Author: Sarah A. Hoyt

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 Do You Kipple? – Alma Boykin

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

So, do you Kipple?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Go in and do the best you can.

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

If I Had A Promo – Jason Dyck

Oh, wait, I do!

Alma Boykin

Alexi, Ivan, and the Hidden Heart

Alexi’s Tale: Part 5

“Firebird is eating tomatoes. Make stop.”

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

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

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

Mary Catelli

The Witch-Child and the Scarlet Fleet

Trapped in a pirate port…

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

Also available from these fine booksellers:

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

Winter’s Curse

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

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

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

Also available from these fine booksellers:

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

Treachery And Spells

Two novellas of magic and adventure…

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

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

Also available from these fine booksellers:

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

John Van Stry

Kaiju

Portals of Infinity

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

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

But one William finds eerily familiar.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

House, lasers, plague of locusts.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Lately I’ve been fretting about my memory.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And I worry.

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

Nobody Expects the Fannish Inquisition!

By Christopher M. Chupik

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Hey, how did I get up on this soapbox?

Ahem.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Any Englishman would be right to give up.

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

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

They recovered.  Will we recover?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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