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This Was My First Election – E. Marshall Hoyt

This was my first election.

I’m not particularly happy about that, of course, I missed the chance to vote in 2012 by a mere couple of weeks. But I did my civic duty, and I voted. Voting did not instill me with the feeling I had hoped for, of course.

In 2012, I couldn’t escape the talk of politics if I tried. Everyone was involved, invested, and more importantly- passionate. Everyone. You can argue the faults of a two party system encouraging such rabid support of any candidate, which itself breeds the rabid hared of the candidate opposite your choice, but four years ago it seemed justified. The current administration- finally coming to its end soon- had made large powerful moves towards political reform that they wanted, and in some respects they pushed the envelope, as to appeal to every shade of liberal voter they could in as many ways as possible.

Climate change? Let’s put in some deep cutting taxes and regulations to encourage “safer” technology.
Healthcare? We passed the reform blindly a couple of years ago, but now it’s time to sink the bill’s vampire teeth in.

The Middle East? Pft, we solved that problem easy peasy- turns out we just had to leave! That will probably turn out well.

Everything sounded like a bad sales pitch, and the effects of those policies and the administration’s lack-luster approach to everything from foreign policy to economic reform left much to be desired. Because of this, conservatives were mighty angry, and rightfully so. In 2008, McCain was not an excellent candidate, and he didn’t resonate with republicans well, all while the DNC had pitted against McCain a far more competent campaigner. His plans and promises were terrible, but, he knew how to sell his cyanide like it was lemonade. In some ways, we had gotten stuck with Obama for 4 years, and we wanted out.

That’s when Romney finally came along. I’ll be the first to admit, that he had a humble start. His speeches were elegant, but he had a long way to prove himself before he had many conservatives’ votes. Luckily, he proved himself well. The race was heated, the debates were intense to watch, even when the moderators clearly favored Obama and targeted Romney. This of course brought out the crazies of the left, and the media to echo them, trying to find fault in the most minor things that Romney uttered.

The guy doesn’t like PBS programming? He hates big bird! He’s awful! His dislike of a children’s show character is clearly an indication of his political skills!
Did he just mention women and binders in the same sentence? Binders of women! Sexist!
Wait, is he running against our beloved black president- his race clearly being the most important attribute as leader of this country? Racist! Bigot.

They were really trying to find ways to break down his campaign, but he stood strong. He was a strong candidate, a good one, and no matter if you were against or for him, there was good reason to be passionate.

Then the election day came.

Hype was turned to despair, as conservatives and political analysts were baffled at the predictions being disproven. Quite a few even normally democratic siding predictors crunched the numbers and estimated a Romney victory, by a healthy margin, for that matter. This obviously, was not the case.

I wasn’t as emotionally tied to this election, for better or worse. Not in the sense I was back in 2012. I cared far more about the 2012 election, and I couldn’t even vote. Yet, still, there I was, this year, filling out my ballot and I wasn’t happy. Choose the criminal who will sweep her crimes under a rug, or a liberal character in conservative clothing, speaking loud and ugly. I filled it out of course- I’m polite in saying I won’t reveal who I voted for, not for any particular reason other than admitting who I voted for makes me sick, and frankly that applies to both candidates, so it doesn’t matter much anyway.

But, why bring up the passion of the last election and talk so little of the excitement of this election? Well, that’s sort of the point. No one liked this election. The DNC and GOP put up the not-incredibly-preferred and in some way completely wrong candidates for the parties. I would have preferred Cruz, and I know for many a liberal in my age range they would have preferred Bernie. As much as I hate Bernie more than either candidate in this finally finished election, he is indeed a proper representation of the current democratic party (Which itself is a problem).

So of course, as I watch the liberal despair and surprise as handy predictions of a Clinton landslide fell apart and Trump emerged the victor, many of them asked how they could have been so wrong, how Trump could’ve won. Like I said, nobody was excited about this race, and more importantly, the Trump support seemed pretty low in comparison. So, how did he do it?

There is one big reason, and it’s the reason Romney lost and Trump won.

Most of people who voted Trump, didn’t want him to be president.

This probably would serve as a baffling statement to any of the alt-right or left of middle who don’t understand that position at all, but the younger democrats can sympathize, they just don’t know it.

When Bernie lost the nomination, oh how the dedicated Sander supporters wailed and despaired. We don’t want Hillary! She’s not our candidate! They hated it, they hated Hillary, and didn’t want to vote for her.

But they did.

That’s the thing, this election, ultimately, was about voting against, not for. In the last week before the election, I think that’s when very suddenly, almost all the conservatives begrudgingly filled in the bubble next to Trump’s name. This is due to some worrisome information about Clinton that came out, and of course, the decision was made. The more important decision, however, the one that won the election, was that no one talked about it. No one who voted Trump- who only did it as a vote against Clinton- was public about their vote.

For one this made polls, clearly, inaccurate. Secondly, this meant that the Liberals weren’t prepared.

I hate to sound like the same typical and broken record you’d expect on the matter, and certainly conservatives get laughed at for this sort of thing every time, but the left not knowing the amount of votes that would be cast for Trump ahead of time, meant they couldn’t rig it in time.

It seems silly to call voter fraud, especially when it is so hard to provide proof in 2012 without some journalist laughing at it with paper-thin evidence against the call of cheating and declaring the statement unarguably disproven, but in some ways, this election is that proof of foul play.

The Left saw no reason to rig this election, or cheat in votes. They very obviously put in the effort in 2012. There’s a lot of suspicious activity that went on, and being in Colorado, where a record-breaking rally was held for the republican candidate and we somehow ended up being blue, the fraud was clearly massive. But the Left knew the support behind Romney, and they worked overtime. Their efforts paid off too.

That’s exactly the thing, of course. Even a blind man could see that Romney had far more wide spread support in 2012 than Trump has ever had, yet Trump won his election.  Trump won because just over half of the population is conservative, and it took the liberals thinking the election this year was theirs for the taking and not even trying to cheat it, to make that clear. They finally gave us a fair election, for a candidate we don’t even want being president.

Had Romney had such an advantage, had he fought on a fair battle field, he would have indeed gotten his massive victory. But alas, they gave us a fair battleground on an unfair election.

As much as the media, TV, and every other loud mouths of entertainment would like you to believe, the country is not a liberal nation with invisible conservatives lurking in the shadows. It’s a nation of conservatives, many of whom voted trump and drank a bottle of alcohol for being forced to do so, the ones that could even bring themselves to vote.

That’s how much cheating went on 2012.
In 2016, Trump won on the votes of those that didn’t want him, scoring only a part of the conservative base.
In 2012, with almost all the conservatives passionately behind him, Romney just barely lost.

There’s still a happy note, in there, somewhere.  The GOP snagged both parts of Congress, and while much of the GOP in congress doesn’t like Trump (and rightfully so), they can keep Trump in check (hopefully). It’s not going to be sunshine and roses, of course, shit is still going to happen, but the left is as divided as we are right now.

They’re blaming each other, especially the Sanders’ supporters who quietly voted Clinton. Even though they certainly put down Clinton on their ballots, they are actively blaming the DNC for putting in Clinton, believing they cheated Sanders from running (Which they did). The idea that Sanders would have won against Trump is silly, but if Sanders had been the nominee, the support for Trump and opposition to Bernie would probably have been more vocal, thus the left might have actually put in effort into cheating, and then Sanders probably would have been cheated in. That would have been far worse.

Instead, Trump barely pulled through because republicans quietly voted against Hillary at the last minute.

Hopefully, this decision doesn’t ultimately rip off our bums, simply bite us in the ass like we expect.
Hopefully it’s a light, playful bite.

Sorry this is so late.  Last night, absolutely convinced we were stuck with the dowager empress for four years, we went out for “a truly American meal” of burgers and (exceptionally, and trust me, I’m paying for it this morning eczema wise) fries.  Coming out of the restaurant, (where everyone was watching BASEBALL) I checked my phone and realized that Trump was now favored to win.

We dropped by home, then crashed the Vodkapundit’s home, where we stayed until Irene said goodnight…  and I drank half a bottle of Eagle Rare.  (What? Portuguese born, remember?)

So, this morning, and quickly — the GOOD —

I am so relieved Hillary is out of public life.  I wish I could tell you that my late change to “I’ll vote against HER” was because I’d discovered some great qualities in Trump.  Alas, it was mostly because of how reckless she was with national security and how she lied to us over Benghazi, and the sewer-people she surrounds herself with and covers up for.

The Clintons have been flushed out of the national bowl, and before they could foist their entitled spawn upon us for yet another election.  Let this be the end of political dynasties for a while.

(BTW between and I the over-under to Hillary dying of whatever she has is about a year.  But at least it won’t be presidential funeral and it won’t leave us stuck with the loathsome Kaine.)

The press is thoroughly discredited.  And they deserve it.  Discredited and rebuked, and I hope Newsweek eats that thrashed print run and chokes on it.

We have a largely non-socialist legislature who just MIGHT find their balls.

This country has a chance.  JUST a chance.  At least the male evil clown doesn’t hate us.  Let’s make the most of it.

Now the bad:

Trump has appointed Chris Christie head of his transition team.  I know, I know, Christie is a toad-eater who goes where the wind blows, but Trump, appointing Obama’s bestie who stabbed Romney in the back in 2012 will NOT endear you to many of us, and certainly not to the Mormons.  Bad move.

At best we get a self-obsessed guy, who loves the limelight so much he lets his appointees govern.  If he does that, and appoints good people, he might turn out to be one of our good presidents.  If he appoints the Chris Christie’s of this world, he’ll be a run of the mill democrat president circa 1960.  (BUT still better than Hillary.)

The Schadenfreude:
I’m going to spend at least a couple of hours eating schadenfreude with a spoon.  Everyone who told us the Republicans were finished, and the arrow of history was going their way is having major meltdowns.

What can I say, I’m not a good person.

And now, I have a post from the younger son tomorrow.  He sees a civil war in the dem side in the next four years.  I hope he’s right, but wrong about who’ll win it.  That party needs reform.

And I have a book to finish.

In honor of our election, the Merriam-Webster site changed the word of the day to Gotterdammerung.

I’d very much like to think they were joking.

I woke up feeling queasy.  No matter who wins we lose.  Even when I held my nose in previous times, I could think “my guy winning is so much better.”  In this case, all I can tell you that if Trump wins, we MIGHT have a chance.  I give it less than 25% chance that we actually do. If Hillary wins, we have no chance.  We’re going to go down for the long count, and we can only hope that we teach our children well, because we might not see the revival of the republic even to the level it is today.

If Trump wins, we are buying that slim chance at the cost of having effective opposition to the left, and of enshrining a lot of national-socialist attitudes antithetical to our Constitution.

In any case, and whoever wins, we’re going to have a jolly good oldfashioned world war.  Possibly faster under Hillary, because she’ll have to distract us.  But the war thing is not solely in our hands.  I hear people say things like “Putin has nothing to win by going to war with us” and I hit my head on my desk.

Other nations aren’t the US.  They don’t go to war for philanthropic or clear self interest reasons.  They go for war for reasons of culture and of “face” as much as anything else.  (This is something that even Heinlein didn’t seem to understand.  I think you need to be born and raised in another country to get it.)  Russia needs a war.  It needs its empire back.  There are many people raised with the USSR as their only religion who are ready to fight to restore it.

China– do I need to go there?

There will be war.  I’ll be very shocked if it doesn’t come in the next four years, and I have military age sons, third son by adoption, and adopted grandson is a boy, should our jolly war last that long or have a sequel.  Not that granddaughter by adoption is safe either, in these days.  (Consuming your child-bearing age girls in war is lunacy.  Possibly unsurvivable.  Israel sends them to war because they HAVE to.  We don’t have to.)

There will also be an economic crash either way.  Wall Street seems convinced that they get Bill Clinton back, and think Bill Clinton is a financial genius, because of what the republicans forced them to do.  So they’ve come out against Trump, because they think Hillary is all that.

Only Hillary is not all that, but just another old, doddering socialist, and her vp is a communist.  Their solutions will make us Venezuela.

This, btw, is another of those “A generation that doesn’t know history has no past and no future.”  Heinlein was right.

These poor guys were taught falsified history.  And it might destroy us all.

In the meantime, if Trump wins, we crash harder and faster, because the media will do their best to drive us off the cliff.

Of course the chances of Trump winning were minimal, always.  In the primaries, he was the one GOP candidate (He’s not a republican) who tested worst against Hillary.  In fact we know now, from the emails, what we tried to tell Trump supporters before: he was the only one that Hillary wanted to run against.

BUT the press didn’t report/obfuscated that, and his supporters were convinced he was the only one who COULD win.

In the same vein, I watched the media turn the first time that GOP candidates talked back, spear-headed by Cruz into “only Trump fights.”  And I watched people buy it.

Which brings us to where we are today.

And speaking of the media: yesterday, on an fb friend’s page I found out that Newsweek has already sent out copies of its “Madame President” commemorative issue (I hope they sell so few it sends them out of business for good.) BTW snopes at the same time admits they only printed one version — Hillary’s — and already shipped it, but rates this as false, because “they made a mock up of Trump’s too, and if he wins, the Hillary ones will be trashed and Trump’s rushed to press.”  Guys, let’s take a deep breath.  This magazine is running close to the bone (they all are) and if they have to RECALL AND THRASH an entire edition, they’re done.  But they’re so sure of this that they rushed to press, despite the business risk.  Yes, yes, this means the fix is in. As we now know from Podestas emails (along with a lot of things we’d rather NOT know, things that make Imperial Rome seem tame) the press is fully an arm of the democrat power elite, and they know when the fix is in.

At any rate anyone who’s been awake since 2000 knows that.  The fury at George Bush is because he beat the margin of fraud installed and put in place by Clinton’s Motor Voter bill.

They were fortunate that Ol’ George was soft on the left (being a Christian socialist, himself) and therefore didn’t want to fully investigate them.  Or perhaps he was trying for national unity.  And then there was the war. The reason they need to be in power is that they’ve committed acts that would see them dangling from lampposts while the populace spit on their dead bodies.  Insert here Biblical rant about “in the days of judgement there will be more mercy for Sodom and Gomorrah.”  They are fully that despicable from stealing from Hatians to pay for the Clinton’s princess’ lavish wedding, to child sex involvement, to rigging the elections and the press coverage, to things that sane minds would surely recoil from.

They are not going to give us a chance to surprise them.  Yesterday, while at the voting place, taking our ballots in, we met the two people whose votes cancelled ours.  They claimed they tried to sign up to vote, but it didn’t work.  Their licenses were still from California, but they had mail, addressed to them.  And they were allowed to register and vote the same day.

Guys, I’m not even a good techy, but I could print mail with my address on my printer today.  Or with anyone’s address, really.  Now, it’s possible these idiots were plants, and it’s possible they were just dopey (possibly literally, one of the downsides of legalizing ahead of California.) But if the hole is there, it WILL be exploited.  To believe otherwise is to believe that humans are more honest in the matter of elections than in any other matter in their lives.  Dishonest humans exist, therefore fraud will happen.  Our elites have a desperate need to cover up their egregious misdeeds, therefore fraud will be organized on an epic scale.

Which is why I voted for Trump who, while he’s one of them, is also a little crazy.  There comes that 25% or less chance he’ll turn on them.  But I also know it’s a quixotic act, because the fix is in.

Bringing us back to my friend’s post.  IMMEDIATELY one of his female — of course — friends said, well, it was a little presumptuous, but of course we all know Hillary is going to win and she’ll be a great first woman president, because all women will hold her to it.

These same women, apparently are unaware that she first caused, then lied about Benghazi, set fire to the Middle East, wasted the opportunity of rebellion in Iran, kept a private server for her classified emails, so as to avoid answering FOIA requests, lied to the commission investigating the server, seems to have run a pay-per-play system at the state department, sold our uranium to Russia, enriched herself at the expense of Hatian orphans, and other stuff I’m sure I’m forgetting.

What about the godmother of pedophiles and patron saint of traitors says she’ll be a “good president” and who do these women think will show up to take the oath of office.

Ah — the media again.  All these bunnies know is what they heard on the view.  And this passes for voting age adults, ladies and gentlemen.

Well, some of us took an oath too.  It goes like this:

“I hereby declare, on oath, that I absolutely and entirely renounce and abjure all allegiance and fidelity to any foreign prince, potentate, state, or sovereignty, of whom or which I have heretofore been a subject or citizen; that I will support and defend the Constitution and laws of the United States of America against all enemies, foreign and domestic; that I will bear true faith and allegiance to the same; that I will bear arms on behalf of the United States when required by the law; that I will perform noncombatant service in the Armed Forces of the United States when required by the law; that I will perform work of national importance under civilian direction when required by the law; and that I take this obligation freely, without any mental reservation or purpose of evasion; so help me God.”

 

And some of us don’t know how to not fulfill our promises.  We’re broken that way.

There’s a very good chance we’re going down for the long count, but America is not territory.  America is not blood.  America is a belief in the causes of Life, liberty and individual pursuit of happiness.  America is a faith in a nation of laws, in which everyone is equal before the law.  A nation now in abeyance but alive in all of our hearts.

Today we mourn.  I’m treating myself as though I were bereaved.  Favorite foods, some alcohol and being rather gentle with myself and mine, as if we were a family at a Wake, waiting for the funeral.

Tomorrow we fight.  We fight with words now, we fight for hearts and minds.  There might come a time when we fight other ways, but the time is not yet, and if we don’t win hearts and minds in the meantime, we’ll lose that fight even if we win.

Teach, build, create.

Even if we fail, we’ll win because our struggle will pass on the ideas to generations yet unborn.  Maybe at sixth or seventh remove, but it will happen.

We’re Americans and America is alive and well in our hearts.

When my parents got married, the priest who married them gave them as a wedding gift the book he had written (and I think self-published.  It had that look.)  It was called Impious Men, and in it he had collected all the more salacious bits about historical horrors: Roman Emperors, other rulers who slept with horses or bathed in the blood of virgins, the craziest bits of the Aztecs, perhaps.  I don’t know because I never finished the thing.  I read a bit here and a bit there, in the sort of mood one watches a trainwreck.

You see, I discovered it when I was in my teens, while looking for something among mom’s emergency reserve food storage (which got tapped into quite often when price controls unexpectedly failed to work and bring abundance, and store shelves were bare.)

I think I was looking for canned fish, because I was alone in the house with my brother and had to cook something for dinner.  Anyway, in the middle of all of it, towards the back, hidden under the reserve toilet paper, was this book. This was a weird place for even mom to store a book, so I’m going to assume she had the same reaction to the stupid thing that I had.

This was an age at which I read EVERYTHING, including the instructions on medicine I never intended to take. But I left that book unfinished.  It was just — bizarre.

I think the man was very serious, and trying to catalogue these actions by these men.  I’m sure the ending moral was something about how these men lacked a moral compass.  Oh, h*ll yeah, they lacked a moral compass, but there was more to it than that.

Look, I am not a good person.  I’m going to admit if I were Empress of the known world tomorrow there are some people (I have a little list) who would be sent to a deserted, heavily guarded isle, and never allowed near civilization again.  Other than that, I suspect the worst I would do would be to become incredibly lazy and spend night and day surfing the net for cryptozoology or whatever.  I might also give people very odd gifts.  You know, my older son totally needs a pet elephant.

But the stuff this man catalogued was just… incredible.  Incredible in the original sense.  In my early teens, I read it going “Good heavens, I’m sure this is exaggerated, the equivalent of Rome’s tabloids.”

It might have been.  Some historians think so.

But as the sewer of wikileaks runs out into the open, and as people whisper of pedophilia, and rituals that whether they are occult or not, are definitely disgusting and bizarrely boring at the same time, I keep thinking “maybe that stuff in antiquity was true too.”

It’s hard for normal people to believe.  The mind cannot accept a world where ever greater defiance of other people’s taboos, ever greater depraved lunacy, brings nothing but ennui.

And yet I completely understand how the left got where it is.  Having conquered the media/industrial complex, they are always painted in the best colors.  Even Hillary’s corrupt and possibly treasonous handling of secret information (no matter what they tell us, 40% of this nation had or has secret clearance.  We know how anyone else in her position would be treated.  Prison is the beginning of it.  We certainly wouldn’t be giving them a chance at the presidency.  Except most of the people don’t know anything about what she did or how awful it was, about the horrors of wikileaks (and stop kidding us there too.  No, the Russians did NOT change every email) about the kakistocracy of the Clinton foundation.  They know nothing, because the MSM is now fully and openly partisan. They keep talking about how qualified Hillary is, but nothing about how criminal Hillary is.

And that is the problem.

Humans are social apes.  We are human within the confines of society.  As in ape bands, we do things to establish our dominance and that we’re special.  For those of us with no morals whatsoever these can be very bad.  For those of us who are raised or who accepted an ethos of “defiance over rules” and “Morality is for the little people” it can be worse.

We call this nostalgie de la boue (A desire for the mud.)

Sure you can trace a straight line from the romantics wishing to go back to a simpler life, or to idolize the middle ages over their own time, to our present pedophile, treasonous, bodily secretion eating lunatics.  But the difference is the romantics were kept in check.  there were people who despised them and ridiculed them.

Now the ID is enthroned, and these people, truly, have run out of room to establish that they’re all that.  (This is perhaps complicated by the fact that when it comes to handling anything real they are extremely incompetent and must know so, right?  I mean, they must know they’re not that good.)  So all that is left to them is to continue breaking more and more and worse and worse taboos, to continue pushing the envelope, to continue breaking other people’s morals (they have none) in a show of their dominance.

And the problem is that they don’t really enjoy any of it.  They’re doing this partly because they can, partly because they think that’s what everyone else would do in their position, and partly because they don’t know what else to do with themselves.  But the hammer doesn’t fall, some of us — the few who know — are disgusted and despise them, and the vast majority of people know nothing of this.

Our would be elites are vastly unhappy people, aping both daring and pleasure, and consumed by enui and meaninglessness.  They’re not alone.  I was recently re-reading the Black Count and the things they mention almost in passing, such as that the court of Louis XV engaged in orgies in the dark, where you did whatever, with whatever sex.  And yet they were all bored and filled with self-loathing.

That is the lot of those for whom the sum entire of their lives is following their increasingly more bizarre appetites.  Humans are a scavenger species.  We are made to strive. Their liberal privilege means they can’t strive.  No matter how bad they are they’ll be acclaimed as good.  Like the Roman emperors, they can’t get anything but adulation.

Whatever happens on Tuesday, look for this to get worse.  As long as the MSM has control of the public opinion, look for the dive into the mud to get worse and worse.

But historically there is a limit to how deep that dive gets.  Historically it all ends in “Aristo, Aristo a la lantern.”

In the end their “pleasures” for all the harm they can cause to innocents, are just the repetition of other similar “pleasures” which leave no trace behind except horror and disgust.  The world moves on.  They’re not world altering or life-changing, except where they kill millions of people through intention or incompetence.

In the end they’re nothing but dead men walking.

In the end we win, they lose.

 

Sunday Vignettes! – Luke, Mary Catelli, ‘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:

will

Some Books Promo – Free Range Oyster

Book book books book, book. Book book book-book book. Books books book. Books!

Jason Dyck, AKA The Free Range Oyster

Books, books, books. Book.

Alma Boykin

Alexander, Soldier’s Son

Some spirits can cross running water. And salt water as well.

Compared to the Horn of Africa, Denver traffic seemed tame. Until Sgt. Alexander Zolnerovich saw the Little House on Chicken Feet digging up worms in the I-25 median.

Alexander, Soldier’s Son contains all the previously published stories about Alexi, Babushka, Ivan the Purrable, and their allies and enemies. It also has the new story “The Firebird’s Feather.”

Susannah Ailene Martin

The Lifeguard

A headstrong young boy goes to summer camp with his best friend and plans on having the time of his life, but then he meets a lifeguard who seems determined to ruin his fun.

Max Florschutz

Colony

A corporate investigator who doesn’t trust his employer.

A mercenary gun-for-hire with a talent for violence and a willingness to shoot first.

And a white-hat hacker who doesn’t know when to quit.

Three independent contractors brought together for one unusual job. Five years ago, master programmer Carlos Rodriguez retired. Now his old employer wants him back.

Quietly.

It’d be a lot easier if he hadn’t left Earth.

The Future Some Assembly Required — A Blast from the Past from May 2013

*First, I must be clairvoyant on how the economy would go.  Maybe I should hang a shingle. Second, yeah, I’m fobbing you off with a BPF.  Yesterday I ended up losing the say to cleaning carpets.  Greebo has developed this trick of biting the head off catnip mice, then rolling on the catnip all over the carpet, and it REALLY had to be cleaned.  Also, one of the cats (Euclid) is the pukamatic and the other two are sheddomatics.  I meant to do a quick clean, but I HAD to shampoo the downstairs carpets.  Three times to get all the staining out.  This meant I lost the day to write, and I’m BEYOND late.  I’m thinking lovingly of monk’s cells and such, where all I’d have to do is write.
Anyway, then as now, yes, we’re facing horrors as presidents, but who told you the government should make life easier for you?  It’s a constant battle to keep the damn thing small and relatively powerless.  And mostly — like a bad cat — it gets in the way.  (Okay, a saber tooth cat, but never mind.)  Work around, work under, work over.  The future is yours to build.

A further note: I KNOW I have some guest posts, but I can’t find them.  I had to switch to Thunderbird and its search function sucks. So…*

The Future Some Assembly Required — A Blast from the Past from May 2013

We come back to how things are changing, how the future is changing, how work is changing.  Part of this is stupid government tricks, of course.  Yes, 30 hours work week has long been a socialist dream.  Besides drinking their own ink – i.e. believing their own propaganda – the rats in their heads about wealth tend to spread to everything else.  Since wealth is finite, then work is finite.  (Well, think about it.)  At least work on decently planned and properly efficient and NEEDED goods.  (Why would you want luxury goods?  Do you want to be better than other people?  You want to have a lollipop?  Did you bring enough to share with the entire country? I don’t think you’re properly committed to socialism, tovarish.)

Since work is finite, the only way to deal with unemployment is to put things in the law that make it impossible to work more than 30 hours.  In places like France they simply pass legislation making it impossible to work more than thirty hours – which is another reason it’s an American socialist dream.  You see, they’ve gone to France on vacation, and they’ve seen people lounging about with time to enjoy life.  What they don’t see is the outdated appliances, the outdated houses and the narrow lives of common people, because they also normally stay in the best hotels and hang out in the rich areas – but Americans are so… ungovernable, that if if you just did that to them, they would work seventy hours, just to spite you.  So instead you hide the 30 hour a week poison pill in the Health Care legislation.  Employers who would be bankrupted by it, are then forced to dial back everyone’s hours to 30 a week (at least on paper.  Look, I worked exempt positions before. Your hours are not what you put on the time sheet.  Your hours are what it takes to get the job done.)  In the bureaucrat’s mind (not in the real world) this means that the employer will have to hire a new employee for every three on the payroll.  More jobs created.  Everyone is up.  Up everyone’s chocolate ration to two grams a week.

As I mentioned in Drinking Their Own Ink (I really need to tag these d*mn posts.) what actually happens is that everyone lies about it.  People report thirty hours and go on working the normal forty or fifty or sixty.  (Remember the reason the employer is cutting down people’s hours on paper is that he’s already so close to the bone he can’t afford the mandated boondoogle of minimum insurance which includes hypnotherapy and weight loss or whatever they consider minimum.  Perhaps little Asian girls who run on your back for back pain.  Who knows?  It’s a government scam plan.  You will pay for treatment for Brucitis Of The Cleaning Lady Knee even if you’ve never been in the same zip code as a cleaning lady.)

So, everything changes on paper, but not in reality.  Except that analysts, bureaucrats and those of us who work with words, look at the figures on paper, confuse it with reality and announce that due to efficiencies and robotics and stuff we no longer need to work as long.  Then the big government types start talking about this vast underclass who will never find jobs again, and which includes everyone but the top two percent or whatever, and who will need structures to support them the rest of their useless lives.  How can you be against that?  Do you want the useless to starve?

(Rolls eyes.  Rolls eyes so hard that she should use a cup to contain them.)

I confess I would be far more impressed with this if I weren’t following the politics and the laws and seeing the pressures bringing it about, which have nothing to do with technology.  I also confess that I MIGHT still fall for it if I didn’t happen to have a good enough memory to remember Carter’s administration.  (Yes, I was in my cradle.  Shuddup.)

The exact same things were said then, and the science fiction magazines were full of stories about how most people would be unemployed forever, because… because… because… CHEESE!  Okay, they didn’t say cheese.  That would have made way more sense. They said that back then – seventies, remember – our tech was just too darn efficient, and so all these low-level employees weren’t needed and therefore we were headed to a world where the majority would be unemployed like forevah.  The kindly state had to take care of them or they would die – die I tell you, die!

Then came Reagan and near-full-employment and they forgot they’d ever said all that stuff and slinked off without even the decency of a “Never mind.”

Now it’s back.

Ignore them.  Ignoring people who think that a vast majority of people “NEEDS” to be taken care of by an incompetent, massive, bungling bureaucracy is always a good idea.  Look, these jokers aren’t even good at taking care of the few desperately needy people.  You think they can take care of a majority of people in a way that doesn’t lead to massive atrocities?  PFUI.  Most people – even the truly needy – dependent on the government have to exert themselves NOT to be destroyed by clerical error.

No, robotics didn’t become that all-better in the last four years.  Would that they had.

To some extent automated factories were already much, much better.  Eric Flint last week was talking about the hell of assembly line work, but the truth is that the only places that remains are places where it has to by union rule.  Back in 88 I knew someone who ran a plastics factory.  It was just him (and I don’t think he’d ever finished high school) and a bunch of automated machinery.  He poured the mixture in and he pushed buttons and voila, plastic spoons and forks and stuff just came flying out the other end.

This was sort of held back or perhaps dialed back by the commerce with China, where it’s cheaper to have five year olds carve the plastic forks from a plastic block (I’m joking, I’m joking.)  But the tech is there and has always been.

The robots, they shall always be with us.

So… what about work?  How will we deal with the vast army of unemployed people roaming the country side going “braiiiins.”

We won’t because as with zombies, they won’t exist.  At least they won’t exist if our government stops making it a crime to start/run/make a profit at a business.  And even if they continue their war on what you DID build, they still won’t exist.  They’ll just be unemployed on paper, collecting welfare, but inexplicably very busy and perhaps driving Mercedes.  (See Portugal and Greece for what people do when making a living becomes illegal.  And that’s Portugal and Greece, not the US. If you ask in Portugal and Greece, I bet you that they’d say their reason for living is their – hyper extended – family.  In the US people are likely as not to mention work.  Even those who mention family tend to mean their nuclear family, and then after that work.)

What this law has the potential of doing is making us all contractors.  Which means what is happening to writers is heading everyone else’s way fast.

Yesterday some of you in comments got rather lost in the weeds of “specialization versus generalist.”  But, truly, that’s not what’s at stake.

Look, I’m a contractor anyway, so it’s a little different, but being a writer working for a house (or many houses) is sort of a limbo thing, since not only do you license your copyright to them, but they expect you to do all sorts of other things which makes you sort of a contractployee.  What I mean is, the way things used to be, with the few gatekeepers and a lot of writers trying to sell, they could require you do all sorts of things beyond writing the book.  I’m always highly amused by the people who say they’re now going traditional because “that way all I have to do is write.”  Sure it is, if you want the book to tank so badly it leaves a dent.

Among the things I routinely did for my publishing houses were: paying someone to edit, so that if they missed something I’d catch it; paying someone to go over their edits to make sure nothing got changed in a weird way (and with Berkley this was a constant battle); working at publicity, including making publicity materials; paying someone (agent.  Yeah, that worked) to verify the contracts and make sure that everything was right, and to negotiate for me for less than appalling covers (that worked too!)

So, I was already running a little empire of sub contractors.  All that is happening now is that I’m adding another layer.  I might, for instance have to pay someone to put the books in paper, since I can’t seem to figure it out (though I might experiment with my How To Write Interesting Books and maybe I can.)

As an indie publisher it’s the same thing, only I’m doing it on my own and adding artists.  That’s it.  But I also get a much bigger cut of the money, so it works out better.

The only other thing is that you have to look for work, and see the opportunities for work.  And that’s the BIG, major difference.  Look, not all work will ever be automated because work like wealth is infinite.  If everyone automated everything we all do tomorrow, people would come up with new things they need.

Let’s not even go to buggy whips and candle makers.  What about the typing pool?  Every company used to have it, even in the eighties when I started working.  Where has it gone?  Are all those typists roaming the streets flexing their fingers in despondency?

No.  Some are now computer design specialists.  Some are serving coffee at Starbucks.  Some are doing other things that, like those two, were not major employment categories in the eighties.

Open your eyes.  Then (to quote Pratchett) open your eyes again.  See what you’ve been ignoring.  Don’t count on anyone to look after you.  You do not belong to the Government, no matter what the government thinks.  And if you did, yeah, they’d have to feed you but only to their standards, not yours.  And they could choose to stop at any time.

I’m giving you the same guidance I give my kids, who, though they’re both in STEM degrees, cannot – of course – be sure of being able to do anything with them, because – beyond stupid government tricks – the tech is changing so fast:

Look for things people might pay you for.  Then do them.  Get good at doing them.  In the future there might be no jobs, no “employment” as we have grown to think of it.  But there will be work.  And people will still pay for work that benefits them or makes their life easier.  Now, you might end up working four contract jobs in ten hour increments and taking the income from those multiple streams to make a full living.  I’m here to tell you it’s doable. (At least if you add the Jim Baen dictum “Don’t work for buttheads”.)

The future is wide open.  You just have to make it yourself..

Heinlein said if you must travel in time, do it forward, never to the past, because in general (with interludes) the future is better than the past.

I realized last night that one of the most unsatisfactory aspects of this election is that both main candidates are trying to run to the past.

Hillary’s whole plan “More government paying for things and more redistribution” is, as the left’s program has been for years, an attempt to return to the thirties when collective action was the future.

I’ve said it here before and I’ll say it again that part of the dem fascination with nationalized health misses WHEN nationalized health was implemented in most other countries.  In the thirties and forties, it was possible to provide “universal health” without having such demands that it requires the enslaving of most of the population to provide for that “right.”  Also, the spare quality of government provided health would be about the same or better than the patchwork private solutions.  At the level of healthcare we are used to experiencing, there is simply no way to provide it by government fiat without enslaving not just doctors and nurses, but medicine researchers, medical apparatus creators, and most of the population to pay for this drain.  Medicine today and the medicine that the dems see when they say “single payer” are not even comparable, much less the same art.

Then take their crazy fascination with unions.  Unions were important, not to say vital, when most of the work force was non-English-Speaking and just learning to be citizens, not subjects.  In the great industrial cities, crooked and skimming though unions were (it’s a human collective thing) they were better than being taken advantage of.  Now, most of their “gains” were not the result of of “shoulder to shoulder.”  As with feminism, most of the gains of unionism were the result of science — in this case in the form of labor saving that allowed the same gains in less time.  But at any rate, they kept demands alive until they were possible.

The problem now is that their demands have reached the “blue sky” level and do in fact impair the functioning of any entity they take over.  The post office does a lot of things for its own comfort, for instance (have I mentioned I DESPISE the bank-of-mailboxes thing?) and it’s losing badly to private package carriers.  Would be out of business I suspect, if it didn’t have a monopoly on first class mail.  (And if Amazon weren’t throwing business their way.)

The “future” Hillary envisions is all “collectives” and “collective action” as the vast masses of widgets assemble to petition the great industrialists and the ever-benevolent government.  One gets the feeling — and considering everything the feeling is probably right — that the cyber revolution hasn’t processed.  She doesn’t get that technology is now running the opposite way of mass production and mass action.

As for Trump, having listened to his speech, I was shocked at how much he wants to go back to the imaginary fifties.  Take his beef with Amazon — and before you say it wasn’t prompted by their owning the Washington post, he himself brought it up in his speech as why Amazon needed to be taken down a peg.  Considering this was in the context of Hillary supporters and he never brought up either facebook or twitter, it just shows his mind is in the past — he wants to smash Amazon with punitive taxes, so that “department stores stop struggling.  They’re struggling and it’s very bad.”

Or he could lighten the tax burden of department stores, of course, but that is never part of the plan, is it?

He also wants to bring back manufacture, by means of taxes and tariffs.

One gets the idea that the end point of his vision is some sort of Smallville, with department stores, and Sunday drives.  Given his head he’ll probably come up with a plan to revitalize driving on vacation and bring back all the small picturesque motels.  (And given the way his mind works this will be by taxing airlines, big hotels and airbnb.)

He either doesn’t understand that all the taxes and tariffs will also take Americans back to fifties levels of wealth (and if you think that was great you don’t know anyone who actually lived in the fifties.  I didn’t, but I’ve read bios and seen pictures) and bring innovation to a halt.

Look, I get it.  Intellectually I get it.  The human race is now and has always been in a fight between those who want to create and innovate and those who want to go back to the past when things were comfortable.

Chances are when fire was invented the old timers talked about the wonderful benefits of chewing raw mammoth the young were missing out on, and how that was why they all had such weak chins.

But the one thing we know about human development/invention is that it’s unstoppable.  You can manage to stop it and regress it for a while, in a small area, at great human cost, but it won’t still be quite the same.  And it will cost in lives.  For instance, I’m sure the real Korean middle ages were a better place to live than North Korea.

You can’t go back again.  Even when the future scares you.

The future scares a lot of people.  I think Obama’s promise to undo everything Reagan did (he’s getting there) had to do with bringing back the “safe” cold war world he’d grown up with.  Safe has many meanings, and in his mind I think the bipolar world with the smug underlying certainty that the USSR would win (remember on whose side his parents were) was “home.”  Which now I think about it, explains a lot of his ilk’s blind, unreasoning hatred of Reagan.  He took away their safety.

I was talking last week to a Libertarian gentleman who both welcomes the new media and is afraid of the upheaval it is creating in his own life, as a journalist.  I love the opportunities opened by indie publishing, but I won’t lie and say I’m not just a little scared that I won’t be able to make a living, if it all goes tits up and I have to go indie-only.  Though honestly, to be a writer is to live with insecurity, any way.

Most of us right now are caught in this.  To me the changes in publishing loom so large, that everything else seems opaque.  Even my husband’s job is a puzzle to me, let alone other people’s.  BUT whenever I sit down to talk to someone, everything from teaching to dentistry is changing and changing very fast, as technology has hit a turning point.

And I think most people are both excited by the new things in their field, and wishing they could go back to a place of safety.  “I want all of indie, but I want the houses to be healthy enough to know that I can continue publishing traditional forever” for instance.  Or “I want the new media, but the paper I work for should remain healthy.”

But that’s now how the tech change works.  Could we have Amazon and department stores?  Maybe, for a while.  We certainly need competitors to Amazon.that do things the way Amazon does.  And I’m not going to lie and say not having local sources is a way of shopping that is secure in emergencies, but here’s the thing: just as boutique indie bookstores and craft shops and local-grown shops and coming up, I suspect we’ll see others.  NOT department stores, but smaller, specialized stores, with knowledgeable retail people, whose slightly higher prices are more than compensated for by having the type of support Amazon can’t give.

But department stores?  that’s like saying the government needs to bring back Borders and shore up Barnes and Noble. (Don’t give them ideas.) These same stores who were the devil to the left, became an object of nostalgia, once they were replaced by something even more futuristic.

I understand the feeling and the longing.  It’s not that the human world was ever fully stable, tech wise, but it used to be more stable.  Change took longer.  The left probably thought they could bellyache about chain bookstores forever.  They’re none of them involved in real commerce or invention.

When my dad gave me a typewriter when I was 14, and went out of his way and spent more than he should to make it a GOOD one in the belief I’d spend my entire life working on it, he had reason to think that it was true.  The fact I’m typing on a gadget he couldn’t imagine tells you how fast tech has changed.

Perhaps the curious “time machine set to the past” effect of this presidential campaign is the result of us running really old people for the presidency.  But I don’t think so.  I think it’s because things are changing so fast that people chose these two horrors under the idea they’d take us back somewhere safe.

They won’t.  Or at least I’m fairly sure one of them can’t command enough physical force to do to us what was done to North Korea and make us a sort of dysfunctional time capsule.

Because technology is moving forward.  And the way it is now, we’re moving away from mass media and mass production and mass everything and towards a future in which the individual is the measure of everything.

Which is why in the end we win, they lose.

We just have to get us past the shakes, first.

 

When I came of age, back in pre-history, we sure were handed a messed up world.

It was 1980 and all the science fiction authors were predicting nuclear holocaust if we didn’t disarm and submit to the Russians immediately.  This was rather president Carter’s position, I gather, but he softened it somewhat for public consumption.

Being a cold-warrior was a bad thing, in my day.  You see, we came just after the boomers.

Now we’re being aggregated to the boomers which is loony because in 1968, that iconic year, I was learning to write.  Also, btw, the boom had stopped by my time, and classrooms were half full.  Part of what made the boomer generation transformational was no what they were or believed or that a larger number of them were assholes (this is not true.  Same proportion were assholes) but that they came of age at a time when people EARNESTLY believed every generation would be bigger than the previous one.  Read some Heinlein books of the fifties, to get that sense.  So “the youth” was outrageously catered to, instead of being, as always in the past, kept in its place.  Which meant that some of the stupid notions every generation has were enshrined and propagandized AT the boomers by people who wanted to sound “young and hip” and be on the winning side.  The prototypical boomer is a media creation.

But we weren’t even that.  When I was coming of age, we were called all the things the millenials are now (which is why I have great sympathy with them) including slackers, care for nobody, egotists. The twist is that we were also supposedly greedy.  HOW we were supposed to be greedy when we were most of us out of work is a mystery, but it was the fact we walked out of the sit-ins, cut our hair, and tried to find jobs (which by and large were taken by boomers.  Not their fault. They were a massive bulge in the population snake.)

So. When we came of age, we expected to be obliterated by a bomb any minute.  When I told my brother that Portugal, so small, so insignificant, was likely to escape, he reminded me that contaminated sea coasts would kill us.  (I think he was wrong.)

We were, metaphorically speaking, waiting for the hammer to fall.  Those of us who were politically aware knew that the Soviet Union was a mess internally, but we expected it, externally, to project power and have a grip — perhaps the winning grip — on world politics for the rest of our lives.

Pre-Reagan endless unemployment seemed the future.  ALL the future.  As well as ever increasing misery because there just wasn’t enough for all those people being born.  We were going to be increasingly shouting “Make room, make room” just to be able to have a square of ground to sleep on.

Those of us slowly coming to Mr. Heinlein’s view that the founding fathers had a point and that government should be by and for the people were faced with pundits and smart people utterly convinced — even when they opposed it — that history’s arrow pointed the other way.

At best we were all going to to live in a gray world, controlled by bureaucrats.  At worst, we were going to be atoms.  Add to that that we didn’t have jobs (when I was in my twenties and trying to break in, my husband was working 16 to 18 hour days, and sometimes we came to the end of the month wondering how to eat) and there didn’t seem to be much future for us.

The liberty minded among us who aspired to a life in the arts felt like free-marketeers in the soviet union.  If we wanted to survive, we were going to to have to keep quiet the rest of our lives.  The consensus reality was that “mixed” economy, with a heavy dose of planning was the way to go.

Other great ideas of the late seventies though the people here will have to correct me if they were only pervasive in Europe: Price controls. Yes, even in nominally free countries, it was considered sane for the government to tell you how much a bread roll should cost.  Salary controls.  Yes, even in nominally free countries, it seemed sane for the government to tell you how much your employer should pay you. Oil was going to end.  Tomorrow, if not the day after. But we couldn’t have nuclear.  So add a third way of dying: freezing, ofstarvation, in the dark.

Yesterday we got someone very young in the comments (well, I HOPE he was very young) telling us that Trump is the result of his and his like “rage” at the world they’ve inherited, and how we, older people, haven’t done anything to make it the utopia they deserve.

IF I were a little more mendacious, I’d answer with: Well, we collapsed the soviet union for you; planned economies are no longer automatically considered better; you have the internet; things — including overseas travel — are exponentially cheaper and you are, ultimately, much richer than I was at your age, even at the same economic level.  You’re welcome.

The temptation is great, but I’m not that mendacious. I keep my lies to fiction, where they belong.  None of those things were my doing.  I was, as most people were, trying to establish myself in my career, make a living, raise children.

I wasn’t even a public voice for good.  Oh, sure, I worked for Reagan’s campaign, which was probably illegal.  I worked on various elections since.  I write books.  But there wasn’t a hell of a lot I could do to hand my kids utopia on a plate.  If I could I would have, but see, the other side gets a say.

I remember — barely, I know, being ancient — being young, and thinking it was all some vast conspiracy AGAINST ME PERSONALLY.  All those rich people, all those fat cats, and yep, all those boomers, were hiding the stash.  And then I’d stop myself and think about it soberly in the same way I controlled paranoia for years.  When I entered a room and thought everyone there hated me, I went to “Oh, no.  Most of them don’t even know me.”

In the same way the young people who feel betrayed by conservatives and libertarians past need to take a deep breath.  Kid, we didn’t even know you.  We were just people doing the best we could, with no visibility into the future, same as you are.  And no one handed us a perfect world.  And we won’t hand one to their children.  And they won’t hand one to THEIR children, world without end.

Each generation has to fight for its freedom against those who want power, even those who THINK they want it for ‘your own good.’.  There will always be those, no matter how many times we discredit them, no matter how many graves we fill.  They just come back under new names.

Would anyone believe that with the wall done and the cold war over, our kids would believe communism was “fair” and national socialism the new hotness?  No?  I wouldn’t either.

But if you look at it logically, we were soft when communism fell: partly because they had infiltrated our universities and partly because the generation then in control, my grandparents’ generation, had seen that after WWII when you destroyed nations you had to rebuild them, and had come to have doubts about it.

So they were soft, the universities remained infested, and now we’re here, fighting the grandchildren of red-diaper babies, and battling the idea of a closed pie and tribal racialism, and hierarchies of victimhood anew.

Take heart though.  Everything we’re battling is sort of a scaled down version of the past.  Even Putin’s bluster has only a minuscule bite compared to what the USSR could have pulled.

Part of the fun in this is that my generation can’t take credit, but we really can’t take the blame.  Most of us who have a voice have had it too short a time; those of us aspiring to command positions (not me) are still too young.  Our parents’ generation and the boomers are in control now.  Will be in control for — given improved longevity — another twenty years.

Which brings us to the young: Bide your time.  You’re sort of like the heir to the throne chomping at the bit to get it, because you have all these neat ideas.

I remember being like that.

If all of us over 30 disappeared tomorrow in a puff of smoke, you’d find out how disastrous your ideas are.  You’d find it out face first into reality.  And the dead would fill graves without end.

So be glad you won’t have that kind of control.  Work on being yourself, on establishing your career, on having and raising kids.  Somewhere along the line your theories will fail and you won’t even notice.  And when you get where I am, not quite yet with any power, mind, you’ll realize that the best you can hope is that you can do your poor best to hand your kids a SLIGHTLY better world.

Rage has no place in this process.  Very satisfying, no doubt. Cathartic.  BUT every time that kind of rage has been unleashed into the world things went badly: French Revolution; Russian Revolution most revolutions in South America and Africa, the abattoir-wars of the 20th century.

You can’t sweep away the past by wishing it.  Cultures and structures have persistence, as the various people trying to replace facebook or twitter have found.  And those are recent structures.  And you can’t create utopia, because the other side always gets a vote.  And sometimes (when the other side aren’t dyed in the wool communists at least) it’s even a good thing, because it might point out your blind spots.

The crown will come to you in time.  And you’ll find out how little you can actually do, with all your power.

Until then bide your time and try to study the history of politics and yeah, the history of… history.  Read some biographies, too, to understand what the assumptions are, and how they have changed.

I will grant you that if we’d known what the future held we could have done much better for you.  We didn’t.  No one does.  All we can do is do the best we can with the assumptions of our time.

Remember that Romeo and Juliet is a tragedy of haste.  It is also a tragedy of youth.  The two often go together.  And if given their head, it all ends in a suicide pact.

So, go wisely and slow, they stumble fast.

The world is not a conspiracy against you.  We don’t even know you!  And you’re not the great transformational figure you think you are.  Which is great, because those come with a butcher’s bill.

Say thank you to my grandparent’s generation for defeating the soviet union, and give my generation some elbow room, once we have any power, to get you space colonies.

And don’t expect utopia.  It was never in the cards.

“Last night I dreamed again of Manderley” is one of those iconic lines of English literature.  Even if you’ve never heard of Manderley, it evokes a feeling of longing for something lost.  The narrator goes on to describe how even in her dream Manderley is in ruins, and then to establish once and for all that there is no hope of return.

Rebecca is one of my favorite books.  I think I first read it when I was twelve or thirteen.  It is a foregone conclusion that I liked it, I suppose, since the main male character is based on the Athos archetype, with whom I’d fallen in love sometime before.

Years ago, when — I think — I’d just given birth to second son, I found a “sequel.”  I think, us being broke at the time, I borrowed from the library.  Thank G-d. It was a hot mess of feminism and stupidity, including the fact that in the end the main character feels threatened by her beloved husband, because, hey, he killed his first wife.

This completely misses the point of the very flawed main male character.  Yes, he was misguided enough to kill for his ancestral honor, but that is not a “woman killer.”  The tragedy of the character is that he was presented with the only circumstance in which he would kill, driven to it, and even though it destroyed him, he had to do it.  Because the alternative was unbearable.

To reduce it to “he killed women” was an act of unforgivable stupidity.  The fact that the author of the abomination also went on to kill the children of the male character’s sister and brother, or disfigure them or something equally horrible, just made me hate her with a stabby kind of hate, because clearly this author was one of the true devotees of grey goo.  No shred of happiness might escape.

Tonight I dreamed again of the USA…

And there is no happy description I can follow that with.  I haven’t actually voted yet.  There are reasons for this.  And however we end up, I’m not going into exile.  I am a citizen of the United States, and the captain goes down with her ship.

I’m a writer.  I can imagine dark.  I can imagine much darker. I can’t imagine happy.  Not after the next four years.  Not after the next eight.  Ask me again in twenty and I think we’ll be much, much better and if I’m around in forty, I’ll collect on my bet that in the end we win, they lose.

We’re just going to eat live slugs in the meantime.

And I find that in the end I’m my father’s daughter.  I will not abandon the country I love, no matter how bad it gets.  We just love different countries.

The question is if the USA will leave me.  And it will, almost for sure.  For a time at least.

Having decided I needed to vote against Hillary: no, it’s not her corruption.  (What? You think it wasn’t there, before?  Or that I was so stupid as not to know it?  Or that the Clinton’s long time friend and crony, Donald Trump, doesn’t have some of that on him? Probably a lot of that on him.)  It’s the press.  The moment the sluice gates opened.  The moment it became obvious that she has, at the very least, committed serious security breaches, if not sold our secrets to the highest bidder, the press started a drumbeat of “Donald Trump’s tax returns for 1990 MIGHT have used a shady dodge to avoid taxes.”

Oh, yes, yes, that is comparable to the festering mess of corruption and horror that is the Clinton foundation, or the Pay for Play schemes Hillary ran as secretary of state, or–

It was that, the chorus of coordinated deflection, the drumbeat of covering up for a woman who, frankly, has nothing to recommend her, that pushed me over.

I’m going to vote against Hillary Clinton in the only effective way I can.

In the same way that for months now, I’ve refused to say I’d vote for Trump because every time I considered he might be marginally less bad, I got assaulted by alt.right loonies, the latest of which came to my facebook page, and, without my ever saying anything about whom I was voting for, started calling me names and saying I was drunk.

In that same way I can see that Hillary not only has the power of the press, she has the power of a 1984 apparatus, which will smear and cover and attack for her, until people on the street who aren’t political addicts don’t know the truth.

There might have been a time it was safe to elect someone like that.  That time ended September 2001, and it’s definitely not now.  With Russia determined on expansionism, with China rattling sabers, and with the rest of the world doubled over and coughing their lungs out with the pneumonia our chill gave them, it is not a time for us to lack at least somewhat accurate ideas as to what is going on.  A Praetorian guard of Presstitutes is very useful, and being Hillary means never having to say you’re sorry.  Or indeed having to confront error.

Which is why she’s too dangerous, and I have to vote against her.

Even though I can’t bring myself to vote FOR Trump, having decided to use a vote for Trump to bring down Hillary, I brought myself to listen to his speeches.

First, I think I’ve spotted a “tell” of the sort that you learn about politicians.  You know Obama’s “Make no mistake” which means he’s about to tell a whopper?  I think Trump’s is “Believe me.”

Second, his understanding of economics, smeared microns thin might cover the head of a pin.  His intent to take down Amazon is horrifying to this part-indie writer.  Particularly when he’s doing it because they own the Washington Post and the Washington Post dissed him.  His “Mexico will pay for the wall, believe me” borders on the deranged or delusional.  And his promise to slap tariffs on goods, which will immediately become too expensive for Americans to buy, means he doesn’t understand how things work.

On the other hand, Hillary is promising free college, free health care, and other positive liberties which POSITIVELY require the enslavement of half the population.  And the Press and the apparatus of entertainment and “culture” stands ready to aid and abet her in this mission which has no other end but the destruction of Western civilization.  (Though she’s doing it to line her own pockets.)

With Trump, at least, we stand a chance (mind you, not guaranteed) that people will oppose his more ridiculous power grabs; that he won’t get it all his own way.

I’m fully aware that he is supported by a bunch of loonies who give a bad name to Republicans, and who in fact, are everything we’ve always told everyone conservatives weren’t.

I’m also aware he’s not conservative in any way, shape or form.  All his instincts are statist.  I wish I could say I decided to use him as a weapon against Hillary because I’ve become convinced he’ll listen to his advisors and do a halfway decent job.

This isn’t true.  The only reason I’m willing to do this is that the media has proven themselves yet more craven and corrupt than even I expected.

Donald Trump will destroy the Republican Party.  Hillary Clinton will destroy the country.  I wasn’t even ever a Republican, and though I hate to lose the one organized (the Libertarians aren’t) focus of resistance to the left, there is no contest between which one to save.

Having made the decision (I haven’t actually voted yet, and won’t till the last minute, because I think that lessens the chance they’ll know the accurate number of votes they need to manufacture) I thought I’d keep it to myself, possibly forever.  Maybe even get so drunk that I keep it FROM myself.

But then, over a very bad night, I realized that this makes my act of self-debasement futile.  For it to mean anything; for it to actually stop the Clinton criminal machine from taking over the US, I need to explain and hopefully bring a few more along.

So I am doing that.

Now does it mean I’m going to disown you if you vote libertarian, constitutionalist, write in your cat’s name (be careful on that.  In some states a write in means it’s a “spoiled ballot” and they won’t count down ticket either.  Find out before you do it) or even vote for Hillary and all her empty promises, and all her false glamour?

No.

This year there are no good choices.  We each have to come to grips with our most basic values and based on those commit an act that can’t fail to injure anyone with a dose of moral principles.

Unless you’re gleefully voting for one of these scary clowns in order to injure the country and your countrymen, you’re still my friend, and we should definitely make a date to get drunk together, because there isn’t enough booze in the world to wash away this.

It’s impossible to tell if it will make any difference.  It’s impossible to tell what the polls are actually saying, or if there is a vast contingent of Sarahs there, who cross over at the last minute.

What is possible to tell is that whoever wins this, we have our work cut out for us.

These should never have been the choices.  Open primaries MUST die.  The power of the media must be vacated. Fraud must be destroyed.

This means we have to get serious about voting.  It has to stop being the freak show it is, with early voting, vote by mail, vote without ID, vote if you’re a pet with a legal address.

No other country in the world has this crazy system.  And though we’re known to make crazy systems work, this doesn’t.

Do you think it is simply coincidence that the democrats winning the elections come from the most corrupt places in the US.  Really, Arkansas and Chicago?  What’s next? Detroit?

Every time I post this some of you — the younger ones — tell me without early voting they’d never vote because they have jobs and wha wha wha.

That’s nice. Pre-motor voter we had a system where you could show you can’t get off work, or whatever, and they would allow you to vote early.  BUT you had to care enough to show sufficient hardship.

Yes, I know but “Fraud has not been proven.”  Successful fraud ISN’T.  Besides, look at what the press is doing for Hillary.  If fraud HAD been proven, who would report it.

I think it’s safe to assume, humans being humans, if fraud is possible, fraud will happen.

And boy oh boy is fraud possible.  It isn’t even difficult.  Particularly with vote by mail.  How hard is it to have a huge batch of vote by mail votes prepared, to replace, oh, half the vote?  Is it a coincidence that every state that votes by mail goes Democrat?  And that Republicans are forbidden from bringing legal action over election fraud?  I don’t know.  Hey, tell you what, there is this bridge in Brooklyn I can sell you cheap.

So, that needs to be cleaned up, or we’re all disenfranchised.

And then we need to get serious — really serious — about changing this culture and the dominance of the MSM.  No matter who wins.

It will be more difficult under Hillary, because she is not only incompetent (come on guys, her husband pushed Motor Voter without any ever splashing on him) she is also malevolent, and she doesn’t like the US.  Or western civilization.

Of the two crazy evil clowns, she’s the evil clown we can least afford.

Now excuse me, I’m going to take a shower with the wire stripping brush.

I come from a culture that firmly believes that on Halloween and All Hallows, the world is close together to “the other world.”  It is more or less assumed the other world is the world of the dead, but that’s not necessarily true, since anything supernatural or weird was also supposed to have come from “another place.”

It was on Halloween when I was six.  In Portugal we were not quite as crazy as in Mexico about the whole day of the dead thing.  There isn’t much about skeletons and that whole “death is cool” thing.  (Which always creeps me out a bit.)  Instead, you go to the cemetery (true) but you just light candles and talk about the people buried there.  (Or you used to.  I think that’s changed too.) Of course this being a small and enmeshed area, everyone ended up competing on the grave with the most candles and all that.

Also because it was a time a year when everyone in our area came to the same place (this covered for instance both where I grew up and where mom grew up, both quite different) there was a lot of talk and discussion of old times. Think of it as a massive quasi-family reunion.

I have issues with faces.  I still do.  Every time I’m about to see a friend I haven’t seen in years, I’m afraid of not recognizing them. I’ve gotten better over the years because mostly I DO recognize them.  Now casual acquaintances is a little different.  If I haven’t seen you in oh, three or four years, and we shared a moment at a con, you might want to lead with the moment.  Or not. Because at cons I tend to be overwhelmed and everything blends together.

When I was little, though, I had really serious problems.  Not recognizing my own parents problems, particularly if we were going to be in a crowd.  So every morning, I memorized the clothes mom was wearing, so if we went out in public, I would be able to find her.

Now in the cemetery everyone was wearing black clothes, and a woman who looked like my mom (size, hairdo, that type of thing) gave me her hand and started booking it towards the entrance, when mom and dad noticed, ran after and rescued me.

Now there are several “Normal world” explanations.  Several children had died in an epidemic in the area, and this woman had decided I was just like her lost daughter and I’d do. But in a small community (or area) it was impossible for her to think she’d get away with it.  Of course emotionally disturbed people might not think clearly, but think of how to explain it to your neighbors?  In a tightly connected community? Impossible.  Even if I had been a dead ringer for her daughter it would be impossible.

However, from what I remember — and yes, the incident made a huge impact on me, partly because of this — the adults acted like this woman intended to take me away and I’d never be able to come back/never be seen again.

Indulge me for a moment.  Perhaps I wasn’t mistaken that night, perhaps it was my mother… or a close enough analog of my mother.  Imagine she stepped out of her world accidentally, and saw her daughter who had died in the epidemic three years ago, standing there, staring at candles on her cousin’s grave.  And she thought she could change it all.  Somehow.

Of course it’s fanciful.  But the idea of crossing between worlds and where little things change perhaps, but the world is the same is a science fiction trope and it’s enshrined in the Mandela Effect.

If you follow that link, you’ll find that most of the time it’s trivial things that you could have forgotten/reformed in your memory.  I’m so not going to take in account spelling, since people might hear something and learn to spell it wrong.

I also have this theory that whether you remember a public figure’s death wrong has to do with whether you follow that particular field.  For instance, you could never get me to tell you when celebrities died.  I spend a lot of time coming across things and going “I wonder if he’s still alive” about a singer or actor, but it’s not of major significance to you.  I can however usually tell you when science fiction writers left this vale of tears (okay, not always) and also when political figures died.  I would never, for instance, suffer from the literal Mandela effect.

This is similar btw, to being a gateway writer.  If you aren’t paying attention to that particular universe, you’ll remember things wrong, but you remember them as always having been.  This is either because gateway writers attune to that universe, or because — of course — we have fallible memories around the edges.

But there are other incidents, at least in my life, that have the force of the Mandela effect.  For instance, I remember when we found Pete’s Kitchen on Colfax, the way I remembered it was that its number was 1974, which is associated with very “strong” events for both Dan and I.  But then suddenly it was 1962, the year of our birth.  And it had ALWAYS been that.  I don’t think it’s possible for me to confuse that, because who the heck forgets the year of their birth? I’d immediately have remembered it as such.

There’s other things, like titles of books changing.  Dates when movies came out moving around.  Or books, because I swear to you I read Have Spacesuit in Portuguese at 8, but apparently it didn’t exist there.

Sometimes I wonder if you know those ridiculous mistakes parents make?  Like when they confuse your actions with your siblings?  Or your favorite foods/places?  Sometimes those are things that you really couldn’t confuse, particularly for people like my brother and I almost a decade apart, and I wonder.

There were two other moments, when I felt like I’d ALMOST gone elsewhere.  One was when I had a really bad fever.  I was sitting in my office, and suddenly everything but my desk changed.  Instead of being in the half of my bedroom I used as an office for 15 years, I was in a circular tower, as you’d find in a Victorian.  There were stairs right beside the desk, and I could smell the ocean and hear seagulls.  And then it was back.  It was the moment of a blink.  But very clear.  Yes, I had a fever.

However, later, when I hadn’t a fever, some months after, I started heading down the stairs to go grab coffee.  It was early morning, the kids were at school and Dan was at work.  But I heard people talking in the living room and one of them was Dan’s voice, the other a girl I knew was my not-yet-in-school daughter, and one of my sons.  I don’t have a daughter.  The whole thing felt wrong.  The bottom of the stairs looked like always but also wrong.  I walked back to my office, then walked back, and the house was in silence, and I went down the stairs, and everything was as normal.

Yes, I know, writer.  Lost in a brown study.

Some years later, one of my sons came in shaken, from college.  He’d gone into his normal class, it was a test day.  his class has desks arranged in the normal way, and he was a little late, so everyone would be there.  But he stepped into the class, and the desks were in a square and it was empty.  Also “it looked/felt wrong.”  He stepped back out very quickly, then back in, and it was his class.

I told him of my experiences, and I’m not sure he was reassured.  I mean, I AM a writer.

But I wonder if there are indeed those things we play with: worlds, extending to infinity, as close together as the leaves of a book, as far away as another plane.  And if sometimes we do cross between close ones unawares.  You know, all those times when your aunt’s favorite sweater is no longer green but brown? And was always brown?

I understand all my experiences are debatable, and it might all be a widespread case of bad memory.  Maybe.  Part of me wants it to be all nonsense and missremembering.   After all, that world where my office was somehow by the sea had to be pretty far away, and I’d hate to wake up one morning and walk off into a world where I didn’t marry Dan.

But I understand that the universe doesn’t have to follow the rule of “what Sarah likes”.

So — have any of you guys had that experience from the mundane “but I remember it always being different” to almost walking into another place?

And what could it all mean, if you have?  Other than brain glitches or momentary memory slips?