I’m even doing fairly well.  The cold is almost gone and I can write for the first time in a week.
I’ve just been busy AFK and will be for the next two hours at least.
I promise things will calm down after this and I’ll be more trustworthy.  For now, amuse yourselves with this:

Slavery and Freedom

The Promo is Back in Town by Free Range Oyster

J.M. Ney-Grimm

Sarvet’s Wanderyar

Running away leads right back home—or does it?

Sarvet walks with a grinding limp, and her mountain culture keeps girls close to home. Worse, her mother emphasizes all the things Sarvet can’t do. No matter how gutsy her spirit or bold her defiance, staying put means growing weaker. Yet only boys get wanderyars. Lacking their supplies and training, how can Sarvet escape?

Can dreams—even big dreams—and inner certainty transform impossible barricades into a way out?

Ken Lizzi

Thick as Thieves

Fantasy makes crime no less shabby and thieves no less thick. Brick, ex-soldier turned tavern bouncer, lets loyalty and a woman involve him in a caper. Glum Arent, alcoholic poet, needs only greed and wine-addled imagination. Magic, treachery, and bad decisions drive a simple heist from farce to tragedy. Can any of the thieves survive the mishaps and double-crosses?

Cyn Bagley

She Called It, Wolf

EJ Hunter, Book 1

When her uncle calls EJ back home to Felony Flats, a tiny reservation community in Nevada, she is unaware that werewolves and other werekin roam this desert.

Plus she is already in trouble for transforming into a werewolf and saving her teammates from an assassin. This soldier is coming home after early retirement to a world filled with werecats, supersoldiers, and wildfires.

Then she meets the Alpha, Sheriff Adam.

Hans G. Schantz

A Rambling Wreck

Book 2 of The Hidden Truth

He’s a Ramblin’ Wreck from Georgia Tech!

Off to college for the education he’ll need to defeat the guardians of the hidden truth, Peter must infiltrate a deadly conspiracy, thwart an attempted social justice takeover of the school, save his professors from assassination, and somehow find time to study for finals.

The stakes are now higher than ever. To succeed, Peter must discover who burned down the Tolliver Library, find new allies in his fight, and secure the assistance of the legendary George P. Burdell himself.

 

Sunday Vignettes by Luke, Mary Catelli and ‘Nother Mike

So what’s a vignette? You might know them as flash fiction, or even just sketches. We will provide a prompt each Sunday that you can use directly (including it in your work) or just as an inspiration. You, in turn, will write about 50 words (yes, we are going for short shorts! Not even a Drabble 100 words, just half that!). Then post it! For an additional challenge, you can aim to make it exactly 50 words, if you like.

We recommend that if you have an original vignette, you post that as a new reply. If you are commenting on someone’s vignette, then post that as a reply to the vignette. Comments — this is writing practice, so comments should be aimed at helping someone be a better writer, not at crushing them. And since these are likely to be drafts, don’t jump up and down too hard on typos and grammar.

If you have questions, feel free to ask.

Your writing prompt this week is: tremendous

I swear yesterday’s was stream of consciousness.  Sorry.  Almost all better from the cold, but need to write on Guardian and also posts for pj…

So, my post for PJ this week, in case you missed it is here:

Why We Must Go to the Stars.

Sorry, I really have no excuse other than I feel like playing hooky.

I liked my mom’s edition of Cinderella better than the one Disney put on, much less the ones that were immortalized in sappy picture books all my friends seemed to have sitting around the house.

Part of it was, yes, that I was a rather sanguinary little brat, at least in my entertainment (in reality I was so tender hearted I rescued insects and lizards in peril of drowning in the washing tank.)  I did after all devour the rather extensive collection of Captain Morgan’s adventures, all the blood and gore immortalized in litographs with a page of transparent paper protecting them.

But part of it was that it was more… satisfying.  You see, in mother’s version, Cinderella had decided to make her father marry the widow woman in the next estate because this woman petted her much and gave her sweets.

Cinderella’s father told her he’d marry the widow when the pockets of his hunting jacket wore out, so Cinderella stuffed them with salt, to corrupt the leather.

So when she found herself semi-enslaved, she’d brought it on herself, which was far more satisfying than the “out of nowhere, she’s a victim.”  She also contrived on purpose to summon the fairy godmother, so cleaning up her own mess in a way.

Yes, this book also contained the redemption of the evil plot devices er…. I mean step sisters who are transformed into statues until they realize the error of their ways, and then married to likely noblemen.

BUT it is Cinderella’s arc that’s most satisfying.

I’m not ragging on Harry Potter, mind.  I like Harry Potter.  But we were talking about this yesterday in the comments, and both his being ill treated by his family and his specialness are things he was born with (Magic and the ability to be the boy who lived.)

So he is a hero because he was born into the role.

Yes, I know, in the end he has to fight and make the right choices, which is much, much better than what we see otherwise, but let’s be real, okay?  He starts out special just because he’s special.

A lot of main characters these days seem to be that way because they were born into the role.  The hidden prince did nothing to bring about his downfall or his redemption.  Now this has worked through since pre-history, at least if we assume Oedipus as a hidden prince of sorts, but when most stories are like that, it leads one to expect nobility of birth, as it were.  Which is very antithetical to the American idea but quite in keeping with leftist notions in which you belong to a group by birth (their having come right around to feudalism.).

One of the things I like in Heinlein’s books (and in older works of Dumas, or of Scott or a dozen other writers) is that heroes got into their trouble by their own hands, and got out of it the same way.

This is not just an aesthetic opinion.  It builds the expectation that you’re expected to do something, even in hopeless situations.

Perhaps that’s why the super-hero trend, even when I enjoyed some of the movies, hit me the wrong way.  If common people are in the expectation that they can’t do anything to save themselves, it becomes all too easy to wait for the super hero, the pre-ordained being or the perfect president to rescue them.  And in their absence to decide to burn it all down.

That’s not who we are.  We are Americans — every man a king — and each of us should do what we can to get ourselves out of bad situations, whether of our own device or inherited.

There is no one perfect or preordained to save the world.  You either save your own little piece of it or not, and you’re not required to be perfect to make a great difference.

Just do it.

 

 

There will be a post later…

So yesterday, for those who haven’t dug through the comments, we suffered an infestation of the troll who speaks in single sentences, doesn’t make much sense, avoids answering questions, misreads everything you said, and responds with unearned superiority.  Oh, yeah, and hails from Boston.  I know, until that last you thought it was a normal troll.  But it’s not.  He distills the essence of trolldom to such an art form it’s like playing chess with a pigeon.

He’s now gone, but his opening gambit was actually interesting.  Should you compromise your principles to stand with your homeland when it is at war?

Now, that’s not how he put it, or what he meant, and when he said he’s loyal to “principles” not a country, it makes me wish very much he’d immigrate to Venezuela already, where his principles are in obvious display.

But are we loyal to the USA or the constitution?  For which would you fight?  Does the land mean anything.

Sigh.

Different order problems.  Yes, I’m a constitutionalist and the Earth and Sky shall pass away before they dim a single letter or punctuation mark of that immortal document.

And of course I will fight for the Constitution.  I took an oath and meant it, and I do keep it.  Part of what this blog and the inevitable hit on my career are all about.  I fight for constitutional principles where it matters: in the land that is already supposed to be devoted to it.

Even there I compromise — more on that later — because politics and culture is not a “I shout the truth and you believe it” but a give and take, a slow turning.  It’s more akin to sailing in a storm than to a race to the finish.

But once you bring in “war against another country” you are in a wholly different territory.

I’ve told you before, and it’s my perennial fear, our internal divisions which are amplified by the fifth column press might encourage a foreign power to attack us.  And that’s a problem.  If it were just us in the world, sure a civil war might be a fine idea to clear forever some of the crud that has crept into the national gears.  (It’s not a fine idea, but never mind that, it might be DOABLE and the result better than worse.)  But the problem is that a continent-sized nation though we are, we are not alone in the world.  If we start going at each other, other nations will start going at us, breaking us up, partitioning us off, and the end result is more likely to be the disappearance of anything vaguely “USA-like” or even capable of bringing back the constitution.  For centuries.

But surely, you say, if our internal regime is utterly despicable, it still behooves us to work for the enemy, right?

I don’t know.  Note the best known case of resistance to the Nazis was not internal, but a country that had been OCCUPIED by another country, and even there I have read that the only effective parts of the resistance were the communists, who were effectively working for yet another foreign power.

BTW if you read first hand accounts in occupied France the “dance with the devil” aspects of survival become very stark, from those who saw the occupation as a means of advancement to those willing to do the most soul crushing things just to keep their loved ones alive another day.

And in the end, whether to support your country “right or wrong” boils down to that.  Those of us who read history know what happens to occupied countries.  It’s not a fate we want for our relatives, friends, or even, frankly, casual acquaintances.

In the US add to that “which polity can I possibly bring about to the founding principles after the storm passes.”

So, say Hillary had won.  By now we’d probably be thinking of Obama’s years as that golden age of respect for civil liberties.  Now imagine that her normal fine-tuned sense of politics got Russia or China to attack.  Nuke a few cities.  Perhaps land troops or get cat’s paws to.

Would you fight for the US in those circumstances?

Look, it’s not even a question.  Hillary as a leader would be utterly despicable, and her rule would probably destroy what remains of the constitution.  But the enemy is equally despicable.  And besides, it would be coming in as a victor.

Okay, okay, so what about if the enemy was semi decent?  Posit a weird universe in which we’re invaded by England.

Uh… still no question.  We won’t go into the fact that the things we object to in the US are more so with boots on in England, from restrictions on free speech to the disarming of the populace.  Instead, let’s just keep in mind even decent nations behave very badly as victors.  And most of us have people we care for, whom we’d not see killed or worse.  Also, most of us want the US kept as a territory where the constitution can be brought back.

So the order of business would be: fight for my country, THEN reform it.  Because trying to reform it in the middle of an existential struggle would be death for the nation, and bringing a nation back from the dead — in the only case we know — takes thousands of years.

But Sarah, you’ll say, this started out as being over Von Braun’s decision to fight for Germany even though his father at least loathed Hitler.  Surely a regime under which they fed people a paste made of cellulose and old clothes as a way to test what people could live from (and killed 98% of the people fed this) not to mention a regime that killed six million of its citizens cannot be something you fight for AGAINST ANYONE.

Uh… True on the regime, except that amid the allies was good old uncle Joe — and talk about making a deal with the devil there — who went on to kill 40 million of his people and whose engineered famine engendered families swapping children FOR EATING in the 20th century.  I’ll note here in passing that Von Braun’s family land was in the East, the part everyone pretty much knew would go to the USSR’s sphere of influence if not outright occupation.

And then there’s being there, at that time, and not having the advantage of hindsight.  One thing it’s obvious from his correspondence was that Von Braun was half in love with America from reading YA adventure stories about it.  But if you’re in the middle of a war and you know your side is despicable, no matter how inclined you are to believe/welcome the invaders, when you realize these countries you THOUGHT you liked, like the US and England, are allied with the horror that is the USSR which is as bad as the regime in your country, but foreign and disposed to hate you (particularly if you’re a nobleman) well… how are you going to fall?

Again, I’m not defending Von Braun’s choices.  I’m not sure he, himself, would, in later life.  I’m just saying his choices were all too human and necessitate neither a grand plot or psychopathy to explain.

Which brings me to what I said above about fighting to bring the constitution back but compromising, even when you hate to.

Look, you’re never given a choice of cake or death.  Choices in life tend to be more “small pox or black plague” particularly in the political realm, for a libertarian.

And then you go “Small pox might not be easily curable, and it might spread from me to the entire area.  Black plague, if they put you on an IV drip is trivial to beat.”

Or as I said “this is how I ended up attending a demonstration in support of the socialists in Portugal.”  I knew what the socialists were.  “On the way to communism” seemed to be their motto “just slower” and I was not under the illusion their leader was anything but a power hungry moron.  HOWEVER they were the most freedom-minded party available while the state was dominated by straight up Maoists.  It was a matter of “surviving to fight another day.”

Which must stand as my excuse for voting for the loathsome McCain.  Because I knew the disaster Obama would be.  (And for those who say he wasn’t, I”ll be surprised if his so called foreign policy doesn’t get us bombed, and I suspect most of us will die of his messing with the health system because it’s so embuggred that no rationality can be restored for decades.)

Sometimes it’s all about preserving as much of the republic as we can, while we fight the culture war and try to bring our country back to the constitution.

Do those choices stain the soul?  Possibly.  I’m just hoping we’re graded on a curve, otherwise which of us will escape a whipping?

While I would prefer the choice between cake and death, because it’s easy, that is not how life works.

And while I would prefer to fight for our principles in splendid isolation, that’s not how the WORLD works.

In the end, all the other sides get a vote, and sometimes the best we can do is fight a rearguard action and not give way.

And sometimes, it’s enough.

 

 

*I DID catch a cold at TVIW, though to be fair I blame the bizarre airplane stuff on the way back which meant no regular meals, no regular thyroid-pill taking, and “fun” temperature variations.  Anyway, I’m much better today and I have a ton to do, and hey, this post seems interesting (and I have no memory of writing it.) – SAH*

An Affair of Honor a blast from the past from April 24 2012

Lately I’ve been thinking about honor.  Maybe because I spent the last couple of months mulling over the musketeers.  Maybe because I’ve gone back to a regency-reading jag as I work on things as far from regency as possible.

Honor has got a bad rep lately.  It’s been dragged through the mud, and its garments are draggled.  Association of its names with such egregious ideas as “honor killings” has done it no good.

It’s particularly unjust since honor killings are more shame-killings.  I grew up in a culture that still shows a lot of Arab influence, (well, they were there almost as long as the Romans, you know?) and I almost understand honor killings – if I squint and look sideways.  I was, after all, raised in a village (so like Miss Marple I’ve seen all there is to see of human wickedness.)  Of course Portuguese – at least civilized ones – don’t honor-kill their daughters.  But we had a case in the village where a father shaved his daughter’s head because she was talking to a strange boy.  And even with my family’s rather odd behavior, since we were all readers and a fair number of us engaged in creative work, I came across that “how could you talk to him when you were alone in the house?  What will people think?  You have shamed us all.”  I came across it more than once, because I have trouble wrapping my mind across the nonsensical.  And to me – particularly when this started, when I was about eight – seeing a little friend who happened to be a boy was no different from seeing a little friend who happened to be a girl.

But the overwrought minds of village spinsters and old women looked at this the way “enlightened” militant “feminists” do.  Like the one who accused my nine year old of sexual harassment for touching a girl’s behind while trying to get her attention.  (He didn’t fondle her.  He reached through a crowd and poked her, to ask if she wanted to play a space exploration game.)  If you’re a male you have lust and evil on your mind, and any woman allowing you near has lost her virtue.  (They must live MUCH more interesting lives than I do.)

Anyway, honor viewed that way is more what the public thinks of you and what you allow the public to know.  You can lose your honor through all sorts of stupid things that have nothing to do with what is in your heart and mind.  You can be “disgraced” the way a regency maiden was disgraced because she tripped in public and fell across a gentleman, and didn’t immediately faint or whatever.  (Well, at least in regency romances.  I believe true society had more leniency.  I mean, even in the village, even with my eccentric behavior and the fact I wore shorts outside the house – oh, the humanity! – only half the people considered me a slut.)

We find this in Shakespeare too.  “I will bite my thumb at them; which is a disgrace to them, if they bear it.”

This type of honor is fun, of course.  Well, fun to write about.  It allows you to get your characters in all sorts of nonsensical situations.  It is a good stand by for making your character marry someone she hates, for instance.  Or for making your male character fight a stupid duel.  Since we sometimes require non-brain-damaged characters to act like idiots, this type of honor can be a good tool.

BUT…

But the honor I want to talk about isn’t that.

It’s not the external, being paid homage, being rendered honor.  It’s the internal honor, in the secret of your heart, in the center of your being.

To explain it: we all live our lives by certain principles.  Yes, even those you think have no principles have stuff they live by, even if it’s just “look out for number one.”

This is very obvious in fiction, because, of course, the characters live only on the page, and their characteristics stand in obvious relief.  Characters live by some principles.  Athena’s in Darkship Thieves, for the longest time, is “survive” but she does have others, which come to the fore when tested.  Things like “I will not return kindness with evil.”  And of course “I will not abandon those who looked after me.”  (Kit.)  This is even more true of Kyrie in the shifter books, whose internal principle is “look after those who can’t look after themselves.  Not because they’re good, or deserve looking after, but because they can’t.”

(Writers live by some principles, too.  For instance, my refusing to write an autobiography, in which I’d have to tell a lot of lies to protect OTHER PEOPLE’s secrets might have cost me promo and a “dahling of literary establishment” career, but it was my internal principle NOT to step on family and friends on the way to success.  To do it would have broken me, and made it impossible for me to be me.  Break that barrier, and nothing stands between me and shooting people who annoy me.  Me as me stops existing.)

Here’s the thing – it’s not that you can’t have a character break one of their inner principles.  You can, but then all hell should break lose internally as well as externally.  And that type of principle, inner principle, can only be broken if it’s either only partially broken, or if it’s something the character can convince him/herself is an exception.  Say, Kyrie COULD leave someone to starve in the dark.  BUT that person had better be a danger to the other people she feels she must protect.  (And even then, frankly, she’d be more likely to kill them cleanly.)

The reason I’m bringing this up is victimhood.  In this case the treatment of victimhood in books.  What do I mean by that?

When you lose sense of an internal honor, a moral code, a guiding principle, you tend to misunderstand things like Kyrie’s animating period of “look after those who can’t,” which is one of the animating principles of western civilization.  Instead of its being “look after those who can’t, because you owe it to yourself as a human being” you see it as “look after those who can’t because… victims are special.”

I’m getting very tired of seeing this in books written in the last thirty years or so.  People who are downtrodden are some sort of saints – magical, not really human.  They don’t need anything else to make them magnificent – just that someone be mean to them.  The meaner someone is, the more “saintly” the character is treated as – even if the reader can tell he or she is in fact the twit of the universe.

Let me make it clear for those of you short on understanding: the reason Cinderella deserved the prince was NOT because her step sisters were mean to her, but because she was beautiful and sweet.  The sisters are on their own course and earn their own doom.  HER job was to keep her internal honor, and it is that which earns her the prince.  (And please let’s not argue about older versions, okay – I’m talking about it as it’s known.)

Harry Potter is not the main character because he was mistreated, but because he was the boy who lived.  The mistreatment which reaches almost comic proportions is an (effective) attention getting device, but it is not how Harry Potter earns his position in the world.

If your character is repulsive or totally amorphous, that will show through the victimhood, and make the reader – this reader at least – gag.  More than that, while you might make us root for the underdog – it’s almost a reflex – if the underdog doesn’t prove himself, and is always and perpetually the victim, the story becomes an exercise in sado masochism, and will give off a “sick” feeling.  You will also be contributing to moral confusion that is already too prevalent.

Now, I’m not saying you can’t torture your character (look, if you read the beginning of A Few Good Men) you’ll understand why that’s funny coming from me.

I’m saying you should still develop your character after that and make him/her grow.  Or of course, make him a terrible person, if he/she is the villain.  I mean, why can’t a victim be the villain?  Sometimes the poor bastard in the dungeons DID do enough to deserve it.  (Er… not in AFGM, by and large.  Oh, there’s stuff never talked about but visible between the lines that probably would have earned him a spanking, but not dungeons.  THAT was real politik at work, I think.)  Or perhaps he’s still a twit who needs to grow out of what took him there.  Even if punishment was excessive.

I’m tired of the idea that victim = virtue.  We’re starting to see it seep into politics with the idea that groups who have been excluded have some sort of extra special specialness.  You know that isn’t true.  They’re human.  We’re all human.  I do not approve of people being excluded or looked down on for color of skin or other irrelevant traits, (or even relevant.  There’s more to character than intelligence, for instance) but I also don’t approve of their being sanctified because they were excluded and/or victimized.

“But I was put down” is not a claim to heroism.  “But I was put down and achieved something nonetheless” IS.

So, in the end, it’s the internal honor that counts – at least for me, and by and large in life – and what the old biddies in the village think… not so much.  And if the biddies are the readers in the global village, enough of them will get disgusted with the idea that victim means virtuous.  Also, you’ll be contributing to insanity in society at large.

Make your characters (and as much as you can, yourself) persons (worthy of) honor.  We’ll all win by it.

As you guys know I’ve been reading about von Braun.  Mostly I’ve been reading about Von Braun because I visited Huntsville for TVIW and got curious.  Before that all I’d heard bout him, as a person, was, dropped in a conversation “I figure he was a true psychopath who didn’t care, so long as he got to space.”

After reading four biographies (two for, two against) I regret to tell you that I’m not sure that was true.

I come neither to bury Von Braun not to praise him.  I doubt if he knew, in himself, if he was a villain or a hero.  And I doubt he was a psychopath.  The reason I doubt he was the later is that he didn’t take to a totalitarian regime like a duck to water.  Instead he tried to compromise his soul a little at a time, a vestige of humanity and decency obviously holding him back.

If a man of his intelligence, not to mention charisma, had wanted, he could have been in the “high councils” of the oligarchs, but mostly he seemed to do the minimum necessary to a) not get killed and b) keep the rocket program going.  And before you say the rocket program hurt the allies, he himself admitted “When a country is at war, a man wants his country to win, even if he hates the regime.”  And before you poo poo that, remember that a country is not land or borders. It’s your family, your friends, the places you love.  He also admitted he didn’t feel bad about bombing London because the allies had destroyed Berlin, a city he loved.  All these responses are very human and very normal.  Flawed, painful, morally tarnished, maybe, but human.

I’ll confess my bias up front.  One of the “against” bios (the other just kept repeating “Nazi, so bad.” which is senseless) was specious enough to make me want to come to his defense.  Among other things they quoted his words about milking the golden cow in a context that made it sound like it was about the US.  It wasn’t.  It wasn’t about Hitler’s Germany either.  It was about the Weimar Republic, for whom Von Braun had started the rocket program.

Also, they narrated hearsay about the Americans not treating them well enough “overheard by his driver who didn’t talk about it for 60 years” and then talked to the Nation which might as well be the organ of CPUSA.  I’m here to tell you that criticizing your host country is the first phase of every acculturation/immigration.  I saw it with my fellow exchange students, who were here by choice and who suddenly talked about how much better it was back home.  It’s a group bonding exercise in unstable circumstances.  It means nothing.  (No, I didn’t do it, but I’m fairly weird.)

These things predisposed me to “like” him, but the pro bios were also a little weird.  I find it mendatious to say that the Von Braun attached to Mittelwerk — the labor camp attached to Dachau — must have been his brother.  Maybe it was, maybe it wasn’t, but suggesting it as an excuse is a little goofy since Magnus Von Braun was also imported to the US.

And the “he was a loving father and a good neighbor” doesn’t cut it either.  Because, you know, here’s the thing, Pratchett had it absolutely right when the torturer has a coffee mug with the saying “World’s Best Dad.”

So on the character of Von Braun I’m going to say “I don’t know” and in fact, I doubt he did.

The thing that none of the bios seem to take into account is the corrupting power of a tyrannical regime.  This applies with boots on to things like Fascism and Communism but it applies to minor tyrannical regimes too, where behavior you consider unethical is required of you in order to get something you want/need.

Dave Freer commented on the Harvey Weinstein case here — Wiles —and said we writers do things like that too, though usually not sexual (and if you met the average writer you know why.)  He is right.  We’ll get back to that later, just keep in mind that like the Hugos are the Oscars for ugly people so is the book business Hollywood for ugly people.  We’re not (usually, though I’ve had attempts, when I was much younger) required to put out, but we betray ourselves and sell our souls in myriad other ways.

Did Von Braun know that people were being worked to death to build his rockets?  Impossible not to.  Look, guys, seriously, I suspect even the uninvolved unconcerned Germans knew about the Holocaust.  Could he/they do anything about it?

What precisely?

The movies make it seem like everyone rises up at once and overturns a dictatorial regime.  That is not the way real revolutions work.  Time and again, we’ve seen that it’s when a regime softens that it’s overturned.  Before that, attempting an overturn is suicide and often death to all your family and friends too.

He’d started building rockets under Weimar.  He’d come to the Nazis attention.  After that, he’d continue building rockets and like it, and do what he had to do to keep himself and his family alive and well.

One of the biographies claims he tried to/got some prominent scientists out of concentration camps to “help” and live with them and eat what they ate in an attempt to save them.  I haven’t tracked this down to verify, though at least one (French) professor claimed after the war that he was offered just such a position, in an attempt to better his lot.  This professor refused because he didn’t want to aid the Nazi war effort.

In the same way Von Braun was arrested (and let out on probation) twice, for saying that rockets built by slave labor would be defective.

On the other hand, when he came to the states, he brought with him people who were unavoidably more guilty than him, obviously so.  And tried to bring others who were too “dirty” to make it here.

Surely that’s proof he was a villain?

No.  It’s proof that he was human.  You hang around with a group of people long enough, you’re going to like some of them despite despising their opinions or actions.  I didn’t feign my liking for a lot of my liberal or even outright communist colleagues and bosses in NYC.  I can see where they went astray, I despise what they do, but I like them as people, and think some of them are salvageable.

And I’m very glad I’m not the ultimate judge of anyone’s soul, not even mine.

All I’m going to say about Von Braun’s character is that until you withstand his temptations and his fear, you don’t know what you’d do.  It’s very easy for people who are free and at no risk of being killed summarily or having their whole family destroyed, to say “I’d stand above it all.”  But very few people do.  I find it helpful that in the New Testament the man who was chosen to lead the church, in the same circumstances denied the man he believed to be the son of G-d not once but three times.  It’s a good demonstration of frail humanity faced with dictatorship and corruption.

You don’t know what you’d do in the circumstances.

I do, and it doesn’t make me proud.

Sure, I came out politically, when I could afford to, when there was indie and Baen.  But before that, I not only swallowed a lot but said ambiguous “supporting” things when the discussion turned to keeping those undesirable libertarians/conservatives and their “hatred” out.  Because otherwise I’d have lost my sole opportunity to make money with the skill it had taken me almost two decades to acquire, and babies needed shoes.

Looking back it feels a lot like the quote from A Man For All Seasons:
It profits a man nothing to give his soul for the whole world … but for Wales, Richard?

And yet people do, for far less important reasons than getting man to space, or even winning a war so that your family estates aren’t plundered (and if you don’t think that matters you don’t understand attachment to the land) and your family sent forth, homeless and destitute.

Almost every writer, unless they’re dyed the deepest red, made the same compromises.  It’s a bad thing, even in that scale.  Like the actresses giving up their dubious virtue for a role, we give up a part of ourselves when we do that.

But when a system is corrupt and oligarchic there is no way to go around.  And so we keep doing it.

Eventually, I couldn’t take it anymore.  And I had the opportunity to escape.  More or less what Von Braun did.  I’m trying to make good on my second chance, impaired only by stupid health tricks.

But I wouldn’t stand in judgement.  Like the people who escaped the USSR and who were party members, or “little pioneers” or like Pope Benedict being in the Hitler youth, if you stand in judgement of these people, you’ve never experienced even the nano-version of it I and other writers/actors/people in fields where gatekeepers are few and implacable have experienced.

I don’t know if Von Braun sold his soul for a shot at space; I don’t know if he sold it for safety for his family and himself.  I know I sold mine for Wales, metaphorically speaking.  I have no high mountain on which to stand, and my only redeeming realization must be this: that I realized a bad system makes good people bad.

One of the books went on about how evil Von Braun pushed for the Americans to “win” space when the USSR would have done just as well, since it was all for humanity.

Perhaps having experienced the corrupting effects of dictatorship and distorting ideology, he wanted space to be free.  (Yes, I know, he wanted the US to have an orbiting station and bomb any country that misbehaved.  Heinlein modified it and used it in Space Cadet.  It would have gone very badly, particularly if the US gave it over to the UN.  But I can also understand the appeal of the idea for someone who believed in the US.)

People who have sold their souls try to reclaim bits of it in the weirdest ways.

Let that serve as his epitaph.  And our ladder to freedom and redemption for the rest of us.  Do what you can, where and when we can, and may our efforts achieve more than our poor selves can manage.

I enjoyed most of the talks at TVIW, but two were social sciences talks, and somewhat puzzling as most social sciences are these days.  Not because I don’t understand them, but because they make you scratch your head and go “what are they teaching kids in the indoctrination centers these days?”

One of them purported to prepare us for the reaction to new technology by studying the “trajectory of over-enthusiasm about nukes generating the resistance and irrational opposition to them.”

I sat in the audience growing increasingly more baffled.  This man had studied the original sources, at least theoretically, and he had put up some cute posters using “nuclear” as we now use quantum, but he was talking around the elephant in the room.

You see, I had read original sources too, and while there was a period (long before the atomic bomb) when we were convinced (we as a civilization, I wasn’t even born) that radiation cured everything, there never was a period when people thought the atomic bomb was good for you.

Almost from the very beginning, the relief that it ended the war was coupled with “it can kill the world.” and in fact early on we got all the opposition, the demonstrations, the insistence on unilateral disarmament.  Heck, Heinlein himself was convinced early on that having nuclear arsenals would eventually lead to mutual destruction.  (Though he was never an idiot who asked for unilateral disarmament.)

Almost from the beginning anything “nuclear” was subjected to a process of demonization we have since come to see in “anything the left opposes.” Including but not limited to stopping illegal immigration or the importation of Muslim “refugees” or guns… or…

In fact, as this man pointed out, nuclear anything was so perfectly demonized that we don’t have the perfectly safe and effective nuclear power plants we could have.  Of course we still have the bombs, because again not all of us are zany enough to believe in one-sided disarmament.

Afterwards I approached and pointed out to him that most of the overreaction was not because people had been crazy about nuclear everything,b ut because — and yes, we DO know this — the soviet union was deploying its not inconsiderable propaganda machine to oppose nukes and try to convince the US to unilaterally disarm.

He told me, yes, some documents (like all of them, never mind) pointed that way.  But how could you convince people if you just told them that was the truth.  Wouldn’t it be easier to get them to understand nuclear power was safe if you painted it as an over reaction.

Uh. No.  On account of it’s not the truth.  You don’t actually cure a lie by telling another lie.  You don’t cure a misconception by creating another misconception and trying to activate a wholly imaginary mechanism.

You tell people “Yes, you were taken in.  Almost everyone was taken in.  BUT it was not the truth, it was enemy action.  Look, France wasn’t subjected to that kind of propaganda and gets most of its energy from nuclear power.  And it hasn’t imploded.”

You don’t tell them “yes, but your reaction is an over-reaction to to the enthusiasm people first felt.”  Because frankly it doesn’t take much digging to realize there was never crazy enthusiasm for nuclear bombs/power.

This is akin to what I call “diagnosing mental problems people don’t have” which was a very popular entertainment in the seventies.  Take me, for instance, I’m afraid of driving.  I know perfectly well why: my eyes suck and are getting increasingly sucky with age.  And my reflexes have always sucked.  Also I was raised in a culture where only the exceptionally coordinated people were supposed to drive.  If you tell me those, I can at least try to deal with them (no marked success so far.)  But if — as people did with everything in the 70s — you tell me “you are afraid to drive, because you’re afraid of orgasms” I’m going to roll my eyes, laugh and ignore you.

But beyond its being really easy to debunk, there’s something worse with making up this theory, so people can more easily buy into nuclear power or nuclear powered rockets, or whatever: it’s a lie.

I don’t care if it’s a lie for useful purposes.  I don’t care if it’s a lie for a good cause.  It’s a lie.  It’s as much of a lie as “if you don’t make war on the Soviet union they’ll be peaceful.”

Lies internalize the wrong idea of the world in your head, and make it impossible for you to react to the real world.  Step by step, they diminish your chances of surviving…. anything.

This is why you shouldn’t lie.  This is particularly why you shouldn’t lie to the young.  If you invent wholly non-existent social mechanisms and psychological movements to explain something that you know happened for other reasons, you’re making it impossible for people to find the truth and function in reality.

Sure, it’s a tough pill to swallow to know that entire on the whole well-intentioned movements of people protesting nuclear war were not the humanitarians they thought they were, but mere USSR stooges.

It’s particularly tough if you or someone you loved was one of those people.

But it’s also the truth, and as such something people must know to inoculate against future agit-prop of that kind.

Sometimes the truth is unpalatable, and telling it will get people mad at you.  And yet, you must still tell it, because without the truth you have nothing but a growing fog of lies that will kill you as surely as any bomb or any enemy.

There are enough wrong guesses and misguided theories whose authors don’t know they’re not telling the truth.  Don’t add to them with intentional lies and misguided theories in the name of saving someone’s feelings.

Feelings be d*mned.  The truth can save their lives.  Or humanity.

So, we don’t have a promo post.  I might have to talk to the oyster, as I think our wires got crossed somewhere.  It’s also possible he’s really busy and as you know — Bob — he’s doing this as volunteer work.  So, cutting his salary in half would be wholly ineffective.

We didn’t quite encounter the same luck flying back as flying out, as only one plane was late and ONLY 2 hours.  We’ve more or less decided next time if we don’t have money to go earlier and stay later, we’ll just go earlier and leave Friday night.  The horrible trip out left us kind of useless the entire conference, particularly since for whatever reason we didn’t sleep very well while there.

The conference was fascinating and there will be primary posts reporting on it for PJMedia (and my visit to NASA-Marshall) and several secondary order posts for here.  Yes, some might be on “what it profit a man to lose his soul if he gains space.”… particularly if the soul is lost for other reasons.  I think no one alive today who does not — like some crazy people including me — do extensive reading on the world wars fully understands those generations.  Not saying those generations were immaculate (not even the “greatest generation” an encomium the boomers think makes up for under-appreciating their parents when they were young) rather that they were harder than we — much less the generations after — can dream of being.

Right now, though, I came home to an embuggered (totally a word) automated cat box, which also led to secondary order effects (though in general they were way better than I expected) and to house keeping by medical-student-in-clinical-year, which is to say worse (far worse) than none. (I could write a book: “Places NOT to put dirty silverware/dishes.”)

So I’m going to do a lick-and-promise version of my weekly cleaning, then work on Guardian, and then write a few articles, since I missed most of a week.

And now, put your hands together for:

Sunday Vignettes by Luke, Mary Catelli and ‘Nother Mike

So what’s a vignette? You might know them as flash fiction, or even just sketches. We will provide a prompt each Sunday that you can use directly (including it in your work) or just as an inspiration. You, in turn, will write about 50 words (yes, we are going for short shorts! Not even a Drabble 100 words, just half that!). Then post it! For an additional challenge, you can aim to make it exactly 50 words, if you like.

We recommend that if you have an original vignette, you post that as a new reply. If you are commenting on someone’s vignette, then post that as a reply to the vignette. Comments — this is writing practice, so comments should be aimed at helping someone be a better writer, not at crushing them. And since these are likely to be drafts, don’t jump up and down too hard on typos and grammar.

If you have questions, feel free to ask.

Your writing prompt this week is: virus free