If you’re going to publish you’ll close a major highway at rush hour, at 8:30, don’t close it at 8:00.  There is no point stopping people’s commute.  They’ll get up half an hour early to accommodate the procession, but only *ssholes would resent that.

However if you say one hour, then close half an hour earlier, you’re being the prepotent *sshole and messing with people because you CAN and because they’re not of you.

THAT will only play into the hands of the idiots who hate all policemen, and those who want to use the police as the trigger point to bring about their “socialist utopia.”

If you need the place closed from 8, then say so.

Be mindful of the people you serve.  Just like most police officers are decent, so are most people who aren’t police officers.

Presumption of hatred on both sides will only lead to hatred.

And standing at each other’s throats will only please those who wish to bring civilization down.

HRC: The End (or is it?) – by Amanda S. Green

This is the final post on HRC’s book, What Happened. I almost wrote “HRC’s novel”. Why? Because in a lot of ways this has been the best fiction writing I’ve seen in some time. I swear she isn’t recounting the same election season I remember. But it is over, or it will be as soon as I finish this post. What isn’t over is HRC’s belief that she is still relevant and has a role to play in the U.S. political landscape.

I’ll admit up front that I skimmed much of the last 80 pages of the book. Why? Because it is not much more than a rehash of the same sort of things she spent the previous 380 pages or so talking about. Even I have my limits and I finally reached it with this book. In answer to a question one of you asked in the comments a week or so ago, I continued reading and blogging about the book for two reasons. The first was it became like a car wreck. You know as you approach and see the flashing lights of the emergency vehicles that you should look away, but you can’t. You just have to see what happened.

The second reason is a little better. I read the book and blogged about it because the best way to recognize the next HRC to come down the pike is to do our best to understand this one. I’ve come away with a couple of conclusions along this line. The first is that HRC hasn’t admitted, to herself or anyone else, that her political career is truly over. The second is that even if she doesn’t run for office again, she plans to try to pull strings from behind the curtain. The third is that she truly does see herself as some legend in the making, a woman leading a movement and she isn’t about to give that up without a fight.

Campaigns are full of minor annoyances and major frustrations, but at the end of the day, it’s inspiring to watch our democracy whir into action. When all the arguments are made and rallies are finished and TV ads have aired, it comes down to regular people lining up and having their say. I’ve always loved that quip from Winston Churchill about how democracy is the worst form of government – except for all the others. I still believe that, even when our system feels totally nuts. (Electoral College, I’m looking at you.) (pg 378)

That sounds good, doesn’t it? In fact, I’m sure most of us could agree with Churchill’s sentiments. However, when looking at the quote in context, you can see why HRC didn’t give more than one very small part of it. Had she done so, her cut at the Electoral College would quickly fall apart.

The quote comes from a parliamentary debate on November 11, 1947. You can read more of it here, but this is what I found interesting when looking at HRC and her complaints – er, observations about the 2016 election:

Many forms of Government have been tried, and will be tried in this world of sin and woe. No one pretends that democracy is perfect or all-wise. Indeed, it has been said that democracy is the worst form of Government except all those other forms that have been tried from time to time; but there is the broad feeling in our country that the people should rule, continuously rule, and that public opinion, expressed by all constitutional means, should shape, guide, and control the actions of Ministers who are their servants and not their masters.

“[P]ublic opinion, expressed by all constitutional means, should shape, guide and control the actions of Ministers who are their servants and not their masters.” It is clear Churchill understood something HRC continues to deny: elected officials are to be servants of their constituents and not the masters thereof. He also recognized that there are constitutional considerations that come into play – ie, the Electoral College – again, something HRC wants to turn away from. It is clear from everything HRC says in the book that she feels only certain peoples should have a say in how our country is run and that only certain segments of the public should have their opinions considered. That is, in my mind, very far from what Churchill talked about that day in 1947.

For weeks, I had been carrying around heavy binders full of memos relating to the transition and the first decisions I would have to make as President-Elect. There were Cabinet Secretaries to pick, a White House staff to hire, and a legislative agenda to begin working on with Congress. I loved diving into the details of governing, but in the homestretch of the campaign, it was hard to focus on anything past Election Day. (pp 379-380)

Hmm, maybe that was part of the problem, Hils. You got ahead of yourself. You were so focused on what would happen AFTER you were elected that you forgot the first hurdle you had to clear – getting elected. She complained earlier in the book that people couldn’t relate to her and she didn’t understand why. Maybe she ought to take a harder look at herself. Her attitude of assuming she already had won the White House meant she didn’t need to connect to us lowly voters. She didn’t need us. The election was in the bag.

Except, as she and the DNC soon discovered, it wasn’t.

In the chapter entitled “Why” (and you can probably guess what she referred to there – Why did she lose the election? Why didn’t we love her?), she had this to say:

I go back over my own shortcomings and the mistakes we made. I take responsibility for all of them. You can blame the data, blame the message, blame anything you want – but I was the candidate. It was my campaign. Those were my decisions. (pg 391)

Wow, is she actually going to take responsibility? Don’t hold your breath. There’s more.

I also think about the strong headwinds we faced, including the rise of tribal politics in American and across the globe, the restlessness of a country looking for change, excessive coverage of my emails, the unprecedented late intervention by the director of the FBI, the sophisticated misinformation campaign directed from the Kremlin, and the avalanche of fake news. Those aren’t excuses – they’re things that happened, whether we like it or not. (pg 391)

Oookay. Can you imagine how the Left would scream if Trump, or any conservative for that matter, talked about “tribal politics”? Note how she continues to fail to recognize why America wanted change. It’s just bad because it wasn’t the change she was offering. Nor does she discuss the role her own people, and folks from the DNC, played in the Russian connection. And all that “fake news”. Remember, just a couple of chapters earlier, she was excoriating the rest of us because we had lost faith in the foundations of our country, foundations that should be educating us about politics and those running for office. One of those foundations was the media – the same media she now appears to blame for “fake news”.

And we get a laundry list over the next 20 pages or so of why she didn’t win. First there were the 40,000 voters from Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania who voted for Trump instead of her. If they’d just voted for her, she would have won. There is the “false” claim by Joe Biden that she didn’t have an economic message. HRC claims Biden’s statements were false because she talked about the economy. According to her, she talked about it a lot. But she doesn’t get that talking about the economy isn’t the same as having an economic message. Once again, she didn’t connect with the voters, especially in the Rust Belt, because she didn’t tell them not only what she wanted to do to help them and their employers but how she planned to do it. Remember, she admitted earlier she’d made a mistake in that area by talking about shutting down the coal mines and focusing on new energy and renewable energy sources.

She blames those who voted against her instead of “voting for” Trump. She also doesn’t understand it because she had such high approval numbers when she left State. Poor Hillary, we didn’t love her the way she thought we should.

After all, the polls all said she should have won. “So, no, all the polls weren’t wrong. It’s possible that my lead throughout the race was slightly overstated – but not significantly. It’s reasonable to conclude, therefore, that something important and ultimately decisive happened at the very end.” (pg 401)

So, who else does she blame? Comey, of course. After all, he dared speak out about her emails. (pg 405) Russia is next. (pg 406) Economic anxiety and bigotry also make her hit list. (pg 410) She makes no attempt to hide her disdain for those voters who supported Trump. She also manages to throw Bernie Sanders under the bus and Jill Stein quickly follows him.

That said, a small but still significant number of left-wing voters may well have thrown the election to Trump. Jull Stein, the Green Party candidate, called me and my policies “much scarier than Donald Trump” and praised his pro-Russia stance. (pg 411)

If that’s not enough, she claims Trump exploited “racial and cultural anxiety”. (pg 412) I’m not saying that all Trump voters are racists or xenophobes. There are plenty of good-hearted people who are uncomfortable about perceived anti police rhetoric, undocumented immigrants, and fast-changing norms around gender and sexual orientation. But you had to be deaf to miss the coded language and racially charged resentments powering Trump’s campaign. (pg 413) In other words, you are as bad as Trump because you didn’t vote for her.

But it doesn’t stop there. She claims there was voter suppression, citing a claim by an “unnamed” Trump staffer on the issue. (And can you hear the cries of foul if conservatives made such accusations about her campaign and cited unnamed sources?) Oh, and she blames the Supreme Court for “gutting the Voting Rights Act in 2013”. (pp 418-419). Notice how carefully she avoids mentioning the armed “concerned citizens” who did their own forms of voter suppression in 2008 and 2012, those times for the Dems.

There’s more but you get the drift. She finishes up talking about how “love and kindness” had been a fundamental part of her campaign. (pg 441) I guess I didn’t pay close enough attention because I missed that part. What about you? Oh, and she doesn’t carry around any bitterness after the election. She just couldn’t live that way.

So why the hell is she still going on and on about how bad Trump is?

What’s the final verdict on the book? Part of me is glad I read it. I am most definitely glad, after reading it, that she isn’t our president. It won’t surprise me at all to see her trying to make a powerplay of some sort at the next election, whether it be another attempt to win office or to determine who should be the Democrats’ “anointed one”. But the book is done. There are no more blog posts and my liver survived.

Barely.

(You can find the other installments in this series at the following links: What Happened or How I Suffered for this Blog and had to Share, Grit and Gratitude, HRC Gets Caught Trying, A New Deal, A Square Deal or How She Wanted to be the Next Roosevelt, It’s All His Fault, Turning Mourning into a Movement, HRC: Idealism and Realism, HRC: Making History , HRC: Those Damn Emails and HRC: The Russians Did It – Amanda S. Green.)

[I know this is hard to watch, imagine what it must be like to read the book.  If you want to help finance Amanda’s liquor bill, use this address  Send the woman a drink-SAH]

When I was little, I liked tinkering with mechanisms.  Depending on the age, this sometimes meant I took a perfectly good wind-up toy and did things that made it act weirdly.  Take the crawling baby doll I opened up and then had some inconvenient pieces left over, and when she crawled again, she’d crawl three steps and lift her leg.  Three steps and lift her leg.  I was young enough I had no clue why the adults thought this was hilarious, btw.

One thing you learn pretty quickly with mechanisms, at least if you are a little kid taking apart something someone else put together, is to be wary of left over gears.  They were doing something before, and it’s highly unlikely that you tinkered with it in such a way that it made it more efficient and special.

Of course, part of the problem in Marxism is its own devoted belief in its own infallibility and scientific qualities.

When the whole point of a political philosophy is the idea that you’re going to reform society in such a way that will make men like unto angels (since all our bad impulses are the result of capitalism and “greed” and “exploitation” once it’s removed we’ll all be perfect.  This was used in the 70s as the basis for maintaining that putting people in mental hospitals in the US was the same as putting people in mental hospitals for political opinions in the USSR, since capitalism caused mental illness.) and install utopia, it’s hard to realize some of the stuff you’re tinkering with is there for a reason.

Perhaps this explains the left’s continued illusion that breaking the feedback mechanism solves the problem.

It’s a curious delusion, because the rest of us learn to love and use the feedback in our fields of endeavor.

I was only ever a jackleg repairman, but I learned not to remove the parts of the mechanism that would alert me something was wrong well before the whole thing, say, over pressurized and blew up.

And in writing feedback is just as important.  I didn’t actually make much progress in my attempts at professional writing until we got a writers’ group.  This is because I had no clue what I was doing.  Rejection letters were sometimes encouraging “definitely send us your next one” but “this doesn’t fit our needs” wasn’t exactly helpful in pinpointing the problems.

BTW in the case of writers’ group, learn to exclude/ignore the consistently and always negative ones, too.  (If you’re diplomatic, without seeming to be ignoring them.)  A feedback system always stuck on “horrible’ is as bad as one stuck on “wonderful.”  You have to assume it’s either the other person’s taste or personal animosity.  There is  reason “the blind leading the blind” is a bad thing.

Feedback is what calls you back to where other people are, when you’re so lost in your interpretation of the world that you don’t see the flaws in it.

It’s what causes you to consider whether your writing is actually understandable to other people; whether your ideas are really working out that wonderfully; whether those extra gears caused the doll not to pause, leg up.

As I said, the left is notorious for trying to get rid of that.  Tests when you apply for a job are now supposedly “racist” leading to the rampant credentialism.  This allows the left-controlled education system to “certify” people as educated and never have to admit they are failing vast swaths of the population.  Instead they use “endemic racism” to explain that.  (In fact, they use this kind of thing to explain everything, without looking at what the education establishment might be doing wrong.)

Gone is the feedback mechanism that tells us that schools are failing and failing harder for minorities.  Instead the left can posture and preen about their wonderful role in the schools.  Of course, the schools are still failing, and now they insist on Bachelors for everyone, in an attempt to teach people things they used to learn by fourth grade.  The control mechanism is broken.  Piling on more “education” will only bankrupt the country and do nothing.

Then take the push-model of book sales.  Long before there was an Amazon, chain bookstores had cozy deals with publishers that sent most indie bookstores (now beloved in effigy by the left) out of business.

And then the left dominated publishing establishment had a brilliant idea.  For decades they’d been trying to forecast failure and success, and failings.  Books they pushed out the wazzoo (A river in Sundon’tshine) died on the vine when bookstores refused to stock them because the owners had read them.  The books they had designated as to be ignored caught someone’s fancy, and suddenly were all over.

This was inefficient.  It caused way too much printing that never got distributed, and much last minute rushed reprinting. (Even leaving aside how often people chose to read the WRONG things, something that started to matter more and more in the last two decades.)

So they came up with the push model.  It was, from a certain perspective brilliant.

That perspective is the one where the real world doesn’t really exist, so you don’t need to hear from it.

Because the managers of the big corporate bookstores ALSO didn’t read, they took instruction beautifully.  So the publishers could say “you’ll take 100 of x and 2 of y” and they DID.

For a little while it worked beautifully, in the sense that there were no surprise bestsellers, (and publishing houses hated those.  I know someone who unexpectedly sold out her print run in a week.  The publishing house took the book out of print.  No, seriously.) and the books that got seen and talked about were picked by the publisher. (BTW this wasn’t even always or primarily political.  Sure, that existed too sometimes, but mostly it was the crazy fads that publishing convinced itself of.  For instance, sometime in the mid two thousands they convinced themselves no one wanted historical mysteries — they weren’t selling, true, probably because they were on NO shelves — but everyone wanted “chick-lit mysteries” that had covers with lots of shoes and dresses and whose plots were “Sex in the City with murder.”  I remember trying to find something to read, giving up and going to the used bookstore (then a hundred miles away in Denver) for my mystery fix.)

Of course, they sold less.  In fact, as time went on and people got out of the habit of going to the bookstore, because there was never anything they could find to read.  I mean, I remember being chased from Science Fiction to Mystery to finally history, to at last the sort of “utility” book you find in the discount bins you know “a chart of history” type of thing just to find something to buy on our bookstore night.

Then we gave up.

Eventually the broken feedback mechanism gave us the demise of Borders — and B & N is not feeling so good itself — and a yawning, desperate chasm in customers’ need for books that meant the way was wide open for Indie and Amazon.  Even the early badly proofed indie books were like a breath of fresh air because for the first time I could read outside the trends being pushed.

But when you’re a peddler of Utopia, you can’t admit you’re wrong or that your methods are crazy.  After all, your cult of Marx (a college-professor friend recently shocked his students by pointing out Marx is a 19th century western idea — born of the mechanical age and the idea you can make everything just so — and that imposing this interpretation on non-Western systems is colonialist) promises eventual paradise and world domination.  You can’t be wrong. It would mean your whole life has been in vain, and everything you’ve been taught is a lie.

The system might have moved the downtrodden from those “exploited” by the industrial revolution, to “minorities” “third world people” and people with interesting colorations — mostly because the “exploited” workers kept rising up in the world and spitting in the eye of Marx, the ungrateful bastages — but it’s totally still true and the way of the future.  Even if it requires conceptualizing a future where no one works and everything is free, since they’ve now tossed the “workers” out of their ideal society.  (Again, ungrateful bastages who don’t know how “good” the intellectuals are for them.)  But it is totally the future!

So all those people who say that it’s still spinach and to hell with it?  They’re just trying to destroy the train of happiness leading to the station of utopia.

Which means they must be silenced.  If they’re just silenced, then the system will work fine, and everyone will be happy and joyful.

So the latest attack is on free speech.  Because free speech can be hurty and say things the left doesn’t want to hear.  Bad bad free speech must be stopped.

They already have laws against “hate speech” or “harassment, which according to a comment here is “saying something I don’t like more than once.”” in most of the world.

The US is holding fast in our unreasonable devotion to the first amendment which irks the left as much as our devotion to the second.  Don’t we understand that bad speech hurts people?  And leads to bad think?

In any institution they control, from companies code of conduct to deplatforming people on twitter, to Google strangling hits to dissenting blogs, etc, they are already silencing that nasty, evil feedback.

Because if only they don’t hear the whistles of rising steam, the engine will never explode.

Cotton stuffed in their ears, they keep feeding more coal to the engine of public opinion and stopping up the steam vents.

The end of this is what happened to Ceausescu and his repulsive wife: “Beloved leader of the morning, pile of cooling, bullet riddled meat in the afternoon.”

But they don’t see it.  They’re convinced if they just stop the feedback, the machine will work fine.

And they’re going to take all of us into the explosion.  Mind you, in the end we win, they lose, but it’s going to get very rough there for a while.

Unfortunately when dealing with true believers, there’s nothing you can do but let them utterly prove their system wrong, before sane people can build again.

Every year, around this time of year, the newspaper my dad took, the now defunct Primeiro de Janeiro, printed a supplement called “O calendario dos….”  And now I’m at a loss as to the “the” what.  I vaguely remember something like does Matutinhos, but the google search only brings up matosinhos which is a town by the sea, and at any rate, I have no clue what Matutinhos means except it might have some connection to Matitudinal, ie. of the morning or awake.  (Yep, that’s right, I was woke before it was trendy, only we had real grammar.)

Actually it meant the “Calendar of the children” basically.  Every year, shortly after new years, dad and I would take a couple of days, cut out thin cardboard, paste the pages on it, then assemble it, so I had a wall calendar.

The calendar itself was of those things that are the most wholesome and educational, filled with rhymes that taught you stuff about months that came in like a lion and went out like a lamb, good months to plant this and that, and how many days and what holidays the day had.

I’m fairly sure in most households, even households with children, the thing just went into the trash (or to the outhouse) unread.  But for us it was a precious thing, which allowed me hours spent with dad, his telling me stories about each month and things that had happened in that month. (You know, of the “twenty years ago, it snowed in May” variety, only it didn’t snow in Portugal — in our area — between the day I was born and the day I turned 19.  Yep, I’m that hot.  (rolls eyes.))

As such things do, it persisted, so that I think I still had one of those hanging in my room when I got married.

I’m sure dad didn’t give it that much importance.  I’m sure he didn’t give that much importance to our Saturdays when we went to feed the anthills, (I figured out years later, he took me out of the house so mom could clean in peace.)  Or to the day before Christmas when he’d take me to Porto to see the men put up the lights and we stayed over to see the lights lit at night.

It’s different from the adult point of view.  For a year, after I picked the kids up, we stopped at a bakery to have tea before I took them home.  We did this because I’d just sold, and the time they were at school was a mad sprint to write books on time, which means that I usually had forgotten to have lunch.  To this day they remember those teas, and think that’s what adults should do when they pick the kids from school.

You can’t control the things that stay, or even the ones that will have a great influence over your kids (or kids you mentor.)

There were books I received at just the right time to get me interested in this or that.  There is the fact that brother took engineering and had a classmate reading science fiction (and who owned a large library.)  Those books, and more importantly the fact that my brother told me on no account to read the books he’d borrowed (well, it was the seventies.  Some were…. weird.) meant that I fell to science fiction in my early teens and never looked back.  I’d almost certainly be writing anyway, but I might only have written historical novels or heaven knows what without that chain of fortuitous circumstances.  (Weirdly, while I was in Portugal, my brother had me sign a book for this friend.  Sigh.  I wish he’d told me, as I think the friend would like Darkship Thieves.  Instead he got Gentleman Takes a Chance.  Ah, well.)

You can’t control everything your kids see or do.  I later met a family like that.  Their 14 yo homeschooled boy had no idea MURDER existed.  He didn’t know people could kill other people.  It was thought too upsetting for him.  I kept wondering (still do) what would happen to that kid when he entered college which his parents definitely aimed for.  Or even found something NOT a children’s Bible and read the panoply of bad human behavior.

Sure, we’re not the left, so we shouldn’t wallow in mud and claim everyone is a bad person, because only we are good (and should therefore control others) but there are limits how much you can raise children in a sheltered little world.  In the end, they’ll experience human foibles, failings and, yes, sins.  If they don’t know these exist, they’re going to make the perfect the enemy of the good, because they believe it can be perfect.

At the same time there are all the career parents wishing to give their kid quality time while farming him/her out to perfect strangers most of the day.  In daycare they can’t establish the same priorities.  Most daycares are run on the principle of the squeaky wheel. Which means, you know, that we’re prepping future snowflakes, ready to scream and get attention at ANYTHING.

We couldn’t do the quality time thing.  We were with them a lot, or at least I was, though in the first ten years of their lives Dan worked really long hours.  But I was with them all the time, so we settled for quantity time.  Most of it was them coming to us from the room next to the office only when there was a problem.  If I finished a book and decided to play with them for a day, it scared them a little.

But there was enough time for the little wild graces, like taking them to Walmart for back to school shopping, finding cap pistols, buying one for each of us, and then spending the rest of the day in wild shoot outs up and down stairs.  Going to restaurants, getting little swords in our drinks, and having sword duels across the table.  Taking them to zoos and museums, because WE needed a day off, and ending up having deep conversations about animals or art trends.

These things just happened, but I understand that the kids feel they were the best thing ever, now they’re grownup.

I realize many parents have to work, both of them, outside the house.  But take as much QUANTITY time as you can.  Even if all you’re doing is sitting on the same sofa, each reading something (some of my best times with my dad, now I think about it.)  Include them in your shopping trips, your coffee shop trips.  They’re a lot less obtrusive than you think, particularly if they are being included in adult activities.  It makes them feel special.

I’m not a parenting expert.  All I did is raise two of them.

But it’s the wild unexpected graces that stay.  It’s the days you dropped by the coffee shop and got them a hot chocolate while you had coffee, and you talked of nothing much.  They’ll remember that forever.  And then, when they’re adults and have pocket money, sometimes they’ll take you to the zoo, or introduce you to the restaurant they just found, or even take you to the coffee shop.  And you enjoy it, even though you talk of nothing much.

I don’t know of course, I’m still not sure I’ll amount to anything, or that I’ve done or written anything worth being remembered, but I think even should I become a well known writer and influential, there’s a good chance my real influence in the future will come through those bakery visits after elementary school pick up, and the rambling talks we had over tea.

And if I do amount to something, eventually, how much was it those hours spent with dad, cutting out the stupid little calendars?

Love grows.  The influence you have on the future might not be what you expect.  Make time to love and be loved, and to experience the small wild mercies.  (And yes, dad is AFAIK fine, but I do miss him.)

Don’t fret that every minute with your kids or someone’s kids you love isn’t highly educational.  Don’t worry that you didn’t send the kids the Most Educational Toy Ever.  Just make time.  Just time.  And let love grow.

I have no clue where Mary’s word for the week is.  I know she said she sent it, and Mary is an honorable woman.  But my email appears to have done a disappearing act on it, so we’ll make do without.

Fifty words, the word is: root.

Speaking of roots I’m not swearing this will happen, but I’m going to try to find as many of the Argonauta collection books as I can and go back to my sf/f roots in order, to figure out, now as an adult and a professional, what about these books enthralled me and drew me in.  I think that’s important, going back to the root of your passion now and then.  Like anniversaries, renewal of vows and occasion weekends a way refresh a marriage, so getting back in touch with why you first loved something helps clear away the clouds that have gathered in the meantime.

I’ll probably blog about it, too, once a week or so, both what I liked and the things that are now outdated (not just scientifically) or that just strike me as funny now.  (Reading one of my favorite Agatha Christie’s — the moving finger — was struck with all the references to genetic hygiene. Granted in this case it referred to avoiding incest, but it’s a reminder the vocabulary was in everyone’s lips and not a Germany-peculiar disease.)

For those who wish to play at home, the list is here, and the text under the cover lists the actual title.  I’ll note I can’t find number one.  There is one of that name on Amazon and someone “scanned” the text in but not with text recognition, rather as an image, which means I can’t read it. Periodically I might post “wanted” posts here too.

Other things that will happen both here and at MGC will be changes in looks and format.  I promise nothing bad, so just sit tight.  (Not that I expect no bitching.  From this crowd?  I always expect bitching.)

I have a kitchen to clean and three chapters to finish, so go back to your regular insanity.