The Audacious Masculine – or – The Devil Went Down to Georgia On the Railroad– by maryh10000
The audacious masculine is taking extreme, foolhardy, risks simply for the right to say, “I can SO do it!”
In “The Devil Goes Down to Georgia”, a Georgia musician bets with the Devil. Now there’s someone you can count on to keep his word! The contest: who is the better fiddle player?
The stakes for the musician could not be higher – he loses everything, his very soul. To win gains him a fiddle made of gold. But it is clear that this contest, for the musician, is not about money. A gold fiddle is useless for making music. The reason for winning is for bragging rights. It would prove that the musician is so good that even the most evil being in existence, an inveterate liar, cannot help but acknowledge him.
For the Devil, if he wins, he destroys another soul. If he loses (and why would he admit to loss anyway?) he loses only a meaningless bit of matter – a fiddle made of gold.
The modern folk song by The Longest Johns, “On the Railroad,” imagines a work song that could have been sung by the workmen, including freed slaves, whose back breaking labor built the transcontinental railway in the second half of the nineteenth century in the United States. “Sweat and blood gonna earn my pay,” they sing, and the grunts punctuate a tune that evokes a visceral sense of the immense physical exertion required; labor so hard that although the workman “ain’t no slave” he must “slave away,” where they “spare no quarter and… spare no man,” and each instructs the others that “if I should fall, leave me where I lay on the railway.” Grim, dirty, blood-soaked.
But in one of the middle verses, an audacious boast. The boss man has set a pace of a mile of railroad laid per day. And the workman sings back his boast: “I’ll make two for the look on his face.”
A stupid boast. Everything about the song says that a mile a day is already excruciatingly back-breaking labor. Why would the workman even try for two miles? What would he get for it except the boss’s expectation that he could try for twice the work per day that he had planned? And a more deadly pace for the workmen?
But the purpose of the audacious boast isn’t to win any material reward, just as it wasn’t for the musician. The musician must get even the devil to admit that he is the best musician, even should it cost him his soul. The railroad worker must stun the boss man with his sheer physical prowess, even should it cost him more sweat and blood and leave him fallen on the railway.
Why the audacious boast? What does each man gain by risking everything on something so meaningless?
In the end, each man triumphs over his opponent, who never had anything to lose, or even, actually, much to win.
The musician walks away from the devil, risking everything to play the fiddle the best that it can be played. And so, in risking everything in the boast, he becomes what he has boasted – the best. His music is better for his boast, and he has expanded what “best” means.
The railroad worker doesn’t walk away from the boss man. Not yet. Maybe not ever. Maybe he will fall on the railway to Frisco Bay. But he has given his sweat and blood and he has been paid. Even if he “slaves away,” this time he is “no slave.” He may have a boss man, but he does not have a master. If he makes it to Frisco Bay, he will have earned his pay, and while he has “dirt on his brow,” he also has “steel in his soul.” The boss man may only require a mile a day. But he knows he can do two. Because he is a free man and he chooses to so dispose of his labor.
The boast of the audacious masculine is that he will risk everything to go past what he has done before. If he fails, the price is catastrophic. But if he succeeds….
Through a mutual friend, I got something ESR said, and it struck me as profound:
“Voltaire can be inverted. If you’re willing to commit atrocities, this is a sign that you believe absurdities.” –
Eric S. Raymond
The context was a discussion of AI and AI advancements but that is not important right now.
The important thing is the actual meaning of those words.
We’re surrounded by not particularly bright or educated (though a lot of them are very credentialed and confuse that for intelligence), but very passionate people causally saying things like We need to reduce Earth population by several billion, or We must all stop eating meat, or We must stop using fossil fuels.
Each of those involves atrocities that would make Pol Pot blanch. Whatever they imagine, they have no idea what it would entail.
They might think all we need to do is stop reproducing. Say, sterilize most of mankind, and let population reduce quietly. But it’s never that way, of course. Even if you managed that, do you have any idea what removing people’s hope of connection to the future — most people’s only way to matter — and making them feel they don’t count? Ooh, boy. I could write an entire dystopian novel on the death and destruction that will follow. Entire industries would collapse, and the ability to feed those humans they left able to reproduce. The end of civilization comes shortly after.
Or let’s make meat too expensive and/or unavailable. Turns out — conversationally — children need a certain amount of animal protein to develop properly. And you have no idea what parents of a dying child will do. None. Again, I could write entire dystopian novels.
Stop using fossil fuels, this might sound very good if you are wealthy and live in an enclave where you can drive your electrical car everywhere and charge it everywhere and, oh, yeah, if you don’t know where electricity comes from. Not only is renewable negligible for electricity production, in the current state of tech, but to mine the materials for batteries is destroying (of course, poor continent) Africa and its children. And electric will never do for the transport of goods and materials that take to support a civilization. Not in current tech. And no, tech development is not something you an just create out of thin air by wishing it. The cold equations of physics are bitches that won’t move.
So, the various cities, states and countries happily jumping aboard the ban fossil fuels bandwagon are all on board to kill millions of people of famine and cold or heat. Atrocities.
And do they believe absurdities?
Ooh, boy, do they ever. Their minds are a collection of things that were never true with all the depth of a comic book for toddlers.
They believe that the great god science (not the process of inquiry and proof/disproof that goes under the same name) has said the Earth will boil in 12 years if we don’t stop using evilbad fossil fuels. They are shallow enough not to check about all the other failed doomsday predictions. (To be fair, some of them are actually children, in so far as college students these days are children.)
They believe there are too many people in the world. They never ask too many people for what. Or too many people where specifically. Or even How do we know there are too many people? because in absolute terms the data collection is mostly Pull From Air. No. They believe there are too many people in the world. Because they were told there are too many people. And if there are any more people, we’re all going to starve and destroy the Earth and offend science. Or whatever.
They believe we shouldn’t eat animal protein because…It varies, doesn’t it? Many of them it’s because “it’s bad to have to kill to live.” Which only means they haven’t looked around at the vaunted circle of life. Or they believe killing an animal is the same as killing a human. Or they believe that it’s somehow bad to be human and eat animals. Or farming causes global warming, and we’re all going to burn in 12 years. Or– The idiocy is gibberingly insane and none of these people has ever so much as visited a model farm, let alone lived near one.
All of these people, who look at normal humans with hatred — humans are a plague upon the Earth, you know — and do acts of casual destruction, like pour out milk in the grocery store, or destroy art, or glue themselves to roads, or pass legislation forbidding fossil fuel want to kill you and yours. In their minds, the perfect world starts with destroying humanity.
Some delude themselves about the extent of the destruction it would entail, but a lot — I have in mind an elderly, seemingly kindly SF fan, who once started talking glowingly about “Earth changes” and his eyes shone, and he became animated about how billions needed to die, so we could have a better humanity and a better future — do and rejoice in this.
The absurdities this hatred for humanity rests on, are puerile, even stupider than “if only everyone.”
When someone starts talking about the necessity to eliminate most of humanity, interrogate their motives. Chances are they are inane, a tissue of lies and wishful thinking.
Resting on nothing but an unearned assumption of superiority.
*Look, I’m an old woman, so let me get the health talk out of the way first. This one is definitely not auto-immune as younger son had it first — and is just getting over it after two weeks — and now Dan has caught it from me. I’m better today. Yesterday the thought of crossing the room to get a book, say, was too much effort. Today I managed the dishes, a load of laundry and intend to sort clothes. The house is a screaming pigsty, but it will wait till tomorrow. Yes, I feel like I can, but I won’t. I know better. I roasted a chicken yesterday, and we’ll eat on it for three days easy, (It’s a roaster) then make the leftover into pot pie. So…. we’re fine, and I think head is clear enough to write, as opposed to yesterday. There will be nappage. FIL still lingers between life and death. Dan saw him on his last lucid day, so that’s good. Some deaths are difficult, just as some births are. Prayers requested.– SAH*
Please, when reading this post, take in account that I’m just on the very beginning of coming back from a URI, which means depressive is a state of being.
However, over the last few months, I’ve come to observe something strange.
To give a little blog history: one of the first commenters here was BobtheRegisteredFool. I’ve come to actually think well of him over the years, and these days his comments, except for the occasional slip, not only make sense but are often amazingly insightful.
However, when he first came to us — he now admits — he wasn’t doing well mentally, emotionally and perhaps spiritually. He’s dealt with it overtime, so this is not a put down, but I’m wondering if when he came to us he was a good sensor for clown car meeting dumpster fire ahead.
I mean, when he first got here, Bob often tried to incite war with Canada. Supposing — ! — we deal with ourselves, and restore freedom, this is now almost inevitable, as they sink deeper into the morass of New and Improved Cuba! (Who knew the illusions of sixties hippies could lead to this, eh? Castro’s bastard trying to emulate daddy in the great North?) Considering that communism created starvation in tropical Cuba, surrounded by an ocean full of edibles, imagine what it will do to Canada. By the time we uncluster ourselves, it might not be so much a war, as a mercy invasion.
He also urged war with Mexico, partly to stop the drug trade. I’ll note war on the cartels is now on the agenda should Trump get elected again and this time make it stick. (I’ll note that I don’t even disagree with this. One of my last days in Denver, we got stuck behind a car with custom body work that declared the driver’s allegiance to the Sinaloa cartel. When that is out in public, imagine how bad it is.)
I don’t see where a war on cartels, doesn’t involve a war with Mexico, considering the cartels hold on Mexico.
Whether that will lead to also giving junkies the death penalty, I don’t know, I wouldn’t think so, but in Bob’s world, anything is possible.
Also, whether or not we’re going to preemptively nuke other countries, is a mystery. I mean, we probably wouldn’t do it under a Republican admin, but under this one? Your guess is as good as mine.
In fact, ladies and gentlemen, this being Bob’s world, I advise you to drink a bottle of Scotch then hit yourself on the head with a mallet, then consider what comes next.
That’s probably the truth.
I woke up this morning and looked at the Bongino Report and…. well….
With the understanding this is half in jest, half in WTF World? and a realization that this illness might indeed have come to me at the right time, because I can’t do much more than this stuff…..
Lean back and enjoy the ride. Be ready to react if some glimmer of sanity presents.
Or at least not dead. I’m not even — really == worse I just had a really bad cough over night, so didn’t sleep much, (mostly because I’d forgotten to buy cough syrup after the great coughening induced by blood pressure meds.)
And this morning I was really, really odd. I felt I couldn’t even. So this is the first time I got online all day.
I’m assured from watching this crud progress with younger son that the cough is the last stage and might drag three days, but I’ll be sure to have cough syrup on hand so I can sleep tonight.
Please forgive me. Worst part, I didn’t even write. Just grumpy and blah, and coughing.
Have you ever been in a car crash? I have. It was a nothing thing — okay, it totaled the car, but I walked away — but it’s at the basis of my driving anxiety. Sometimes I manage the anxiety. Sometimes I’m incapable to and don’t drive for years at a time.
Which is stupid, because I know what caused that crash. We’d moved an hour and a half away. We’d left my car at the old place, and drove back to get it on Saturday morning very early. So early I forgot my glasses on the bedside table. I have hellish astigmatism. In fact, back then I wasn’t nearsighted. I only wore glasses because of the astigmatism. I became aware I didn’t have my glasses on halfway there, and I drove back fine, being extra careful. Except ten minutes from the new home, a bunch of cars had got between Dan and I, and I was afraid he’d turn, and I wouldn’t make the turn at a light. So I rushed. And the experience of it is that a telephone pole jumped in front of the car. Of course, it was the astigmatism giving that illusion.
But the experience was everything is fine, everything is fine, oh, sh*t! And by then it was too late to do anything about it. In my mind, it is hours between realizing I was going to hit and there was nothing I could do, and actually hitting and destroying the car.
Sounds stopped, there was an unnatural silence, and time became taffy, extending indefinitely.
As a country, we’ve been locked there since 2020. Which probably also explains how you feel. Tired and anxious, and often hopeless.
Because you can tap the brakes and try to turn the wheel all you want to. It’s too late to change. There’s nothing you can do except anticipate how bad it will be, and hoping you walk away.
Only it’s more like a crash in WWI, which, yes, sometimes you could walk away from, but not often. And you could burn to death in the crash far more than in the car.
If you feel like what happened this week makes it more likely that we’ll be consumed by fire in the wreckage, you wouldn’t be wrong.
But there’s not much you can do. Except anticipate the crash and maybe make it more survivable by positioning yourself slightly differently, clenching or not clenching, moving slightly back so the airbag doesn’t kill you.
All you can do is think through likely — remember LIKELY. No, going back to the middle ages is not likely, unless we get hit by the Sweet Meteor of Doom — scenarios and anticipate what you’ll need, and what to do.
Looking at my experience with a car crash, above, some other things to take from it:
There is nothing you can do. There was nothing you could do due to the initial condition. In my case driving without glasses. In our case, FDR highjacked our system and made it vulnerable to this. This was done before most of us were born, let alone voted.
Time seems unusually lengthened. All those memes — the ones not made by glowies trying to get you to do something stupid — about the Founding Fathers and “Me and my homies would be stacking bodies” is because your sense of time is way telescoped. You’ve been aware of what’s going on before anyone “normal” was, because you’re a political junkie (the diagnostic circumstances are “you read this blog.”) The funding fathers were political junkies in their time too, granted. But they didn’t jump hot for a loooooong time. And they kept a toe in diplomacy to the end, so when war broke out they were still trying to petition the king.
As with a car crash, the tempo is ‘excruciatingly slow, then very fast.’ Once you hit that pole, you’re back to normal time, and you experience it as everything moving very fast, suddenly. Like coming out from a dark room into the light, you’ll be startled and blinded by the fact the light is magnified by your eyes being unprepared. Remember that, metaphorically, so you don’t lose your bearings/feel as if the world has gone mad.
Prepare, prepare, prepare. Sure, physically. But also mentally and emotionally. Prepare for what will be very hard though possibly/probably brief times when you might very well have to do what is for you unthinkable. We’ve lived ridiculously comfortable, easy lives compared to our ancestors. I don’t expect it to get to even 19th century level. But it will get tough. It has been noted in studies that people who think through possibilities experience less disorientation in a disaster or disruption, and are less likely to experience shock/depression. So prepare mentally. Prepare, prepare, prepare.
Until then, hang lose. And pray the Republic doesn’t catch fire in the crash. And we don’t all perish in it.
There will be a post after this, but not April Fools.
This one is a brief update on everything: FIL still lingering, though at the stage that you have to check the monitor to make sure he’s still breathing. He stopped being responsive, etc. once husband had left. We don’t wish him death, but there is pain involved and he’s doped out of his mind, and it’s just…. lingering.
Meanwhile cold/flu/wtf I got from younger son (he’s such a SHARING boy) has progressed past the fever stage, which means I slept…. uh…. a lot. I’m sitting here in my nightgown contemplating showering. Right now, the big issue is coughing and my voice going away.
I’m not 100% but writing SHOULD happen today. Fortunately it’s a sitting down and moving only fingers position. So not exactly tiring. And before you all yell at me yes, ma’ams and sirs and aardvarks, I will be taking a midday nap.
Of course, the crazy brain went “No fever! Let’s clean and finish unpacking!”
To be fair both need to be done before the kittens get here, but also I’m not stupid, so no.
I’ll finish this not an April Fool’s Post with links to April Fools of Yesteryear for those with an insatiable apetite.
*First to get the update out of the way: My FIL did in fact start accellarating towards death, once Dan had said goodbye. He’s not expected to live till tonight. We’d thought he was waiting to say goodbye to his only living son, and that seems to have been it. We are coping as best we can. It is, of course, very hard on Dan.
No, it’s no peaches for me either, (Note I skipped Insty posting last night) but it’s orders of magnitude easier.
Meanwhile I either managed to catch younger son’s … whatever it is that gave him walking pneumonia (He’s recovering) or I’m suffering from emotional reaction to the turmoil of the last few days. Six of one half a dozen of the other, but I’m tired and dragging and it’s entirely possible that I won’t accomplish anything but some administrivia today. Though I slept well, a nap is on the schedule.*
If you must walk on thin ice, you might as well learn to dance!
Which mostly is the art of the writer in these our “changing times.” (I love that expression because it implies other times didn’t change. Though i do agree our times are changing in some weird ways.)
And it might very well be the art of everyone. The art of living in the present as is. (Clown car, on fire, in a dumpster, but also a time of deep technology driven changes that might even be called a singularity, though not the singularity of fevered dreams.)
I’m coming to the end of many cycles, professional and life, all the same time. Very different cycles, both in roles, and in how much they’ve lasted and the impression they’ve left in my mind and life. But a lot of them, some expected, some sudden, dead-ending this week or the next couple of weeks.
It prompted my husband, Dan, to say over breakfast “It’s starting to feel like one of those things, like Repairman Jack’s (a series by F. Paul Wilson) “the spear has no branches.”
Since this is a process over several books in which all of the main characters close relatives and those he cherishes get killed off one by one, in order to forge him into the ultimate weapon (hence spear and having no branches) I was mildly alarmed. I pointed out if someone starts killing off those I love, the close in ones, I won’t be a spear, I’ll be dead.
But he said, “No, but more like the game table is being cleared for a new play.” Which… well, this is happening to both of us, at the same time. A lot of things that took a lot of our time, attention and concentration are being removed suddenly.
I choose to believe this is so I can write. Looks skyward: note if that’s the purpose I’d best get over this cruddy condition soon.
However, for various reasons, I’ve become aware of how fast and how much writing, as a field has changed these last 10 years, and how fast everything that goes into getting that book in your hands has changed.
To analogize (I like that, because it’s easier, and I feel cruddy) it is as though you were a guy who makes craft pencils out of little fallen branches. (Never mind, roll with it.)
11 years ago, before indie came on, you worked piecemeal for a company who sold these, and put them in stores. You gathered branches of the right side, cut them to the appropriate length and polished them so no one got a splinter, then sent them to the company which then drilled a hole in it, put in a lead and place them in stores. For this they took 90% of the income, and you lumped it, because without them you couldn’t get the pencils actually to be pencils, much less place them in stores, so the public could buy them.
Worse, there were only 4 companies nationally that sold these pencils; they all had their quirks and in general if you worked with one of them no one else would buy you. They told you how many branches they wanted from you that year and the specifications. And if you pissed off the company you worked for no one else would hire you, and you’d be unemployed. There were thousands of people who wanted to do this work, after all. (Again, roll with it.)
Sure, sure, there were those loonies who made the pencils in their garage, but they had to show them off the back of their car or at local craft fairs, and few were profitable, let alone making a living. Most of the self-drilled pencils sucked, which was worse.
Then the market opened through Amazon. You could sell your pencils directly to the public. But you didn’t have the equipment to drill (and it was expensive and had a learning curb) and you couldn’t buy the lead, except in bulk, so it was easier to get a subcontractor.
Your job was the same. You cut and polished the branch, then you subcontracted people to drill and insert the lead. Some people also paid someone to put it on Amazon and other online stores.
Nowadays, there are affordable widgets that drill the hole, you can buy small packs of lead and there’s a really cheap machine that inserts it. Then you bundle it up in a pretty ribbon, and put it up for sale in minutes. (I can’t find an analogy for copyediting, which sane indies still hire out, and which are, ultimately, pretty cheap.)
I feel pretty comfortable with things as they are right now, but of course there’s already rumbles of change. Amazon is doing strange things, so we have to find ways to sidestep. (What Ringo is doing with substack is brilliant. And it opens the door to other things, like real time writing competitions.) After all 12 years ago Smashwords was a major competitor in ebooks, and now they’re a punchline.
The only thing sure is that we don’t know what comes next. And that everything can change very fast.
To a great extent this applies to everyone. The technology innovations that allow for work from home and a highly distributed team were already there at the great lockdown of 2020. But the lockdown accelerated it very fast and in ways everyone running around screaming “This is the new normal” failed to understand.
There’s a new normal, indeed, but the new normal is not what they thought they were instituting.
In the new normal, working from home allows for more flextime and more distributed residence. Homeschooling might suddenly have become the new normal too. There is naturally a lot less driving, if you’re working from home (Husband and I are not feeling the pinch of the high gas prices like we did in 08, because largely our drives are jaunts to the grocery store, a drive to church and a longer trip once a month or sometimes once every two months. We grumble about it, but it’s not the hair on fire thing it was 08 through 16.
I honestly don’t think most people have fully processed this. There has been a great migration, but I think it’s a fraction of what it will be.
Just like in 11 when I started publishing indie even though I felt I was coming at it very late, it was still the wild frontier, with most writers not even registering it existed. Heck, even now, only about half do. The perennial advice to someone who has a book that doesn’t fit their house, or who wants to do something different is “Go to x small press.” When in fact, you no longer need it. Great advice for 1999.
People process change far slower than things are actually changing. And those of us who went “Oh, so this means we can–” are way ahead of the curve.
Even now, companies having realized their beautiful offices are useless are trying to force the workforce back into them. And failing, as work from home has opened the work market to the entire country and in some cases the world, so forced employees escape faster than nomads forced into government housing in Africa.
The outlines of all the echoes of this massive change are only barely visible. Our institutions aren’t even vaguely prepared. Heck, they’re not aware of any of this. Look at how the idiots in charge are trying to find ways to force people to drive less that include moving to large cities. Bah. As well flow the water back into the faucet.
I can see many things coming, from perhaps clusters of decent restaurants appearing wherever little towns are close together that the work from home populace can go to one or the other at will, but I can see a ton more interest in cooking from home as well. I can see delivery services from places like Sam’s club becoming super-popular, if their customer base is more widespread. I can see services catering to homeschoolers. And I can see in the not so distant future dating sites that list your resume, because hey, if you’re both coders — or writers, or editors — having one fill in for the other, or even having someone who understands your work is a great enhancement to a marriage, and makes things far more flexible. (Yes, that sounds weird. But more or less weird than picking up someone because they dance well, or whatever?) I can see more age-integrted environments, as the young stop heading to the cities for dating opportunities and beginning jobs.
Will all of them come through? Probably not. We’re dealing with second and third and fourth order effects in a very complex environment, but some of them will. Along with a lot of others I can’t anticipate.
And the inner Libertarian would like me to remind you that the reason it all feels stressful and apocalyptic is that over the 20th century we concentrated power and regulation as much as possible in the largest possible body of government.
Since the innovations are by nature distributed, I keep seeing these institutions behave exactly like traditional publishers when indie came in. Only with guns, lawyers, and armies of rioters on the shady side.
They’re trying as crazily and desperately possible to hold onto power that is flowing or has already flowed away from their grasp. And everything they do to hold on (What DO you think the lockdowns were really for? Well, okay, to also do shady election things, but that was all part of it. Trying to force us to obey, d*mn it.) backfires and accelerates the change, because that’s the nature of great changes. You can see this after the Black Death too. But they weren’t as centralized, so the crazy stuff was mostly local.
Anyway, we’re dancing on logs floating down the river. It’s taking us where we want to go, but boy is it a balance act.
Or if you prefer, what a long, strange trip it’s been.
Because my life is a novel, there is an overarching theme playing itself out throughout all the events right now. I’m not going to rewrite the report of it, because I just did it over at Mad Genius Club.
If you want a detailed-ish report of what is going on, head over, I’ll wait.
Back? Cool.
I feel a bit like I was hit on the head with a spar today. Now a great part of this is that I have slept about 3 hours, and unfortunately that’s been going on for a couple of weeks, because of ongoing death in the family and its affecting Dan’s sleep and work cycles, which in turn affect mine.
I feel like I should be telling you something deep, profound, earth-shaking about all of this, but mostly I just feel loopy.
On the other hand, years ago — Dear Lord, my kids who are now thirty something and closing in on thirty, when did that happen, were toddler and pre-schooler — Kris Rusch told me that staying alive in writing is a matter of rolling with the punches and reinventing yourself.
And in a way, I was born for this. I grew up in unstable, sometimes outrageous times, and came of age — in my thirties — at the beginning of the age of catastrophic change.
I’ll let Deej hit it in the comments, but yeah, I’ve seen empires fall and a new age be born. I’ve seen promising beginnings brought to nothing, and things despaired of return, stronger than ever.
And we all know what I’m hoping for for the Republic, right?
I’d link the Ragehaolic’s rant on Lincoln, but since it’s a forbidden topic in the comments, I won’t. Let’s say that the Republic has been dying since it was born, and it’s gone through worse times than this. Again find good contemporary writing on Woodrow Wilson and FDR. Someone who has more time than I do and doesn’t have his/her mind eaten by worlds trying to come to life that have waited far too long should do the research and write something about how bad and how dark it got — governance and freedoms wise — during that time.
In many ways we’ve been clawing the republic back since FDR. And our progress has accelerated the last thirty years, partly due to catastrophic technological innovation.
But catastrophic is there for a reason. It feels like our world is ending. And in a way it is. It’s just not OUR world. It’s the world we grew up with; the constraints we accepted and thought were eternal.
This throws us in a soup of possibilities that’s both exhilarating and terrifying.
As I pointed out in Mad Genius Club, it’s weird being considered an old woman of the field. Particularly since in many ways I’m just starting out.
Heck, I’m only now writing a series that I conceived of at 14.
Human life on this Earth is a blink. Life is eternal. The movement of humanity is slow and very long.
What we do today, even though it might not look like it, even some little things, echoes into forever.
And all we can do is make the moment count, and make those echoes ring loud with freedom and joy and humanity.
Let’s live forever!
*The images are copyright by me, and are released under CC BY to anyone who wishes to use them. Have fun.
I’m tired. Today, while trying to write I was struck by a weird combination of anxiety and mourning, for no reason I can figure out, except perhaps exhaustion. It kept me checking the news every 2 minutes, also for no discernible reason.
And when I sat down to write a post, it seemed like I couldn’t find a theme, until started searching for a post to use as a blast from the past. And then I ran across this post from 2015 which I excerpted bellow.
I was suddenly and startlingly aware that this must be said (again) and that it explains why we’re all exhausted, and why even people of good will on the left can’t seem to understand they’re not fighting the monsters that exist only in their imaginations, and why if we engage them and they’re at risk of having their world view upended they become hysterically defensive.
And why they, so often, rewrite overnight.
It’s not that they’re NPCs. It’s not that they’re less human than we are. It is that they belong to a culture, they were taught a history, and given a mission. Their mission, their view of themselves in this world history makes them who they are and gives their world meaning.
We’re humans. None of us sees the world unaided by the lenses of our culture. This is why acculturation is so difficult, and will leave scars, and why it feels like going insane. In many ways it is like going insane. Your entire view of the world dissolves, and another replaces it. It’s like reality dissolving before your eyes.
Which is why the human solution to absorbing another culture — and perhaps the most human solution. Stop staring at me like I’m crazy. I’ve been thinking really strange things all day, and perhaps I am — is to kill the adults and raise the kids in the winning culture. No, I’m not suggesting anyone do that, but it is what was done throughout history. (Sometimes women were kept too, but that wasn’t the kinder fate.)
[I can see in my future a sword and sorcery story from early times, that I don’t want to write, but probably will. Because I’m trying to puzzle these mechanics out and I think in fiction. I think by running imaginary scenarios.]
THIS is the excerpt that gelled my thoughts such as they are, on our national moment. It is from deep in the puppy years, and it…. feels like it. I’m cutting out the name of the person I’m talking about, not to ressurrect old fights, because this is NOT about that.
BEGINNING OF EXCERPT:
But one thing is to know it instinctively – and even then when I write about it, people email me to tell me that I am wrong and “paranoid” and yeah, one is always afraid – and another to have one’s nose rubbed in it in the form of a supposed adult saying with the simplicity of a 12 year old that the people who oppose her are “racist, sexist, homophobic” and “bad to reprehensible” even before the “poopy-head” level classification of “neo-nazis.”
Look, it is the fact that [NAME OMITTED] is sincere and, in her own mind, fighting on the side of angels, that is shocking and scary. And it fits perfectly with what I’ve seen in the publishing world (other than Baen, natch) in my years working as a professional writer.
These people don’t live in the world we live in.
Most of us – well, some of us – went through excellent universities, and read voraciously, and were subjected to the barrage of media that projected the same mental picture [NAME OMITTED] has: the left is eternally right (when they were wrong, their mistakes – like segregation – are now attributed to the right) and the future is a bright socialist utopia (really communist, but we’ll call it socialist so as not to scare the squares) and anyone who stands against it is an evil right winger, a fascist, a neo nazi and by definition racist, sexist, homophobic.
The thing is that this view was propagated pretty uniformly from the academic/media/entertainment complex for most of the twentieth century and people absorbed it to some extent. But most people in the real world come across enough stuff that doesn’t fit, or perhaps read enough about the fall of the Soviet Union to know it’s not just “this time it will be different” but the system itself is flawed.
And some of us come to view individual rights, individual conscience and individual freedom as the only best system (not perfect. No system is perfect.)
But that’s because the places we work in, the world we move in isn’t a unified front. Those who stay in academia, those who go into the arts or into publishing, though, move from a world of being fed a message into a world of being fed the same message. Not only is there no incentive to doubt, but doubting or showing any wobbling of belief will be detrimental to you. You stay within that world because it’s safe and because it’s what everyone around you believes. How can everything you know be wrong.
This was particularly emphasized by the fact that the Second World War was excised entirely from East German education at the time, and they were only taught about ‘The Great War’ – what the rest of the world was calling World War I. Socialist Germany was a big exercise in erasing the past and reconstructing it in a great big lie – and somewhat inconveniently, there were still people who remembered WWII. It was a verboten subject, and the younger generation knew nothing of it. They didn’t believe that someone as evil as Hitler could have ever existed.
Dad, the Aristotlean gadfly that he was, liked to smuggle in copies of Mein Kampf and give it away as gifts, his own little subversive fight for the truth. I know he horrified one of our babysitters with it, who was a college student and an avowed Marxist who enjoyed being able to pit wills and philosophical arguments with ‘someone unfortunate enough not to be educated in Socialist education.’ It was her awakening into questioning what she knew.
One of the people working at the consulate fell in love with an East German woman. The only way they could marry was if she escaped East Berlin, and so he smuggled her out. The details of that I don’t know, but I remember my dad saying she was struck dumb for three days from sheer culture shock after she saw West Berlin for the first time – and realized that everything she’d been raised to believe, and had known as truth was in fact a carefully manufactured and maintained lie that was possible only through total control of information. Everything had to be spoon fed. They had to develop a disdain, to instill contempt, pity and aversion to Capitalism, America and other countries on the other side of the Iron Curtain.
In a way [NAME OMITTED] lives in a similar world. A world in which some verities are so absolute they can’t ever be questioned.
END OF EXCERPT
Other people have said this. Other people have talked about the “two different movies” in the head of the left and the right.
Would that it was only that; that it was only superficial indoctrination. But it’s not. It’s something more than that, something that reaches far, far back, and that in the west, in the current time and place, had hardened into a complete encasing reality and culture that can’t and won’t be challenged. Because if it’s challenged, people defend it harder. It’s the only way they can stay sane within their own views, their culture.
This is why in the culture wars when we call out gross and horrifying evil from the other side, we find ourselves accused of things that don’t even make sense.
Take the whole puppy thing, (Please, not actually, because Larry has threatened anyone who picks it up under that name with the wrath of Larry) but look at it.
We were a gonzo band of idealists, half of us — more or less. I never actually counted, partly because there was the inner ring, the outer ring, the outer, outer ring, and the ululating multitudes — women, the other half … well, men of such varied backgrounds that they can’t be lumped as anything in particular. However, one thing is sure certain: not a single one of us was an editor. Not a single one of us was a publisher. Not a single one of us — even — was wealthy. I don’t know the background of every single one of the 100 or so people I interacted with that year, and at any rate those three years or so are very foggy because I had major surgery that had problems healing, and took more painkillers than at any other time in my life (Not opiates, which make me ill, but pain and pain killers are both exhausting.) However, I don’t think a single one of them was born wealthy or from a powerful family, though some were bestselling authors and doing relatively well. (In a profession where you can make a lot of money one year and none the next, mind.)
In our simple and frankly simple-minded way we tried to rally the fans themselves to rescue an award that had been won by people we respected from thralldom to pseudo literary pretentiousness.
Against us, everything was marshaled, from international publications, to whispers in private gatherings. From claims of our origins which made no sense, to weirder things, including threats to our children and spouses. The truth which we didn’t realize at the time, is that we were threatening people’s paychecks. You see we, innocents that we were, were all workers in the word vineyards, creating something for the masses to consume, for which we wanted to be paid. But the top tiers of our field, the revered ones, were those who were writing not to be read, but to receive awards for their correct world view, which in turns translated into either amazingly well paid academia and consultant jobs and/or Hollywood jobs.
We were chumps who believed in writing for readers’ enjoyment. But our insanity in trying to give awards to people we enjoyed reading was threatening their livelihood.
NOTE that all of them were powerful people, with contacts well beyond ours. They might not make much money from writing, but they all had well known names as “smart” (leftism is a positional good) defenders of leftist ideology. They COULD get us slandered in international publications. We mostly took to our blogs.
If this starts to look like our current political situation, you’re not wrong.
However, over all, and still subsisting in many official pages the most bizarre and strangest thing is the narrative they peddled, and which people believed:
That we were powerful people, afraid to lose our power, and therefore we were trying to keep “women, gays, people of color” (some of which were in our number, some even in the inner circles) from writing science fiction. And that our entire effort was this repressive attempt to keep minorities down, so we could remain powerful.
It is bizarre that this narrative was ever accepted, since we were writers, who in the general run of the publishing world have the right to only two things: sell the work of their minds, and get paid for it.
One of the amusing after-shots of this whole mess was the writer who accused me of getting him blacklisted at Baen (this after I was dumped by Baen, incidentally.) This was someone nominally on our side, and I could only stare at the level of sheer insanity.
Sure, maybe Larry who makes most of their money could get someone blacklisted at Baen. Frankly, I doubt it. I doubt it, because publishers don’t like it when you dictate to them. I mean, not that Larry would do that to anyone, but if they had another, less scrupulous bestseller who tried to do it, I doubt it would work.
But except for Larry, the rest of us were at best midlisters. maybe midlisters with some following, but you know, none of us was a major figure.
So what power were we afraid to lose? Supposing we were racist, sexist and homophobic (the people who read me and can say that with a straight face need their heads examined) and wanted to keep minorities from being published, what were we intending to do to bring this about? Stop them getting awards? Shit, honeychild, none of us at that point had got any awards. If not getting awards kept you from getting published, none of us would be published. (Oh, sorry, I’d got the Prometheus. And I love my Prometheus win. But it wasn’t the make or break for “I’ll continue writing” or I’d have given up in the 12 years since.)
The idea that we were these powerful beings, jealous of our power and wanting to keep it, was so crazy bizarro — particularly when one of our major opponents was the largest publishing house in the business — that it should have been laughed out of the room.
That it wasn’t tells you how deep the indoctrination is.
We were saying that preachy lefty fiction is not the best fiction, and therefore in the culture of the left, honed and polished over a century in all institutions of learning and in all arts and publishing and mass communication, we must be on the side of oppressors. We must be racist/sexist/homophobic. HAD TO BE. Because otherwise reality would dissolve.
And so people, good bad and indifferent, and of all levels of intelligence, piously repeated a story which rationally, on the face of it wouldn’t fool my cat Havelock, who is, frankly, mentally disabled.
They had to. Because if they didn’t, the world was not what they thought, and they couldn’t go on. They just couldn’t.
And if you’re thinking of all the people, good bad and indifferent and everything in between who piously believe that BLM really was about black lives — and who also, despite video evidence — believe Kyle Rittenhouse killed black men, not white psychopaths. Or piously believe a guided tour of the Capitol by unarmed people was “an insurrection.” Or who really, piously believe that Covid 19 was the worst thing ever, fully deserving the Covidiocy treatment. Or–
Yeah. That’s what it is. They have to believe the institutions and means of information they always trusted, otherwise their world will dissolve. And they’ll swallow the most ridiculous lies to keep their world and their guideposts intact. Because otherwise they’ll undergo a mental experience much like a primitive whose tribe has lost a war and who is unfortunate enough not to be killed: he’ll have to change everything about himself involuntarily.
This is not invincible. It’s getting broken little by little.
What level of cognitive dissonance does it take for it to break?
Well, it didn’t break for the Germans when they could smell the smoke of the burning human bodies down the road. It didn’t break for them when their nation became desperate enough to recruit old, broken down men and beardless youths.
They still believed in the glorious Reich of a 1000 years. It’s just fewer believed it every day, and that the daily breakdown of civilization was exposing more and more of them to the fact they believed a lie.
Now, some never stopped believing it. I heard them mutter darkly in German about the horrible Americans who had destroyed the German dream. Not shaved-head neo-nazis, but normal guys, in a pub, after hours.
But the problem isn’t that. The vast majority of them did give it up. The problem rather is what they boomeranged into, because of the underpinnings of their culture.
They still believed in their own superiority. As well go back to the Germanic tribes, and uproot that. They still believed in strong-man government. They just fell into soft and increasingly hardening socialism.
Now, we’re not quite as bad as the Germans were, and the underpinning of our culture are different — thank heavens — and more and more people are waking every day — thank heavens on that too — because the people who took over in the color revolution are the most bumbling, bizarrely incompetent bunch of aspiring-morons in the history of humanity.
We used to marvel at some of the Roman Emperors and how they managed to stay in power, but the Romans didn’t have fast means to distribute individual opinion. We do. And yet we’re suffering through the reign of someone more imbecile and self-adoring than Commodus.
People are waking up.
Again, calm the effe down, they’re not the majority. if they were the majority, they would not have bothered developing the most exhaustive means of stealing elections ever known or turned our elections into a mockery of the word. My best estimate is that they are about 20 to 25% of the population. Because if they were any more than that they wouldn’t need so many crazy ways to circumvent our voting.
But 20 to 25% is a huge number, given what we know, what we’ve seen. It’s a massive number of people who believe a narrative that’s patently and obviously false.
In this war we’re fighting to save our nation, people who otherwise would be on our side, are fighting on the other side, convinced we’re some kind of ogre coming to devour everything good and worth fighting for. They see us through a deep fog of lies and distortions. Many of the, perhaps, are aware of what they’ve become and assume we must be the same only worse.
Imagine how hard you’d fight someone who had all of your worst characteristics magnified.
In the end we win they lose.
But Lord, the magnitude of destruction that will be needed to lift that fog of lies.
And Lord, how many good people we will lose fighting on both sides.
And even so, may the fog be lifted. May we see clearly.
And may we have the courage not to close our eyes.
According To Hoyt 