Author: Sarah A. Hoyt

I’m not going to write about the Oregon shootings.  Not enough information is out and at this point we’d be sharing ignorance.  There is a post maybe, if the profile of the killer is accurate, because it plugs into fears I’ve had for a few years now.

There might also be (there is) a post on the sheer insanity of taking a shooting in a gun free zone as a sign we need more gun laws, as though laws were some sort of magic shield that changes reality.  Anyone who genuinely thinks that way is still in kindergarten, mentally.

But I don’t want to write about the shooting in particular.  I want to talk about this sort of event, which might not be more frequent than before (I’ve seen claims both ways) but which we’re more aware of, I guess.

My first awareness of mass killing was Black September, during the first Olympics I paid attention to.  Dad had sold it to me as this beautiful ceremony, tying in to the ancient Olympics, and how it was all about peace, and then…

Then there was 9/11.  But before that, because I live in CO, there was Columbine.  I got to not just read in horror about the school shooting, but also to be frisked whenever I dropped the kids off at pre-school while wearing a raincoat.  (We had only one car, my house was three blocks from the school and we had a ridiculously rainy year.)

And then there was Beslan.  Beslan, and knowing how easy (truly) it would be for something like that to happen in my kids’ schools almost got me to take the kids out of school and homeschool.  I’m frankly shocked we haven’t had one of those in the US yet.  I’ve expected it for years.  Maybe the terrorist scum knows us better than I thought, and knows if they touch our kids, it’s all up with them.  Maybe.

And I got to watch the school’s completely ineffective and actually counterproductive reaction to Beslan and to Columbine.

I mean, our preschool teacher informed us, in dramatic accents that she would die for our kids.  And all I could think was “Lady, I don’t want you to die for them.  I want you to protect them.”

And their grand plan was to lock the classroom doors, and let no one out.  You know, the perfectly normal classroom doors, you could kick in without much effort, and which were not bullet proof.  What this amounted to was isolating the classrooms, and making it easy for a single killer to move down a hallway shooting the kids in batch lots.

This makes absolutely no sense, of course, unless you think of guns as magical objects, against which there is no defense but to cower and hope that the evil object and its thrall don’t find you.

If say, imagine, someone has an evil magic wand, that can kill you just by being in your vicinity, and he’s loose in the school, yep, the best thing to do is to hide and close the door and hope evil sates itself on your neighbors before it gets to you.

It’s also pusillanimous and shameful and unworthy of any human who walks on two legs.  But it is the result of what the left is and what is has become.  90% of the communists and socialists walking around today are not such because they think those regimes are admirable (at least not if they’re over twenty and actually know anything of the world and history) but because they’re afraid they’re inevitable.  Their embrace of the crazy left is not an embrace of ideals they think will make the world better, it’s an attempt to be eaten last.

With such people in charge of our policies, as they are throughout most educational establishments, it’s no wonder that the ‘eat me last’ strategy is the best they can come up with.

It is also unworthy — as I said — of any human over the age of six.

Look, we live very comfortable and very safe lives by the standard of our ancestors.  And I’m not going to preach about traditional morality, because some of your traditions are not my traditions.  I mean, I do believe, on a spiritual level as well as on a practical one, that one defends oneself and also those who can’t defend themselves.  It’s a moral duty, as well as a practical one.

But let’s go with the practical side, shall we?  I’d bet you the majority of our ancestors are people who defended themselves and those of their group (whatever the group happened to be, and in most cases a tribe.)

Why?

Because groups where individuals didn’t defend themselves and didn’t defend those closest to them didn’t survive to contribute their genetics in any significant amount.  Those mythical angelic noble savages who never raised a hand to another human being even while being slaughtered, if they ever existed, were the human equivalent of the Dodo.  You are not of them and have nothing (or very little) in common with them, genetically.

And those tribes that survived by being the last to be eaten while they probably survived to some extent, were not the most successful around, and I doubt a great part of you comes from them.

So–

So after the Columbine thing, I started teaching my kids what to do in case of a shooting.  Because guns aren’t magical, they don’t render the shooter invulnerable.  They just make him more deadly than would, say, a knife or a mace.  BUT neither infallible nor invulnerable.  It’s important to remember that.

Because schools and other public spaces (including army bases) insist on making people there sitting ducks, with no guns for defense you have to get creative.

From being in situations where reaction was needed, I know that I have two modes, and never know which switch is going to flip: the fight like crazy, or the freeze.  Fortunately two of the occasions I froze, freeze was what was called for and in the second it even gave me the appearance of courage.

I also know that training and constant instruction makes it less likely you will freeze.

So, we taught our kids, if an active shooter came into the classroom, throw EVERYTHING at them.  Everything and anything you can reach: books, binders, even desks (which Robert, being a bulldozer, could have lifted by three.)  If you can get them down disarm them.

If you are locked in a classroom, and there’s an active shooter in the school, throw a desk through the window, get out (presuming they’re on the bottom floor, of course), run in zigzags if there’s any sign of shooting from the school to the outside.  If it’s a false alarm, we’ll deal with the window.

My kids never needed to put this into action.  But I remain convinced it’s the right course of action.

Remember 9/11.  The plane that crashed in PA WITHOUT being used as a weapon?  The difference is the people in it didn’t follow the instructions to go passive and wait for someone else to save them, which were standard for high jackings before 9/11.

This is the same reason that other attempts have failed.  The underwear bomber?  the shoe bomber?  It wasn’t the TSA (maybe the underwear bomber!) that stopped them, it was their fellow passengers behaving like a pack, not a herd, and looking to their own protection.

More gun laws won’t make you safe.  More gun free zones won’t make you safe.  people intent on harming you don’t care about the regulations.

This is not kindergarten.  Your government is not the “all powerful” teacher.  They can’t keep you safe, no matter if they lie and say they can.  No matter if they THINK they can.

It is the duty of every adult human to defend him/herself and those weaker than themselves.  Not metaphorically.  Not by pile-on twitter mobs.  But in very real fact.  If someone is threatening you or those near you, defense is not just an option, it’s a duty.

In the end, no one else has your preservation as much in mind as you do.  Nor should they.  And defending the weak, the sick, the small, is a duty of civilization.

Guns are not magical. They don’t absolve you from the duties of humanity and civilization.

Cowering and letting people be shot is the behavior of children and cowards.  Don’t be either.

Take stock of the situation and defend yourself.  Yeah, you might die, but at least you’ll die like an adult human, not a sheep.

I don’t judge anyone in that situation, because I never know when I’m going to just freeze.  BUT I’ll try not to freeze.

As Heinlein put it, paraphrased because I always remember it in  Portuguese “It’s better to be a live sheep than a dead lion, but it’s always better to be a live lion.  In most cases it’s also easier.”

In a time of uncertainty and violence, (as all times are) don’t bleat for more laws.  Laws can’t protect you or those you love.  They’re just words, on paper.

Be a lion.

Today it occurred to me it’s exactly 20 years since I caught the pneumonia that almost killed me.  Okay, it didn’t start in October.  It started in November.  But the percursor to it started in October, with the kids and Dan catching some form of stomach flu.  Since younger kid was then just short of one, and his brother was three, stomach flu meant piles and piles of clothes and BED CLOTHES to wash and more often than not carpets to clean.  I was running the carpet cleaner continuously, I was running the wash continuously, and yet there were piles of smelly sheets in a corner of the laundry room.

Then Dan caught the respiratory bug going on at work.  I — seemingly — didn’t catch it.  Usually you know when I’m sick, because I cough constantly.  I wasn’t coughing at all.

I just felt exhausted.  In fact, driving Dan to one of his doctor’s appointments, the doctor said I looked sicker than Dan.

By November it was obvious I had SOMETHING.  I thought it was one of my bad asthma attacks.  While making food for the Holiday meeting of our writers’ group, I had to keep drinking coffee, which seemed to help my breathing, which tracked to asthma.

By late December I gave up.  As in, doing anything at all became too much work.  It took me an hour to dress, because I’d put on a piece of clothing, then rest, then put on the other.  And I was spending most of my time on the sofa, which is why we asked one of my friends to come mind the kids — as mothers of small children know, minding small kids is an athletic endeavor — because I couldn’t.

And then on the eleventh of January — fortunately early morning, while Dan was home, because I don’t know what my friend would have made of it, I got up to go to the bathroom and collapsed in the hallway.

Dan found me passed out, freaked, threw me in the back of the car, and drove me to emergency (after getting someone to stay with the kids.)

When I got to the hospital, my blood oxygen levels didn’t register.  I walked in, and they said they’d never seen anyone below 65 walk in.  They admitted me.  Where, if my blood oxygen levels hadn’t been so low, they’d have thought I was an hypochondriac, because my x rays showed NOTHING in my lungs.  (Later it became known that form of pneumonia was intracellular — i.e. the space between the cells.)  OTOH they could HEAR liquid in my lungs.

The emergency room doctor who admitted me had been seeing a lot of this and made the decision in about 5 minutes.  He gave me intravenous zitromax (sp?) then a new drug, and put me on oxygen.  For about two days I sort of recovered, slowly, then I got treated by a group of five doctors.

And then things got “fun.”  They decided my white blood count wasn’t high enough for the problem to be an infection.  They took me off antibiotics and wanted to give me steroids.  I refused the steroids, because certain types of infections get worse with them (which we knew from our cat.)

I kept getting worse, including coding in the middle of one night, and having a heart attack during a broncoscopy.  (I told them not to give me atropine when my heart was already enlarged and I was tachycardic.  Don’t they read Agatha Christie?)

After which I was in ICU.  For eleven days.

The pulmonologist wanted to do a lung biopsy.  My sister-in-law who is a pathologist in Portugal, was in constant communication with my husband and said given my state at the time, a lung biopsy would kill me.

So, Dan refused to sign the consent and told me not to sign the consent.

Now, I was somewhere between life and death, floating in a weird space in which my then 2 and a half years dead grandmother came and sat with me.

Our kids were being watched round the clock by a group of volunteer friends, who spelled themselves, as though they were family, so these little kids were never without someone.

However there were gaps.  Our friends had jobs and obligations.  So, sometimes, Dan had to leave me (greater love has no man than he who sleeps for almost a dozen nights on the floor of an ICU room, on his coat, in the middle of January) for an hour or so.

When he did, the doctors came.  The pulmonologist told me I should have the biopsy, for instance.  I told him my SIL advised against it in my condition, as chances were I’d die.

He told me, yeah, it was a high risk, but so what?  In the state I was in, I was no good to my husband and kids, and besides, what was I? A house wife?  I wasn’t much help to them anyway, and think of how much money I would save my family by dying.

I signed the form.

Dan came in as they were prepping me, threw the mother of all fits, pointed out I was not competent to sign anything and threatened to sue them to their back teeth.  Then he demanded they give me antibiotics again, the antibiotics under which I had improved.  They said no, and he said, that’s fine, we’re going to the other (the Catholic) hospital in town.  And he said, “Honey, put your clothes on, we’re going.”

This is one of three times my husband has given me a direct order.  I wasn’t at all sure of the advisability of obeying, but I did promise to obey, so as he handed me my clothes, I sat up slowly and started dressing.  Keep in mind, I was tachycardic and my heart was enlarged.

The doctors freaked, and told my husband they’d give me the antibiotic, but it wouldn’t do any good, because it wasn’t an infection.

For the next three days I got the antibiotic in IV — yes, that same antibiotic you get five little tablets of, and that’s it? — and it burned the IV sites after a few hours, so that they moved it constantly.  Three days later, I looked like an addict with track marks.

And four days later I walked out of the hospital under my own power because I was too well for the insurance to pay for my bills any longer.  I stayed on oral dose antibiotic (yes, that same one) for a month and a half, but six months later I was well enough to prep and stage a house for selling.

Two years later I made my first novel sale.  Nine years later, I home schooled younger son, who would otherwise have dropped out of sixth grade and probably never opened a book again.

For the last twenty years I’ve cooked, I’ve cleaned, I’ve refinished furniture, sewed clothes, and generally made our lifestyle the same as that of a family with two normal incomes.  Oh, and I’ve written 23 books which got published.  I don’t know if those count, but at least one of those got me a fan letter from a lady saying it had kept her sane through cancer treatment.  (Weirdly?  The book was Plain Jane.)  She got an autographed copy by return mail, of course.

The above story is relevant for various reasons.  First of all, and unlike some people who have written on Sir Terry Pratchett’s saying he planned committing suicide, I don’t judge people in that situation.  I don’t judge, because I’ve been there and when I signed that consent form, it was more or less what I expected.  Now, I wasn’t competent, but people who are terminal by definition aren’t competent.

Also, I’ve seen two friends die of cancer.  It’s an ugly, slow death.  One of them was one of dad’s best friends, and it was an open secret the doctors put him down when the family couldn’t endure it anymore.  The other was my friend Alan, Dan’s best friend, now dead almost a year.  He died naturally, but it was also a slow, agonizing death.

I don’t hold it against any family members who, when hope is gone, wish they could relieve people of their suffering.  We do that for our pets.  (Though my family is really bad at it.  We’ve lost 4 cats, and only two were euthanized, one for constant pain beyond our power to relieve — his kidneys failed — the other because cancer fused her jaw.)  And I understand the desire to “make it stop.”

But — yes, there is a but — there is a Second of All.

Second of all, I am sternly against legalizing medically assisted suicide.  For the same reason I don’t judge people and the decision they choose to make, it is power I don’t think we should put in doctors’ hands.  Doctors have authority and power, particularly when you’re ill, and too many of them seem to make strange judgements on human life, like the one who tried to convince me my family (and please keep in mind we had an infant and a toddler) was better off with me gone.

After all I was “just a housewife” and therefore making no contributions to the family.

When you’re sick, and if you’re like me and fight the black dog ALL THE TIME anyway, you’re likely to be depressed, and it’s very easy to tell you the world is better off without you, and there’s no hope.

It was all too easy to convince me of this, and if I hadn’t had a husband and friends who thought I was valuable and needed, I would have died then.  I don’t know if my contributions since are worth anything in the grand scheme of things, but at least my contributions to my kids have been important and irreplaceable. But I couldn’t see it, so I was at the mercy of strangers with their prejudices, except for a husband and friends who cared.

Which brings us to this article sent to me by one of you.

I can hear some readers saying, “Who?” Maggie Karner had the same brain cancer as Brittany Maynard, who became an A-list international celebrity for announcing she would commit assisted suicide.

*I am struggling in with a rather difficult post just now, which is somewhat related to this one.  At any rate, forgive me if I put up a BFP today.*

This is a post about the qualities and the effects of despair.  There are several reasons for it, the proximate one being that we are fed a lot of it – purposely? – by our art and entertainment complex.

I’m well acquainted with despair.  You could say it is an old friend of mine, except that despair is no one’s friend.

Despair accounted for how long it took me to break into publishing, to an extent, by creating long gaps of silence in my production, and several attempts at doing something else – anything else – with my life.  My basement is littered with the beginnings of would-be-money-making projects I tried to engage in to avoid what seemed to be a hopeless attempt at getting published.  Despair has accounted for how few of my books have been out the last two years.  Those of you who have followed my blog through that time know I hit the nadir of despair about a year ago, when it looked like despite all my best efforts to keep running on ice, my career in writing was over.

I was wrong.  I was wrong for several reasons, one of them being that Darkship Thieves – my heart’s darling at that point – did well for itself, and continues to do surprisingly well.  I was wrong, because indie possibilities opened.  I was wrong because I lost it – truly lost it – and started telling it like it is, and weirdly, surprisingly the “me” I’d suppressed so long, in order to have a career that would allow me to feed the kids, allowed me to find readers who helped my career.  Go figure.

But the point is not that I was wrong.  The point is that I know from despair and what’s more, I understand why despair is considered a sin.  This is not always the case, and I’ve always had an issue with, say, sloth, since – being active by nature – I can’t imagine a worst punishment than being forced to do nothing.

Despair is a sin because it eats you, from the inside out.  Despair comes with “I will never” and “what is the use” and “the game is rigged, so why bother?”  Despair comes with beating your head against a glass window that shouldn’t be there, and yet is.  Despair, in its ultimate form has blighted more artistic careers, destroyed more souls (and by soul here, I don’t require you believe in an immortal entity.  I refer only to that which makes your mind and spirit yours) caused more suicides than anything else.

Despair is that feeling you get when you’ve run the maze, you’ve done your best, and you come to the end and there’s nothing but a blank wall.

It is a powerful emotion, at least for those of us who have faced it.  It is dramatic, if you end a story with it, after a good run and a lot of hope, it stays in the mind.

It is in fact a primary color, and it’s small wonder beginning writers use it, just like beginning artists – say kindergarten – use primary colors.

And it is a sin.  It is a sin against your future self.  It is a sin against humanity.  It is a sin against possibility.  Remember that.  We’ll come back to it.

However, the fact that it is an easily identifiable tint and primary doesn’t explain why there is so much of it larded around science fiction and fantasy, which SHOULD be the literature of possibility.  Sure a lot of this can be explained by the youth of writers (in truth or in practice,) the youth of editors (most of the ones working with newby writers are just out of college) and a certain fashionable air of the times, when it is considered smart and hip to dress all in black and moan about the evils of the future.  (Kind of like it was fashionable for Goethe’s Werner.  Never mind.  Hip, I tell you.  futuristic even.)

But wait, there’s more.  There’s what despair serves to do.  People who despair don’t try to change things and/or undermine the establishment.  People who despair, at the very least go away and shut up, even if they don’t deliberately kill themselves.

There is a striking scene in one of Leo Frankowski’s books, in which a Mongol Lord gets peasants to line up so he can behead them.  And when the hero comes along and kills him, the peasants turn on the hero because “now you’ve gone and angered them.”  And when the hero asks what can be worse than being killed, they have nothing, except “they will make it worse.”  THAT’s despair.  Despair makes you embrace death willingly rather than rebel, no matter how bad things get.

While I don’t believe in a grand conspiracy among publishing outlets and entertainment venues, I do believe in a tribal culture in what is – after all – when it comes to influential people maybe a few thousand people: a small village.  Tribal cultures are easy to influence.  I’m not saying anyone is, I’m saying it’s possible – and we’ve found that type of influence behind a lot of the recent “trends.”

So, before you give in to despair, ask yourself cui bono?  (And if you’re not into asking yourself Latin questions and are now wondering if you should have been paying more attention to Dancing With The Stars and supermarket tabloids, let me dispel your confusion.  That means “Whom does this profit?”)

Dave Freer talks about sheep and goats.  Most of humanity are sheep.  Some of us are goats.  The problem of any establishment, any power, anyone who abrogates influence over human hearts and minds is to control the goats and to make the sheep do more than stand in place and bah.  The more brutally repressive regimes eliminate the goats, often physically, and leave only the sheep.  The result is all the innovation and elan of… North Korea.

The best regimes manage to allow the goats their head, keeping them only off the things that will hurt other people.  They usually result in the highest production – both artistic and material.

In between there are several types of goat-herding schemes, including tolerating them within certain bounds and shipping them abroad to claim new pastures for the sheep.  The British Empire used both strategies with great success since the Elizabethan age.  They eventually stopped using it and resorted to despair.  The British Empire didn’t survive much longer.

So ask yourself what about the current establishment makes it resort to despair?  It’s surely the mark of a philosophical system that has nothing else to offer its goats.  It’s the mark of a philosophical system that is doomed, and wants to keep things quiet “just a little longer.”

And it has been THE culture in publishing since the seventies.  The embrace of declining numbers, declining revenues, declining living standards for writers – the willing embrace of decline – the meek submission to the people who are killing us, because you wouldn’t want to get them angry.  They could really make it unpleasant then.

In According To Hoyt, we’ve talked about how going Indie is a mark of impatience… or something – at least according to the establishment.  We’re supposed to stay still, and let despair permeate us, and slowly tighten around us like a band, allowing us to make only the approved noises, which increase the cultural despair and get everyone accustomed to decline and darkness, and no way out.  When publishers say the mid-list should die, they expect us to curl up and do so.  How quaint.

Despair is a sin.  And, to quote Jerry Pournelle, it might not even reflect the truth.  Look at Heinlein, a smart man and most of us would say an optimist, who chose not to have children, avowedly (yes, I’m aware there might have been other reasons) because “the world was such a mess.”  And yet, if he’d had a child in his first marriage, that child would now be older than my dad, who has had a full life, and not an unpleasant one.

Do not take Mr. Heinlein’s example in that particular aspect of his life.  Take his example in his writing.  Despair is a sin.  And there is usually another way: a way through, a way around.  Find the way.  Pull the Mongol horseman down.  If you kill enough of them, they’ll go away.  Refuse to write despair.  Refuse to believe despair.  Look doom and gloom in the eye and ask them “you and what army?”  Yes, it might all come to the same in the end, but at least you’ll have fought and died like a human being and not a bah lamb.

Tell the Grocers of Despair you have better things to do.  There is a fight going on, and you’d rather fight.  And then go on and discover new pastures.  The poor sheep need somewhere to graze on.  And you’ll have more freedom to breathe.  And everyone wins in the end.

Remember qui bono?  If they sell you despair it’s because they’re afraid of what you can do if you don’t give up.  Don’t give up.  Nothing will piss the establishment more than your continued – and cheerful – battling on.  Do it.  Let THEM despair.

Yesterday I had a moment of dissonance as I clicked on Mad Genius Club. [update: fixed link.] I stared at the title of the post, wondering if I’d written it because it was titled with a Leonard Cohen song title and then went on to quote Leonard Cohen.

Which is all great because it was Dave Freer’s post, and we’re friends, but I had no idea anyone else shared my tastes in music. Because that’s not one of the mind-sets of the groups I run in.  The groups I run in have other things in common.  But not too much.  We try not to group-think.  Some of the bigger, most fundamental arguments I’ve had have been with my friends.  We remained friends afterwards, but we test our perceptions of things fairly often.

If you go to the post, you’ll see it’s about mind sets, and how someone coming new to an established culture like, say, Baen might be shocked and think that everything that’s being done is being done wrong.

I didn’t have this problem, because I had arrived to most of the ideas Baen was using on my own before being bought by Baen.  Things like “the first taste is free.” And “pirates aren’t really a problem.” ( Yes, I fell for the whole “book pirates must be stopped” for about six months, then started thinking through it: both the fact that no one steals from obscure beginners and that the culture of piracy is such they’ll steal books they don’t read (for the triumph of breaking the code) and that they wouldn’t buy them anyway.  Also, that the loss to piracy is far smaller than the “loss” of traditional books to lending, used books and what I used to do of rescuing books from the trash in tourist hotels in Porto.)

However, particularly when ebooks were new, like 20 years ago, the technology itself was terrifying for most of the writers and publishers, who were not only older than I, but not the greatest of tech geeks.  Also new technology scares people, because there’s an entire new world of things that can go wrong.

But most important of all, everyone who was talking about ebooks and the horrible dangers of piracy was of one mind.  And those that had no opinion heard the entire group agree.

Publishing was a small, provincial group with no knowledge of anything outside it.  Traditional publishing still is to a certain extent.  They are a relatively small group of people, who constantly rub elbows, and who know very few people outside the field who read or have opinions about publishing.

There is an idea — or at least I’ve had this idea — that indie is challenging the claustrophobic nature of publishing, bringing new ideas into the closed world of the industry and exploding old notions.

But the more I read about … well, the field I work in, the more I become aware that my assumptions are wrong.  No, they’re not really changing their minds, or looking at evidence, or evaluating numbers.

Do you guys remember Dorothy Grant’s post on the publishing numbers?

Among other things (and if you haven’t read the post you should) she said this:

Amazon-imprint & Indie books now make up 60% of the market, and gross 40% of the revenues.

Yes, you read that right. More than half of all the books sold aren’t from the Big Five, or the 1195 other publishers of the AAP. Congratulations, indie writers, you’re not fighting to get in the market anymore. You ARE the market.

Unfortunately (?) what those numbers also show is that the sales of ebooks from traditional venues are down — way down compared to paper books.  Which means… that traditional publishers should be reconsidering their idea of pricing ebooks way above paper books.  (Because I keep losing books in this house, I’m trying to go as much ebooks as possible, and I’ll pay the ridiculous prices for, say, Jim Butcher.  And PF Chisholm’s Elizabethan mysteries.  But that’s it.  And the last one only because I was ill and really depressed about it, otherwise I’d have waited and bought the paper book used, even though I’d feel really bad about not supporting a good series.)

I assumed publishers would be reconsidering their ebook prices because, let’s face it, they can’t count their sales of paper too well.  No seriously, the Nielsen numbers reflect maybe one third of books sold, and then they calculate according to some bizarre formula even they admit is not right.  (BTW for publishers like Baen who make a strong showing in comic bookstores  and other non-traditional venues, Nielsen is even less reliable.)

But they could look at reports and go “whoa, we’re losing money to indie.  How can we compete?  Perhaps not pricing ebooks higher than paperbooks?”

That’s what I sort of assumed.  Because I forgot they’re a closed shop: a small, provincial group of people for whom it is more important to keep the good opinion of their colleagues than to do anything else, including survive.

These are the sort of poisonous circles in which thinking for yourself, or not singing in the choir becomes a thought-crime.

In these circumstances, it becomes very easy to blame your failure on an evil villain — Amazon for instance — which is stealing your business by totally unfair methods.  It becomes very easy to join in rage-fests against this Emanuel Goldstein instead of contemplating what makes Amazon succeed and why your printruns keep falling.

And it’s really easy to think that the fall in ebook sales FOR TRADITIONAL PUBLISHERS is the same as a fall or leveling off in ebook sales.

[And I bet you not included in this is the biggest number of ebook “sales” in recent months: Kindle Lending Library.  I have a membership and I bet a lot of you do.  Sure.  If you read more than three books a month, even at 2.99, it’s a good price.  It also prejudices you AGAINST buying ebooks.  Because if you can read something that is included in your subscription, it’s cheaper, and we’re mostly broke, most of us.  (Trust me, I just read a modern retelling of the book of Ruth which was like having your back teeth extracted through your eye sockets, because I kept thinking “but it’s free.”  Okay, I need to control that.)

The thing is, even though those aren’t exactly “ebook sales” they are, because the reader is still paying money, and the author is still getting paid (and for some stories more than they’re up for.)  But none of that will show in ebook sales and most of those are not traditional, because traditional publishers won’t put books on KULL.  (Though some of the romance series now have their first book in a series on KULL.  I’m resisting the feeling I should buy the others, at traditional publishing prices.  I can’t afford them.  But it’s a great marketing technique.)]

Have you guys ever read books on “How to lie with statistics?” or “How to lie with numbers?”

Sure you have, and I’m sure traditional publishing house personnel have also.  BUT the numbers are telling them things they want to hear.  More than that, things their entire circle wants to hear.  So there’s no one to say “what if we’re terribly wrong?”  And “Have you looked at these other factors?”

John Carlton in his blog The Arts Mechanical did a round up on this subject.

He quotes this:

Publishers, seeking to capitalize on the shift, are pouring money into their print infrastructures and distribution. Hachette added 218,000 square feet to its Indiana warehouse late last year, and Simon & Schuster is expanding its New Jersey distribution facility by 200,000 square feet.

Penguin Random House has invested nearly $100 million in expanding and updating its warehouses and speeding up distribution of its books. It added 365,000 square feet last year to its warehouse in Crawfordsville, Ind., more than doubling the size of the warehouse.

“People talked about the demise of physical books as if it was only a matter of time, but even 50 to 100 years from now, print will be a big chunk of our business,” said Markus Dohle, the chief executive of Penguin Random House, which has nearly 250 imprints globally. Print books account for more than 70 percent of the company’s sales in the United States.

The company began offering independent booksellers in 2011 two-day guaranteed delivery from November to January, the peak book buying months.

Yep.  As far as publishers are concerned, their concerted effort at making ebooks too expensive is paying off.  People are going back to print.  Happy days are here again.  Build more warehouses and maximize your ability to stock independent book sellers.

Now I know some independent booksellers are making a come back, but I can also tell you there aren’t nearly the numbers of them there were in the late nineties before the chains killed them and before Amazon ate the chains.  For instance, in my old neighborhood there used to be a good indie bookseller, a good indie used/new bookseller, and a good used book seller.  Of those the indie used/new bookseller remains, but their bookshelves are now mostly used and keep shrinking.

I do confess that looking at that information above, and the fact publishers are building warehouses and expanding their paper book side, I took a step back.  Once I’d picked my jaw off the table, I checked my gut on why this felt not just wrong but borderline insane.

I checked things like Barnes and Noble toysellers, with an ever shrinking amount of BOOK shelf space; I checked things like the number of bookstores available in my area, or the fact that I — by any definition a power reader — haven’t been in a bookstore for… two? years, and the last one I entered (other than to pick up my friend and pet the store cats) was a used bookstore where I was buying a batch of $2 books.

And this is not because I have a grudge against traditional publishing — my grudge against them started as a reader, when series disappeared, and authors I’d just discovered had been unable to publish for three years — because I continued reading them grudge or no grudge until they made it difficult (and I still buy Butcher from Random Penguin.)  And this is not because it’s what I want to see: before I wet my toes in indie publishing, watching what was happening in traditional was like standing by and watching the Titanic sink all over again.  I used to tell my friend Charles “I’m at least still employed.  It’s like the Titanic is sinking, but I’m floating on the grand piano.”

Speaking of Charles, the aforementioned friend who works in a used bookstore.  The bookstore he used to work for went under, partly driven by Amazon offering used books.  (For a while there, and this is my perspective, not his) his former boss appeared to go nuts and start tossing every book that would bring in minimum payment, not realizing the money was in the volume of plus shipping money.)

His current employer, another used bookstore is opening up as a concert and event venue and other ways of supplementing income.  It’s a great bookstore, and it has cats.  BUT I’m going to guess that the volume of used book buying is down, even on Amazon.

I know my volume of paper book buying is way down, and not just because we’re moving.  Unless it’s research, or art or such, I’m not buying paper books.  (Exceptions made for books I expect to get signed or that are not in ebook.)

Of course, I could be atypical.  Except… except that the last three times I flew, I saw exactly ONE person reading a paper book.  In fact, in the last five years, that one person, reading what appeared to be  bestseller was the only one not flourishing phone/kindle/nook/ipad.

More interestingly, I keep seeing free bookshelves on craigslist, or really cheap ones.  For years, bookshelves were hard to find used, and expensive when you found them.  But not anymore.

AND most importantly of all, it’s impossible to beat the convenience of ebooks.  I actually lack the romantic attachment many people my age seem to have to paper books.  Yeah, yeah, the feel, the weight, the smell — bah.  I’m in it for the story. And ebooks have assuaged one of my constant fears from childhood: the fear I’d be left without something I felt like reading RIGHT THEN. I mean, I had enough to-be-read books at any given time, but what if I wasn’t in the mood for anything I owned.

I don’t know what the percentage of people is who drove madly across town to Borders, went in five minutes before closing, and bought out an entire shelf of material because THAT NIGHT they wanted historical.  Well, ebooks saves me that drive, but more importantly, I’m not restricted to whatever is on the shelves on that night. I can ALWAYS find something I feel like reading.

To addicts like me, who formed the backbone of the book business, THAT means ebooks win.  Every time.

And so, traditional publishers look at the numbers and prepare for the big rush back to paper books.

Because it’s their culture.  Because it’s the circle they dance in.  I can’t find any justification for their optimism — if you can call it that — but in their circle, it’s an article of faith.

Just as I supposed it’s an article of faith in the GOP that at the last minute they can slid in Jeb Bush and everyone will be happy.  Or amid the Democrats, it’s an article of faith that everyone is waiting for Hilary.  (No, not to confess to felony, but to be elected.)

It’s baffling unless you realize you’re dealing with cultures, not with people, not even with groups.  Cultures have these beliefs they tell themselves, and isolated cultures have really tenacious stories they tell themselves, and are really good at punishing dissenters.

So all cultures change slowly and isolated cultures — our so called intelligentsia, the publishing establishment, the DC habitues– change extremely slow if at all.  Because in their circles it’s better to be wrong in objective fact than to be thought wrong by their friends and colleagues.

And this is why politics — and entertainment, and journalism, and the arts — are downstream from the culture.

And why the culture can blind people completely to what is going on beneath their noses, while they go dancing in circles, merrily, nearer and nearer the precipice, until all that you can do for them is say the prayer for the dead.

Which is one of myriad reasons that in the end we win, they lose.  It’s also one of myriad reasons that despair is premature and infantile.

Be not afraid.  Stay the course.  It’s going to get very rough, but we can turn her around.  All it will take is sweat, tears and maybe even blood for much longer than anyone should be required to expend them.

It’s been done before.  We can do it too.

Mars – Les Johnson

Mars. In the heart and mind of almost every science fiction fan I know, the mere mention of the planet Mars evokes a sense of “what if?” followed by wistful recollection of the many books, television shows and movies that have been made depicting the exploration of the Red Planet.

Who among us hasn’t wished they’d heard the live broadcast of Orson Wells’ The War of the Worlds back in 1938? A few of our older kin recall the disappointment of learning that Mars is a barren dessert and not the Barsoom of Edgar Rice Burroughs. We’ve experienced the joys of reading Ray Bradbury’s The Martian Chronicles and the disappointment of seeing the truly mediocre television miniseries of the same name. And then there’s Ben Bova’s sweeping novel of Mars exploration titled, simply, Mars. And Kim Stanley Robinson’s series, Red Mars, Green Mars and Blue Mars; the list goes on. And now we get to see how Andy Weir’s survival story, The Martian, survives translation to the big screen. (I’ve already seen it – There was a special screening at the US Space and Rocket Center in Huntsville on September 21. No spoilers here!) Almost every science fiction writer, including me, have written about Mars in either a book or short story. It’s in our blood.

Since I work for NASA and have looked extensively at the technologies required to send people to Mars, I am often asked how close we are to being able to take such a journey. [DISCLAIMER: The very fact that I work for NASA requires me to say that “the opinions expressed herein are my own and do not reflect the views of my employer.”] Basing my opinion solely on information that is publicly available, the answer is… not straightforward. Let me break it into the three areas that Project Managers and Decision Makers (the ones with the money) use when they assess the viability of a project in an attempt to explain my answer.

TECHNICAL

This is the area where engineers, scientists and science fiction fans like to reside. (Yes, I consciously group scientists and engineers with science fiction fans together in the same category!) From a purely technical point of view:

1) We have or will soon have the rockets needed to send the huge amount of mass required to keep people alive for the 1.5 to 3.5 year round trip journey to and from Mars. CHECK

2) Thanks to years of experience on the International Space Station (ISS), we believe we have the life support systems required. We can recycle up to 90% of the water we need and a significant fraction of the oxygen. We can scrub the CO₂ from the air and mitigate most of the adverse effects that come from weightlessness; though providing artificial gravity for the trip would be desirable. (We can probably do this also.) CHECK

3) We have or can soon have the in-space propulsion systems required to carry people and cargo from Earth orbit to Mars and back again. Chemical rockets can do the job, but they require a lot of fuel. A lot of fuel. (Did I say they require a lot of fuel?) With investment, we could use nuclear thermal rockets to cut the fuel load by approximately 50%. Alternatively, we could use electric propulsion to efficiently send much of the cargo required ahead of the crew, while sending the people with more traditional chemical propulsion. This approach would also decrease the amount of fuel required. CHECK

4) We know how to build the lander to take the crew to the surface of Mars and launch them back into space. No one has built the lander or the ascent vehicle yet, but we know we can. CHECK

5) We also know how to build a habitat for the astronauts to use when they are on the surface of Mars exploring.   CHECK

6) There is one serious technical unknown that has split many in the community: the adverse effects of being exposed to space radiation for a long period of time. The exposure from a trip to Mars would almost certainly increase a person’s risk of getting some cancers. Unfortunately, there doesn’t seem to be a near-term fix for this problem so it might just have to be a risk they live with. Which brings me to…

SCHEDULE

Mounting a mission to Mars will take a long time.

1) You have to build the advocacy – either in governments or in the private sector. Someone has to be convinced to do it and figure out what technical solutions are the best to actually go and build. This will require a minimum of 2 years. (This is very optimistic!)

2) Once you decide to go, then you have to build the hardware. This takes more time than anyone wants it to take. Plan on 5 years, minimum, to design and build all of the complex systems described in the TECHNICAL section above.

3) Will there be an uncrewed test flight? Or will you fly these complex systems with people during the first mission in which they will be used? If you decide to have a dress rehearsal test flight, then you can add a minimum of 8 – 10 years to your schedule. That’s how long it will take to fly to and from Mars and then build the next set of hardware.

4) Finally, you fly to Mars. Conservatively, allow for a 3-year, round-trip mission.

The total time from the moment you decide you want to go until you return the astronauts home is 18 – 20 years with a test flight and a minimum of 10 years without. Ouch! And you have to keep your sponsors excited, with the money flowing, for the duration.

FUNDING

Someone has to pay for this mission and it will either be the tax payers, investors or a wealthy patron. Realistically, the project will cost somewhere between $10 Billion and $100 Billion. Now there are a few billionaires out there, but very few are willing to bet their entire net worth on a first mission to Mars. A consortium of billionaires could do it, but is this going to happen?

A corporation could certainly pay for it. The annual profits of Exxon, Coca Cola and Apple certainly put them in the category of ‘they have the money.’ But recall that corporations are in business to make money and a first mission to Mars is certain to be a money loser. How will they be able to convince shareholders that betting the company on a Mars mission is a good investment when there is no real economic benefit to be gained, at least in the near- to moderate-term.

That leaves governments and the taxpayers. There is precedent: Project Apollo, various 19th century colonial empires, and the American Louisiana Purchase and exploration. For you and me, $100B is a lot of money. But on the scale of what the United States government spends in a year, it is so little that it might as well be a rounding error. In 2015, NASA’s budget was ~$18B. The Department of Defense spent ~$598B. Medicare cost the taxpayers ~$522B. And the total spending of the United States government was ~$3.9 trillion — that’s ~$3900 billion, or enough to sponsor over 39 Mars missions.

What do we conclude from all this?

1) We want to go to Mars.

2) It is technically feasible to go to Mars.

3) It is logistically possible to go to Mars within a decade of deciding to do so.

4) A trip to Mars is affordable.

Why, then, aren’t we going to Mars?

Because it isn’t a priority. We, as a society, don’t want it badly enough.

Priorities can change. So get busy. Mars awaits!

Les Johnson

Les is a physicist, a husband and father, a science fiction author for Baen books whose latest novel, Rescue Mode, is to be released in paperback September 29. You may learn more about Les, his work and his writing by visiting his website at www.lesjohnsonauthor.com, on Facebook and on Twitter (@LesAuthor).

First of all I didn’t sleep this late, and there’s no pod people in my basement.  What happened is we went out to get water for Derpfish’s aquarium. Because I need to change his water.

I am actually in basement right now as I write this, but will be going upstairs to work as soon as it’s done.  I’m waiting for holding tank to be warmed up for Derpy, so I can clean his aquarium and change the water and filters.

Anyway —

I’m working on getting Witch’s Daughter ready to go up, after which I’ll resume posting Rogue Magic on weekends.  I’m also editing the Magical British Empire to go up and getting a little impatient at the beginning writer who wrote it.  I hope to get it up soon and then get up the Musketeer Vamps which reverted also.

I’m also writing Darkship Revenge, now with more Mule/Good Men villainy…

After that it’s Dragons which I’ll put up in subscriber page as I write, and while we’re at it.

I apologize to my much-abused subscribers for not having distributed the freebies they’re entitled too so far.  Sorry, guys, it’s one of those things, the moment I put up the subscriber page, the wheels came off the health and it’s been two and a half years give or take, though the last half year has been definite recovery.

Through Fire is delivered, and DSR2 is halfway there.

Now I now that you guys are supposed to get a bunch of stuff, but the paypal interface doesn’t keep who is at which level and — see wheels coming off — I didn’t keep a list.  Dan has finally gone through and made lists for me, but … I’m going to be blunt.  We’re tight.  We’re tighter than a drum, right now.  Yes, we’d be a lot tighter without your donations.  Yes, I know I owe you posters and t-shirts and mugs (some of you.)  But here’s the thing — right now, I simply can’t have them made.  (Mortgage, rent, repair on outgoing house.)

What I do have is an overflowing brag shelf, full of contributor copies.  I’m out of Darkship Thieves and Draw One in the Dark and Death of a Musketeer.  I MIGHT be out of Dipped, Stripped and Dead.  The rest — and remember I also write as Sarah D’Almeida, Sarah Marques and Elise Hyatt and there is the write for hire as Laurien Gardner — Plain Jane, the “fictional biography” of Jane Seymour, wife of Henry VIII.

I still intend to give everyone who subscribed their due, even if they only subscribed a year.  Stuff will come once we’re moved, only paying mortgage/rent AND I’m keeping track of life a little better (Almost there, I swear.)  So probably early next year.  HOWEVER until then, as a holding prize, if any of you who subscribe above $50 want a book, or for those above $100 a couple of books, or above $500 half a dozen books (I’m not going to be really tight on those numbers, unless I run out, so… you can also say 2, 4 and 7 or whatever) signed, to keep or give to friends and family for the holidays, ping me on my Goldport address with your list of wishes, and I’ll ship this coming week.  Also, those of you $100 and above, let me know if you’re interested in a Sarah’s Huns/Sarah Diner challenge coin in addition to/besides the books.

And the right stuff for subscriptions will ship as soon as I get the d*mn finances off our throats.  (Which might be house sale or delivering a bunch of books, natch.)

As soon as I have half an hour, (well, I’m looking after two houses and writing a lot) I’ll start a patreon account and then slowly try to move people over.  I hear the platform is better.

In the meantime, I’m okay and I’m going to go upstairs and write, after I change Derpfish water and filters.

There might be a walk in the lovely Fall sunshine in store, too.

Tomorrow I have an exciting guest, and then will return on Tuesday!

Oh, yeah, I’m now doing this once a week.  I started with one of the old Austen stories which I’ll finish a chapter a week (this gives me some weeks before I have to write new stuff, so room to breathe…  https://www.wattpad.com/myworks/50695945-between-the-night-and-the-morrow

Lately a lot of people have been asking me about Human Wave.  They want to be sure, you see, that they’re doing it right.

Part of the problem of course, is that I know what Human Wave is in my head, and I know it when I see it, but it’s kind of hard to say “you shall do this/not that.”  For one, look at that header up there.  The only interest I have in taking over the world is to leave it alone, and more importantly to make it leave me alone as much as possible.  I was to be free to conduct my business and live my life without bloody stupid regulations.  (And before the opposition readers on this blog bandy it all over that I’m saying the government is interfering with freedom of expression, no of course that’s not what I’m saying.  I’m saying stuff like, even if I should make enough for Dan and I to live from our writing (a distant goal, but not as distant as it was five years ago) we can’t, because I’ll be d*mned if I’m going on the exchanges, which are overpriced, restricted as to doctors that will take them, and most of all a free lunch for identity thieves, no to mention giving others power over your health decisions.  Besides, I will not be forced to buy something on the government’s terms, because a government of free men has no right to make you buy stuff.  (And before someone comes up with auto insurance, no, I don’t have to buy it.  I also don’t have to own a car.  I can’t help owning a body by virtue of existing.  So please, take a powder.  Not the same.  That is a ridiculous burden to place on a business person “your partner, or you must have a day job, for the insurance, so you’re not thrown on a chaotic, irrational, restricted AND unsafe system.  Because we said so.”  (What we’ll probably end up doing, only it will necessitate much higher income, is pay the d*mn fine and then pay for for-cash services wherever we end up living.)

And yeah, not the government, so not censorship, but the  Special Jeering Brigade do a lot of trying to get you to toe the line by yelling at anything you write that doesn’t fit this month’s notion of the “only right thing” to write.  Mostly I ignore them, though, but this is part of why I don’t want to issue orders from Mount Sinai (Or even Mount Ararat, since we seem to be Apres le Deluge). Can you write dystopic fiction?  Is that  human wave?  I don’t know.  Depends on the fiction. Can the character die at the end?  I don’t know.  Can he?  Depends — as it does in life — what you die for and how and what type of person you were.

One of the examples that Charlie Martin brought up recently was Cold Equations.  Yeah, yeah, I know, the story of bad engineering, but AS A SHORT STORY it is a masterpiece of science fiction short fiction.  My ambition in life is still to write something half as good.

So, is it Human Wave?  The girl dies in obedience to the cold equations?  Well, yeah, BUT both characters are excruciatingly human as are their motivations.  (Probably because of my attachment to my older brother I cried buckets when reading this story for the first time at 12, because I could see me doing what the girl did.)  More importantly, she doesn’t die in vain.  If the cargo had been widgets, the pilot (and she herself) would have come up with something else to do.  BUT she dies to save a planet.  Sad doesn’t equal non human wave.

What about a story in which all the characters are aliens?  Well… does it embody human/sentient life values?  Is it true to itself or is it nihilist for nihilism’s sake?  If the first, it’s still human wave.

Look what we have here, not just in writing, but in all the arts, is an entrenched establishment that has become ossified.

It’s not entirely their fault.  They are the result of the last big turmoil in the arts, when the classical/representational manner of writing/painting was the establishment and the challengers wished to shock people.

There was a time when “the obligatory reference to classical works” was… well, obligatory.

That dissolved under a wave (eh) of nihilism and well, Marxism.  It appeared there for a while that if only you could destroy the world as it was, you could build Utopia.

If the twentieth century has taught us anything, it is that destroying is just a means of destroying.  Utopia doesn’t magically emerge from convincing humans that being human is somehow bad.  Equality doesn’t emerge from satisfying the screams of envy.  Prosperity doesn’t magically emerge from destroying those who produce.

Turns out that pulling apart society for the sake of pulling it apart, tearing down “the way it’s been done” just for the sake of doing so, and shocking the bourgeois because it’s so much fun doesn’t actually build anything worth looking at or reading.  What it does is harden the viewer/reader to the point that you have to go ever further out to build ever more heretical visions and create ever more outrageous shocks, which then become the status quo.

It also turns out that when that sort of revolutionary who believes in tearing down for its own sake, gets power, all they can do is keep tearing down, until the product manages to be, objectively, both repulsive and boring to any sane person.  (I’m not saying, understand that — with exceptions, the dinosaur abomination coming to mind, for instance — that the product of the other side is both boring and repulsive.  Most of the time it’s simply boring.  More ambitious writers manage the repulsive too.)  In painting this is very obvious.  The shock that doesn’t shock anyone does manage, nonetheless, to turn the normal, sane human being off the “art” being displayed.  (Though even there most of it is just boring.  Really, the Denver museum of art paid millions for a bunch of twisted together kitchen implements?  Without the little card explaining what it is and how it relates to domestic dissatisfaction, that “art” evokes “my drawer got stuck again.”)

So this avant garde of the past aged without doing more than throwing continuous artistic tantrums at the world that refused to conform to their visions.  Some of the early ones, when they still weren’t the establishment were magnificent and are probably art, just because, well, art includes tantrums too.  BUT after they became the establishment all they could do was chase the thrill and shock that no longer existed ever further, off the plank of sanity and into the ocean of irrelevance.

When they realized this — when the museums emptied of the middle-brow and the print runs fell — they chased relevance by erecting ever more exacting rules saying “this you shall not do, that you shall not say, this thing you shall not even think.”  This ranges from political correctness to the sort of stultifying mandates on style and manner that are the last gasp of any dying artistic movement.  (I’m still sticking my middle finger up at the minimalists and the idiots who think first person is always bad. )

Which brings us to science fiction.  Since science fiction in its heyday was not considered art or literature, it was just… what people wrote for fun.  (Kind of like Shakespeare in his day.)  There would be some reflexive clasical references, which were the equivalent of Kit Marlowe putting his stage directions in Latin, just to prove his education wasn’t wasted.  However, they weren’t exactly following any school.

Then came… the deluge.  Or at least the “if we destroy all the rules and shock everyone, it will be literature and amazing.”  And when they took over the establishment, the same thing followed as in the rest of the art.

Now… Now they — even those marginally younger than I — are the establishment.  They are the authorities still vainly rebelling against an establishment that doesn’t exist, that probably never existed except in their heads.  Which is probably why they attract so many people with issues with daddy or teacher or other authority figures who didn’t let them have their bugs and eat them too in childhood. (It also explains a certain fascination with the contents of their metaphorical diaper, now I think about it.) They must be FOREVER the first woman to write non-binary sex, even if it has been done for decades before they were born.  They must be forever the most shocking thing Evah! even if what they’re doing was done better and more apropos by their grandparents’ generation.  It’s all they have.

So, what is Human Wave?  Who are these crazy Avant Garde kids who refuse to continue tearing pieces off an establishment that no longer exists? Do we really — giggle, snort — want to go back to the writing as it was done in the pulp days?  (Whenever that was.  It’s been dated all over the twentieth century, by different people.)

Be real.  Most of us haven’t even read much pulp.  THAT establishment was dead by the time most of us were born, and heck New Wave was well established by the time I could read and write, let alone by the time I discovered science fiction.  We are not the imaginary dad come again, to spank the unruly children.  Heck, most of us are young enough to be the children (or the much younger brothers and sisters) of people in the establishment.

We are those who believe you must build, as well as tear down.  We are those who don’t believe you can tell us how to write — theme or stylistically — for our own good.  We do not give you the right to judge us, and we find most of your authoritative pronouncements immensely funny.  We’re the people who looked at what you were doing and yawned or laughed.

Other than that…  If there are Human Wave Commandments they start with “Don’t be boring” and continue with “Build, don’t just tear down.”  There are other things that go with that, such as eschewing nihilism for nihilism’s sake and not conforming to the CURRENT counter-cultural convention, unless we want to.

In a way we are the equivalent of the new realistic movement in the visual arts.  It turns out that the camera didn’t kill art, but the attempt to destroy visual reality through counter cultural posing almost did.

Turns out that there are images that can only be captured through the mind’s eye and artistic skill.  Of course, most new artists don’t go to galleries, they go to Deviant Art.

And most new writers go to indie, all the while creating visions of reality that can’t be captured by simply writing slice of life, but which also don’t fit in the new “you must offend everyone but the “thought-leader” of the week” dictates of the ossified establishment.”

This seems particularly true in science fiction where “fun” is a new commandment of indie authors, at least those who want to sell a lot and be read a lot (and most of them do.) Fun does not preclude deeper emotions, and in fact in many cases needs them.

We are the people looking at reality and twisting it to make people think, but mostly to make them give us their beer money.

Art?  Probably.  I understand Shakespeare wrote to make people applaud and give him THEIR beer money, and look where it got him.

But mostly?  Mostly we’re the people breaking the rules and pointing and laughing at the establishment.  Which is a tradition worth continuing, particularly when we have an establishment as giggle-snort worthy as our current one.

On with the motley.  Carry on.

We have to do nothing but exist, to make the establishment collapse.  It has nothing holding it up but the muscle-memory of their own rebellion.

Be not afraid.

*This post was published earlier on Jeb’s blog, but we both thought it needed greater exposure.*

Real-life “Hunger Games” — Jeb Kinnison

Social capital, what’s that? The built-up support networks of families and individuals that help maintain and order their lives. Family ties, community ties — with organizations like churches, schools, and voluntary associations that once were more common parts of everyone’s lives. The mutual assistance of friends and neighbors. Reputation, status, and the regard of others which motivated good behavior, honesty in dealing, and charitable assistance, which maintained and strengthened those ties, and helped those in need with both assistance and the strings of obligation to repay that assistance by being useful members of the community.

In a small town, the impulse to assist the poor and disorganized was direct, and the people being helped were known to everyone. Big cities with their concentrated slums of poor immigrants led to social service agencies, funded at first by churches and cities, and then by state and federal governments. As the source of the assistance became impersonal, so did the aid — and the direct contact between those assisting and those assisted declined. Instead of the local church matrons with their bourgeois ideas of proper behavior and work, harassed social workers with enormous caseloads processed cases quickly, and the ideology of government assistance changed so that any behavioral expectation of the client population was viewed as an affront to their dignity.

In time, the government assistance ethos spread to every corner of the country and crowded out the local community services. Meanwhile, locally-controlled schools were gradually taken over by higher levels of government and distant union bureaucracies so that the influence of local parents was minimized. This was viewed as “progressive,” since distant elites thought local school boards and parents were too parochial and backward to be entrusted with decisions, and would get in the way of teaching the correct materials.

The incorrect application of emotions of sympathy and support to faceless categories of people like “the poor” and “the undocumented” removes any possibility of understanding the real situations of each of the category’s members. A hazy idealized poor family is envisioned, then a response that would be appropriate if that family lived next door (help them!) leads to voting for politicians that offer new programs to help “people like that.” By misapplying family and community feelings to higher levels of government, voters put into place a bureaucracy that misses most of the social signalling features of local groups and takes tax money to grow itself, crowding out local groups (and the valuable social signals that maintained bourgeois standards.)

Progressives generally are sentimentally supportive of direct local politics — they especially favor the ideals of the New England town meeting, where everyone who showed up had a say. The reason why this form of local government was generally abandoned is that it is simply too time-consuming for larger communities, and allows the motivated minority to capture control. Election of representatives was an advance which allowed voters to go about their own lives most of the time while exerting control through their representative, who had time to understand the issues thoroughly and vote in council in the best interests of the voters. Being in the 1% of local voters who cares deeply enough about an item to show up at a public meeting about it does not mean your feelings about it are more important than the views of those who didn’t show up; the once-every-few-years election is more likely to reflect what most voters want.

What have been the effects of progressive, centralized control of education, healthcare, and social services? It is true that the backwards practices of a few local school boards have been reformed, but the loss of a rich layer of church and private charity social services has impoverished local social capital. While today’s mass communication and the Internet removed one of the impulses to community (“I’m bored. Let’s go into town and hang out!”), a lot of the loss is due to the crowding out by a monopoly government, which had deep pockets and would use them to continue failed policies, as Microsoft in the 80s used the profits from its near-monopoly OS business to keep creating mediocre applications software until the innovators in applications were destroyed.

Very wealthy people have always been freer than others from the stifling social controls and judgments of bourgeois community standards. The elite of Paris and London in the 1800s often kept mistresses and dabbled in drug use without having their lives destroyed. The lower classes did not have the wealth to recover from errors, and those who did not hew to bourgeois social norms were isolated and damaged.

As the upper middle classes in the US grew as wealthy as the elite had been in the previous century after WWII, the sexual revolution and War on Poverty bestowed more social freedom on everyone — the middle and upper classes got birth control, sexual freedom, and women in the workplace, while the poor got programs to “uplift” them from poverty (a term which exposes the condescension involved). Social workers in vast numbers were hired to distribute assistance, free of any obligation — except for unmarried mothers, who were told their assistance would be cut if they married a working man.

Over the course of several generations, the well-off used their freedoms and came out relatively unscathed — families were still largely intact, children were still trained in the arts of civilization and followed the path of university and marriage into professional careers. But the artificial assistance to the poor, with its lack of community obligations and support and its immediate withdrawal in the event of marriage and better work, removed the social incentives that keep healthy communities healthy. Intact families grew less common. Crime and social pathologies became the norm in poor inner-city communities. As conditions worsened, the motivated and organized left for more civilized neighborhoods with better schools. The segregation of cities and even whole regions by income increased. Whole generations of children were poorly raised, poorly schooled, and left to drift without purpose or guidance from now-absent fathers, who were in prison or adrift themselves.

See this post and its links for more discussion of the black community specifically.

Meaning well is no defense.

We have a large number of people trained in academia who think their impulses to control other people’s lives indirectly through election of technocrats are just as virtuous, and a replacement for, the individual impulse to assist someone near you. They are horribly, hopelessly wrong, but convinced they are right and that only troglodytes and racists would oppose their “help.” They live in a bubble with other Virtuous People and feel superior to people who work in trades or live away from the elite coastal cities. Their lives are rich with experiences and status goods, and they can handle sexual and social freedoms well (mostly) because of their deep reserves of cash and connections — “rehab” is an option, and being late to work because of a bender or hookup won’t get them fired.

But for the poor, the “assistance” of government bureaucracies has gradually destroyed their families, their jobs, their communities, and their social capital.

The Hunger Games is an entertainment, but part of its attraction is the funhouse-mirror view of the societal and geographic divisions we see today in the US. The country is divided between the rich and frivolous Capital District, distracted by the spectacles of the Games and government-provided entertainments, and the poorer Districts where laborers (generally of the grubby, lower-class kind) toil generation after generation to support the imperial Capitol.

The heroine, Katniss Everdeen, grows up impoverished in the coal mining district, but with a strong and resourceful spirit takes on the system as a focal point for rebellion. The economics of the government are far from clear (why does an empire with high technology still have manual labor as its foundation?), but its oppressive nature and manipulation of the educated and refined white collar workers of the Capitol are clear.

Charles Murray fearlessly dares to be politically incorrect in his Coming Apart: The State of White America, 1960-2010:

In Coming Apart, Charles Murray explores the formation of American classes that are different in kind from anything we have ever known, focusing on whites as a way of driving home the fact that the trends he describes do not break along lines of race or ethnicity.

Drawing on five decades of statistics and research, Coming Apart demonstrates that a new upper class and a new lower class have diverged so far in core behaviors and values that they barely recognize their underlying American kinshipÑdivergence that has nothing to do with income inequality and that has grown during good economic times and bad.

The top and bottom of white America increasingly live in different cultures, Murray argues, with the powerful upper class living in enclaves surrounded by their own kind, ignorant about life in mainstream America, and the lower class suffering from erosions of family and community life that strike at the heart of the pursuit of happiness. That divergence puts the success of the American project at risk.

His point in focusing on the white class structure is that black communities have been the canaries in the coal mine — more fragile and more urban, and therefore the first to be effected by the social welfare bureaucracies. Now the social pathologies that destroyed inner-city black communities are spreading to the rural and suburban lower classes — marriage rates dropping, children brought up poorly, gangs and the drug war creating social chaos. Progressive whites could pretend the black community was in trouble because not enough was being done, and racism — but when the rot spreads to every city and town, it’s impossible to explain it as the result of racism.

The more progressives elect politicians purporting to care about income inequality, the worse the life of the poor. The phenomenal damage caused by the Drug War to inner city communities and families, the prison-industrial complex that has helped destroy the black family and the lives of millions of young men, the hair-trigger police SWAT teams raiding the innocent by mistake and killing dogs and people in the hundreds — these are all the effects of a government elected by “caring” people who want to control the lives of others from a distance. And now the damage is going mainstream.

The Economist this week has a great story about the Hunger Games-like divide in the US:

SHANA, a bright and chirpy 12-year-old, goes to ballet classes four nights a week, plus Hebrew school on Wednesday night and Sunday morning. Her mother Susan, a high-flying civil servant, played her Baby Einstein videos as an infant, read to her constantly, sent her to excellent schools and was scrupulous about handwashing.

Susan is, in short, a very conscientious mother. But she worries that she is not. She says she thinks about parenting Òall the timeÓ. But, asked how many hours she spends with Shana, she says: ÒProbably not enoughÓ. Then she looks tearful, and describes the guilt she feels whenever she is not nurturing her daughter.

Susan lives in Bethesda, an azalea-garlanded suburb of Washington, DC packed with lawyers, diplomats and other brainy types. The median household income, at $142,000, is nearly three times the American average. Some 84% of residents over the age of 25 are college graduates, compared with a national norm of 32%. Couples who both have advanced degrees are like well-tended lawnsÑubiquitous.

Bethesda moms and dads take parenting seriously. Angie Zeidenberg, the director of a local nursery, estimates that 95% of the parents she deals with read parenting books. Nearly all visit parenting websites or attend parenting classes, she says.

Bethesda children are constantly stimulated. Natalia, a local four-year-old, watches her three older siblings study and wants to join in. ÒShe pretends to have homework,Ó says her mother, Veronica; she sits next to them and practises her letters.

Veronica is an accountant; her husband is an engineer. Their children Òall know that school doesnÕt end at 18,Ó says Veronica. ÒThey assume theyÕll go to college and do a masterÕs.Ó Asked how often she checks her various childrenÕs progress on Edline, the local schoolsÕ website that shows grades in real time, she admits: ÒMore than I should, probably.Ó

In ÒComing ApartÓ, Charles Murray, a social scientist, ranked American zip codes by income and educational attainment. Bethesda is in the top 1%. Kids raised in such ÒsuperzipsÓ tend to learn a lot while young and earn a lot as adults. Those raised in not-so-super zips are not so lucky.

Consider the children of Cabin Creek, West Virginia. The scenery they see from their front porches is more spectacular than anything Bethesda has to offer: the Appalachian Mountains rather than the tree-lined back streets of suburbia. But the local economy is in poor shape, as the coal industry declines. The median household income is $26,000, half the national average. Only 6% of adults have college degrees. On Mr MurrayÕs scale, Cabin Creek is in the bottom 10%.

Melissa, a local parent, says that her son often comes home from school and announces that he has no homework. She does not believe him, but she cannot stop him from heading straight out across the creek to play with his friends in the woods.

She has other things to worry about. The father of her first three children died. The father of her baby is not around. Her baby suffers from a rare nutritional disorder. And Melissa has to get by on $420 a month in government benefits. Small wonder that she struggles to enforce homework. And small wonder the gap between haves and have-nots in America is so hard to close.

…

In a study in 1995, Betty Hart and Todd Risley of the University of Kansas found that children in professional families heard on average 2,100 words an hour. Working-class kids heard 1,200; those whose families lived on welfare heard only 600. By the age of three, a doctorÕs or lawyerÕs child has probably heard 30m more words than a poor child has.

Well-off parents talk to their school-age children for three more hours each week than low-income parents, according to Meredith Phillips of the University of California, Los Angeles. They put their toddlers and babies in stimulating places such as parks and churches for four-and-a-half more hours. And highly educated mothers are better at giving their children the right kind of stimulation for their age, according to Ariel Kalil of the University of Chicago. To simplify, they play with their toddlers more and organise their teenagers.

The Adventures of Supermom

ÒI talk to him constantly,Ó says Lacey, another Bethesda mother, of her two-year-old son. ÒAs we go through the day, I talk about what weÕre doing. I try to make the regular tasks interesting and fun, like going to the grocery store.Ó Her older son, who is five, devours maths apps and asks his mother questions about arithmetic. At the weekend the family might go to the American History Museum or the Washington Zoo or a park.

Cabin Creek parents love their children just as much as Bethesda parents do, but they read to them less. It doesnÕt help that they are much more likely to be raising their children alone, like Melissa. Only 9% of American women with college degrees who gave birth in the past year are unmarried; for those who failed to finish high school the figure is 61%. Two parents have more time between them than one.

And even two-parent families in Cabin Creek tend to be more stretched than those in Bethesda. Sarah, another Cabin Creek mom, has a sick mother and a husband who was injured in a coal mine. Her three boys, two of whom make it a point of pride to be on the naughty kids list at school, exhaust her. She helps them with their homework and reads to them fairly regularly, but often just lets them watch television. ÒDora the ExplorerÓ is somewhat educational, she says: ÒItÕs got Spanish in it.Ó

Children with at least one parent with a graduate degree score roughly 400 points higher (out of 2,400) on the Scholastic Aptitude Test (a test used for college entrance) than children whose parents did not finish high school. This is a huge gap. It is hard to say how much it owes to nurture and how much to nature. Both usually push in the same direction. Brainy parents pass on their genes, including the ones that predispose their children to be intelligent. They also create an environment at home that helps that intelligence to blossom, and they buy houses near good schools.

…

The two aspects of parenting that seem to matter most are intellectual stimulation (eg, talking, reading, answering Òwhy?Ó questions) and emotional support (eg, bonding with infants so that they grow up confident and secure). Mr Reeves and his Brookings colleague Kimberly Howard take a composite measure of these things called the HOME scale (Home Observation for Measurement of the Environment) and relate it to how well children do in later life, using data from a big federal survey of those born in the 1980s and 1990s.

The results are striking. Some 43% of mothers who dropped out of high school were ranked among the bottom 25% of parents, as were 44% of single mothers. The gap between high- and middle-income parents was small, but the gap between the middle and the bottom was large: 48% of parents in the lowest income quintile were also among the weakest parents, compared with 16% of the parents in the middle and 5% in the richest (see chart 2).

Likewise, the difference between high-school dropouts and the rest was far greater than the gap between high-school and college graduates. Mr Reeves and Ms Howard estimate that if moms in the bottom fifth were averagely effective parents, 9% more of their kids would graduate from high school, 6% fewer would become teen parents and 3% fewer would be convicted of a crime by the age of 19.

Read the whole thing here. The story goes on at length about suggestions for improving the lives of children brought up in social and financial poverty. Some of these are just more of the same failed top-down ideas (universal pre-school, more social workers.) But the most useful strategy of all is to allow the laws of natural community organization to work again by ending the Drug War, the police war on poor citizens, the overregulation that makes it hard to start and keep a small business, and the paternalistic “assistance” that prevents natural formation of strong families.

So, I’ll go back to trying to explain the things I love about Portugal, or at least about the Portugal I grew up in.

Mind you, the things I love, the things that bring tears to my eyes, the things I remember so vividly that if I close my eyes, I can imagine myself back there, are not only highly personal (meaning I don’t think anyone else, even born in the same general time and place would share them) but also highly time/place bound (meaning Portugal nowadays would not be any more likely to bring these experiences to someone, than any other place in the world would. And probably less.)

I was reminded of what’s really important, what’s really part and parcel of who I am, the things I really miss, when someone posted a video of the area I was born and raised in on Facebook. It doesn’t appear to be on youtube, so I can’t link it here. The still shot before the video starts is of two rows of houses flanking the camera – tall houses, flat against the street. By coincidence, the house only half shown on the right was my grandmother’s house, where I was born and lived till I was six. In fact, the door – now a garage door, because the house has been sold to strangers and modernized and completely changed – on the lower right hand corner was the door to the part of the house where I was born.

The rest of the movie goes on to show mostly apartment buildings – btw, part of the interesting point in this is that the person narrating it, from outside the area and from a heavily populated part of Porto, considered this walk bucolic and relaxing, even though most of the area is high rises and there are now no green areas except the parks. (It also shows tons of palm trees, which didn’t exist when I was growing up. Oh, okay, maybe one specialized type of palms, but they didn’t look like any of the palm trees in tropical postcards, which a lot of the new imports do. The type of palms that grew in the area before was more straggly, less sightly and mostly viewed as a sort of binding material for sheaves or produce and such. Fiteiras – bind trees, roughly – is what we called them. Lest you get the idea I was born in a tropical resort, that area is subject to arctic fronts and has the charmingly drizzly, dismal weather England is famed for.)

But it was that still shot, before you click on play, that captured me. It felt as though I could somehow go into the frame, go around the right hand of the house, before it showed in the picture, enter the metal gates into the wash-tank area that was shared by my family’s household and the tenants, past the wooden gate my grandfather built, and around my grandfather’s workshop to the back door. In across the patio, and the kitchen door would be open – of course, it always was – and then I’d go into the kitchen, with its noisy clock on the wall, and call my grandmother – now gone nineteen years – and she’d come from somewhere within and bring out the good cookies (since now that I don’t live there, I’d qualify as company) and make tea.

The point is that this is the place I go when I dream. It’s the place my mind goes when I think of “home” – and it is always the place as it was when I was very young, with my grandmother and my grandfather still alive. (And my grandfather died when I was fourteen.) With the dogs and cats I knew when I was young too.

Was it such a special place, then? I don’t know. To me it was the whole world. At a very fundamental level, it still is.

First remove from your mind all ideas of the landscape as you would imagine it. There is a fundamental divide between Southern and Northern Europe, and the US gets its landscape traditions and imaginings from the North. At the most basic level, that means that what you think would be wooden fences are actually stone walls. Usually very tall – about eight feet tall – stone walls often topped by broken glass to discourage robbers. These were grey because the rock in the region is mostly granite. They were often covered in greyish green moss and in spring might grow with little scraggly flowers in every barely visible crack. After that, you have to give up the idea of open lawns, or open anything. Even in the village of my childhood, where you’d think there was plenty of room, (there was, but taken up with pastures, fields — some lying fallow a year or three — and woods) houses tended to be closer together and if they had a yard in front, it was like urban yards, in the US – handkerchief sized at best, the size you could mow with a weed whacker. Not that most people did have lawns. Usually they had a profusion of flowers.

But only the newest houses had these “gardens” up front, and shorter (about five feet) walls that allowed you to glimpse the gardens. The older houses, by and large, came right up to the street. The doors opened from the narrowest of sidewalks. Yards, as such, were in the back, and they were often mini farms.

My grandmother’s house was one of these, and it had two front doors, opening RIGHT into the main street of the village, at what I suppose was a prime location, across from the store which sold everything from tobacco to codfish to clogs to notebooks. I don’t know if it had two front doors all along, or if the second front door – with its different house number – was pierced through the wall when my parents got married and my grandmother converted what had been – from what I understand – some sort of storage rooms into a shotgun type apartment for them. This is the place I was born – it consisted of a long, narrow kitchen where my mother worked, most of the time, the kitchen table doubling as her work table, a hallway the same breadth as the kitchen, from which my parents’ bedroom had been carved out with interior walls. It didn’t have a door, just a yellow curtain with black checks. In the hallway, before the bedroom, was my brother’s bed – really just a cot, to which an improvised new end had been added as he grew taller than expected – and his bookcase. Mostly he did his homework in the kitchen, or the living room if he needed privacy. Then at the front was a living room where my mother saw clients. We had the dining room furniture crammed there, most of my conscious memories. My mind also wants to add a sofa bed to it, but I honestly can’t remember if that’s true or my memory just thinks there ought to be one there. Note that natural light came in at two ends of the “home” only, through the almost always open back door (unless it was very cold) and through the glass insets at the front door. My grandmother’s house, next door, had windows.

Most of the time I slept at my grandmother’s or in my mother’s room – my dad worked out of town all week, which means I could sleep in their bed. And I always did if I was ill. I had asthma and bronchitis and –briefly, apparently – TB, so I guess my mom found it vital to monitor my breathing.

If you’re imagining a childhood of hard privation, well… sort of? I mean, my mother was very careful with expenses, and yeah, they had one more child – me – than fit into the house. On the other hand, this was largely self-inflicted. You see, my parents have a horror of debt and being in debt. So while they wanted to build their own house, they didn’t want to have a mortgage, so they were saving everything to build the house. This house was under construction for most of my early childhood (building in stone takes time) and we moved into it when I was six. I still returned to my grandmother’s house every day, usually to hang out and do homework. (It was just ten minutes walk up the main road.) So my grandmother’s house remained “home”. And it still is, even though it doesn’t exist in any real way anymore.

At some point – I suspect when my great grandmother was widowed early? Though my uncle seemed to imply at least once that this happened in his life time, i.e. when my grandparents inherited the house – rental houses were built next to the main house and attached to it. Well, one rental house, with each floor rented to a different family. It must have been at this time that their part of the yard – which comprised the water pump, as well as their two washing tanks and our large one (very large. Stone, and probably six by six and three feet deep) – were partitioned off. The tenants’ kids were supposed to stay in that area (it included a cement patio) unless specifically invited. But other than that, the area got used by us as well (we had one of the wheel water pumps. Great arm exercise for most of us, grandkids, as teens.)

It filled the “Water cistern” on the roof of the bathroom. And the tenants were allowed to hang their clothes in the depths of the backyard. And most people came in through those gates.

The backyard… in my mind it’s huge. Very deep. I’m not sure how much of this is true, and how much it’s a three-year old’s view. My play area started outside my grandmother’s (and ours) back doors. There was a broad flagstoned patio. From it, straight down, was a garden path right to the back. To the other side was a path around my grandfather’s workshop (he was a cabinet maker) into the little area from which the tenants area was subdivided. There was another path there, to the depth of the yard, and a path across. (Actually two.) You could circumnavigate the entire yard on those paths and I often did, either running or on my little red tricycle. I used to dream of doors opening in those areas that led to other worlds, which just tells you I was born to write spec fic.

The center of the yard had fruit trees and vegetables. The edges were ringed with grapevines, which in the manner of the region were trained up columns and across wires, so that they grew overhead, as a sort of roof. Under the grapevines (which were really only in full foliage summer and fall) we grew more vegetables, cabbage and I suspect potatoes. I don’t remember very clearly.

The back wall looked out onto what was to me then a complete wilderness. Fields belonging to the neighbors, and at the back of that a forest called Coriscos (lightning bolts) which I thought was untouched and virginal. Mostly pine trees, with some oaks, the occasional creek and small lake. The funny thing – my dad took me for walks in the forest most Saturdays, weather permitting, mostly to get me out from under mom’s feet, so she could clean house – is that though I remember clear as day us coming across toppled stones (some of them with inscriptions in Latin) and bits of wall (birds and lizards nested there) and even what was clearly bits of houses, until about a year ago I still thought of this as “the forest” and assumed it had never been anything but. This was dispelled last year by one of the earth view programs. From the air, you can see the entire area still covered in trees (about half what it was in my childhood. Perhaps less) is crisscrossed in the scars of vanished foundations and roads. Makes sense, of course, since the area was populated since before the Romans, so the idea that no one ever built there is a little nuts. But from the look of the ruins, from the foot print, I got the impression that the village extended there (or another village was there) more recently than the Romans, though not all that recently. Gut feeling I’d say that those areas were abandoned shortly after the Great Plague dramatically reduced the population of the area. I could be wrong, of course. It might have got burned and abandoned in the Napoleonic wars, which was not only time enough for the forest to grow over it, but time enough for enough people who didn’t remember it to immigrate to the area and for local memory of it to be forgotten.

To me, when you say “forest” that’s the area I think of – the dark green shadows, birdsong and running water. Curiously, in my mind, it’s always fall. The wild blackberry bushes that grow anywhere left untended in that area are always heavy with fruit (which, yes, we picked and ate, sometimes after rubbing it on our sleeve to…. I don’t know, add more germs? It seemed like a nod to appease the demons of dirt, though.)

It’s always fall in the house, too, and my grandmother is splitting wood to feed the Franklin stove, in her kitchen. There are cats around that stove, of course: Tareco (rags) patriarch of all he surveyed; Black, my first cat (yes, I was imaginative. Yes, he was black.); Vadia, (stray) the mother of the large and incestuous cat tribe; Moshe Dayan, the grey tabby who had lost an eye as a kitten and who, for reasons known only to my mom was her favorite. I’m told before these there was Matateu, the tom (I don’t remember him, though I’m told I lamented him for days) and Vadia the dog (I also don’t remember her.) I do remember Lord, the dog, who looked like an oversized cocker spaniel, mostly white with brown spots. He was my dad’s dog when he was single, and he’s what’s in my mind when you say “dog”. I remember sharing my bread with him – he licked off the butter, and I ate the bread. Until my mom caught us, that is.

Up till we moved away, the youngest and often solitary child (my brother is almost ten years older and my cousin, who was raised by my grandparents is fourteen years older than I) I played mostly with the cats (I must have tried their patience horribly) and though I was a cat, or perhaps that they were my siblings and would grow up to be children.

I spent most of my day reading comics (first by looking at the pictures, and remembering what people had read to me) or building cities out of several large boxes of inherited legos. If bored, I attached myself to my grandmother, who was always doing something interesting. I remember going with her to one of the nearby fields that led to the woods (my dad and I jumped the back wall, but grandma insisted on going in the land route. I vaguely remember the neighbors hated us jumping the back wall onto their cabbage patch, en route to the woods.) to “gather grass for the rabbits.” I had my own little apron and scythe.

Actually if there’s one thing in which these reminiscences are in any way relevant, those few of you still awake, might note two things. The first is that I was left largely to my own devices, unless I attached myself to an adult. There were no play dates and no one really put themselves out for my entertainment. The adults were mostly around (except my dad who worked outside the village) but they had their own work, and their own business. I was presumed, being a kid, to know my own business which was playing and learning. If I attached myself to an adult too long or too intrusively, the adult felt perfectly free to tell me to find something else to do. (When this failed, if it was warm, they filled the old hip bath, threw a pair of my brother’s old bathing trunks on me, and flung me into it with all my toys. This was guaranteed to keep me quiet for several hours.) There were no play dates, no extra lessons, no feeling that life was rushed or scheduled. Once I was up and had been fed breakfast, it was presumed I could amuse myself. By and large I did, though it sometimes involved annoying the living daylights out of my brother and (female) cousin. Not that this was difficult, since they were teens. We had no TV and though I sometimes listened to radio programs (mom favored shows on mythology or history) it was usually while doing other things. I’m not saying the adult graced with my presence (snort) didn’t often try to include me in whatever he or she was doing to an extent – I had the apron and scythe when I went out with grandma. My grandfather gave me a small hammer, brads and scraps of wood and would, if he had time, provide instruction on building doll furniture. My mom tried – with varying degrees of lack of success – to teach me to sew. I remember an ill-fated attempt at painting the hen house, though it’s QUITE likely I came up with that on my very own, with no adult encouragement. I remember it ended badly.

I believe this is now called “quantity time” as opposed to quality time. It’s also known as benign neglect and people with phd after their names say it’s the best way to raise a child. I don’t know. I have some pretty wonderful childhood memories. It taught me to amuse myself and develop my imagination. And I have, of necessity, brought up my kids in a similar manner.

The other thing you might note is that provided I wasn’t destroying something or running around the street (this was more a class thing than anything else. The street was not that busy. My mom was of course afraid I’d get run over – lack of clue about reality and luck being what they are, I might have been – but mostly they didn’t want me associating with the children of the very poor, who roamed the street in a large band. There were reasons for this other than snobbery. The first time I was brought in contact with them, in school, I caught lice, which had to be gotten rid of without ruining my hip-length hair. Not an easy feat) I wasn’t watched over that closely. I remember as young as four and five spending entire days playing at my friends’ houses or their coming over to play. And I was allowed to have implements no one NOW would give their three year old: scythes, knives, chisels, hammers. Note that other than the incident with my brother’s transistor radio and the mallet (I’m sorry. OTOH he HAD painted fangs on my favorite pull toy — a smiling sheep) I never broke anything nor stabbed anyone.

Anyway, I suspect most of these reminiscences aren’t interesting to anyone but me. I will (hey, saving it for Halloween) speak later of more specific cultural things, many of them (as such things are) surrounding death and dying (all primeval stories are ultimately about either sex or death.)

You see what I mean about what I remember of Portugal and what I really love back there being so intensely personal as to be almost universal? There is a house back there in time that will always be home. And if there really is anything after death, and if there’s fairness in the universe, outside the minds of those who dreamed up the concept, I’ll eventually find my way back to that primeval garden filled with cats and dogs, with a conveniently circular path that a small kid can traverse on her tricycle, but with neither apple nor serpent. And this time, growing up will not expel me.

So, lately I’ve run into outright attempts to invent the past.

The most egregious is in that course on myth I’m listening to while walking.  He says there is absolutely no proof of a great mother (more or less exclusive) worship before patriarchal gods “pushed” her out.  He says there is no sign that societies that worshiped goddesses treat women better… And then he proceeds for lectures on end to act as though such things were proven.

It is, I suppose, very attractive to the modern mind, with its idea that every Jack and Jill (but mostly Jill) needs a role model that matches his or her external or cultural characteristics that they assume worship of any sort of fertility goddess would mean a great respect for women.

Do I need to tell you this is poppycock?

I shouldn’t need to.  We know almost every ancient religion worshiped at least one (often more) female deities, and we know that compared to us in the present so called “patriarchy” women were not only not respected, but were often used in strictly utilitarian ways as in “Mother, caretaker, etc.”

I see absolutely no reason to imagine that primitive humans were better than that, particularly since we do have archaeological evidence (scant, so non-conclusive) to back up the sort of hard scrabble/winner take all existence the great apes bands have, where the word “family” and “harem” are basically equivalent and the alpha male takes all.

In fact the evidence from modern day primitives, whether or not the worship of a female goddess is present, often leads one to conclude that the presence of a female goddess implies stronger patriarchy.

Things that are taken as support, of a great and happy matriarchy, such as matrilineal descent are actually proof of nothing.  The Zulus have that, which did not stop them being the bamfest bamfs to have stridden through Africa in the 19th century, leaving destruction and desolation in their wake.

Oh, and to minds before our “class, gender, and race” obsessed ones, (partly because of grave mal-education founded in Marxist principles) it’s not necessary to have the same fiddly bits, the same color or even the same general shape as someone else to take them as a role model.  More males were devoted to the Virgin Mary than women, a fact easily verifiable by reading any biography of Christians past.  And more females held Jesus or a male saint in particular affection.

If you go even further back, many devotees of Cybele were male (at least until they ceased being males) and there were female devotees to male gods, too.

Look, I know this is hard to explain, but before we got so incredibly “sophisticated”, males in general liked females and vice versa (even those who didn’t bang fiddly bits with the opposite sex, or, in fact, with anyone.)

But this is merely one of the things to have gotten under my nose recently.  Because evidence of myth making is everywhere, and not just in the far past, when it’s easier to swallow just-so stories.

There seems to be this strange idea that we must tell stories of the world as we wish it to be and then it will automagically become so.  And because no part of the world, and no time in History can compare to Western society in the current times (and very few can compare to the united states of America) the way to bring their stories into existence is to tell us how bad we are in comparison to everyone else.

The fact that this is a blatant lie doesn’t matter.  They still do it.

They are convinced, if they can shame us with these imaginary superior cultures that we will somehow adopt the ways they want us to.

One egregious demonstration of this is the claim that other times and places were more tolerant of different sexual personas.  This one makes me want to SCREAM because… well… define “more tolerant.”

Traditional societies often had niches for sexually different people, including but not limited to those who lived as the opposite sex.  BUT when the ignorant parrots of the western world go on about this stuff, they usually know just enough about the other culture to project all sorts of happy thoughts upon it.  The thing is that assuming the persona and lifestyle of the opposite sex was often not a choice, and not because the person “felt” one way or another.  Certain social circumstances dictated a certain change.  Like, in Romania (I think) a woman whose brothers have been killed was almost required to assume a male persona in order to support the family.  Whether she wanted to or not.  And I have a vague idea that in certain parts of India, a woman who cannot find a husband is allowed to “marry” another woman.  Note there is no mention made of sexual desire for her own gender.  It’s more a matter of fitting neatly into society.

And then there were those priests of Cybele.  What part was choice, and what part what was expected of that particular person in those particular circumstances?

Before modern time, even in Europe, how many second or third sons or daughters were committed to the church and a celibate state whether that was their choice or no?  (And how many did honor to that state, anyway?)

Traditional societies more often than not have less room for the individual than the Western society, which means that projecting our idealized intent onto such societies, and viewing deviation from our norm as “tolerance” is an act of provincial stupidity.

The truth is it has been the Judeo-Christian tradition, flowering into the enlightenment coupled with the material wealth fostered by the industrial revolution and, yes, capitalism (in however small measure it is allowed even in the west) that has allowed our society to develop ideas of self fulfillment, of “pursuit of happiness” which would be considered downright strange in the past.

Note, I’m not implying that we’re perfect.  Being human, we can’t be perfect.  And if we don’t get lost looking for an imaginary past, our grandchildren might look upon us as intolerant barbarians.

HOWEVER I’m implying looking for lessons in the distant and the primitive does nothing for us here and now, particularly when most of those lessons are crazy made-up stuff.

For instance, what good is it saying that women were revered in pre-history, when we know that more than likely women in pre-contraceptive days and particularly in poor times and places were sort of a baby factory whose life was limited and confined by their biological function?  What does it teach women?  That merely letting go and daydreaming about a past that never was will make them superior to men?

Is this what we  want?

It has long been said that the truth will set you free.  This is often true, even when that freedom is the bleak and dry eyed horror of knowing how wrong things can go.  (As in, say, studying totalitarian regimes of the past.)

The corollary is that lies enslave you.  They make the perfect the enemy of the good, and in making current day people long for a past that never was, turn them into the dupes and followers of totalitarians and power seekers.

Or in other words, stop making sh*t up.  It doesn’t help, and it might be hurting.  The future deserves better than your lies about the past.