So, what is the state of the writer and this writer’s business these days?

Well, I’m still grossly derelict in selling the little money-makers.  I have had my copyrights back since March, but it’s taken time to get the books back up in new editions.  Partly this is because this business has been very much a one-woman show.  I write, I send out, I do everything but the books because husband found early on I’m really bad at both keeping track of what’s due and not transposing digits in the accounting.  When time comes to pay taxes, it matters rather whether a payment was 135 or 531.  So he pulled that away from me as soon as my earnings went over $500 a year.

Would you believe that was only 12 years ago?  And that for most of the first five years I made 3 to 5k a year?  Stupid career this, if you need to survive.  Of course, that’s the other part of this: I took on all sorts of additional duties, because for most of our married life, I was making next to nothing (and often nothing, though the first year I made anything (19 years ago) I made $50.  We went out and had pizza.  We were so excited.

What I mean is, because we were living on one income and most of our friends were on two, and because I appreciated Dan’s putting his own art (composing, music, writing – like I do drawing and painting and writing) on hold so I could pursue mine with a roof over head and three meals a day, I viewed it as my duty to bridge that gap.

We were recently doing financials for the last 20 years (too long a story to tell) and our sons who were part of it of necessity were shocked on how little we actually lived on most of that time, because they know what their friends’ parents made.  I had to explain “Well, think about it, they were taking trips to Europe for weeks every year, and we were taking three days in Denver, at Embassy Suites, because it was cheaper than two rooms, and gaming the free breakfast so we didn’t need to have lunch, and having dinner at Pete’s Kitchen, and going to Lakeside Amusement park instead of Elitch Gardens.”  And the kids blinked and said “But that never felt deprived.  It felt QUIRKY.  I mean, we were eccentric, sure, not poor.”  Of course we were poor too, but no we didn’t feel it, because as the kids put it “we had so much fun.”

But part of that coping – beyond vacation, and even to afford those vacations – was that I did a lot behind the scenes.  When we found a decent ARC I stopped making clothes (I actually enjoy it, but it took a lot of time) but I still reupholstered every sofa we had until the last two sets (and the last two sets were bought used but in good condition.  The last but one perished by cat – sigh.)

I got furniture free or very cheap and refinished/rehabilitated.  I painted our own walls.  I cooked our own food from scratch, often in batch jobs and froze when there was a difficult scheduling time ahead.  We have laid carpet, built porches, seeded lawns, planned gardens (which is what upsets me about our current house.  NOTHING but weeds grows there.  I’m going to try mint.)  The house before this one was bought in need of major rehabilitation, which I mostly did myself, painstakingly.  (This one needs some, if I can find time, but it’s not in real trouble.)

The kids saw none of this.  It was just what mom did (and they helped with as they got older.)  It never occurred to them part of the reason we lived like this and not like their friends whose moms never sewed a curtain or hemmed a pair of pants was not because mom was quirky but because mom was poor.  They naturally assumed our way was better.  (In many things it is.  We have a tendency to gain weight on both sides of this family and I shudder to think what the kids would be like if we’d fed them on fast food and never asked them to lift a finger.)

But that’s part of it, in time this because “the way we live” even for me.  There are things I do because I’ve done them that way for thirty years.

Right now it’s interfering with my work –which does pay – because I have clue zero how to delegate.  For instance #1 son cooks – better than I – and #2 is willing to learn.  BUT I keep forgetting when they say “Give me two days a week to cook and clean.” To do just that.  Because it’s been my job so long.

Same with laundry.  I’ll hold on to ironing, thank you, partly because I’m in love with my industrial steam iron (shuddup.  You have your kinks, I have mine) partly because that’s what I do while watching TV.  BUT I should be delegating laundry, and they’re willing.  I just keep FORGETTING to say “Let’s go downstairs and I’ll teach you how to separate out a load and the settings.”

(I don’t think I can get any of the guys to do the yard.  Dan keeps muttering about buying Astroturf.  I don’t blame them.  It’s like heartbreak yard.  One of these weekends I need to get one of them to help me build raised beds, plant those with bulbs next spring, and see if some form of creeping mint will do for the front beds.)

Anyway, we’ve got far afield.  Sorry.  My mind is going in all directions this morning – and I woke up very late – but part of the issue is that my habit of not delegating because we couldn’t has become ingrained.  I don’t think of it even for writing.

I had a major breakthrough with contracting out editing, and I’ll do the same for putting it in create space, having found someone who will do it for me.  And I have a cover being made, and will contract out another probably this week.  BUT it took me months to even be able to let go to that level where I could say “I can let someone else do this.”

It took that long because it’s an habit of mind of and things established over years that MUST be broken, and that’s as hard for individuals as for society.

So… I’ve been remiss and my little whores novels haven’t been walking the literary streets selling their sassy selves, which means that I’m making less money than I should be, which – frankly – with the kids in college at the same time, is stupid and possibly criminal.

Among other things I don’t have anything in Kobo or Apple, except through NRP.  And that needs to happen.

Also for things like No Will But His All Romance will need to happen.

I also must redo the early, fairly appalling covers.

Then there is the stuff I must or should write.  Under MUST is of course the stuff contracted to Baen which is Through Fire this month – I might extend into first week of September, but I hope not – the second book of the Earth revolution, and then Darkship Revenge in December.  But if I can, I’d like to wedge Bowl of Red between them – the next shifter book – because they’re bringing out an omnibus of the first two shifters and we should pound while the iron is hot.

But as Pam Uphoff pointed out, I need to get used to thinking of my indie stuff as “Must” too.  Witchfinder is almost ready to go to betas (I now decided to obsess over “did I foreshadow enough?”  At this point foreshadowing is more or less automatic, but this doing a chapter a week thing can bollix it.)  And then I need three days to finish Shadow Gods (and as soon as I get going on that, I will commission cover for it.)  That’s YA fantasy. There’s also another waiting in the wings which is YA SF.  And I have promised a new one of the Musketeer Mysteries in December.

Then there’s stuff I’d LIKE to do, like the rest of the bios for Henry VIII’s queens.  This is good to do because they’re perennial sellers, no matter who writes them, and because they would help support No Will But His, one of my reversals.  I wrote Plain Jane in three days, so it should be possible, right?

And there are others, of course.  The guys and I were talking about each of us taking one of the Bennet girls and writing their post P & P story – shorttish novel.  (I want Lydia.)

And there’s my half finished stuff that the earstwhile agent wouldn’t send out.

The question is: HOW do I do all that.

I’ve been talking to Kevin Anderson (yes, he IS a bad influence) and I’ve isolated three factors that should allow me to increase production:

1-      Get healthy.  This involves not just reducing stress, but getting the hvac fixed, which hopefully happens this September.  (I’ll call them and remind them next week that I’m waiting on  a part.)

2-      Figure out everything I can offload, including editing, illustration, etc – this is harder than it seems because until stuff IS out and earning, I have to do all this on a shoe string budget.  Ditto for household work.  Until the boys move out, household work will eat some amount of time, the trick is to minimize how much.

3-      Systematize (totally a word, shut up – actually it is, it’s just an abomination) my production.  What this means is that you can train your mind to do certain tasks at a certain time.  So, schedule things in at this time or that.  This is very hard to do because in this business there’s always snags and emergencies.  But if I set myself into doing creative writing mornings, research for next book afternoons, publishing on Saturdays, I think life will be easier.

The snag with that last, of course, is scheduling in off time, which must be done.

How fast could I write?  I don’t know.

Look I can and have written books in three days or two weeks.  The issue was the days/weeks/months of silence in between.

How many of those silences were caused by knowing what I was writing would never be sent out, let alone sell?  How many were caused by knowing that the babies would just be dropped down the volcano?  And how many were the natural result of “refilling” the well?

I don’t know.  Traditional publishing was such a warm bucket of fail that it’s hard to distinguish what Dave Freer calls “Battle fatigue” from the necessary breaks of a creative mind between projects.

What I mean is, there are things all of us in publishing have accepted as “natural” that are no more natural than my economizing housekeeping ways – but just the way things were, and what we got used to.

Kevin tells me he’s now at a place that he’s thinking “Why not a book a month?”

I’m not there yet, but I can see being there, maybe in two years, when the boys are out of the house (hopefully, barring disaster) and I can afford (if the indie earns) to pay someone to come clean and do the boxes twice a week and if I’ve managed to create new habits of work.

So, at fifty, I’m embarking on an adventure where everything is new.  This is good.  Wouldn’t want to live in boring times.  (Oh, wouldn’t I ever!)

Fortunately on the way there, I have a lot of half-finished/almost finished/needs rewriting stuff like Shadow Gods.  And I am now (WHY? WHY? WHY?) doing two novels at a chapter a week, and that will also feed it.

First – very first goal, though is distressing and getting healthy.  (Yes, a program of exercise is part of this.  The challenge is always winter because I HATE cold.)

To that end this weekend has been a success.  In the writing end… — waggles hand – only so so.  This weekend was plagued with equipment failure TM including Dan’s laptop having the megrims, so it made it hard to get stuff done.

But I am much less stressed, and hopefully the state of the writer will progress…  And there will be more stuff up for you to buy.

There will be a new chapter of Elf’s Blood in an hour or so up at MGC.

It is a truth universally acknowledged that it is a bad thing – a very bad thing – to make Sarah berserk out over breakfast, which is why most sentient species, some invertebrates and some single-cell life forms have learned to avoid it.

No, this doesn’t mean Dan and the boys are in trouble.  No, that’s fine.  What happens is this – after week from hell, I was running around with a headache so bad I could barely think through it.  In case it wasn’t obvious from the rate of typo to word in the last few posts, I also could barely write through it.

As happens we found a hotel that met our low-price-to-low-flea rate and Dan and I ran away so I could get work done on the overdue Baen novel.  (It is unique in writers that our vacations involve the chance to write MORE.  Shouldn’t be a great shock, though.  Our “let’s go out to dinner” nights involved “I need to work out a novel plot.)

This was particularly needed because on top of the situation with our friend Alan – who should go home from the hospital today and start a new course of chemotherapy, so that’s good news – my kids are having beginning of school year issues.  Since it is written (I don’t know where, but if I ever find out, I’m setting fire to it) that nothing the Hoyts do can be easy or simple, they’re both adding second majors and weird ones at that, and giving the bureaucracy hissy fits.  This for some reason causes them to run into my office at the rate of a kid every five minutes, to p*ss and moan.  So, the office gets impossible to work in (also smelly.  The cats hate competition) and I lost two entire days to this.  Which also added to my blazing stress headache.

So we ran away for three days and two nights to “get writing done.”  So far so good, right?

Yeah.  Except that breakfast is included in the room special promo sale.  Which is why we stayed here.  Have breakfast latish and you don’t need lunch, so that’s one meal less to pay for.  (Hey, we’re writers.  We’re cheap.  Also, largely poor, our days of being rich beyond the dreams of average – sic – having crashed at the same time the towers turned to rubble and the tech boom collapsed.)

So we went down to breakfast.

Just when you thought it was safe to go down to breakfast…

We were in a little isolated table but separated by a curtain from a large group table.  I heard the words “They can’t expect Obama to fix everything with one measure.  I mean, things were so bad it doesn’t have a quick solution,” and I told Dan “Right then, I’m going to order an omelet, before I start ranting.”

When my calmer half said “I don’t know.  I’m kind of hoping they make you start ranting.”

So I went down to get the omelet, and I came back and sat down.  The large group of unmitigated stupid seemed to be talking lower – at least.  If I said the multiplication tables backward in my head, I could tune out the occasional break through sentence like “What we need is more business regulation.”

And then, zero to nothing, I heard something, and I started shaking – painful body-long shakes – trying to suppress the berserker.

The phrase was “the problem is we have too many liberties in this country.”  Like that.  Like that, I found I was putting my head through the curtain and saying “If you discuss politics in public, I’m going to intervene.”

I want to point out that when I’m fighting the berserker, my voice gets really weird, and my eyes get this bizarre “one step over the line and you’re dead, Mister.”

I’ve been known to make postal workers run away (true) and airline employees bend over backward to give me anything I want, while I’m being perfectly polite and suppressing the berserker.

But these people were wrapped in an invincible mantel of stupidity.  They said – I swear to Bob – “What?  This is a public space, we can talk about anything we want.”

I said “Absolutely.  And I can correct you anyway I want.”

At that point the better half who is a New England gentleman intervened. “Yes, it’s a public space,” he said.  “And we’d like to have breakfast without your politics intruding on it.  Can you keep it down, please?  Particularly if you insist on being ill informed.”  (When calmer half feels the need to put in the knife, imagine what my excitable self was feeling.)

And so I downed as much warm coffee as I could, because if you can’t find alcohol, warm liquids will help, and eventually the shakes subsided.

Too many liberties…

There are three things to take from this encounter: first, it is polite and proper, if sharing a public space with other sentient beings, to try not to say anything offensive out loud.  I tend to discuss the latest scientific developments, a novel I just read, anything innocuous.  I’ve gone to dinner with PJM colleagues and not discussed politics loud enough for the other tables to hear – and shut up when the waitress approached.

Look, guys, there was a reason that Englishmen who had servants said “not in front of the help” – it wasn’t just to avoid gossip.  It was also to avoid making another human being, not in a position to retaliate, uncomfortable.

Good manners and all that.

So, if you have politics to discuss, keep your voice down or save it to your room.  UNLESS you’re sure that the entire room is taken up with your coreligionists.

Another thing is that these people looked fairly normal.  I didn’t see any badges of the little Satanists for Stalin or anything of the kind.  This scares me beyond belief and I’m trying not to be depressed.  They really think Obama is fixing “this mess.”  I… Look, go over to the Zero Hedge guys… just read this.

A tiny excerpt:

#1 When Barack Obama entered the White House, 60.6 percent of working age Americans had a job.  Today, only 58.7 percent of working age Americans have a job.

#2 Since Obama has been president, seven out of every eight jobs that have been “created” in the U.S. economy have been part-time jobs.

#3 The number of full-time workers in the United States is still nearly 6 million below the old record that was set back in 2007.

#4 It is hard to believe, but an astounding 53 percent of all American workers now make less than $30,000 a year.

#5 40 percent of all workers in the United States actually make less than what a full-time minimum wage worker made back in 1968.

#6 When the Obama era began, the average duration of unemployment in this country was 19.8 weeks.  Today, it is 36.6 weeks.

#7 During the first four years of Obama, the number of Americans “not in the labor force” soared by an astounding 8,332,000.  That far exceeds any previous four year total.

There is more.  Oh, yes, there are 33 of these facts.  But the mainstream media won’t report it, and those who are dumb beyond the dreams of average swallow it, hook, line and sinker.  And what can we do?  I’m serious.  WHAT can we do?  This is sort of like before the French Revolution when people demanded Necker be returned to power because when he was borrowing and spending everyone was doing so well.  There are no words.  To paraphrase Heinlein, stupidity is the only capital crime.  The punishment is always death.  Unfortunately when it’s public stupidity, the death often follows on those who weren’t stupid.

Those who don’t know history are doomed to repeat it and take the rest of us along for the ride.

The third point though…

There are few things you can say that are so HEINOUS that they send me into automatic “Must suppress the berserker” mode.  Look, guys I’ve got through entire dinners with communists without getting there, and without looking speculatively at the silverware and considering how to kill someone with a fork.  (Okay, I lie about the second one, but all the same. Thoughts are, thank you, private, and my hobbies are my own.)

But that “we have too many liberties” got under my shield and went directly to the “attack” and immediately as well to the “you can’t go berserk in a public space.  No, really.”

How can anyone think we have too many liberties?

Oh, I know.  They think that because they believe in the myth of the “superior man” who will take care of them.  The man on the white horse who knows better than everyone, and who can run everything so that no one is ever afraid or poor or sick or marginalized.

In other words, they dream of the ideal childhood.

The rest of us know that never in the history of the world, not even the calmest, has there been a time when a leader could guarantee safety, health and contentment to everyone. There will always be poor, unloved, suffering people.  You can’t help that.

You behave in a way you help those around you and you try not to be a burden, but even then at times that will fail.

Those of us who are religious believe a time will come when we will live like that, in perfect harmony and contentment with a superior being watching over us.

But last time I looked, neither king, premier, president, emperor or satrap had the power to look into the hearts and minds and judge everyone perfectly.  And no, the NSA spying ain’t it.  And none of the above were the creators of the universe.

They are all, in fact, fallible men, usually fallible men attracted to power over others, who want to run you not for your own good but for their own internal satisfaction.  And since people who crave this sort of power tend to be more broken than writers, their internal satisfaction might be something that even they don’t understand.

There is no man on a white horse.  There is, always, an old trickster, coming to town and promising eternal peace.  If you look carefully, you can see the horse is a mule that has been painted white.  And the man is just using the same old promises the human brain is wired to crave, but what he wants is quite different.  And even if he truly believes what he says, he can’t deliver.  He’s just a man.  He can’t know what each individual wants and needs.  Only each of you can know what he wants and needs.  And sometimes not even that.

Clearly the people on the next table would like to believe in the man on the painted mule.  I would too.  The idea someone will look after you perfectly is SO appealing.  But I’m grown up.  You can’t go back to kindergarten.  And even my kindergarten teacher had no clue how to handle me.

I’ll handle myself, thank you.  Even to the point of making sure I don’t berserk out at the breakfast table.  It can be done.  It’s just not easy, or comforting or pretty.

It’s a horrible way to live.  Except for every other one.  I’ll keep my liberties, thank you.  You want to give yours up, I can give you a list of destinations willing to oblige you.  It starts with Cuba.

No kings, no queens, no lords, no ladies.  We won’t be fooled again.

For previous chapters, click here

*This is the new free novel I’m posting here a chapter at a time.  This is pre-first-draft, as it comes out.  It is a sequel to Witchfinder which will soon be taken down (once edited) and put for sale on Amazon (It’s half done.  My wretched health this year delayed everything.  I hope to finish MY edits and cut and add this weekend — I almost made it last weekend —  at which point it will take another two weeks at the editor).  Meanwhile, if you donate $6 or more, I’ll get you a copy of Rogue Magic, once finished and edited, in your favored ebook format.  Of course, if you’re already subscribing to the blog at a level at which you get whichever books come out that year, you don’t need to worry. *

NOTICE: For those unsure about copyright law and because there was a particularly weird case, just because I’m making the pre-first draft of my novel available to blog readers, it doesn’t mean that this isn’t copyrighted to me.  Rogue Magic as all the contents of this blog is © Sarah A. Hoyt 2013.  Do not copy, alter, distribute or resell without permission.  Exceptions made for ATTRIBUTED quotes as critique or linking to this blog. Credit for the cover image is © Ateliersommerland | Dreamstime.com

The Earl In The Ointment

Jonathan Blythe, Earl of Savage,

Not only was I not nearly drunk enough, but my demmed brain was trying to work, despite the alcohol I’d ingested.  The thing in my pocket had started glowing and tugging me in a specific direction, and after a long, stumbling walk, I found myself in front of Seraphim’s offices.

The worst part was that a cold breeze, from the river, had almost completely cleared my head by then.

Thoughts were assembling themselves, painfully, slowly, against the remnants of magic glamour, against the confusion of the gin.

It went something like this,

“Strap me, when have I found Seraphim to be on the wrong side of things?”

“And if he’s not, why am I trying to fool him.”

This was followed by, my own mind trying to be reasonable, something it had never been very good at, and which the encounter with fairyland’s king hadn’t helped,

“Gabriel Penn says his brother is too honorable for what needs to be done.”

This was not a good enough comeback and my sarcastic side was ready to pounce, “Is he now?  The same Seraphim Ainsling who eloped with the Princess Royale on the eve of her marrying a foreign prince, and who presented king and court with a consummated marriage is too honorable for what needs to be done?  Damme, Jon.  How many infants will you have to throttle and how many maidens rape?”

This almost sobered me up completely, and the thought wouldn’t leave my mind.  What I mean is, well, Seraphim is honorable, I suppose, in comparison to me, but then so are most creatures, including some cut purses.  What I mean is, I’m my father’s son, not honorable at all, or dear Papa would still be alive and causing trouble in the world for the sake of his purse.

But the thing is, the thing is, Seraphim is the son of his father, too, the old soot we knew as Old Darkwater, and who, frankly, wasn’t that far off my father’s morals, only in different ways.  You’d be safe around him for loyalty, and you’d probably come away better off for money because he was no good at holding on to his, but strap me if you could trust him with your peculiar, or your monkey for that matter.  Not that I blamed him exactly.  I’d never tried bestiality – had even less interest in it than in boys, so it hardly seemed worth the trouble – but Freddie had once told me that—

I brought my reeling thoughts back in order.  The thing was that Seraphim was not a dead bore, either.  When he came across me in Eton and I was up to some jolly prank, he never told.  He might pull me aside and beat the startch out of me if he thought what I was doing would hurt others, but most of the time he’d just roll his eyes and say “you’re going to come home weeping from that one, Jon.”  And he wouldn’t tell anyone, not even afterwards, when the cockatoo had been found in the master’s umbrella.  Which goes to show you.  He wasn’t a tell tale either.

And if something were right to do, if there were really kidnapped warrior maidens, if I really had to find them to keep the world of myth away, if–  If any of that was true, then Seraphim would listen and help.  There was no need to go behind his back.  And it might be very ill advised.  Because Seraphim… what I mean is, he’s a right one.

I became aware too, that I was far more befuddled than the blue ruin I’d drunk would account for. Which meant that Gabriel Penn – or Night Arrow, or whatever he was just now – had given me a whopping shot of magic to confuse me.

Question, why confuse the senses of someone you just enlisted as an helper?

Answer, You’d only do that if you thought the fully awake man would discover something you didn’t want him to know.  And the shot of believe-me and I-am-right magic he’d given me, meant the truth was either right in front of my eyes, or truly heinous, and definitely not what his elf majesty had told me.

Which meant…

Which meant my instinct to get drunk had been right.  There’s only one thing against that kind of spell and it is to tilt yourself off your magical axis enough it loses its grip.  Alcohol will do it.  So will a good petit-mort but I hardly had the time for that.  Besides I was used to being drunk.  During the last year of Papa’s plot, as I caught hints of what it was, I’d been drunk all the time, at least at a low level, just to keep myself from jabbering with fear.

It also meant I should trust my instincts.  Jonathan Blythe, himself, might not be very smart.  None of my masters thought so, at lest.  And as for the Earl of Savage, I wouldn’t give two nubbins for the blighter.  I’d known his predecessor.  But the instinct of the inner Jon, the creature who’d got me out of scrapes more often than not, was, if not infallible, at least pretty close to it.

So the inner Jon said trust Seraphim and I’d trust Seraphim.  It was as well the magical device was pulling me that way, anyway.

I walked up to the sentinels, tipped my hat, “I need to see Seraphim,” I said, purposely not calling him His Grace or The Witchfinder, to let them know I was an old and valued acquaintance.  Damme, my brother in law who was his brother out-of-law had married his ex-fiance who was my late sister.  What I mean is, his half-brother’s lover was raising my nephew who was his own half brother.  That made us relatives, I think.  Though the coils of connection would make a village gossip’s head hurt.

They took a moment to recover from the familiarity, and by then I was hallway into the entrance room.  One of the guards ran after me, “Sir, Milord!  His Grace is in conference – he said not to be disturbed!”

“Trust me, he needs to see me,” I said, and smiled, my best smile, which seemed to confuse him.  Possibly because I never learned a respectable way to smile.

“Milord!” he said, but I was already ahead of him and knocking on the door to the office proper.”

From inside came Seraphim’s voice, “Who knocks?”  I had the impression of a hastily suppressed babble of voices at the knock, but couldn’t be sure.

“Savage,” I said, which it occurred to me if we hadn’t been thrown together so much since Papa’s demise might be misinterpreted.

“Come,” Seraphim answered from within.

The gadget in my pocket was pounding against my high and felt hot.

The guard retreated muttering, “First Lord Michael, now this.  As well hang a curtain.”

I opened the door.  And stopped, in sheer shock.  Because you see, in the office was my beautiful unconue, or to put it another way – since I was also the despair of my French masters – that beautiful piece of ginger nonsense I’d met when fairyland met Avalon and who’d helped me fight off demons and then disappeared without a trace.  Except from my heart.

She was wearing a rather tight on the bodice … looked like a ballgown.  Peach.  Or pink.  And definitely mouth watering, even if an odd choice for a ginger.

And she was between two guards.  And Seraphim was half standing out of his chair.  And his brother stood nearby.

I had a second, to take in the entire tableau, and then Miss whatever her name was, dove towards me, and the guards restrained her just in time.

But she screamed, “Oh, please.  He has a magical bomb in his pocket.  If you won’t let me do it, you defuse it.  Or we all die in seconds.”

So, yesterday, while cruising Instapundit in the five minutes between penguins  (I use a penguin timer instead of a tomato for the Pomodoro Technique.  Deal.) I came across a thing where fast food workers were threatening to strike.

So I sashayed over to the link.  (Part of the reason I need the discipline of Pomodoro is that I’m really, really (REALLY) bad at not getting distracted by news articles.)

Someone here – I think it was Rick – had asked me to write about the controversy over a living wage.  I’ve avoided it because every time I state economic facts (remember, there’s a reason they call economics the dismal science) some lefty blogger links me saying I want poor people to die or some similar excreta.  For instance, the post called “If you don’t work you die” – which applies to society as a whole, i.e. a society that doesn’t produce enough to support itself will die out – got some left chickie (might have been male, I didn’t check.  Was still a chickie.) ranting how I should have been a Nazi prison guard.

But this article finally got me to tackling the whole “living wage” controversy, because the article itself and the interviews with the people are so full of unmitigated fail that… well…

Let’s start by stating my goal: I would like everyone to make a living wage working at whatever they want to or are best at.  I’d like it to start with me, frankly, because thought I’m doing all right, if you parse out my hours weekends and evenings and all I’m making far less than that.  But of course, I have a hope of escape, or at least a hope of supporting myself from all this hard work in my old age, when work slows down.  (I have no illusions I’ll ever be able to retire.)  And I do realize fast-food and low level retail workers can’t.  And I wish they could from the bottom of my heart.  But—

But economics is a science, which means it’s something that studies nature to discover its laws. This means our laws cannot change nature.   You can’t legislate economics, any more than you can legislate the weather.  For instance, I would love it for it to rain only at night because then when we go anywhere during the day it would always be sunny.  Also, could we get snow to melt after a few hours of looking scenic?  I hate walking in subzero weather.  And so many elderly die from extremes in weather.  We should make the temperature 62 degrees year around.  Think how much we’d save on fuel, too.  Why wouldn’t you do that?  What do you have against the elderly and the poor.

Because it doesn’t work.  Because the government in DC can pass all the laws it wants, but the weather still will do exactly what it will do.

Now imagine that the government could affect the weather in a limited way.  Say, shave off the hardest cold and the worst heat.  Wouldn’t that be great?

No. Pray they never do.  Why?  Because while it might produce the “desired” result in a limited way, in a limited area, over time it will cause much more damage in other places.  Because the weather system is interconnected, dependent on myriad factors some of which we don’t know yet, and if you push one way to make it the way you want, you’re going to cause disaster elsewhere.  And if you’re callous enough not to care what happens elsewhere, yet the disaster will eventually come around to you, too.

And that’s sort of what the living wage is like.  The article plays fast and lose with statististics, when it says most of these people are neither teenagers nor part timers.  To quote what a friend told me “I love the abuse of statistics. “The EPI says that roughly eight out of 10 workers in the country earning minimum wage are 20 or older and that half of them work 40 hours a week” followed by “It is clear that the bulk of minimum-wage workers are mid- or full-time adult employees, not teenagers or part-timers”.  Well if 8/10 are 20 or older and half do NOT work 40 hours, AT LEAST 4/10 or 40% are, in fact, “part-timers”. Since the other 2/10 are under 20, that means that 60% are teenagers or part-timers. Um, that IS the “bulk”.  (These calculations are not mine, but from a friend, but they seem accurate to me.

But let’s leave that aside – there are reasons teenagers might be paid a living wage – reasons teenagers might need a living wage.  My mom got married at eighteen and was technically a teenager.  Only a crazy society considers “teen pregnancy” a problem, when it’s been the norm throughout history.  And if teens can be parents, they “should” have a living wage, right?  Besides, a lot of the part timers probably want to be full timers.

The problem here, the problem with this article, the problem with the whole controversy over a living wage is that it mixes ethics and science.  The two never mix.  You can’t question the morality of the formula H2O.  You can’t ask if it would be a more balanced world if it were H2O2.  You can’t really say “Should humans have tails?”  (Well, you could, but then you’d be my older child.)  Or “Is it fair that humans have opposable thumbs when most species don’t?” – it is what it is.

Economics is what it is.  We can discuss the ethics of it, of course.  Older son, in his bio major, studied ethics.  But he studied them as a separate discipline, NOT AS BIOLOGY.

Meanwhile, younger son, whose engineering major requires a hefty dose of Business classes had to take an economics course where the professor seemed to think he was teaching Sunday school.  It was all about what is more moral, and what is better for the community.  Oh, please!  Do have Ethics of Business Practices (not getting in bed with government to create a virtual monopoly would be something to teach the kids – because it’s bad for the economy and the community.  Curiously, this was not something ever discussed in this very confused class.  Go figure.)  BUT don’t call them “basic economics.”  Basic economics are matters of investment and profit, of marketing and selling.

This is because people get confused.  You find some of the confusion in the article.  They interview a Ms. Dukes who makes 8.65 and rarely is given forty hours a week, and she says she’s striking for a living wage and full time, because there are no other jobs, and she can’t live from this.

Sigh.

I’m fully willing to believe she can’t live from that.  It takes one heck of a juggling act.  (I know.  We’ve gone through periods of doing just that.) However, if she is supporting children on that, she qualifies for several government subsidies, ranging from earned income credit, to children support subsidies.  (We didn’t because our situation was temporary.)  So, her income will be more than that.

But let’s say she’d prefer to get off the dole and support herself, a noble and worthy goal.  I sympathize with her.  I understand her issues.  But striking will not achieve her goal.  Not only if it’s massive and widespread.

It’s more likely to get her replaced with a robot.

This is not because as her colleague Mr. Wise puts it upward on the article, “Executives make millions of dollars,” and aren’t sharing – or something – his point is confused beyond being upset at the idea that people – other people – make a great deal of money and he’s barely surviving.

It’s easy to go on about the obscene profits of executives.  In fact, I think they perhaps should show some common decorum and not flaunt it – but the top of any profession pays like that, and the top of entertainment and sports often pays better.

I resent obscenely paid executives, who make enough to buy a Paraguay or two (ah!) only when they do so by getting in bed with the government and making life harder for the rest of us, including preventing competitors from rising up.  BUT even I confess that sometimes getting in bed with the government is necessary to allow your business to survive.

If people insist on electing economic fascists, then you have to work with economic fascists.

And as for ostentatiousness, a) we’re Americans.  Our top of the heap is SUPPOSED to be loud, ostentatious and vulgar.  At least according to Europeans.  And that’s just our GOOD side.  B) There are people who crave that sort of thing.  The wisdom of capitalism (if such thing can be spoken of, since it’s not in any way a planned system, at least not when it works right) is to allow them to satisfy it cleanly in business and not by force in politics.  And, in a system that’s working well, their thirst for much more than they can consume redounds to the benefit of others by growing businesses and industries.

Which bring us to Ms. Dukes and Mr. Wise and their horrible situation.  I’m the first to admit their situation is horrible.  I’ve been stuck making far less than minimum wage but unable to quit for over ten years, and let me tell you, it does eat your soul.  Even if what you’re working at – as I am – is something you love to begin with.  Now I feel better because Indie provides hope of reward commensurate to my effort.  (Only hope for now.)  BUT to be stuck working less than minimum wage at a job you dislike but can’t quit?  Year after year after year?  Sweet Lord, it would eat you from the inside out.

And I do realize neither of them is probably a graduate of economics.  Mind, I’m not putting them down.  They’re right when they say people can’t find other jobs.  It’s that bad out there.  We know someone who used to work in IT who was last seen as a fry cook at Dennys.  Assuming that everyone stuck at a low-level job is a dummy or uneducated is one of the things I hate about liberals.  A lot of Mensans work minimum wage jobs.  It’s the lack of social skills.

But even if either of them took economics in college, it was likely to have been the chimera of ethoeconomics and not science.

What they could figure out, with pencil and paper, and even if they’re as digit dyslexic as I am, is that let’s say the top executives of MacDonalds make ten million a piece and there are three of them.

I don’t know how many MacDonalds there throughout the land – but I’m going to estimate a million for ease of handling.  Our little town has at least ten, and the little mountain village I used to live in boasted one, so I suspect if anything I’m underestimating.

Let’s say that all of the MacDonald’s top execs DONATED their entire wages.  They’re all probably rich toffs, right, and don’t need to get any more money, right?  So they donated all thirty million.  Which, distributed through all the franchises would give each… $30  That allows them to give three and a half extra hours to ONE of their workers at the current pay.

But let’s raise that hypothetical executive pay to 300 million (not unusual these days) and let’s say they donated it whole.  Each MacDonald’s gets… $300.  So one of the half time employees can now become full time… for a week.  Even if MacDonald’s has 100 executives at that obscene pay level… one might be able to become full time for a year — ONE employee per franchise.

But let’s go further.  I’m sure MacDonald’s has a ton of investors, and let’s say that these investors profits are all donated back, instead of being disbursed.  They MIGHT – might, although there’s other considerations such as health care being mandated after 40 hours – be able to take their entire force full time.  Maybe.  Or give them each a $2 raise per hour.  (But probably not both.)

However, then the investors with withhold investment and run away. The company would go into bankruptcy and, like Twinkies, go out of business.  After a glorious month or so, there would be fewer jobs and Mr. Wise and Ms Dukes would be out on the street.

But wait, there’s more – because the above still confuses economics and ethics.  WHY should the executives/investors give all their profits to the employees?

Because, of course, the employees need it.  They have families to support.

Yes, but…

Why are the employees HIRED in the first place?  What is the work they do called?  No, not wage slavery.  It’s called “a job.”  They’re hired because there’s a job to do.

Let’s say that tomorrow there was enough money from investments or donations or government support to take all of them full time.  WHAT WOULD THEY BE DOING?

These are NOT salaried workers.  I know tons of people who are doing two or three jobs in addition to their own and not paid for them because they’re salaried.  (Pretty much everyone who still has a job is doing this these days.) BUT these are hourly workers.

If a store took half of its part-timers full time, it would run out of stuff for them to do.  It would have to lay off some of the other part-timers or full timers.  Who then would have no job at all.  That’s just what it is.

And as for paying better per hour – yes, the executives make obscene salaries and bonuses – but that’s because there are economies of scale.  When you add up millions of franchises, you end up with a lot at the top.  It’s kind of like the whole “if you took a penny from everyone’s bank account you’d be rich beyond the dreams of avarice, but the theft wouldn’t be noticed.”  Economies of scale.  The same applies to investors who, btw, in America are not normally mustache twirling, top-hat wearing villains, but pension funds.  If you take the profit off investment, a lot of grandmas will end up destitute.

But most fast foods are franchises and, from what I understand from people I’ve known who’ve owned these, they work on a razor thin margin.  The only way to raise wages is to raise the price of food.  And if you raise the price of food any number of people now using you in this pinched economy will not be able to.  You’ll close or find a cheaper solution.

The same btw applies to most retail.  I know of someone who runs a used bookstore as sort of a side thing to various SUCCESSFUL businesses, because he likes books (Or perhaps is running a numbers game out of the store.  Who knows?)

Most people I know are either working insanely (which is good for fast food but bad for books) and/or underemployed/paid and sinking into more and more debt every month.  What this means is that a lot of the things people buy in good times are being cut out: new clothes; luxury food; high class entertainment – anything non essential.

I’ve noticed in the last six to seven years that the restaurants closing are those in the middle price range.  Why?  Because people will flock to fast food for the “dollar menu” because it’s a quicky you can get when you just worked a sixteen hour day.

And the high price, high class restaurants go on because their people are those few at the top who are still making enough (or people like us who forego mid-restaurants and even fast food for convenience reasons and SAVE in order to go out somewhere NICE four times a year.)

In between is a vast desert.  Raising the prices of fast food would put them in-between and take them out.

But then, of course, there’s robots.  The robots that CAN operate most fast food chains exist.  They’re not being bought because – like when I spent a summer in Germany ironing sheets, despite their having an ironing machine – humans are cheaper.  Or at least they don’t require upfront investment.

Make it so humans are more expensive than machines and the machines will be bought.  And there will be more people out of work.

Confusing ethics with economics leads to HIGHLY unethical economics and ruin.

Can the strikes force fast food establishments to pay more/give more hours.  Probably.  But as the auto-industry shows, there’s a vast difference between what is good for workers and what is good for the company. (Except when the company is forced to fold, it’s ALSO bad for workers.)

And the same goes for the nation.  Let alone that the idea of a national minimum wage is obscene when you consider the lifestyle cost in NYC is not even close to that in Hays, Kansas.  9.95 in NYC might get you a comfier sewer grating.  In Hays, Kansas, it’s more than a living wage.

BUT beyond that, the idea is obscene because it will cause the closing of innumerable establishments and throw any number of people out of employment, which means many people will never get their first work experience, many children will grow up never seeing their parents work, etc.

But Sarah, you say, places like Australia have lavish minimum wage and their economy hasn’t collapsed.  (A few years ago you’d have quoted Europe too!)

Well, no.

First of all there’s that scale thing – Australia – and most other countries, even those that are our area – are much smaller and less diverse in population.  Second, lavish minimum wage sacrifices business startups and indie businesses.  Why?  Well, our distinguished commenter from Finland has explained this: Because it’s impossible to make the jump between being a sole/proprietor/employee and the kind of money that can pay for employees.  So, businesses don’t start, which makes the economy top heavy with corporations and government boondoogles projects.  This works for a while, but not forever.

Second, Australia might avoid the collapse that comes at the end of that longer than most because it has wilderness, a tradition of self-sufficiency AND is not stupid enough to give lavish benefits to the unemployed – their unemployment benefits are JUST enough to barely keep body and soul together.  So, people go and get a job.  Europe didn’t take that precaution.  We all know where Europe is headed, or at least what it’s circling.

Well – who is going to cut benefits to those who can’t find jobs (at all) in the US.  The aggregate of welfare benefits will keep someone in decent comfort, if not in luxury.  Getting all the benefits you can is a full time job (which makes it a trap) and the more people we throw at that particular boondoogle government program, the fewer will EVER be able to work.

Then there’s third – we maintain a level of defense higher than ANY OTHER FREE COUNTRY, except perhaps Israel.   I don’t think this is unnecessary.  We’re large, we’re loud, and sometimes we elect incredible dumb*sses who practically hang signs on our forehead begging other people to attack us.  We need the defense.  We also defend most of our allies (though these days some people up top seem to have reversed the ally/enemy sign.  I understand.  That type of mistake is why I couldn’t go into engineering.  But at least I never set fire to Egypt and armed the enemy.  Never mind.  Let it go.)  This is money the government takes in taxes from individuals and from establishments throughout the land.  (Something to consider about obscene compensation.  When we were rich beyond the dreams of average (sic) – the three years Dan worked a stressful traveling job {think the special forces of programming.  If no one else could fix it, you called them.  They were ridiculously high paid, plus you paid hotel and travel.  Even if someone worked half the year, the company that contracted them out still made an obscene profit}—we made twice as much as we’d been making for a year (after that they cut salaries.  The economy, you know.)  What was amazing was that after taxes and expenses we cleared about 10k more over when Dan was making half as much.  Yes, there were other expenses which included things I had to pay for because he wasn’t home to do it.  Like garden work.  BUT still.  Our tax bill was massive and ridiculous. I shudder to think what it is once you hit that dreaded 250k, which we didn’t come close to.  And remember that in some parts of the country t250k JUST gets you by.)

What I mean is everything government does – and common defense is one of the legitimate functions – comes out of the economy.  The government doesn’t CREATE wealth.  This means that by being the world police, we can afford less of the goodies our allies take for granted.  It also means that we have more innovation and more small businesses, but that’s just a side benefit.

Right now, of course, we’re trapped in a place where the government is doing its best to kill innovation and small business by regulation, while people fail to find work/struggle to survive on low pay.

I sympathize.  I sympathize with the Mr. Wises and the Ms. Dukes of the world.  They are trapped in a horrible place.  I’ve had friends there.  One of them went on to get her doctorate because “I had to have an escape plan” – but not everyone can be a doctor.  And not everyone has some artistic talent to pursue which AT LEAST gives hope of escape.  And not everyone is cut out to be an entrepreneur and start cleaning houses for a living, or something.

BUT demanding more money and more hours is confusing the economy for a machine that is supposed to give you what you want, or supposed to “morally” provide this or that.

It won’t.

It might be ethical to pour sugar into your gas tank, but all that will happen is that the engine will seize and stop.  Same with the economy.

And then we can all be equally poor.  And maybe, for some people, that is enough.

The more I read your comments, the more it becomes obvious I need to talk about collapses again.  I don’t want to.  I was going to write a funny story about when the squirrel got in my attic, but I tried three runs at it, and it’s not gelling, because I need to talk to you about collapse – yeah, I’m a gateway blogger.  Deal. – So I’ll do the squirrel tomorrow.

Collapses are difficult in a country that either never experienced one or that – if you count the 30s – experienced one very long ago.

Whenever collapse is mentioned you guys go into this weird mode that ranges from “in preparation, I’m learning to chip flint” to “I am training to kill squirrels with my bare hands and cook them over a camping fire.”

Now, do I know that the collapse when it happens (I think we’ve passed the if chilluns) won’t take that?

No, of course I’m not.  I’m not sure because the collapse hasn’t happened, and when it does happen it will be suis generis by definition.  The collapse of something this big hasn’t happened, unless we go back all the way to Rome and a different level of civilization.

(This “big” in terms of world-civilization-supporting presence.  Yes, the British empire collapsed, but when that Atlas shrugged we were there to take up the burden.  Yes, our ways were different, but we still were ready.  Only the less rational of the progressives expect China to take our place.  And that’s because they don’t GET China.  The rest of the progressives (weirdly more in touch with reality than those that think China will become a benevolent world wide trade facilitator) think that as soon as we collapse the world becomes rich and holds hands and sings Koombaya.  Oh, brother, can you spare some reality?)

So, it’s entirely possible that the collapse will send those of us who survive – and if the collapse is that massive, those who survive will be maybe one sixth of us, with luck – to hunt squirrels with flint knives.

However, I read a lot of history, and that’s not how any collapse has happened, ever.

Take the French Revolution – please.  I don’t want it in my head anymore – few people know it started with a currency collapse.  Few people know this because it’s much more fun for teachers to talk about the oppressed poor and going to jail for stealing a loaf of bread (something that was pretty much widespread throughout Europe and, btw, rightly so.  They were ALL much poorer.  A loaf of bread was worth much more in relative terms, and so a baker who lost too many would be endangered.  Also, there were, in most civilized nations, alms houses.  They were hell on Earth, but better than dying or being thrown in jail for a loaf of bread.  We’re not that much more “civilized” or “compassionate” than people then.  We’re just richer, so a loaf of bread seems trivial to us, but it wasn’t to them.  Then as now, some people chose risky ways to get what they needed. You places your bets, you takes your winnings.)

As I’ve been reading this, I’ve become convinced we’re sort of going to experience that sort of collapse but at a higher level.  You know, the economy implodes, we turn to civil war, and meanwhile our enemies invade.

So, that’s all we’re looking at, not the end of the world.

What? Really?

No, look, seriously, it’s not the end of the world.  It’s survivable.  It’s buildable after.  It’s just a messy and bloody practical reflection of catastrophic change.

What I mean is, yes, there’s something we can do to come out of this more free than before, and to rebuild on better lines.

Is it guaranteed?  Oh, come on.  The only thing that’s sure is death and taxes, even when the taxes kill you.  But there is just a chance.

However, to do it what you need to prepare is not along the lines of learning to chip flint.  Or even to build log cabins.  Or trap squirrels.  (Both of those might come in handy and under general knowledge you should at least have a book that shows you how to do it. But don’t count on making a living from it.)

So, let’s look at the thing with a clear eye: did France recede into, say, middle ages civilization?  Emphatically no.  The industrial revolution continued THROUGHOUT the revolution. Did their way of life go back to more primitive forms? Well, yes.  But more primitive forms meant being sure you weren’t going to be the victim of a riot on the way to the baker, and learned to bake your own bread (in the cities, in the countryside they still did) if the baker had shut down because there was a riot.

Yes, if you were in Paris, your life became hell, and you might get killed for no particular reason – depending on who you were and the neighborhood – BUT note Paris didn’t depopulate, which it would have if people were genuinely starving in place, and if life became that horrible.

When reading history it’s very important to distinguish what the narrator is saying and the truth.  If I wrote something around last summer “It seems all of Colorado is on fire” and then the super volcano erupted, sealing us in lava, and a thousand years from now my note was all they found, they might think “All of Colorado was on fire before the volcano.  She was there, she’d know.”  In fact, most of Colorado was fine and not even all areas were getting smoke.

Most of France was all right.  Some was emphatically not all right (there was a region that had genocide imposed against it.)

BUT if you’re going to be caught in one of those movements of history and killed, there’s no point worrying about it.  There’s nothing much you can do.  It’s kind of like being afraid of the super volcano.  What are you going to do about it?

If you’re not, what you have to prepare for is disruptions and inconveniences.

This is something that seems to be true everywhere that experiences a collapse.  Take Lebanon (please, I don’t want it.  I already ate a Paraguay {comment reference joke!} I’m full.)  To us during Lebanon’s civil war, as shown in our TVs, the whole place was falling apart, and back to the stone age.  But people grew up there, during that, decent middle class lives – with some interesting twists.

Portugal had only a mini slow mo collapse, but I suspect it’s much the same, amped up, to what we’d experience here.

Look, to impose country-wide poverty it takes a CONTROLLING regime.  While the twits at the top are TRYING to impose that on us, I don’t think they have a chance in h*ll.  We’re Americans.  We don’t go down easy and we’re not easily governable.  Also we’re massive both in terms of landmass and population.  (The USSR had massive landmass, but not the same population.)  I think we’re about to go pear shaped at them.

Which brings us to a collapse, not imposition of poverty from above.  Which brings us to: we’re not going back to the nineteenth century.  Heck, chances are we’re not going back to the fifties.

Heck, even the communists haven’t managed to take Cuba back to the middle ages – though they’ve tried.  Instead they sort of froze it in time into a poor version of the fifties.

We are not going back to the middle ages, either – it’s not how collapses work.

Look, guys, the network doesn’t vanish overnight.  Power plants don’t disappear. Factories don’t stop. Cars don’t just quit working all at once.  There are things that can cause that, and some regions might experience that, but not ALL, not even most.  It’s not a high probability.  If that happens at all, it will be a city or so.  Walk to the next one.  It won’t kill you.  Or maybe it will, if people in the city defend.  Which is why you need to prepare.

But that’s still a low probability and the preparations should amount to “A friend in another city who will come and pick me up at some mutually arranged place.”

Someone here said we prepare for the disaster we can prepare for.  I.e. if we have a hammer.  It’s kind of like that, of course, (by my profession, by my way of living, I can’t prepare totally for utter collapse.  I have made preparations to survive a month in place, but it won’t be pretty and it can’t be a way of life.  Yes, I’m Heinleinian enough I’d like a log cabin somewhere, but I can’t afford it) but I’m also bolstered by history.  Collapse or no collapse, civilization level doesn’t go back.

What you get instead is an inability to trust the civilization you’ve come to know.  Your “conveniences” will fail, and “conveniences in this case include not just cable TV (actually that might well keep going through it all) but electricity, water, roads.

I’m not saying that electricity will go out and stay out.  That’s highly unlikely.  In modern collapses that only happened in zones where active fighting was going on, and sometimes not there.

I’m saying that hours at the power plant might become… erratic.  And if you’re at the mercy of a power plant that runs on coal (raises hand) doubly so, with sugar on top, depending on coal supply.

That is what will hurt you the most.  No?  Keep in mind civilization goes on at about this level.  How many of you use computers for your paid-work? (Raises hand.)

I’m also saying that water can become contaminated.  As someone said here “keep bleach handy.”  That is only an issue if you don’t.  But you have to learn not to trust stuff like that.

Roads might become potholed to the point of unusability.  In Portugal, the roads would kill a car in three years, at the height of the “slow mo collapse.”  People passed info about the biggest potholes.

This is edging towards the bigger preparation you need to do.

There will be other inconveniences, but none of them as bad as the lack of electricity for long periods of time, erratically.  Like, for instance, there is a strong to medium chance that gas and other supplies will become erratic.  Where we live two thirds of the year a bicycle is feasible (not for me.  I’ll need a tricycle.  I never learned to ride a bike.  Because we couldn’t afford one, when I should have been learning.  Also because I’m a klutz.  Shut up, wretches.)

Electricity is a problem because it can cut you from the network.  And for many of us, the network is social life and work and everything in between (I shop a lot on Amazon.)  But also – our neighborhood has these erratic power failures, twice a year and GAH, not being able to work!  It makes you fret twice as hard.

So, here’s my suggestions for the type of collapse I think most likely and beyond the ammo and whatever needed for active fighting which if we follow the French model will happen in at least some areas of the country:

Go to ebay.  Find three extra batteries for your computer.  Make sure you keep them charged.  (Why ebay?  You can usually get them for $25 or so.  In my case for the travel computer, because the new one is way more expensive.)

Make sure you have a device that allows you to connect to the net without depending on local power/ your own hub.  Ipad or smart phone or kindle tablet with 4G.  It’s prep expense.  If you can, get it.  That way if you get caught in one of the (bowel) movements  of history or the flailing about of a dying government, you can tell your friends to come get you.

Have stuff in place to survive a week of erratic grocery.  Have other ways to get where you absolutely must go.

If in a hot climate, have at least one room you can cool somehow without electricity.  Because heat can kill you.  Same with heating in cold climates.

Oh, if you’re a writer, and electricity becomes THAT erratic – you know the jags we go on – buy a used typewriter.  Manual.  You might have to repair it yourself, but there’s probably instructions on line.  But look, if you write on a typewriter, when electricity comes back you can scan the damn things in, while even I myself can’t interpret my handwriting.  If yours  is better, may the (by hand writing) force be with you, but mine is what it is – and I’m looking for a little manual typewriter, just in case.  The last thing husband and kids want, when stuck in the house without power, is to have me climbing walls because I can’t write the next chapter. Your mileage may vary.

Mid-range skills now hobbies MIGHT come in handy. As we all become poorer, being able to do clothing alterations MIGHT be prized (but remember the transition might be short, so unless you enjoy it, don’t bother learning it.)  Same with playing an instrument.  When everyone is stir crazy from lack of electricity, someone who can play music can provide relief. But don’t learn to build steam engines or anything like that.  Cooking from scratch might not hurt.  It gives you flexibility with bad supply chains.

But more importantly, and above all that, build under.  Heinlein despised “rugged individualists” who thought they never needed the collective, ever.  That he trusted government for most of the needs, like roads or electricity, just means he lived in different times.  We can’t do much about that – for now – but we might have to rely on our friends for aid and succor and support.

We will also need our friends – possibly – for ensuring commerce and other things that government used to guarantee.  How?

Well, say I’m stuck and can’t upload books but I can send TXRed a CD with three novels via whatever parcel post still runs, and give her my publishing password on the tablet.  She can upload them for me, and I’ll still get paid.

I can’t think of all the situations in which the network can come in handy, but I guarantee it can be.

We keep thinking of a sort of Galt’s Gulch with everyone gathered in one place, lending aid, comfort and protecting each other.

This is unlikely.

It’s unlikely because this is the 21^st century.  Civilization and tech create distributed networks, both in reality and in physical space.  But is there a reason not to have a Galt’s Network?  One that allows us to survive the collapse and keep on going, and perhaps – perhaps – ensure that this time the bad guys don’t win?

I don’t see why we shouldn’t.  Embryonic internet, on 9/11, but people stuck across the country as the planes stopped were able to make it home in relays of friends they’d met on line, who each drove them the next ninety miles.  Is there some reason we can’t save our own caught in one of the places that goes grimdark? Or send our own clothes, if they’re caught in a place where there are none in the stores.  Or flour.  Or…

And this is important – this sort of network – for another reason.  People here keep saying “Beware revolution.  The next regime was only better in one instance.”

I’m not proposing revolution, but collapse MIGHT force one on us, if only because some people find collapses ideal opportunity to impose totalitarianism.  (Okay, most people.)

And why Galt?  Because it allows us to separate from a society that is not only taking far more than it gives, but that is slowly circling the drain.  It allows us to mini-galt and small-strike of sorts.

So, let’s look at the one revolution that was different – The USA – why was it different?

Because they had already built their own institutions, their own polity.  They weren’t inventing it from scratch, mid air.  The distance between countries meant they were already independent, in most ways.

And that’s what we need to do and what we need to be.  That way if a totalitarian horror (yes, there’s worse than our current mess) we’ll be organized to fight.  And we’ll be organized to survive.  And we’ll be organized to govern* afterwards.

Despair is a sin.  Don’t give up.  Don’t lie flat.  Build under.  When it collapses, we’ll be there, keeping civilization going.  Maybe we won’t even notice the collapse.

Be not afraid and stop learning to chip flint.  Learn to network, instead.  The future is ours, because we embrace it.  Let the Luddites wail and gnash their teeth.  We have places to be.

* (I know all of you made a face.  I am not going to govern anyone.  I just want to be left in peace.  Since most of you are the same, let’s stipulate a very small and localized government.  Enough to keep the lights on and commerce flowing.)

UPDATE:  Different post, Freedom! (weirdly not political) over at Mad Genius Club.

*I promise unless something serious and unforeseen happens, this will be the last guest post for the week.  I think I’m almost back to thinking in words.  For those not otherwise linked to me — facebook, MGC — a friend who is part of our extended family went into ICU unexpectedly on Saturday.  I haven’t exactly been busy with this — save for visits — in fact, it would be much easier if I had been busy, i.e. if there was anything I could do. And it’s not exactly totally unexpected; our friend has been ill.  BUT it was out of the blue, and it left me feeling — partly because I couldn’t do anything — like someone took a cheese grater to my soul.  He is much better and out of ICU, though still very ill, and my brain is pivoting away from fruitless panic.  Tomorrow I should have words again.  For now, my friend Bill, who doesn’t do guest posts for me normally unless I beg a lot, has sent me one in all on his own.  So, here it is.*

Top Down

by BILL READER

I have been generous with my parentheticals in this post. I am normally a man sadly afflicted with footnotes, but they don’t work well in blogs, so you get parentheses instead. You can read past them if you’d prefer I focus on the point “like a laser”. But I did not come to cut, I came to bludgeon, and I have left in my deviations from the path accordingly.

Sarah tells me she’s had quite a lot of heat from the left. I’m very happy for her. If the enemy isn’t screaming, you aren’t fighting properly. Besides, I know the Huns and Hoydens love their chew toys and get downright rambunctious without them. That includes me, really. So while we have your attention, you teacher’s pets out of the Frankfurt School, let’s have a little chat about the cool kids in your class.

See, it’s often said that the head of a company defines its culture. The leader is the person people associate with that organization, especially the employees. Whether the leader causes the organization to imitate them, or alternatively, imitates organizational ideals to rise to power, varies. In many ways, this chicken-and-egg problem is not important, because either way, the leader would still be indicative of how the organization is arranged. But it occurs to me that, when you get right down it, political parties are basically large corporations. One wonders naturally, therefore, who are the leaders that pattern your organization, leftists?  (And I anticipate naturally that you will object to being associated with a corporation. But it’s true regardless, so none of that prissy proletarian pap out of you, Democrats, Socialists, and Communists. You, and your big shiny DNC, are the people who put Mr. Billion-Dollar-Campaign in office, remember? You’ve got just as many expensive donors… George Soros, for one, who is about as grassroots as a bromeliad (and not nearly as pretty). Or how about the laundry list of high-rollers Obama was busy partying with during campaign season… the multi-thousand-per-plate dinners, you remember those? You ought to. One of those parties in Las Vegas was more important to Obama than deploying forces already in the area of Benghazi to stop our ambassador from being raped and killed. Ah, but I forget… you are “compassionate”, and so by your own definition no longer need to worry about the mere unnecessary loss of human life. Not if there’s money to be fed into your machine on the line. But I digress.)

Actually, one doesn’t really have to wonder about your heroes. You are up front about them. One might only be left to wonder WHY they are your heroes.

For example, you like Marx. You bleat that Marxism is a legitimate method for analyzing the world, and excuse or ignore that every time it’s actually been applied to the running of the world, it has resulted in massive death. To anyone but you true believers that would be a sign that Marx had fundamentally misapprehended the nature of both humans and their social systems. A friend of mine, analyzing the “Communist Manifesto”, concluded that Marx was an incoherent malcontent who had apparently sacrificed internal consistency in the piece in return for making it more inflammatory towards the “Bourgeoisie”. Me, I always thought Marx was just an idiot theoretician who forcibly hammered the square peg of history into the circular hole of his ideas and never had to atone for how much horror that little intellectual cheat would wreak on the world. Either way, it fits many of you well. It is no secret you like to be inflammatory. Like Stalin, life under your regimes is always the endless “revolution from above”. You are always jumping on some new enemy, always busy being offended at something or pretending to save the Earth, because “campaign” for you is not an event but a way of life. And you often sacrifice your internal coherence for being more inflammatory… that’s why you complain about the worsening global warming when the measurements of your own agencies show the Earth isn’t getting hotter. It’s also why you like to say that NSA isn’t really spying on people when it’s known to have subpoenaed enormous amounts of phone metadata sufficient to construct models of what lifestyles the phone owners have and what social networks they’re in. And to have been associated with a program called PRISM that had buy-in from several major tech companies, including Google, Apple, Facebook, and Microsoft, which strongly suggests that reconstruction of social networks was the exact goal. And to be mediated in all this by secret and voter-proof FISA courts and to have abused its power in illegal ways already (Let it not be said that I’m unfair or overgeneral… David Sirota of Salon has noticed that Obama’s lying about the NSA not conducting domestic spying). And yet, many of your fundamental mistakes are motivated, as the perceptive commentator Bill Whittle pointed out in “The Train Set”, by a love of theory. You like Obama’s Keynesian stimulus of the economy because you like the theory that you can spend and print unfathomable amounts of money and somehow create value rather than just creating money. After-inflation costs of everything go up proportionally because the official inflation rate is being held down, of course. But you refuse to put two and two together because you have been taught that economics is whatever you tell it to be. You like “smart diplomacy” in the Middle East, because there’s a theory in your heads that says the world will work better if the US is less “imperialistic” and “aggressive”, even though Obama’s indecision, followed by much ill-decision in Egypt, has caused the country to devolve into a mess. I’m not sure if even Obama knows whether we’re on the side of the radical Islamists who want us dead or not. (And I don’t even know how I’d classify the “Al Queda is on the run” followed by serial embassy closures, or the scapegoating of a film producer for an attack we were warned about in advance, to the point where Stevens had repeatedly requested beefed-up security. It crosses the line from being “less imperialistic” to being “more brain-damaged”. If Jihadists celebrated Christmas, I imagine the ones who hoisted the black flag of Al Qaeda over the Benghazi embassy would have thought it’d come early.)

Of course, you have other heroes. Some of you leftists are probably wearing the face of one of them right now, knowing you. And lord, how I love to see those Che Guevara tees, because they remind me that sometimes the bad guys will self-identify. Che is less cut-and-dried than Marx. Marx you know everything about, because he is a neat, self-contained microcosm of illogic floating separate from the rest of reality. But you don’t really know Che. Well, one hopes you don’t really know Che, anyway, which is kind of the central problem with you wearing his visage.

I have a book with me leftists are never going to read anyway, so whoever of you happen to still be hanging on or… more likely… skimming the article looking for a typo to build an ad hominem attack around, are going to get a few quotes and paraphrases out of it instead. The book is called “Exposing the Real Che Guevara” by Humberto Fontova, and it’s an interesting read… a kind of cross between George Forrest and H.P. Lovecraft, the latter being because of the depravity of the individual being examined. Some details stick in the mind. Like, for example, the fact that you who are so fond of thinking of conservatives as metaphorical puppy-strangling maniacs, are wearing the face of a man who ordered an actual puppy strangled, and then wrote about it in his memoirs. Maybe that’s not a shock, though, since your president does eat dog. So here’s a choice selection from the chapter “Fidel’s Favorite Executioner”, among the more blood-soaked chapters in a book fairly dripping. A fourteen-year-old boy who was, by his own admission, taken in because he’d tried to defend his father from the people who took him to the firing squad, was watched by the other prisoners as he was dragged to the stake, by Che personally, to be shot. This boy was so eloquent in pleading his innocence that only one of the men in the firing line actually had the gumption to fire a shot at him. Che’s personal friend, a marine deserter and ex-con named Marks, went up and shot the boy twice at point blank range. Then, and remember, all of this is under Che’s watchful eye, the entire firing squad, including the one who had fired, was arrested for disobeying orders. There are stories from poor Cubans who had their house raided, and family members stolen, and then were ordered not to mourn them (page 108). There is more ghoulish stuff… Che’s friend Marks liked to bring his dog in to drink the blood of people who had been shot (what of it was left… one of the things Che ordered done to boost the Cuban economy was the extraction of blood from prisoners, for sale on the black market (page 77)). And considering that Che specifically ordered the wall of his office that faced the firing squad removed so he could watch the bloody executions at leisure, it’s safe to say he approved. From that window he watched, by some accounts, as many as 400 executions in a week (page 74). Appropriate, one supposes. The chapter opens with a quote from Che’s diaries: “Crazy with fury I will stain my rifle red while slaughtering any enemy that falls in my hands! My nostrils dilate while savoring the acrid odor of gunpowder and blood.” (page 66). I cannot list all the “enemies” that fell in Che’s hands, since an enemy was anyone he wanted it to be and the trials described, transcribed, and recorded in the book are pure theater that reduced the death toll exactly none. This is your “secular saint”, leftists: A murderous coward whose victims’ blood you see fit to steep yourselves in as you go about your quests for “awareness” and “compassion”. To conservatives, I recommend the book extensively, along with Elie Wiesel’s “Night” and “The Black Book of Communism”, as part of a comprehensive understanding of leftist atrocities (and an additional note to the leftists… yes, for the thousandth time, the National Socialists, who nationalized all major industries, engaged in massive public works, and instituted strict economic and, infamously, social control, were also leftists. That they were opposed to communists in theory is neither here nor there. They were also theoretically opposed to fascists after the falling-out with Mussolini, and yet they had almost indistinguishable economic ideas about what makes a country successful… namely, the same ideas you Keynsians and Statists have.).

Now we come to the difficult question, leftists. Why do you wear the face of a communist regime’s chief executioner? To be counter-cultural? Congratulations, mission accomplished. Possibly you have even overshot into being counter-civilizational, and you’re approaching counter-human.

At the very least, I like to delude myself into thinking that you are motivated solely by ignorance. I imagine that if you’ve even bothered reading the “Motorcycle Diaries”, you’ve obscured any signs that Che Guevara is a kill-crazy psychopath with the tall roadside grass of denial. In that case it is broadly metaphorical of your selective perception. Your current highest official, the president, is a man who grew up with very little affinity for the ideals of the US, raised by grandparents who had moved across the country to put his mother in a school notorious for its communist teaching regimen. And then apparently they were supposed to have become as American as apple pie in between. Oh, make that until Obama needed to throw his own grandmother under the bus.  He chaired the law review without reviewing any laws, and guest-lectured about the Constitution on the basis of no-one-is-entirely-sure-what-experience, given his bafflement at it only laying out… ahem… “negative liberties”. Despite all this evidence to the contrary, you never once question the idea that he has the best interests of the US in mind and the competence to protect them? (Side note: while one of Obama’s less publicized nuggets, “negative liberties” is undoubtedly one the most troubling. It frames the defense of the people from various governmental encroachments with the ultimate in negative words… the literal word “negative”. Much like the Orwellian reversal of “tax breaks” into the term “tax expenditures”, it spins everything from the perspective of the state… that is, from the state’s perspective, the constitution says what it can’t do. At the same time, it shows remarkable incomprehension of economics. It conflates not promising to give people certain services and commodities with failure on the part of a government. By that logic, all forms of success are necessarily some flavor of redistributionist. And that analysis, which was also done at the time Obama made that statement, has only been proven more and more prophetic, as Obama routinely tests the limits of the public patience on items in the Bill of Rights and exercises an increasingly disastrous economic program.)

The theory I don’t wish to believe is that some of you know full well what kind of monster you’ve got there. I wonder if, like Che, you long to go beyond this petty government harassment as executed by the IRS and really get into the thick of it… create your own dungeons, build your own prison camps, execute your own thousands and kill men, women, and children alike for yourselves. Some of you, like Che, enjoy sending other armed people to do your dirty work while you watch from afar, as the disgusting tactic of S.W.A.T.ing has shown. On the other hand, some of you attempted to hold actual riots in 2008, and it was deeply satisfying watching you have panic attacks while the Denver police corralled you. Maybe that’s not far off Che, either, who was eventually captured while trying to “liberate” Bolivia… by which I mean he was knocking around the jungle ineffectually and in a drunken stupor.

But how does one tell if the left in general has the same desire to oppress? There is history, on one hand. Statists almost everywhere else have already racked up long and bloody records. And while it’s no guarantee, it makes sense. The prioritization of the state above individuals means that sooner or later, if individuals are perceived to threaten the state, the state lashes out. And the bigger the state, the smaller an action constitutes a “threat”.

Ours is fairly big already. I can tell because Republicans are demonized for the most trivial things, like allowing an automatic reduction in the rate at which government spending increases, also known as the “sequester”. The statists are upset, not over reducing government, not even over stopping government growth, but over slowing down the rate at which money is shoveled into its maw. Does that mean anything? I suppose first we’d have to ask if they’re even aware of that fact. After all, I can understand how someone who is under-informed could see government agencies furloughing people, so they can still have the money for the expansions they had already planned for, and incorrectly conclude that some kind of cut occurred. Obama has done his best to feed the myth, by stopping White House tours and complaining about the sequester around the country… if he has time to talk about how broke we are between the massive, expensive vacations, anyway. It’s a plausible out, at least for that case in point. Maybe leftists haven’t come as a whole to the place that they’ll defend the state above all. Merely being ignorant and easily misdirected is enough.

And if so, well, it’s fitting, because it circles back to Obama. Obama is an undeniable leftist idol, and of all the ones on this list, by far the most recent. Don’t even dream of denying it, guys… you don’t merely tolerate him, you venerate him. This is reward on investment, since he puts immense amounts of money into being symbolic of the left. And while all my conservative readers probably know a great deal about Obama’s past, that’s merely the framework built around what Obama is. Remember that first and foremost, as a third generation communist, Obama is an ideologue. He does not rise to the level of a theoretician, unlike Marx… he has no new ideas, he has dogma, handed down to him from his communist grandparents. He is ignorance personified, because not only does he have no comprehension of reality, he’s filled the place that might have been filled with comprehension with utter nonsense. But because his worldview leads him to believe in the ultimate superiority of all other countries in the world, it also makes him remarkably easy to mislead. That’s one reason why Putin has played Obama like a fiddle. It’s also why Obama’s little rainbow tour, filled with hugging despots, bowing to tyrants, and “reset button” antics, was so forehead-slappingly dumb. Like Dennis Rodman, it takes Obama about three minutes talking to a foreign dictator to decide they’re really not all that bad, because Obama is unspeakably gullible.

But, whether it is because they imitate him or because Obama comes from among them, Democrats have many of those traits from their leader. Like him, many of their avid practitioners are now either weathervaning bobble-heads, or people whose parents and grandparents got steeped in agitprop and never broke free. And they will believe the most preposterous things, in contravention of all evidence offered to them, in the face of even their own observations, if their leaders tell them it is so.

And so, at last, we come to the bottom of this ideology. Leftists can clearly be seen to reflect their idols, in myriad ways. They have, all of them, traits of Marx, Che, and Obama. Sometimes, arguably, there is that chicken and egg question, especially with Obama, being by far the most passive “leader” they have. But regardless, it is undeniable that among leftists, people with traits they reflect, as a group, have risen to high prominence and general recognition. As I said at the beginning, an organization’s culture is often defined by its leader, and  think there’s a strong case to be made that Democrats are no exception.

One final point which we might reflect on, however, is that these demigods of the left are not merely flawed men, but men defined by their flaws. Marx could not have pursued the blinkered ideology that made him famous if he had had the courage to let reality supersede his theories. Che, given how questionably competent he was, would not have carved out nearly as much of a niche in pop culture had he not been bloodthirsty and power-hungry as well. It is the motive force that allowed him to rise to such prominence among people as repressive as his friends. And Obama may seem like he’s gone a long way for a man in blinders, but the fact that he cannot perceive a reality beyond what he was taught is also probably exactly why Democrats like him. When they hear him, he’s talking to them in the language of their textbooks, repeating the reassuring lies they love. And the wonderful thing about Obama is they know they can count on him never to break form, because there is nothing else in his whole mental world but their lies.
Therefore, a comment on the cool kids, leftists. Opponents of individualism and avatars of the collective like to justify the immense power they want the state to have by saying it will be wielded by good and decent individuals. Leftists often live lives that are moral by their own definition, supporting their party above all, practicing the religion of environmentalism and in general considering themselves superior to conservatives on the basis of their own delusions. But leftists, that self-deception, that you are somehow better because you call everyone and their brother an “-ist” of some kind, and worry constantly about perils that have shaky support or no support while ignoring clear and present dangers, and evangelize about received knowledge from your leaders, is exactly why you make such terrible leaders. You think that acting counter-intuitively makes you seem smarter, when in reality, it makes you fundamentally anti-empirical and puts you at odds with reality about 95% of the time. And the delusion is itself necessary to being a statist, since if you have no claim to superiority, then why should I be subordinated to you? That the claim to superiority comes through self-delusion is likewise no surprise, since self-delusion is always easier than achievement, especially when the society encourages it. Hence, we see a pattern emerge over and over… that the will to power is more often the result of narcissism than genuine superiority. Leftists are like the arch-statists they admire because they emerge from the same well… and the real lesson we learn from examining the “cool kids” is that even among those who would build a top-down state, they cannot escape the overwhelming effects of the individual. That mass of people who want to control others work together only because all their members are seriously broken in that same way. Thus, being set apart is still an individual endeavor. To be remembered among leftists, have an especially perverse desire to control others, be especially well indoctrinated… be especially broken. They may have twisted the standards of individual success in an attempt to supersede individuals, but they cannot remove success from the equation entirely. On the other hand, as they are conceived, they also cannot help but try.

This is why, in the end, we will win, and they will lose, because we are (as we have ever been), aligned with the laws that govern reality, and they are aligned with how they wish reality worked.

The problem of getting into the frame of mind where you want to gore sacred cows is that sooner or later you’re going to run onto the fields of your childhood and gore Betsy, the cow who let you pet her when you were really little.

What I mean is that having started to doubt pretty much all ideas of the seventies and beyond, I find myself doubting some of the ideas that thrilled me to the core when I was an embryonic geek aged twelve or so.

Take for example the search for extraterrestrial life…

I remember how impressed I was when I found something about Voyager and what we’d sent our potential playfellows in space.  It seemed like a wonderful idea.  I mean – we wanted to talk to these people in space, so surely they’d want to talk to us?

Think of the wonderful scientific and philosophical exchange, the things we could never learn while locked in our symmetrical, bi-gender, ape-based bodies.  I mean, we could talk to ammonia-based aliens, reptile-like aliens, or things we couldn’t even imagine, but who would be intelligent and have wonderful secrets to reveal.

Sigh.

Then the seventies came to an end, and the effluvium of drugs saturating western culture receded a little, and we looked down at ourselves and saw that we were wearing bellbottoms and ran to cover them up with fig leaves.

What I mean is, I – alas – grew up and, like many ideas that seemed perfectly wonderful in the seventies, I started having serious doubts about the way we’d gone about searching for extra-terrestrial life.

I wasn’t so jaded, mind, that a few years ago I DIDN’T install SETI on my computer.  (I had to remove it, it made my old laptop very slow.)

But last night the guys and I were discussing the idea of search for extraterrestrial life and I realized how bass ackwards it is to be sending them all this information about us.

I’m, of course, not the first one to come up with this.  One of the reasons I love Independence Day was that the whole movie is a denial of a character’s optimistic statement that “They didn’t come all this way looking for a fight.”

This hooks up with the whole idea of Robert A. Heinlein that serious space exploration will only be undertaken for colonization or hope of colonization and that if some species has survived and become the strongest in the world they are not lotus eaters who like to pet furry bunnies.

More likely, like us, they’re bunny eaters, red in teeth and claw.  And if they are more advanced than us, they might very well also be stronger, meaner and more determined.

The whole idea of aliens being more enlightened, purer, less interested doesn’t seem to be supported by “how species survive.”

Oh, sure, if we really were created by a superior intelligence, who worked directly – and not through natural laws – with the clay of the universe, perhaps some of those beings out there, really are like onto angels.  (Although in at least one telling, angels come in two varieties.  And in others angels range from bloodthirsty to unimaginably vile.  Keep that in mind. If you have A LOT of time to waste, buy yourself a Dictionary of Angels.  Reading one gave me the idea of an eternal life with bureaucracy no one can understand, not even the angels.  No, I’m not writing it.)

BUT if we’re going with scientific principles, chances are that the aliens in Puppet Masters are cuddly and friendly as a puppy compared to the creatures that wait us in space.

So what on Earth possessed us to send them a whole heap of information about ourselves?  And to still look so hard for them with SETI?

… I got nothing.  Judging from the history of Earth, while the Aliens might have a lot to teach us, the most likely for us to learn it is by reading their entrails after we kill them all.  Sadly, that might be the best thing, because otherwise they’ll be reading ours.

Our sending that stuff out to the cosmos might in fact mark us as the “special” class of the cosmos.

Short of the massive force of Independence Day, which at least would make us feel important (as we died) here are some of the more dispiriting messages we could receive back, (and these would be written in English unless otherwise marked.)

–          Okay.  Whatevs.

–          How precious.  Is that the best you can do Buttercup?

–          You call that a civilization?  My kids can build better on a weekend in the backyard.

–          Riiiiiiiight.  Why don’t you stop trolling?  Your supposed information is internally contradictory and no one would be stupid enough to send the key to their civilization to us.

–          Ah!  Funny.

–          Ewwwwwwwwwwwwwww!

–          Pervert!

–          We have filed a restraining order with the Galactic tribunal. Please cease your transmissions.

–          (this one would be in some alien language and it would take us years to decipher to find it says) The over-under on conquering your sorry planet is three minutes.  We’ve sent our invincible armada your way.

–          (This one too, after incredible effort, we’d manage to read and it would say: )  Another one?  Another one?  Why is it that every species that hits this state of development sends out one of these? And they all think they’re so special!  It’s a good thing we have some morals and don’t eat children, or you’d be gone.  PS – Take off those bell bottoms and find some fig leaves.  Have you looked at yourselves in the mirror?

Villains and Villainy: The Choice to Be Evil

By Mike Brogley

A while back, during a discussion by the Hoyt’s Huns Commentariat on character motivations, our hostess, the lovely and talented Senhora Dona Sara Hoyt, saw a comment of mine on villains, villainy, and choice, and asked me to expand on my thoughts a bit as a guest post. Being both naturally long winded (ask my lovely wife) and a fan of anything allowing Sarah more time to write her books, I agreed.

Our discussion that day was on the topic of bad guys, villains and villainy, and what goes into making a character’s villainy believable. I’ve certainly read stories and seen TV and movies where the character designated as the villain is identifiable because he’s in effect wearing a black “I ARE A VILLAIN!” t-shirt. In silent westerns the identifying item of clothing was the black cowboy hat, while in young-lady-tied-up-on-the-tracks melodramas the villain was generally the guy with the stooped posture and the large waxed mustache. Given the limitations of these early movie formats, shortcuts like these served as a quick way to let the audience figure out who they should be rooting for so the action could commence.

Written fiction gives more opportunity for the author to go past simply describing what is happening, and readers expect a more insights into just why that fellow wearing the black hat is so invested in continuing to do bad things which our heroes must oppose. When the villain’s actions make sense, the hero’s challenges are more challenging, heroic setbacks are more believable, and heroic accomplishments are more satisfying.

In the Commentariat  discussion the villainy of one Darth Vader, formerly Anakin Skywalker, Dark Lord of the Sith, Galactic Overlord, right hand man to and eventual assassin of the Emperor of the Galactic Empire, was brought up as an example. An examination of the Darth Vader character works for our exploration of villainy on a couple of levels, both because he was drawn so well, and because he was drawn so poorly in the extended Star Wars saga. We’ll get back to Darth in a bit, but first let’s talk a bit about villainy in general.

By definition, something is wrong with a villain. The choices they make are not the “correct” choices with which society in general would agree. Something has shifted the structure of beliefs they use to decide what to do that yields an altered value system, leading to actions – betraying trusts, harming innocents, causing unnecessary pain – that are generally recognized as “bad”.

So what makes a well-rounded characters’ villainy believable? And how can this be done while also avoiding muddying the writing to the point that our villains become more sympathetic and likeable than our heroes, since, to paraphrase what Sarah has said, that way leads to deep, deep mud indeed.

In real life, ‘experts’ have been trying to understand what makes people do evil for a very long time. Explanations including possession by demons, curses by angry gods, and spells cast by evil magicians or witches standing in threes around a big pot were popular in the past, Modern experts have a similar range of explanations. At base, all of these explanations fall into two broad categories: Nature – that the person who performs some evil action has some innate characteristic, flaw or fundamental void of character that causes them to do bad things, or alternately prevents them from being able to distinguish between good and evil so they can choose to do good; or Nurture – that the person’s environment, education or upbringing led, lured, or forced the person to their eventual acts of evil.

My default answer to any “Choose A or B” question is always “Both,” and I think that applies to this question as well – aspects of intrinsic “flaw” as well as environmental factors both undoubtedly contribute to a person committing heinous acts.

Sometimes a person who commits evil is just broken. A number of articles from a few years back explored the use of Dr. Robert D. Hare’s Psychopathy Checklist, Revised (PCL-R), a commonly used screening tool in the diagnosis of psychopathic individuals.  People with psychopathic characteristics are highly impulsive, lack empathy, anxiety or guilt, and effectively lack any conscience (here’s a good blog post on this topic). Using the PCL-R test, researchers document a general adult population incidence of psychopathy of 1 in 100 in males and 1 in 300 in females. Then they looked at prison inmates, where the proportions were significantly different: 1 in 5 prisoners in the general prison population are diagnosable as psychopaths, and 1 in 2 violent offender inmates are diagnosable as psychopaths – fifty times the ratio in the general non-prison male population. Obviously there is a connection between this particular fashion in which people can be broken and crime.

We should just give this test to kids and preemptively lock up anyone with a certain score or higher indicating psychopathic characteristics, right?

Not so fast, cowboy. Not all psychopaths become criminals: Those same articles revealed that PCL-R testing of corporate CEOs yielded a ratio of 4 in 100 as diagnosable psychopaths, a rate four times higher than found in the general male population. Obviously if clinically psychopathic individuals can attain and sustain the heights of corporate governance, these people can by definition be fully functioning members of society.

I couldn’t find any testing results along these lines for government employees or politicians, alas. Wouldn’t that be an interesting PhD. dissertation?

And recall, half of violent offenders are not diagnosable as psychopaths, yet they still committed the violent acts that sent them to prison – these folks who are not lacking in empathy and conscience nevertheless acted in ways presumably equally as evil as those diagnosable as psychopaths. To return to our character study, aspects of brokenness can inform the basic makeup of the character, but there has to be more involved to enable our villain to choose villainy.

Fundamentally broken characters can certainly make interesting villains (Hannibal Lector in The Silence of the Lambs, or Joker in The Dark Knight), interesting supporting characters (Tovera, Adele Mundy’s personal aide in David Drake’s RCN/Lt. Leary series), and even interesting heroes: In researching for this article I came across a compelling argument that James Bond – a manipulative person, very good at lying, who kills easily with no compunctions – could be a psychopath. And yet Bond is in the service of good.

What about these characters drives why they choose the paths they do?

So let’s go back to one of the primary mainstream cultural references on heroism and villainy, the Star Wars movies, and Anakin Skywalker/Darth Vader. In the first trilogy (episode IV – A New Hope 1977, episode V – The Empire Strikes Back 1980, and episode VI – The Return of the Jedi 1983), we don’t really get a lot of insights into the Darth Vader character, certainly not in the first movie. George Lucas consciously patterned his movies after the serialized cliffhanger adventures, and as such he started out consciously using the shorthand tropes of that form and built from there, mostly in surface details: Vader wears black, chokes people, and ends up killing the hero’s mentor and tries to stop the hero from succeeding in his first quest. In the later movies we learn that Vader works for the head evil character, the Emperor, who is not attractive and talks in an evil voice, and at the Emperor’s direction Vader does more evil things – he tortures prisoners, chokes annoying subordinates to death over the phone, and chops off the hand of the hero, Luke Skywalker, Vader’s own son, while trying and failing to get Luke to change sides in order to set up something of a family villainy business. In the end Vader becomes un-evil, kills the Emperor, saves Luke, and dies. There’s lots of adventure derring-do by the heroes along the way, and unfortunately Ewoks as well, but we only get a very short character journey for Darth Vader and not much about why Vader is evil.

George Lucas has talked about using Joseph Campbell’s The Hero’s Journey as a major basis for the story progression in Star Wars, and his first trilogy concentrates on the character journey of Luke Skywalker. Luke starts as an innocent, endures trials and challenges, identifies and faces his fears, in the end chooses to remain good, which leads to the defeat of his opponent and victory.

But what about Darth Vader’s path? We had to wait twenty two years after the first movie for George Lucas to tell us more, until he released the first installment of his Star Wars prequel trilogy (episode I A Phantom Menace 1999; episode II Attack of the Clones 2002; episode III Revenge of the Sith 2005). This trilogy is all about Anakin Skywalker, the person who will eventually become Darth Vader. It starts out with Anakin as an overly cute 9 year old blonde slave kid with a severe midichlorian infection who Yoda tries to blackball from entering Jedi training, who by the second movie has become a whiny teenage Jedi Knight trainee with problems avoiding interactions with his protectee that Jedi HR would find very troubling, and by the third movie he’s a combat veteran Jedi Knight with a secret: Anakin has secretly married his prior protectee in major violation of Jedi regulations, and she’s now pregnant. Anakin’s effort to protect his wife and unborn child lead him into making his one fateful choice, when he intervenes to prevent the arrest of soon-to-be-Emperor Palpatine by the Jedi, and thus Anakin’s fate is sealed. Then Anakin changes his name to Darth Vader, kills his wife because George Lucas, and falls into hot lava.

George Lucas wrote Anakin’s character in the prequel series as a victim with only one choice: whether or not to stop Palpatine’s arrest. Anakin’s choice to stop the Jedi and join Palpatine at that pivotal moment is the net result of all the forces (no pun intended) acting on Anakin, from his birth as a slave, to his adoption and training as a Jedi, to his courtship and secret marriage. And even then Anakin doesn’t really get to choose – his tragic history has already made the choice for him, and once this choice is made, Anakin/Vader’s future is fixed.

This is predestination, and I have a problem with that. Choices matter, and one bad choice that a character may be driven to make cannot predefine all the rest of the character’s choices as they go on living their life. Only a set of values that make those (evil) choices the right choices can do that.

So Anakin, raised as a Jedi paladin from the age of 9, gets stuffed into the Vader suit at age 25 or so. Suddenly he’s 6 inches taller and speaking with James Earl Jones’ voice. He becomes by Imperial HR job description a full-fledged Evil Overlord, second in power only to the Emperor in the new Galactic Empire they’ve created. Anakin has made his one fateful choice and… That limits him how?

What’s to prevent Anakin from choosing to be Imperial Super-Nice-Guy Darth Vader, painting his suit white with a My Little Kitty logo on his chest and travelling across the Empire, spreading cookies and candy to all the kids on colony worlds he meets as he fulfills his Imperial mandate? Sure, he might have to make a few hard choices, but he appears on Imperial holoTV all the time to make sure all Imperial Subjects know how he feels their pain, how much he cares about their problems, how hard he’s working to keep all Imperial Subjects safe and happy?

In other words, what prevents Anakin Skywalker from acting as a good guy in the twenty-something years between the end of episode III and his death at the end of episode IV?  The one fateful choice theory just doesn’t work for me – destiny is fine as an explanation by lazy historians after the fact, but when Anakin is standing there trying to decide what to do next, he has to have something more complex than “Oh, that’s right, I forgot; I’m Evil!” to drive his decisions.

Perhaps he regrets his one fateful choice. Certainly regret can play a role – there’s not a much more powerful emotional driver than regret over past choices. But I can’t see regret alone as driving anyone to consistently choose to do bad things. I think most people, and thus most believable characters, deal with regret without constantly referring to any one fateful choice in their past as the determining factor for everything they choose to do from that point on. Being consistently evil is a lot of work. Consistent evil must have enormously strong underpinnings to keep villains from just quitting and planting a garden.

Characters need a consistent internal structure of values and beliefs that justify the choices they make, every day, day after day. One weak moment, one poor decision, one slip of the tongue, one fateful choice to support one mentor over another, just doesn’t rise to that level. Villains, like every one of us, make a whole pile of choices every day, over and over again, for years on end – and as they just choose to consistently do evil things, the reason they continue to make those choices have to make sense.

There is a maxim that everyone is the hero in the story they tell themselves in their own mind. In Vader’s mind, the story he tells himself must build a framework of assumptions and practical guidelines to support the daily choices – throttle this annoying incompetent admiral here, choke this diplomatic courier captain whose throat he finds in his grasp there, torture Han and Leia to lure Luke into a trap the next day – that the rest of us call evil, but in his value structure those evil choices are perfectly justifiable, and in fact are the correct choices for Darth Vader given his objectives, beliefs, and value system.

Now George Lucas didn’t show us this level of insight – we never saw R2-D2 plug into the Death Star’s network, happen across Darth Vader’s personal storage allocation in the Death Star Storage Cloud, and copy Vader’s private journal including his personal mission statement – but hey, we’re creative here, let’s synthesize something that makes sense. Imagine this as one of those pop-up holograms that R2 occasionally emits:

The Republic was a failure. I fought and nearly died in the Clone Wars, and we came close to losing over and over again. Only through the efforts of my Master, now Emperor Palpatine, and through no help of the Jedi, did we eventually create the Clone Troopers that enabled us to defend the Republic and have any chance of winning. Then, when we’d nearly won, the Jedi tried to arrest Palpatine and take over!

And don’t get me started on the Jedi – those weak fools with their endless rules and constraints, limiting what powers to use, what relationships to have, what actions to take – as if concepts of good and evil matter when what is needed to protect civilization is clear! I had to break their rules just to have a normal life and marry my wife! And then the Jedi betrayed the Republic and Obi Wan tried to kill me, even dragging Padme into what should have been an honorable duel between the two of us, causing her death and that of my unborn child! I lost both my legs and my remaining arm to that sanctimonious fool, but he couldn’t bring himself to finish the job, and failed to kill me. He was weak – they all were. The Jedi were a cancer on galactic society, and they had to be exterminated, root and branch. There was no choice.

The Empire has been the guarantor of Peace and Order across the galaxy ever since the Clone Wars ended, and I will use any power, destroy any being, do anything to prevent another descent into chaos like that from happening again.

Anyone who stands against the Emperor stands against civilization, and I stand for civilization as its protector. That service is all I have left. Thanks to Obi Wan and the Jedi, the Empire is the only legacy that I can leave behind.

With that story running through Anakin’s head, his actions over the next twenty years make sense. Leveraging his training as one of the protectors of the Republic, he allows nothing to stand in the way of the protection of his legacy. Anakin’s belief structure sustains him until he is hit with a series of shocks – His son is alive! And he has a daughter! The Emperor plans to include him in the next Imperial Downsizing! His son is about to die! Can this be what he committed all those evil acts, sacrificed everything he was, to protect? Can he allow his son be murdered in front of him rather than challenge Palpatine?

With our statement above as the mental background, that’s a pretty good story.

I was going to keep talking (ask my lovely wife) and touch on the implications of Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs to a character’s motivations, and the usefulness of the concept of a decision chain in looking at a character’s progression into villainy, but perhaps I should refrain and wrap up here.

Building a good character, especially a good villain, requires that the character is believable, and building a coherent (if twisted) mindset that clearly explains how that villain can justify to themselves continuing to consistently act within their particular manner of villainy over time will pay dividends across your story, especially in how these well rounded villains in turn will help flesh out your heroes.

Maybe you will even find out that, once well rounded, your villain has something of a mind of his own, and your story will become richer still.

And if that happens, that’s cool – a story with depth, and challenge, and development, and interesting people, some of whom try to kill other interesting people, for various interesting reasons, not all of which are clear all the time… THAT’s the kind of story I like to read.

Thanks for your time, and thank you Sarah for the opportunity to play in your sandbox.

—

Mike Brogley is a nascent writer, photographer, pilot and 25 year semiconductor industry veteran, currently between jobs and actively searching in the Silicon Valley job market, so if you know of an opening in marketing or program management, shoot him a message. Otherwise, just be glad he’s helping Sarah take a day off from the blog so she can write more shifters and darkship thieves and musketeers and stuff, as we all know how much we all want more of that, even if she won’t say “moose and squirrel”.

Mike comments on According to Hoyt as FlyingMike.

Alces et Sciurus mori debet!

As those of you who’ve heard me moan over the last month or so know, I’ve been on a steady diet of French Revolution.

This is enough to send anyone looking for a way to die before thing get to that point.

Mind you a lot of the accusations against  the ancien regime were right.  I found myself astonished at the stories of orgies in the reign of the regent which I came at sideways in The Black Count (highly recommended, btw.  The story of Alexander Dumas’ father.)  I knew the ancient regime had been sclerotic, unresponsive and – from our POV (not the one of the time, necessarily) morally flawed. But the way that revolution went wrong sometimes defies the imagination (though the problem started when they took equalite to mean in general, not just before the law.)

There will be a post about this, perhaps tomorrow.  Not today because I lack the necessary strength today, having woken up with a sinus headache.  A friend mentioned yesterday that non fiction takes more out of you than fiction.  And she’s right.

But today I thought I’d write about something else.  Yesterday we got someone presuming us ignorant and telling us “Benghazi is not a thing” with which words he hoped to redirect us… away from the murder of an ambassador while troops were ready to scramble.  Away from the fact that we haven’t even attempted to punish the culprits and from the fact that our then secretary of state and the President spent money on a video apologizing for an obscure you tube video they claimed had caused the incident.  (These are people so blinkered they think apologies bring anything but more violence in the world stage.  So blinkered they think that it’s fair to apologize for our freedom of speech to barbarians who kill their own children in ‘honor killings.’  SO ignorant of history they think it is logical or civilized to say “the future must not belong to the enemies of Islam”  Replace Islam with Christianity or for that matter Scientology and you’ll see how silly that sounds.  Who are you to pick the future religion of humanity Mr. President?  The leaders of Rome thought they could do that too.  When is the last time you made a sacrifice at the temple of Jove?) He also enlightened us by telling us that you know, both Progressive and Tea Party groups had been targeted – even though the very people pursuing the history of the IRS abuses have been scouring the lists for ONE, just ONE progressive group whose application was delayed, and while the Tea Party applications are in fact still mired in paper work – including being asked what their prayers are, if their members pray, and for other completely insane stuff along the same lines.

AND THEN he presumed to enlighten us about his sources of information.  Two I expected.  It’s what snot nosed kids (and cases of arrested development) think is authoritative before they realize what a great deal of bunk they were fed in high school and PARTICULARLY college: the New York Times (Home of Walter Duranty, apologist for Stalin’s worst excesses) and the BBC (coming from a country that is falling apart at the seams under rampant political correctness.)  But the third was a new one – do the young and stupid really consider Al Jazeera in English a reliable news source.  In Heaven’s name WHY?  These people belong to a religion and an ideology (the ideology supports the idea that their religion should own the world) that is at war with us.  They’ve not only declared war against us, they have attacked one of our cities – two if you count the Boston Marathon – and our interests abroad.  Not counting myriad foiled and not “small” attacks at home.  What kind of mental twist makes you consider enemy propaganda a news source?

Did their grandparents listen to Tokyo Rose?  Or to the German equivalent whose name escapes me now. Oh, wait a lot of them probably did.    The ability of the intelligentsia to embrace those who want to kill them is absolutely baffling.  I can never decide whether it comes from from absolute arrogance and certainty that nothing can touch them and therefore why can’t they be gracious and throw the “exploited” – as defined by them, of course – a bone? Or whether it comes from such abject fear they’ll throw their compatriots to the wolf in the hopes of being eaten last.  Or, as my friend Kate would put it “Yes.”

Anyway, that comment clicked in with what I’ve been listening to while cleaning, to take a break from the fricking French Revolution.  (What scares me is that the French Revolution situation is likely what we’re about to experience – being attacked from outside while we’re trying to fight it out among ourselves AND while the economy implodes.  Only we’re bigger and have better technology, which is feeding the “I wake up screaming” moments.)

Yesterday, in despair, and afraid I’d slit my wrists if I read about one more massacre and heads carried on pikes while the nation was bankrupt and other nations were attacking it, I loaded The Puppet Masters into the mp3 player.

It worked after a fashion – they win at the end.  But it’s not like I’m ignorant of the fact that the victory would be unlikely in real life.

That comment yesterday reminded me of this episode.

Zone Red swallowed up the task force as if it had never existed……..

By early morning, they had their visual evidence.  Stereo Stations in the central valley were giving out with the same old pap; Rise and Shine with Mary Sunshine, Breakfast With the Browns, and such junk.  There was not a station with the President’s stereocast, not one that even conceded that anything had happened.  The military dispatches tapered off and stopped around four o’clock and Rexton’s frantic calls were not answered.  Task Force Redemption of schedule Counter Blast ceased to exist – spurlos versenkt.

We’re faced with something very similar.  Faced with an administration that is doing all those things they claim to be against: spying on citizens; killing citizens without a trial; using the IRS to discriminate against their political enemies; laundering money to enrich their friends, and killing people who tan an interesting color in different countries for no good reason (I’m talking about Mexico, but maybe they’re not interesting enough for these idiots?) – the willing koolaid drinkers will buy the first excuse to come down the pike or no excuse at all.

I confess I’m less furious with them for taking the stupid excuses proffered like “Both sides of the spectrum were discriminated against” without looking further because it is human to trust “authority” as defined by the human, than for completely ignoring some of the events.

No “George Bush had Wide Receiver” is NOT an excuse for Fast and Furious.  And it shouldn’t be taken as that unless you’re stuck circa kindergarten.  And even in kindergarten, if I remember (before I got kicked out of it) that only excused minor infractions, like throwing cookies on the floor, not, say, beating the cat to death.  Fast and Furious is not a minor offense.  If Mexico thought they had a chance to beat us, it is casus belli – sending weapons to insurgent factions in the territory of an ally.  Wars have been fought over much less. (And for the idiots who are relying on Al Jazeera for reporting – Wide Receiver followed the guns, retrieved them, made arrests AND IT WAS DONE WITH THE MEXICAN GOVERNMENT’S COOPERATION.  Fast and Furious just sent a lot of UNTRACED guns south of the border because… either the administration is composed of brain damaged children OR because our “well spoken” president had said that most of the guns that were used in the Mexican drug war came from our “open” policy [in an attempt to bolster his unconscionable attempt to disarm our citizens.] This wasn’t even a lie.  It was so untrue it didn’t rise to the level of lie – it was just dumb.  BUT the king cannot be wrong so the minions hustled to make it the truth retroactively. I presume they’re not brain damaged children [I could be wrong, of course.])

So, no, it’s not an excuse.  But for people who feel threatened in their entire world view, (Look, they thought this would be a paradise by now if only Carter had been reelected.  They thought Reagan was a disaster, they thought – They believe the narrative, not their lying eyes.  Only the flagrant disaster that’s Obama is making that world view shake.  That must not be allowed particularly not when you think you’re SOOOO smart) it is a straw to grasp at.

What I resent more are the things they outright ignore – absorb and let go as if they’d never been.  Things they can’t avoid knowing about: Summer of recovery one, and two, and three, and…  Or that the Middle East is on the verge of eruption (No?  Why then are we closing embassies?) Or Benghazi.  My G-d, (and I’m not swearing.  I’d really like His attention to this.) HOW can they ignore Benghazi?  The excuse proffered has been proven so wrong even Obama admits it.  So how can they ignore it and keep on going.

We live in a republic, a form of government depending on the consent of the governed – and yet our government decides that some citizens in peril abroad should be abandoned.

He let them die abandoned, the COWARD.  Either because a failed rescue might hurt his precious re-election chances, or because he was actually using the Bathsheba option and Stevens was someone he wanted out of the way.  I hope – and pray, regularly – the last isn’t true.  I’d hate to think that of even he Stuttering Excuse of a Miserable Failure.  But the coverup is so intensive, so organized one can’t help asking “What else is hidden there?”

Benghazi would have made me furious even had I been – as I was at 9/11 – a capital L starry eyed libertarian and not the wiser but older (and not just in years) constitutional libertarian I am now. It might have been enough to wake me up.

And yet, they absorb it.  They absorb it as though it had never been.

How can they?

Easy, very easy.  Puppet Masters deals with this too.  Humans like life to be predictable.  They like to predict life according to their own internal narrative, which is often the strongest myth they were fed by school or media or a really convincing friend.

Invaders from space that control your brain?  Why would I believe that, when life goes on normally?  Oh, look, it’s Rise and Shine with Mary Sunshine.

In fact, people are able to ignore the most bizarre sights if they’re not reported locally.  I’m not the first, and I won’t be the last, to see armed men in dark clothes crawling through my neighborhood at night and immediately turn on the news to CONFIRM WHAT I SAW.  And ignore it if there is none.  (To be honest, where I live, it’s probably a military exercise, so I give it a lot of leeway, but all the same.)

Something like that is at work here – the media – or as I like to call them, the palace eunuchs – cover up scandals with bigger scandals and push the scandal to the back by the sheer enormity of the next scandal. Or they ignore the scandal, even when it’s obvious, and it’s as if it never happened.  It shouldn’t work but it does, because people want to forget and just live daily life.

In a way the President is being allowed a lot of leeway because EVEN I don’t want to believe his crimes are as heinous as they very well might be.  It destroys all my sense of security in the world.

And the other excuse is implied in my comment – the Puppet Masters in Heinlein’s novel, captured the brains of infected enemies.  They controlled how people processed what they saw.

In a collective sense we’re suffering from the same.  We’re such a big country, nobody can know for sure what’s happening everywhere.  I have family in some states and friends in some states, but not in others.  So we depend on the media.  And the media has been captured.  Oh, not by a brain parasite.  We should be so lucky.  The media has been captured by the alien ideology of Marxism which distorts everything they do and say.  (While Marx was useless and bug f*ck nuts, he at least lived in a time when EVERY ONE of his pretty theories hadn’t been proven wrong and there weren’t millions of rotting corpses disproving them. But ah – the theory is so pretty.  And so infantile even those who are not very smart but think they are can grasp it.  [Hint, those who are smart see the holes.  I did, after being taught Marxism in every course for three years.  No, not in America.])

They’re not seeing real life, they’re seeing Hegelian dialectic and classes rising up against classes and exploited and exploiters.  (Real life doesn’t fit neat categories.)  They’re seeing zero sum economics (no, it’s not.  The sum total of wealth in the world is much higher than it was in your grandparents’ day.  It can be created.)

So they report only what they can see through this distorted lens.  And people who rely on them are as effectively hag ridden as those captured by Heinlein’s alien parasites.

Unfortunately there’s no seven day fever we can use to kill the parasites and leave the host alive, and most of us feel sorry for the host.  Most of us were at a time or another and to some degree prisoners of the same monster.  It is the result of growing up in the 20^th century.

So… what do we do?

We don’t.  Reality will take care of it.  Just like the parasites in Heinlein didn’t take care of their hosts, and so the hosts would have died of one of the diseases that mankind has finally beaten back: bubonic or typhus, likely, our own parasites aren’t very good at taking care of the economy, so they will kill themselves and the society that supports them.

The trick here is to be ready when that happens.  Trust me, reading about the French Revolution has convinced me, more than ever, that what can’t go on, won’t.

BUT that doesn’t mean we embrace death and destruction and the endless night.  When things fall apart we must be ready.  Not just ready to survive, but ready to carry on with a civilized life.

Pain is inevitable – for all of us – when things fall apart.  But we must have in place alternative ways of communicating, of making a living, of keeping civilization alive.  Yes, even for the now hag ridden who might or might not wake up.

We will collapse – it’s the logical result of their having removed themselves from reality.  But when that happens we must make sure the collapse is as short and painless as possible.  We must be ready to rebuild.

In the end we win they lose – it’s the result of having reality on our side.  But reality will spank us both, if we’re not ready.

Be not afraid – and work on your plan B.

For previous chapters, click here

*This is the new free novel I’m posting here a chapter at a time.  This is pre-first-draft, as it comes out.  It is a sequel to Witchfinder which will soon be taken down (once edited) and put for sale on Amazon (It’s half done.  My wretched health this year delayed everything.  I hope to finish MY edits and cut and add this weekend — I almost made it last weekend —  at which point it will take another two weeks at the editor).  Meanwhile, if you donate $6 or more, I’ll get you a copy of Rogue Magic, once finished and edited, in your favored ebook format.  Of course, if you’re already subscribing to the blog at a level at which you get whichever books come out that year, you don’t need to worry. *

NOTICE: For those unsure about copyright law and because there was a particularly weird case, just because I’m making the pre-first draft of my novel available to blog readers, it doesn’t mean that this isn’t copyrighted to me.  Rogue Magic as all the contents of this blog is © Sarah A. Hoyt 2013.  Do not copy, alter, distribute or resell without permission.  Exceptions made for ATTRIBUTED quotes as critique or linking to this blog. Credit for the cover image is © Ateliersommerland | Dreamstime.com

A Night Escape

Akakios Phillandrus, Earl of Yelverton:

I’d let them change my last name, and I suppose “friend of mankind” was appropriate.  At any rate, we had no last names, and with the herd I’d only been known as Prince Akakios.  And I’d accepted the diminished title that Night Arrow, king of Fairyland, had negotiated with the king of Brittania.

It didn’t matter, at any rate.  I’d known when I left the herd with lady Caroline that I’d never go back again.  The prophecy said that to help restore the true king I must give up fairyland, and I did.  With a light heart?  Does anyone ever give anything up with a light heart when they’ve known nothing else?  All I knew from birth was the herd.  Even before I changed into my centaur form the first time at five, and was taken from my mother to the company of my father’s herd at six, the village was all the wives of the herd, and the children were those who went with me when I was moved to the herd, as same-year-colts and friends and companions.

I made the decision, I thought, with open eyes, but I hadn’t thought through all that it entailed.  No one could.

I know I am lucky to end up with a title and a fortune, but I’d thought that perhaps the Darkwaters would take me into their family circle and treat me as one of them.

Nothing prepared me for this school.

I did not get sent to Eton.  I believe it was well meant.  I was older than most students there, already, and also, I was too odd.

So instead I was sent to St. Agur’s.  St. Agur’s was a school originally funded by monks.  It wasn’t exactly a school for delinquent children.  And it wasn’t exactly a school for magical orphans, like those, charity and not, which dotted the land and catered to byblows of noblemen and common people; people conceived of elves and other fairykind; and the inexplicably magically talented commoner.

Instead, it was a combination of all three.  Oh, not delinquents as such, but young gentlemen who had trouble accommodating to polite society, sometimes because their parents had only recently ascended to their honors.

It wasn’t hell, exactly, but within a month I’d decided it was one of the antechambers.  I’d also decided first that His Grace of Darkwater could not know what it was like, and then that he probably did, and didn’t realize how hellish it would be for me.

First, because the things I thought were most hellish might not have bothered a normal human.  For instance, the first time I got severely scolded I didn’t realize it.  I got told that my performance in the game field wasn’t “quite the thing” and it wasn’t until the shunning administered by my classmates that I realized I’d transgressed rules by playing as we played in the herd, with full body and full force.  To have to reign in and fit in made me feel awkward, and I couldn’t behave like all the others if I tried.

Second because what made it truly hellish was the confinement.  I knew I couldn’t change into horse form in this world, and therefore must learn to live as a human.  But I dreamed every night of galloping through open fields, of running unhindered for miles, as we had in the herd.  I dreamed of fragrant fields, and I wondered how my orchard was doing back home.

It was as though I were a prisoner in this human skin, and unable to break out of it.

The Duke of Darkwater would see only that there were many boys my age and older, that we were almost all new to the nobility of this land, if not to this land, and that I might make friends.

I hadn’t made friends.  There was a lad who was a lion shifter, and who’d become sort of a protégée, but being 5 years younger than I, he was more little brother than friend.

I’d applied myself to my lessons – even with the herd, I’d been always eager to learn – and tried to get through this as fast as possible.

The one bright spot in this existence, and the reason St. Agur’s had been picked was that Caroline – Lady Caroline, that is, the sister of the Duke of Darkwater – whom I’d met in my adventures, and who was my affianced wife, bound by promise to marry me as soon as we came of age, had been put in a school just down the road.  My school was all male and hers all female.  We got together with her school for dances and picnics, for strolls in the park and for such social activities, so I saw her once a week.  And though I still wasn’t allowed to run, I could always talk with Caroline, and she would always understand me.

So when I woke up in the middle of the night with the warning running in my head, my first thought was of her.  And when I realized I was mid-shift, my only thought was of her.

I got off my bed, quickly, before it collapsed under my weight, and thanked all divinities that the Duke of Darkwater had paid extra to get me a private room.  I stood, on my four hooves, in the little room, and looked at myself in the mirror.  They’d made me cut my hair at shoulder length, but other than that, I looked as I did when I ran with the herd.

And that was wrong.  There shouldn’t be enough background magic on Avalon to allow me to shift. Wrong in the sense of disturbing, was also the warning that had awakened me, my father’s voice in my head, telling me the king had been replaced and kidnapped or killed by an hostile power, and that my land was under attack.  He said the prohibition on me to reenter fairyland might be moot, but if not, yet I must contact Lord Darkwater and make him help them.  The king of fairyland was Darwater’s half brother.  This concerned the family.  And Darkwater was the king’s Witchfinder, tasked with dealing with all magical problems from other worlds, and this was in his purvey.

This too necessitated Caroline.  But it was the middle of the night.  I could wait till tomorrow and ask for someone to send a message to Duke.  But, other than the sheer consternation at finding me in Centaur form, and perhaps demands to shift back, which I wasn’t entirely sure I could, magic feeling the way it did around me, I doubted they would send a message, or send it soon enough.

The easiest thing would be to take advantage of my own hooves – harder than the ones of Earth horses, and not in need of shoes – and get Caroline, and make it to the Darkwater estate as fast as hooves can carry me.

I looked at my image in the mirror and frowned.  Dark curls, broad shoulders, a bare chest.  The thing was, in the herd, I’d gone barechested, of course.  It was how we lived.  Oh, sometimes we tied on cloth for decoration, or bandoliers in which to carry things, but we didn’t wear clothes unless in human form.  BUT here, if seen running like this through the road, I’d be taken for some wild invader from fairyland.  And besides…  My image looked at me from the mirror with pursed lips, Caroline was a young lady of good breeding.  My bare chest would shock her.

So I opened my closet and brought out a clean shirt, and a jacket.  Stepping as carefully as I could so as not to wake the house, I went to the washstand where a pitcher kept water warm for morning washing up, and washed my face and hands.  I didn’t need to shave yet, which was good, as I didn’t wish to light a lamp.

In the band I’d have tied my hair back with a bandana, but here, I simply tied my hair back, as I did for lessons.

If you think creeping down a corridor and three flights of stairs on horse’s hooves is easy, you should try it yourself.  There is a reason people rarely ride horses up the stairs or, worse, down them.

It seemed like years later, and was probably half an hour, when I eased the latch on the back door and erupted out into the moonlight.  I was sweaty, shaky, nauseous, and feeling like this was the worst thing I’d ever done, and not just because of the climb down the stairs.  I was very afraid the Earl of Darkwater would disapprove.  But there was no remedy.

I closed the door again carefully, and waited till I was off the grounds and on the road to gallop.  Galloping felt so good I had to force myself into the grounds of St. Claire’s, the girl’s school.

Caroline had shown me the window of her dormitory.  I knelt to pick up pebbles from the driveway and started throwing them at the window.

Presently it opened.  I whispered as loudly as I dared at the form that appeared on it, “Caroline Ainsling.  I must see Caroline Ainsling.”

From the  window came a giggle and something that was not a whisper, though it might have thought it was.  “Oooh, Ainsling.  It’s a centaur.  And he wants you.”