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Shhh.  Did you know there’s  a secret cabal that runs the world?

I don’t know why but this idea is hardwired into the human brain as plausible, and also as cool.  Things like the Da Vinci Code owe no small part of their success to the fact that people want to believe that some unseen, all-powerful force is behind history.

I could give you a guess as to why. It’s a guess and a just so story, but it has some merit. After all humans owe no small part of their recent (say last 100 thousand years) success to the retention of PHYSICAL infantile characteristics well into adulthood, as well as the prolongation of childhood.  Now there is no logical reason this would prolong intellectual infantile characteristics… no reason beyond the fact that we are both a body and a mind and mind tends to respond to the body.

As infants and children, we are all born into a world (a very small one) run by a secret conspiracy of one or two.  I mean, I know my parents could turn my world upside down without warning (and often did, without realizing it.  I mean, seriously who forgets to tell their 14 year old they’re supposed to leave on vacation the next day?) upending all my plans and changing all my set habits.

Even as adults, our lives can be upended by nothing we’ve done or can prevent.  Look, almost all the hard times we’ve gone through were caused by stupid economist (manipulating stupid politician) tricks. Then there’s stuff like 9/11 which more or less put paid to Dan’s job at the time because it involved traveling, and suddenly, with the airline industry in disarray we had the choice of moving East or his spending two days a week traveling.  Which made the four-days-on, three-days-off job into a five-days-on-one-day-off.  Nothing we could have done or prevented and definitely unseen forces changing our lives.

Where I differ from conspiracy theorists, is that while I agree unseen forces (or at least too many potentially visible forces to follow and “see”) are at work in everyone’s life, I don’t believe those forces are a conspiracy, or centrally located, or even vaguely coordinated.

Take for instance the “conspiracy against libertarian and right wing writers in science fiction.”  I don’t actually believe in any such thing.  Oh, sure, the usual suspects were positing that we believe there is a conspiracy of elite “feminists and homosexuals” ruling everything and against us.  They countered this by pointing out all the states and other governments that republicans control. Which has nothing to do with publishing or the gatekeepers in the arts in general.

I don’t even… I mean… these people literally don’t know if it’s ass or breakfast time.  That’s as much sense as they make.  They seem to have clue zero of how we think EVEN WHEN WE EXPLAIN IT TO THEM.  In public.  Day after day at Mad Genius Club, for instance.

My friend Bill Reader (who laughed at my shock at their theory above) seems to have been right.  Their only attempts at understanding us seems to come from seeing us as themselves but evil (I need to buy a fake mustache to twirl.) And they believe in centralized conspiracy theories (i.e. the only opposition to “progressive” ideas is the Koch brothers Libertarians who, apparently having taken leave of their senses, are supposed to be financing and spearheading everything from the religious right to banking conspiracies; or the only reason that we don’t already have cars that run on spit and rainbows is because the evil oil companies CONSPIRE against those being made public; or the only reason they’re not personally successful with their degrees in the science of basketweaving is that the MAN is holding them down.)  So, we too must believe in conspiracy theories, but they must involve people the progressives consider allies.  Hence an elite of homosexuals and feminists.

Yep the idea was so strange I’m not going to lie, I giggled.  And when they inevitably pick up on this, I shall gif them because the only way to answer the utterly absurd is with absurd pictures.  I think some of my gay friends who are very successful indeed come closest to an “elite” of homosexuals — which comes to nothing as most of them are conservative/libertarian.  The individualists fail to organize, and, oh, yeah, they couldn’t conspire their way out of a wet paper bag (not even one of those brown racissss paperbags.)  BUT they’re good at the real world of individual work and achievement.  As are a lot of people.

Now I do believe there is a self-proclaimed elite running most of the entertainment, arts, news and publishing.  But I don’t think it got there by a conspiracy, or that they are “homosexuals and feminists.”

Mostly they got there by gerontocracy, which, except for brief periods is the form of government of most western societies.  Where people live long enough, their power and wealth increases with age.  And the makeup of the ruling class of elders resembles nothing so much as those who got a head start by being born in the right families 70 or so years ago.  Hence the Clintons and the Warrens and others seem to be mostly white, mostly elderly and a little more than half female (perhaps because women live longer.)  That’s all.

Now I don’t say it’s easy for libertarians and conservatives (at least open ones) to make it in the arts.

The people in charge are imbued with the ideas that were fashionable in their twenties and thirties.  And that, due in no small part to the USSR’s agit prop efforts in our universities (no, not a conspiracy.  Both the plans and the documentation of actions are there if you care to look.  An enemy undermining you while at war is not a conspiracy.  It’s just psychological warfare) are mostly Marxist.

(Oh, btw, the usual suspects also say communism is not originally Marxist, because Marx posited the withering of the state.  I’d make a gif post about this — and might — but all they’re showing is that they know as much about Marx as the guy who was ahead of me in line to sign up for Russian classes so he could read Marx in the original.  Yeah, he posited the withering of the state.  After the all-powerful state had freed people of the evil influence of capitalism, so a new generation was born with no greed or self interest.  This would be the Homo Sovieticus.  And it borrows more than anything from the tales of the second coming.  As we’ve found, barring a Messiah, men are still born as men and an all-grasping state doesn’t automagically make them into angels.  Something that would only shock Marx.  Oh, and current “progressives” which are probably the only thing more clueless than Marx.  Their fathers have eaten sour fruit and the children’s teeth are set on edge, or if you prefer, their father was an idiot, and they’re even more brainless. I mean they routinely attribute criminal behavior or even bad behavior to that corruption of morals of living in a capitalist society, but they don’t even know the whole mystical mumbo-jumbo that underlies that “society is guilty” theory.)

This means that in those fields where the gerontocracy has seized power, not being a Marxist is the equivalent of being a child-abuser (this analogy was made by the Puppy Kickers during last year’s Hugo kerfuffle.)  If you’re not a Marxist, you don’t want the evil capitalism that distorts all of humanity’s good impulses to be superseded.  You  actively hate (as opposed to merely not believing in) the idea of a society where we all live in peace and harmony and everyone receives benes according to their talents and needs.

Worse, at least in the arts, (where “Marxist analysis” and writing/painting/composing to “improve the world” have replaced the sense of aesthetics that ruled before and that went back to the renaissance’s rediscovery of Greece and Rome), if you’re not following the Marxist aesthetics of either criticizing the world as exists (particularly the individualist and capitalist parts of it) or trying to change it, you fall outside their ability to classify.  I.e. you will read to them as very bad.  Or possibly as bewilderingly mixed.  To put it another way, they can’t make head or tails of an aesthetics based on ludic enjoyment and cathartic/emotional release.)  So when they say the things we like are very bad or “infantile” or “incompetent” they are right, according to the way they judge.  Of course, according to the way we judge most of their stuff is preachy, puerile and most of all stultifyingly predictable.

So, what we have here is a clash of two cultures, having nothing to do with a conspiracy.  And btw, it doesn’t mean any of us can’t fake their aesthetics and get into traditional publishing.  In fact, if indie hadn’t arisen through disruptive technology, most of us would have gotten in/kept working at it.  Look, Marxist aesthetics aren’t hard to fake, really, and most of us learned them in college ANYWAY.  In fact, removing them from our brain is the hardest part of writing at least at first for most of us with an “excellent” education.

Fortunately we don’t need to fake it, or get into fields that are, at best, limping on towards their logical end, due to technology, economics, and the fact that the current market in literature (and art, and–) bypasses gatekeepers and sells straight to the public.

You don’t need to believe there’s a conspiracy against you to believe your values are at odds with the decadent gerontocracy in control and also that hitting your head against a wall is painful, when there’s a big gate you can go through and which is open right next to said wall.

(Not that I don’t advise people who have yet to break in to try both.  One book for trad, one for indie.  Because the magic of a gerontocracy is that sooner or later the rulers die.  Sooner, since they’re so hot and heavy on assisted suicide and all. And having a foot in the door and a place inside from which you can undermine the establishment has never hurt anyone. At worst, you’ll have a minor part in changing it before it dies.  At best you’ll make a lot of money while doing it.)

But I personally don’t believe in conspiracies.  Not the history-revising conspiracies, not the economy controlling conspiracies, not even the gatekeeper conspiracy.

I believe in chaos.  I believe in chaotic systems.  Which is why I don’t believe in centralized government OR planned economies.  I mean, I believe they can exist. Just like gatekeepers exist, using their fading “power” to control rent seekers and unthinking newbies into following them like blind ducklings into No Awarding fresh blood in the field, even while shrieking they’re being held down.  (Because you know, the most powerful house in the field is fighting against people who have the power to…  No, it doesn’t stand scrutiny.  Also, notice who is leading them.  Gerontocracy again.)

Those aren’t conspiracies so much, as people using the channels of power they acquired through decades of patient climbing on the backs of others.

I also believe they fail spectacularly and in proportion to how much they try to control.  (So, say, the USSR fails harder than someone just trying to control to whom awards are given in a backwater field of a dying industry.)

Conspiracies fail because three can keep a secret if two are dead and even the disorganized chicanery of gatekeepers and rent-seekers can be disrupted by a hacking of emails AND because technicians and engineers stand ready to rock the best laid plans of oldsters in control of dying industries with technologies that bypass them.

Those who see in a clash of cultures a conspiracy or in their opponents’ rejection of the gatekeepers belief in conspiracies are woefully unprepared to deal with a world where change is going accelerating, disruptive technology building on and causing more disruptive technology, no matter how much the “elites” try to slow it down.

And that’s fine.  We have no interest in their useless lawn, when we can plant orchards of of our own.

So let them attempt to conspire.  Let them continue to perceive us as through a distorted mirror.

As I said, gerontocracies are self-limiting.  In the end they collapse for the obvious reason.  And afterwards, we’ll be here, building.  And catching society on our own load-bearing structures which we’re creating under, around, over and beside the ones that the “progressives” are so happily destroying.   (Partly because theirs is a philosophy of destruction and always was. Practical Marxist revolution =destroy what’s there — ????? — utopia. And partly because they’re old and out of touch with the world as it is.  Which means their brilliant ideas don’t work well in the present.  Particularly in science fiction, the gerontocrats and those who follow their lead are the future of the past.)

So.  Go about your business.  Fear not the conspiracy.  Dance happily in the chaos.

While they have some power, they will make our life a bit unpleasant.  But their power is smaller every day.  And in the end, we’re free.  And that’s no conspiracy.

 

 

I was never a good little girl.  It wasn’t that I was bad, exactly, or at least I never had evil intent.  But I was never very good at obeying, or at doing what I was expected to do, expressed or assumed.

I could adduce several reasons, including the fact that I lived at odds with my strong willed mother, but I don’t think that’s it.  I think it’s more a fault in ourselves — or in this case, in myself — that I was not put together right from early on.

Oh, sure, I liked baby dolls — for a while, though mostly I liked doing their hair until they were bald — but I also liked cars, and trains, and I really liked making stuff out of wood.  And while I could sort of kind of like pretty dresses and clothes, I couldn’t be bothered to stay in them or keep them clean very long.  Mom said the only way to keep clean after putting me in a pretty dress was to sit me down somewhere and have two adults keep an eye on me.  The wall or the tree or the mud puddle might have been there for months, but the minute I was put in a clean, frilly dress, I felt an irresistible desire to meddle with it.

It got worse when I entered middle school, and when most girls were trying to impress boys — and teachers — with how pretty and sweet and gentle they were.

It was as though I hadn’t got the memo.  I knew very well that teachers preferred girls who obeyed and parroted back their line than girls who actually learned, learned more than was required and thought for themselves.

And of course there was sexism.  Look this was a Latin culture in the sixties and seventies.  Some teachers might pay lip service to women being as smart as men, and everyone paid lip service to women having the same rights as men.  But every day, in interaction, men were expected to be smarter and more rational than women.  In school even the teachers who tried not to acted like it was very strange I could compete with boys.  And because boys had the advantage of being expected to be right and smart, it was pretty hard to compete.

I was expected to be smart but not so smart.  Which is part of the reason I felt the need to be smarter than all of them.

Somewhere at the back of my mind, I had the idea that people would like me DESPITE the fact I wouldn’t play their game?  Adolescent rebellion, perhaps.

It grew into something different: a decision to do and fight for what is right, regardless of what people wanted me to do.  If you always rebel against what people want or expect, they control you as completely as though you always did what they wanted.

As an adult, not feeling the need to be liked, or approved of, I developed my opinions and ideas with no reference to what those with power wanted me to believe.  And most of all I prize the right to be left alone.

Oh, sure, I played the game when I was first published (and to get published) but that was different.  I was doing it not just for me but for the kids.  To be blunt, we needed the money, and for various reasons that was my best choice.  Also, of course, I felt I should be writing, and this was the only way to get published.  (It seems like another world now.)

But as soon as I could, I walked away from those houses in which uniformity of opinion and behavior was expected.  I still am not very good at being a good girl.

Which is good.

Because recently there is a lot of talk — and action.  Has anyone forgotten the all-woman Nebulas — about giving prizes to women, about women only now breaking into science fiction (an insult to all the women who came before) about the Importance of Recognizing Women.

And every time they talk about this, every time they ignore the pioneering women, every time they recognize inferior work because it was wirtten by a person who happens to have a vagina and SAY WHAT THEY WANT TO HEAR, I see my teachers smirking about girls who wore jeans and enjoining us to wear nice dresses and behave in a feminine manner.  I hear “Nice Prizes For Good Little Girls.”

I wouldn’t want a prize given in those conditions.  I guess the adolescent still lives in me.  me.  I want to win on my intellect, on my work, on the qualities of mind and personality that mean a lot more than what I was born with.

Note I was born into a sexist society, yes, but I’ve never been oppressed.  I’ve never given anyone the right to oppress me, and I’ve yet to meet the man I can’t compete with on more than equal terms.

I don’t need anyone and certainly not people who think they’re superior to the rest of us, to “improve my lot” or make up for supposed oppression.  I do not need Nice Prizes For Good Little Girls.

This is good, since I’ll never manage to be a good little girl.

But just like I wondered, when I was in first grade, about the berribonned girls in frills who never stepped wrong, never felt the need to jump in a mud puddle, and never climbed a tree, I wonder about the women in the field, those women who babble about being liberated and about how they don’t need men, and about whatever the party line is, and who don’t view it as an insult that others assume the right to reward them for being good little girls.

Liberated?  They’re just doing what is expected of them, like any Victorian housewife.

Self-sufficient women who think for themselves don’t get these pats on the back.  And this is good because we’d break the arms of those patting us.

We make our own way, we think our own thoughts, and we do not feel the need to attack men or hate them.  Those men who compete with us on equal terms are our brothers.  The others we ignore.

Because like those men we are free.  And that’s all we ask for.

Freedom’s Never Easy – Amanda Green

Last week, I read a comment from someone on Facebook that brought back memories. Not good memories, not by a long shot, but not terrible ones either. No, the memories were of a time when the nation had been beaten down emotionally and psychologically. It was also a time when I saw up close for the first time just how dedicated so many of my fellow Americans are to the continued survival of this country. It is a memory I mean to hold onto and not let be overshadowed by the white noise of everyday life.

No, I’m not talking about 9/11. In many ways, that was the Pearl Harbor of the current age. Unfortunately, our leaders in Congress and in the Pentagon – and, yes, in the White House – didn’t have the guts to do the job that needed to be done. We are constrained to fight a civilized war, something that is an oxymoron at best and, at worst, the slow surrender of our country to an enemy the powers that be don’t want to defeat.

But that’s another topic and many other posts.

What I’m talking about is 1979. Yes, I know, a number of you weren’t alive back then. But a lot of us were and we remember those days. Trouble was brewing in the Middle East, particularly in Iran. The Shah was losing power. His son was in Lubbock, TX, training at Reese Air Force Base. Gasoline prices had gone through the roof and the supply was limited – at least that’s what we were told. In parts of the country, gasoline was being rationed. Here in TX, you were able to buy gas based on the last digit of your license plate. Odd numbers could buy on odd numbered days and even on even. If you were traveling – and I don’t remember for sure but I think it was 100 miles – from home, you got an exemption. IF you could find a station with gas where you were. Yes, there were even lines at stations to fill up.

My grandparents talked about how it reminded them of the Depression. Oh, not that it was anywhere near as bad but the signs were there that, if something didn’t happen soon, it could be. We looked to Washington and nothing happened. We had a president who very well may have been a very good man but one who was totally out of his element and in over his head. We had a Congress that took more pleasure in harping across the aisle than in taking direct action to deal with the problem. Instead, we were told to conserve. Turn down the thermostat. Use public transportation – which was a laugh in this part of Texas because there was no mass transit, not even on the drawing board.

Then came the Iranian Revolution. Protests against the Shah and his rule had begun approximately two years earlier. Those protests had grown, despite the attempts by the Shah to not only quell them but to silence his detractors. January 1979 saw the Shah fleeing Iran. Gone was a supposed ally and in his place was a government that had no respect and even less regard for this country. In fact, that enmity extended to any western country that wasn’t ready to fall in line with what the Ayatollah and his advisors wanted.

As a country, we watched – much like we are now – as journalists and businessmen, government officials and more – were kidnapped in Iran and held for ransom. We were worried about those people but there was a part of us that said they should have realized the danger of the situation and gotten out. That changed the morning of November 4, 1979 when the American Embassy in Tehran was stormed and more than 60 Americans were seized. Thus began 444 days of uncertainty and anger and frustration for this country.

I’ll never forget that morning. I was living in Lubbock at that time and attending school at Texas Tech. When I walked into the Commons, the group I usually met for coffee before class were all there. Like me, they had already heard the news. Unlike me, they had been busy in the hours since it had been announced.

You see, each and every one of them were either retired military or in the Reserves. Every one of them, male and female, had been on the phone to either the commanding officers or former commanders to see what they needed to do. They were ready to pull on their BDUs, lace up their boots, grab their battle rattle and go bring our people home.

They were determined. They were angry. They were ready to take action. They were, in short, willing to lay down their lives to protect the lives of not only our citizens who had been taken hostage that day but all those the Iranians had abducted over the years.

Unfortunately, it didn’t appear that our government was willing to do the same thing.

Instead of answering the calls that we do something, the government told us to be patient. They were doing their best to get our people home. Negotiations were underway.

Those failed. As did the one attempt by the military to rescue our people. In April 1980, Operation Eagle Claw was launched. We lost 8 servicemen, an Iranian civilian was killed and we also lost two aircraft. And back home we took another blow to the solar plexus.

Each night we listened to Frank Reynolds, and then Ted Koppel, on Nightline, which first broadcast four days after the embassy was stormed. I don’t think I will ever forget the way the show would display America Held Hostage Day (and the appropriate number was inserted). We watched, praying to see good news but, all too often, seeing instead images of our countrymen and the others held hostage. For many, it brought back memories of the films the Viet Cong would release of our POWs.

We truly were held hostage.

As Texans, some of us looked at H. Ross Perot and what he did to try to free two EDS employees who had been arrested not long before the revolution. He put together his own team of experts, former military and paramilitary, and tasked them with getting his two people out of the prison where they were being held. When they realized they couldn’t come up with a plan to do so, a plan that had a higher chance of success than of failure, they started thinking outside the box. They saw the writing on the wall, to continue with the clichés, and knew the day would come when the followers of the Ayatollah would storm the prison in an attempt to free their compatriots who the Shah had imprisoned. When that did, in fact, come about, the EDS employees managed to slip out and meet up with Perot’s team and they were whisked off to safety.

And yet we continued to watch as nothing, seemingly, was being done to free all those other hostages.

What had happened? When had the United States gone from a respected country, one the rest of the world knew would rise up like an angry giant when provoked?

A country is only as respected as its leader. If those who hate us have no respect for our president, if they know he will not take quick and decisive action to counter any move they make against our interests, they will do as they wish. We saw that in 1979. We had a “nice” man in the White House, one with little to no real experience on the national level, much less the international. He wanted to hold out the olive branch to the wolf who was waiting to eat the lamb. With each day that passed, the Iranian revolutionary government thumbed its nose at us because it knew Carter would not order a decisive action against it.

As a country, we were frustrated. We were demoralized. We knew we needed new leadership. We needed someone who would stare the Ayatollah in the eye and not blink. So, when the Republicans nominated Ronald Reagan, we had the cowboy we wanted to ride, not into the sunset but into the thick of the battle. The results at the polls and in the Electoral College showed just how tired the country had gotten of having a “nice” man in the White House. In the popular vote, Reagan received 43,903,230 votes to Carter’s 8,423,115. Reagan received 489 electoral votes to Carter’s 49.

And we still had hostages being held in Iran.

What we didn’t know, and probably shouldn’t have, is that negotiations were going on behind the scenes. Carter and his advisors were negotiating paying what was nothing more than a ransom to get our people out. The Algiers Accord was finalized January 1981. The election had put pressure on Carter and others to quickly conclude the negotiations because Reagan had made it clear during his campaign that he would not pay ransom for our people. The implication, if you want to be nice about it, was that he would take a much more direct form of action.

Would the election have turned out differently if we had known Carter and company were in serious negotiations with the Iranians? Probably not. Most of us wouldn’t have had much patience for the fact the Iranians refused to deal directly with Carter or his advisors. Instead, they would work only with the Algerians. According to Carter, that meant translating anything he or his people said into French for the Algerians who then had to translate it into Farsi for the Iranians.

Am I the only one who has visions of the Keystone Cops dancing in her head?

So, how does this apply to today?

It’s simple really. We have another president, now a lame duck, who has proven to be much like Carter when it comes to foreign relations. Instead of standing up to our enemies, he tries to court them, often to the detriment of our allies. He has shown, in my opinion, that he puts our relations with those enemies above the safety of not only our troops but of our country as a whole. Once more, I see a country that is beaten down. Will our next president be the one to bring us out of this depression, for lack of a better word, or will he (or she) drive us further down the hole?

That is the question we have to ask ourselves when we look at the candidates. If the answer is yes then, for the love of all that is holy, we have to do everything we can to make sure that person is not elected. Unfortunately, I’m afraid we will be faced with a “lesser of two evils” choice. Sometimes, that’s the hand we’re dealt. If that is the case, we do whatever it takes to make sure our senators and representatives are held accountable until the next presidential election.

In short, it is time to make America great again. It is possible but it won’t be easy.

Most Christians and probably most non-Christians in western civilization are familiar with the parable of the talents.  For those not, the quick summation is as follows: a man gives his servants some amount of money each.  After a while he calls it back, and it’s not enough to return it untouched.  If you have made no return on the investment you’ll be punished.

For people of faith, it is normal to consider the “talents” as, well, talents, G-d given and for which we owe a return.  In other words “use what you were given.”

One doesn’t need to be religious to believe in talent, or at least a given set of characteristics that makes you perfect for something or some pursuit.  I see this in my kids, as each seems to have been born with a set of abilities and interests that leads them to the careers they wish to pursue.  I see this because I saw them grow up from day one, and it should surprise no one that the kid who figured out how to close the supermarket doors, in the two seconds I had my back turned, should want to be an engineer.  Or the kid who looked after the old/infirm and orphan cats want to be a doctor.

Of course, there’s probably some confirmation/recollection bias there.

However I’ve been known to tell people I don’t believe in talent.  As you can see above, this is not absolutely true.

What I don’t believe in, rather, is the primacy of talent in determining one’s success.  This is for some reason a peculiar belief of people in artistic fields.

There is not only the bizarre belief that you have to have “it” if you’re going to be big”, but also the concomitant belief that if you have “it” you’ll make it big despite yourself.

As far as I can tell neither of these is true.

One of the most naturally talented writers I know: blessed with natural language command ( the very smallest of the writing gifts) but also with good pattern recognition for plots and with the ability to bring characters to life (I have this too, but I honestly don’t even know what natural inclination/ability causes it. I know when it’s not there, but I don’t know how to teach it) won a contest in which I placed second when I was pregnant with number 2 son.  It’s twenty two years later and to my knowledge she’s still not published and is not even attempting indie.  Why?  I don’t know.  She spent years rewriting one book.  So, she’s the most prodigiously talented individual I’ve ever met.  And it’s done nothing towards a career.

On the other hand, in my fifteen years of trying to mentor and help others, I saw people whose first efforts made my eyes cross, and who seemed to have nothing, neither natural facility with language, no concept of plot, not even any idea what a character was supposed to do.  But by dint of reading up and writing a million bad words, they got to good ones, and are now published and some of them are making more than I am.

Because it’s not the talents you are given, it’s what you do with them.  And most of what you do with them is “by the sweat of your brow.”

There are at least three sad conditions relating to talents, and two are related to too-much talent.

The most serious one is called “Easy come, easy go.”  I’m not going to say that is the case of my sometime friend mentioned above, but it might very well be.  I know other people, undoubtedly talented, who either gained notoriety or published right off the bat.  Most of them never succeeded in repeating this feat.

Next one I call “cat with ADHD” and it is the problem of a lot of us.  We write, we do art, some of you crazy people compose music, program, design games, and do only heaven knows what more.

The problem with this is that you can’t pursue several horses at once and catch them all.  (Not even several pokeman.)  Particularly through the years when you’re very busy, say with family or studies or whatever, pick one thing to do and apply yourself to it.  There will always be time for the rest, maybe.  But if you try to be all things, you’ll be nothing.

And then there’s the most tragic condition of all: that is when someone who is actually nothing special, is convinced they are all that– that their natural talents are such they need to do nothing and try no harder than the lowest difficulty setting.

This is sometimes because the person has other qualities (for a while there publishing would fall on its knees if you were female and in your twenties.)  They’re fashionably tan, or have some other distinguishing characteristic, including physical beauty.  Or they’re the “right” political color.  Or even, they sleep with the editor, or were the editor’s roommate in college.

Anything like that (though less in our diminished times) can cause people to acclaim an otherwise mediocre talent.

So why is this not good?  Because when you receive all that acclaim for talent which is in fact not there, at some inner level you either know it, or you are going to find it out.

I’m avoiding making comparisons to politics, and to people who were convinced they could arrest the climb of the seas.  There is plenty, heaven knows, in our own field, of people being acclaimed for work that is at best good journeyman stuff.

The problem is, even if the person him/herself believes it at first, sooner or later they hit the inescapable wall of their own incompetence, lack of training, or lack of knowledge, or sometimes, even, lack of talent.

We all hit it sometimes, and the normal reaction is to go ahead and learn or try or develop what you don’t have.

However, if you hit that wall after years of being told you’re the greatest — for reasons you can’t even figure out — you might not know how to overcome, compensate, or fight.

Heinlein said never ruin your children by making their life too easy.  I’d say the same applies to anyone who wishes to write, or even, simply, to live the best life they can and make use of their talents to their fullest ability.

Learn to maximize what you have and compensate for what you don’t have.  Remember that work is more important than talent and that if you don’t work, study and figure out how to make the most of what you have, talent by itself will get you nowhere.

Do you have a duty to use your talents?  A duty to whom? I don’t believe you’re owned by humanity.  But the waste might be a betrayal of yourself and what you could be.

If you do decide to use your talents, remember, the greatest talent of all is the willingness to work and to get better.

In the mess ahead, all of us will need all our talent and most of all our work to survive and to rebuild.

Go do it.

 

 

 

 

*Happy Valentines day to all of you.  I’ll be celebrating with my sweetie.- SAH*

Promo Post, the Triskaidekaphobia Edition- Jason Dyck

Cedar Sanderson

Warp Resonance

Five Space Opera tales, short stories and novellas with a foreward written by Peter Grant.

Tamashira has a dilemma. Stay with the ship and crew she knows, or risk being stranded on an unknown planet forever when the warp node goes out of resonance. Really, it’s not a hard decision to make. But then a girl is kidnapped and she must face her past or have a death on her conscience.

Lira is a space scout. Like the mountain men of old Earth, she explores and blazes trails. But her duty has taken her to a very settled planet, to retrieve a young woman, and it’s no milk run.

Lissa looks to the stars, excited to leap off the Earth and into her destiny. But first, there is someone she has to see one more time.

A lonely young woman on a faraway planet tends her family and wishes she had someone to talk to, other than family. High above in a courier ship, a ship’s officer is about to learn how content she really is, even if she doesn’t feel that way…

Susan is not afraid of bugs. But when she makes a second contact with aliens, that lack of xenophobia might not be enough to keep her alive. The cat is, she learns, sometimes smarter than the human.

From the foreword by Peter Grant: “There is occasionally – all too rarely – a moment that comes when reading something new, a sort of mental frisson, when one realizes that one’s reading something special. This isn’t just another run-of-the-mill book or story, but something that is reaching out of the page and grabbing one by the throat and dragging one into its world and storyline, absorbing, entertaining, sometimes even enthralling. That’s what happened to me the first time I read Cedar Sanderson’s work. It was her novel, ‘Vulcan’s Kittens’, and I’ve never looked back from there. She’s one of the few authors whose work I’ll buy sight unseen, knowing that it’ll intrigue and challenge me and make me think.”

Mark Alger

The Genesis Undertaking

The Baby Troll Chronicles Book 2

Where did Dolly come from? Now, the story that lays it all out, who she was, who she is, The story of her unique beginning, covering the first twelve hours of her life as a Real Grrl and her struggle to survive against the odds, and with all the Gods of Man (well, a good third of them, at any rate), out for her blood. Why does she constantly jones for cheese Danish? Why does she, at 5’2″ love Chuck Taylor basketball shoes?

Dolly is ribald, cheeky, sexy, adventurous, outrageous, and fun. A great ride. Dolly may make you blush, but she will also make you laugh.

Ben Zwycky

Nobility Among Us

“Still, this process does not sit well with me. Letting the people think they are in control of these proceedings, having them vote for their chosen candidate as if they will change the way things are done, these are dangerous ideas. Furthermore, these are actual lowborns we are admitting to our ranks. What if something slips through the filtering process, what then? I have this nagging feeling that this whole enterprise will come back to haunt us one day.”

Brought together by a reality show designed to pacify the people of Gandria, Viscount Marcus Draishire and his low-born wife are secret devotees of the forbidden book. This could get both of them imprisoned or worse. Marcus hears a case of a cattle farmer suing his baron for unfair taxation. Should he follow the king’s decree, that all nobles are immune from criticism, or judge the case on its merits? Marcus chooses the latter and gets himself some unwanted attention. He now has to balance acting in the best interests of his subjects against antagonising his superiors, who tend to express their displeasure with a bomb, bullet or knife.

The people under him have their own struggles and the nobility itself is walking something of a tightrope, the need to crush dissent weighing against that of projecting a benevolent public image; no-one wants another uprising.

On sale this week

Selected Verse – Faith and Family

A series of love poems that gives glimpses into the magical process by which a lonely and shy young man transforms into a husband and father and how the love in his family grows. This is followed by verse that look at aspects of wider family life, then at the ways in which the divine has revealed itself in history, both in ancient and modern times, how these clash with a fallen world and call us to something higher and grander than ourselves.

On sale this week

Beyond the Mist

The Chara Series Book 1

Am I falling or flying? Powerless or mighty? Imprisoned or free?

I have nothing: no possessions, no memories, no reference points or even solid ground to stand on; just falling (or is it flying?) through an endless mist. A voice beside me says this is the last free space in a world of slavery and suffering; another that it’s a self-imposed prison from a world of beauty and adventure. Who should I believe? What is waiting for me out there?

I make my choice and begin to discover what lies beyond the mist.

On sale this week

Celia Hayes & Jeanne Hayden

The Chronicles of Luna City

Welcome to Luna City, Karnes County, Texas… Population 2,453, not counting a fugitive former celebrity chef…

Where the high school football team is called the Mighty Fighting Moths… and their yearly Homecoming game is under some strange and irregular curse.

Which was once meant to be a stop on the San Antonio and Aransas Pass Railroad, but which was derailed by True Love…

Where half the townsfolk has the surname of Gonzalez or Gonzales, they’re all related and descended from the holder of the original Spanish land grant… but no one has ever been able to figure out whether his name ended in an ‘s’ or a ‘z’, due to illegible handwriting on the original paperwork…

Where the last two members of a Sixties hippy nudist commune still still keep the faith with peace, love, and organic vegetables at the Age of Aquarius Campground and Goat Farm…

And a historic marker on Town Square marks the spot where a local bootlegger was nearly hung in 1926 for (among a long list of offenses against the laws of God and Man) impersonating a nun.

Luna City, where eccentricity is just a part of every-day life. Drop in for a visit – you might never want to leave.

So, a site that shall not be named mostly because I don’t want to deal with them today, (since I have a rather tight schedule this week), has long been in the habit of “skimming till offended” and taking a sentence or two out of context which they then use to feed their mental-ward of psychos so they can engage in demonizing everyone not establishment-sf.

No site not-establishement-sf is too small, as posts by friends and distant associates with a couple of indie novellas out are scrutinized with the same avid appetite for bad-think-to-shun-and-mock as those by me or anyone else who has long been a professional in the field.

Apparently no post of mine is also either too small or inconsequential as they have now taken to scrutinizing the posts at MGC which has led to the most recent pratfall.

Anyone who follows the blog knows, unless something is really vitally important my posts are “teaching posts”.  I.e. I write the sort of thing I think might help a newby or someone who is indie and therefore hasn’t been exposed to the details, of say, what constitutes copyright violation.

These posts are often inspired by something a friend or acquaintance asks me, or sometimes by something in the media.

The most recent post to get the attention of the spin-mutilate-mock-destroy crowd, was one that used as a jumping point a public case of copyright infringement.  In the post I mention I have neither examined the claims nor interested myself in the details, so I’m not going to pronounce on the true merits.

However, what concerned me, about the case, was the way it’s being reported in the media, as a case based on the use of somewhat similar names for things, and of a band of humans defending against supernatural menace.

Again, I don’t know the true details of the case, so I never intended to (nor did) write about it.  I just pointed out as described the case would be laughed out of court, as the general description applies to Dresden Files, Buffy Vampire Slayer, and everything in between.  And the things the press uses to adduce the validity of the case (librarian and publisher confusion) aren’t.  Both libraries and publishers have confused things before that had nothing to do with each other.

What my post — being a teaching post — meant to make sure of is that no new writer, or indie writer went and shelved his work or hid it or pulled it off sale thinking they’d be next in this type of lawsuit.

The unnamed site, having read the first paragraph and seeing that a post followed, immediately went on to say that research was hard and that, without doing it, I’d done a whole post about the case.  When it was pointed out to them I hadn’t, but the case was a mere jumping off point, they claimed stupidity on my part since the post was an obvious sham or something.

I want anyone reading my post and considering its intent (to reassure newbies.  I often get asked whether someone is plagiarizing because they were inspired by a book, series or song, without any of the wording being used, or even the same elements save one) to understand this is what that site does.  This is how they are creating and widening a rift in science fiction and being a poisonous and malevolent influence.

I have — or had.  There was no break, but I haven’t talked to most in a while — friends among the readers of that site.  After years of friendship, I wonder how they can convince themselves everything I say is either stupid or not researched or somehow an attack.

I want what remains of the decent people I knew to consider if this kind of group-hate might not be a bad idea.

You see, hate is an emotion that demands feeding, and sooner or later all such groups eat their own.

We’re not the ones scrutinizing every possible blog for an offense — except when the offenses are against us — and we’re not the ones going after teaching posts in the craft for things to be offended about.

It seems like those flames of hate are running out of oxygen.  Beware when they turn on you.

Could you survive the sort of treatment meted above to a post that had less than nothing to do with the war in science fiction?  Are you sure?

Because sooner or later it’s going to come for you.

When our older son was interviewing with medschools, on the night of his return from one, his plane was diverted to Denver because of fog.

Normally when this sort of thing happens, the fog is at a high enough level that it doesn’t affect people on the ground, or not much beyond the airport, which, in customary fashion is at one end of the city.

And normally we’d have waited till the morning, since the airline would get him home sooner or later.  Actually, if he hadn’t had a test the next morning, we’d have told him to take a taxi to the embassy suites we stayed in when they were little, and which is consistently cheaper than the others by half (old decor) and if the airline proved difficult we’d either pick him up or get a shuttle for him.

Unfortunately these were booked at the same time as finals and the next morning at nine thirty am Robert had a final with one of those professors who won’t postpone.  (Younger son has one of these, and we’re going to have to leave TVIW earlyish, so that he can make it to a final on Thursday morning.)

So… With Robert arriving just as DIA was closing, and knowing how strange the airport gets in the night, Dan and I drove, through the fog to Denver.

The Highway actually does have several places, for those who aren’t familiar with the area, where there’s a narrow berm, a metal guardrail, and then a fall of several hundred feet.

Normally there is no danger at all in those sections.

I’ve been in fog before, even driven in it.  For those who know the region, I used to live in Manitou Springs.  Sometimes in the morning, I walked through clouds taking the kid sto school.  Or looked down from a crest on the road and saw what you see from an airplane window.

This fog was worse than that, worse than the fogs in my childhood which came out of the downs and made everything past about a palm a vaguely discernible shape.  You couldn’t even discern shapes.  We were driving, most of the time at 75 — because what if someone came up behind — on a twisty mountain highway, in blank whiteness.  We couldn’t tell were the road ended and the mountain side begun on either side.

I half joke that if the universe’s set up is universes where each thing plays out, in most of those we are dead.

Our saving grace was that there were tail lights ahead of us.  We followed those tail lights, so dimly perceived through the fog we didn’t know if we were following a bus, a truck, or a car, or indeed a phantom.  The lights had that vague quality that they might very well hve been wishful illusions.

We made it there and fortunately on the way back, the fog was still there but had lifted some, and I think our son doesn’t believe how bad it was going up.

Which brings us to right now.

Not only have I not been myself, lately, but people I know, friends, acquaintances, people whose judgement I trust, don’t seem to me to be themselves either.

It’s the little things, the everyday life.  People do and say things that lead me to quirk an eyebrow and say “We all have gone a little crazy, apparently.”

And yesterday night I realized why, at least for me.

We all have to make decisions, every day, that involve assumptions about the future.  And some of those will be absolutely wrong.

They range from the trivial, like when I buy some food thinking we’ll need it/the guys will like it, and the poor thing goes bad in the freezer because no one, not even me, feels like it.

To the serious:  If I’d known 20 years ago how indie would play out, I’d have written a book for submitting and one for the drawer all along and been prepared when indie hit.

And there will always be things you don’t know about.  Like indie.  Impossible to foresee.

But for the more mundane decisions, we rely on what we read in the news a lot more than you might think.  We rely also on a sense of where the economy is.  Before you buy that house or that car, you consult your gut feeling of what your income will be.

Sure, you might be in an accident tomorrow and incapacitated the rest of your life. Or you might win the lottery.  But neither of those is the way to bet, and you tend to decide based on what you hear from your neighbors and friends/what you see around you/and yes, what the news and the government tell you.

Our official sources and their numbers were so sure we were in a recovery, they raised the rates. I don’t even know if newspapers are still proclaiming Summer (winter, spring) of recovery, because I rarely look at them anymore.

I do know the rate raising removed the one prop from the stock market.  We haven’t lost much, because we’ve never had much to invest or even to put away for retirement, but we know people who have.

And then there’s this and this and this and this.  And more.  Talk of banks collapsing.  Talk of an imploding Europe.  Talk.

I can no longer visit zero hedge because son threatened to make me call a suicide hotline if he caught me on it again.  He said it was the psychological equivalent of finding your granddad who has PTSD standing in the bathtub with the cord of the plugged in toaster wrapped around his neck.

He’s right to the extent that I only troll zero hedge when I’m profoundly depressed and uneasy.  When I have a feeling that the step I see clearly won’t be there when I lower my foot to step down. I know zero hedge is as nuts as the blogger that shall not be named for anything but finance, but for finance they’re sounding if anything conservative.

But I think that even people who don’t read blogs are feeling this.  There’s such a chasm between the happy talk of the government and their house organs (and you know what organs) and what we see and sense all around us.  It’s crazy making.  Some of us are buying houses.  All of us are counting on jobs.  Many of us run businesses.  All of us could get ill and need help tomorrow.  (And what one of my friends is going through with health insurance and the unaffordable care act is mind bending and terrifying, and I’m sure he’s not alone.)

I think it makes everyone a little crazy.  A lot on edge.

We’re all driving down a foggy road at night.  The next turn could take us down the mountain to our death, but none of our means of mass information will or perhaps can show a true picture.

The people who can (I know a few) are hunkering down in a defensible position; are bolstering their preparations; are taking no risks.

For some of us, with kids still in college, this is not possible.  We must forge on.

In the fog.  Not sure the lights we follow are not a phantom.

And then there’s the elections, where at least half of our countrymen seem determined to steer us off the cliff now, and end the suspense.

May G-d have mercy on our souls. May we come safely to the end of the journey.  And may our children find their journey easier, and in daylight, so they can see their way.

In the end, we win, they lose.  It’s inevitable, because we align with reality.  But let it happen without first destroying the world and civilization.  And in our life time, still.

 

That Time the Parties Agreed to Switch Sides by Matthew Bowman

We continue our myth-blasting here at ATH; but Sarah asked me to handle this one, because she’s busy doing stuff like “working on a book” and “moving” (transparent excuses, but we’ll let it slide for now).

Today’s topic was inspired by a mutual acquaintance’s encounter with someone who was perpetuating the myth that anything bad that was done by Democrats in the past, particularly having to do with racism, isn’t an indictment on the history of the Democratic Party. Why? Well, because they were actually Republicans who then switched sides later. Duh.

Now, I grew up with this myth. It was actually told to me by my own dear mother, herself a former Democrat from the South who switched to the Republicans due to Reagan. She said, very matter-of-factly, that “Southern Democrats” were conservative; in fact, they would have been Republicans, but couldn’t quite make that leap due to cultural implications that made switching parties the same as changing your religion.

That last part is true; actually, in many ways, it’s a lot easier and less dangerous to your social well-being to switch political affiliation now than it ever has been in the past. Yes, we have an SJW crowd that’s making it very difficult to possess freedom of belief (“Und vat is dees? Hyou hold to zee wrongthink? To zee camps vit hyou! Unleash zee Twitter bots!”), but today you can also use the Internet to find like-minded people and not feel like you’re isolated for doing what you believe is rational. In the past, if you switched parties, you’d do better to be a Baptist converting to Catholicism.

Oh, yeah. That used to be a much bigger thing, too. Um, new analogy . . . oh, I know. You might as well have been a non-white, homosexual, or trans who thinks government overreach isn’t awesome.

As I grew up, though, I started doing what I wasn’t supposed to do. I started doing research. I started learning history. But even worse: before I got my history degree, I was a science geek. That means that I approach history the way I do experimentation. I don’t just read and absorb; I test, I fiddle, and I look for contradictions.

And boy, did I find contradictions.

The story was that the Southern Democrats stayed Democrat because of remaining irritation about this thing called the Civil War. My mother would tell me how her father was conservative; and we’ve had stories even in recent years about Democrats who, like Reagan before them, realized their party had left them. One can look at the anecdotal evidence and easily conclude that there was something very strange about the Democrats in the South.

And indeed there was, but not in this simplistic way. The problem isn’t whether the members of the two parties contained conservatives and progressives; the question at hand is whether the parties switched sides.

Actually, the current divide on the left/right, collectivist/individualist ideological spectrum is relatively new. Oh, the left/right thing has been around for over two hundred years (it started during the French Revolution, but even today the American use means something different from the European definition; that’s a different blog post, though), but it used to be that none of our major parties have had an exclusive claim on any one part of that spectrum. There used to be a lot of overlap. However, you could still tell the difference between them by how they approached, in the aggregate, the idea of the relationship between the state and the individual.

As we all know, the Republican Party was formed on an abolitionist platform. One could easily describe it as a party that stood for keeping government from taking away the freedom of the individual. Whether they succeeded at this all the time is not in question, even if you argue about some of the details; but on the whole, this has always been the core idea of the party.

This does not mean the Democratic party was the boogeyman, even if they could — and fairly — have been described as the party of slavery a hundred and fifty years ago. They, too, were formed on a platform of individualism; but we could easily define its approach as being a party that stood for a government that supports the individual. There have been times when the Democrats have stood for the rights of citizens against the threat of government, but on the whole; it is a party that believes government should always act, even if it doesn’t work.

The Republican Party is not, historically, the party of smaller government. Similarly, the Democratic Party is not, historically, the party of big government. However, you can track their growth to both positions over the last (almost) two centuries.

And it’s that ability to track growth that puts the lie to this myth. It isn’t just about tracking party affiliation; even though there was much more overlap in decades past than there is today, the policies on both sides tended to stay along party lines. Even if you just stick to reading about Congressional debates and voting records, you’ll see that bearing out. No, the way to track the truth about this myth is to how each party implements its ideas.

But that doesn’t matter to those who espouse this idea. The myth says that Republicans can’t hold on to the prize of being the party that freed slaves and ended oppression, because that’s not what the Republican Party is today. Southern Democrats, the “Dixicrats,” where just the ones who held out the longest before switching to the Republicans, just like all the other evil, racist, hateful people. They’re nothing like Lincoln, who was the very model of a modern mainstream Democrat.

Now, I could pull out all sorts of stats and charts to combat this, but that sort of thing makes for boring blogging. Instead, let’s just look at the argument itself. And not even the argument of two groups deciding to just get up and switch sides; let’s just look at the logic of the timeline.

At some point between now and the Civil War, we know the Republicans and Democrats switched parties. Now, obviously, this wouldn’t have been an amicable, mutual exchange during one election cycle where each party decided to use each other’s name, trademarks, symbols, or rhetoric. Let’s try to make this as realistic as possible. This is “merely” a mass migration, which means it could have happened slowly at first before gathering momentum. That allows us some leeway with things settling into place in more recent decades. Our job here is to examine exactly when this switch reached critical mass.

Since this theory is normally brought up to defend against reports of Democrats who fought to keep their right to oppress blacks, turning on firehoses, standing in schoolhouse doors, and unleashing trained attack dogs on unarmed adults and children, we know we have an upper limit on this switch: sometime after the Civil Rights Era. The Republicans who passed the Civil Rights Act weren’t really Republicans; they were Democrats, and switched their party affiliation after successfully getting this done because . . . they wanted to celebrate . . . or something.

Yeah, I know. It’s hard, but bear with me and accept it for the sake of argument. I don’t want to just prove this wrong; I want to obliterate it as much as possible.

This theory rests on the historical principles of each party being that of the other party today. Since the Civil Rights Act was passed in 1964 and Republicans are clearly evil by the time we get to Nixon’s presidency in 1969, we know that the critical mass happened sometime in those intervening five years. Before that, Democrats were Republicans, and Republicans were Democrats.

Now, those who cling to this myth in order to support their idea of the Democratic Party as the savior of all things non-male and non-white (with some exceptions for gay, transexual, and socialist whites, as well as any inconvenient non-male, non-whites, such as our lovely hostess today) do so by saying you have to understand things with switched labels.

Remember what I said about approaching history as experimentation? We’re going to try that out. So everyone remember, for the rest of the article, Republicans before Nixon are actually Democrats, and Democrats during the same period are actually Republicans. Everyone got that?

Good.

Democrats won the Civil War and passed amendments to the Constitution that guaranteed the rights of citizens irrespective of their skin color. The Democrats also elected the first black national politicians. In response, Republicans formed the KKK in order to keep that sort of thing from happening. The Republican strongholds in the South solidified their power, trying to chip away at racial freedoms any way they could.

Later, during what’s known as the Progressive Era, President Taft (Democrat) called for an income tax, and the 61st Congress (Democrat) passed the proposal for the 16th Amendment, which was then sent to the state legislatures to ratify. This created a split among the Democrats, some of whom left to join the Progressive Party.

Aha! So we’ve got Progressives in the Progressive Era splitting off from the good Democrats, which shows that they’ll eventually form the modern Democrats we have today! This theory is looking more likely all the time!

In the following years, a surge of left-leaning elections brought a lot more Republicans into power, as well as the first nationally-elected member of the Socialist Party, Victor L. Berger, who had also been a founding member of the Social Dem– I mean, Social Republican Party.

Wait . . . if the names were just reversed, shouldn’t the Socialists be buddy-buddy with the other side?

Ah, no matter. One data point isn’t enough to disprove this theory! Especially if we add a little unicorn dust.

Anyway, those left-wing Republicans got Congress the power to tax income itself, in an effort to pay for an expanding government. It was only a very small tax, and only on the richest segment of society. Over time, though, the tax was expanded by Republicans to what it is today. Well, today it’s shrunk considerably from a few decades ago, but that’s after the Civil Rights Era, and we don’t care about that part.

 

Soon after that, Prohibition started. That was the thirteen-year period when you couldn’t get a drink, at least legally. It was spearheaded by Protestant revivalists, women’s temperance movements, and bipartisan progressives who thought that —

Wait.

Progressives?

*reads that again*

Prohibition was a “victory for progressives and social gospel activists battling poverty.”

Okay, that’s really weird. But it’s bipartisan. So obviously they’re in the process of moving between parties.

Except . . . shouldn’t it be the conservatives who are behind this kind of moral crusading? I mean, come on, progressives are the ones who say morality should never be enforced on anyone who doesn’t want it, except for straight sex, gay sex, trans sex, contraception, health insurance, wedding cakes, Chik-Fil-A sandwiches, welfare, environmental mandates, Common Core, Hawaiian shirts worn by space scientists, feminism, spanking, breast feeding, illegal immigration, binders full of women — you know, the important stuff, not drugs and alcohol. Priorities, people!

Well, it was a strange time. That was back when flapper dresses were cool, after all. Obviously we have to make allowances for progressives who don’t realize they can’t be hanging out with evil Republicans (who aren’t yet called Republicans, but we’ll get to that).

Soon after this, President Coolidge, a good Democrat, took office, where he stood for good Democrat things like reducing taxes and government involvement in — Wait. Those sound like Republican things. But he was a Democrat! I mean, under the rule that the names were switched.

“In addition to these tax cuts, Coolidge proposed reductions in federal expenditures and retiring some of the federal debt. Coolidge’s ideas were shared by the [DEMOCRATS] in Congress, and in 1924, Congress passed the Revenue Act of 1924, which reduced income tax rates and eliminated all income taxation for some two million people.”

Unpossible! There must be some mistake.

“Coolidge opposed McNary-Haugen, declaring that agriculture must stand ‘on an independent business basis,’ and said that ‘government control cannot be divorced from political control.’”

Okay, nobody panic. Clearly, Coolidge was an outlier. And, you know, all the others in Congress who went along with it. Obviously, they hadn’t switched labels yet. Can’t use this switch-the-names trick all the time, right? Heh heh. Yeah. That’s it.

The next Republican President . . . ah, yes. Here we go. This is the guy that not only lead the United States into a massive, unimaginable war on two fronts, building up military forces to unprecedented levels, he also placed United States citizens into concentration camps just because of their ethnicity! See? See? Evil Republicans, right there.

Wait . . . that name. Roosevelt? Franklin Delano Roosevelt? FDR? That guy? The model of a good Democrat? No, can’t be.

*checks again*

Yeah, same guy. The same one who implemented good socialist policies like welfare and was strongly supported by minorities across the spectrum also did stuff like trying to pack the courts and warmongering and racist segregation. How could such a good Democrat do such evil things?

Well, clearly, it’s some sort of conspiracy. See, even though he was on the “bad” side of the political divide, at least after you do the name-switch trick, he must have been ahead of his time. It’s the only explanation. He was bravely trying to make the bad party good, and it was his influence that turned it into the good Democrat party we know and love today. It was just he was surrounded by evil Republicans who were trying to stop it. They were the ones responsible for the bad stuff.

Oh, and look. The Democrats in Congress were opposing his war effort. Excellent. See, the name-switch trick still works.

And it continues. His successor was Truman, also a real Republican, and we can safely hate him because he authorized nuclear bombs, which is evil.

. . . and he also began the presidential push for civil rights reforms, over the strong objections from the Southern Republicans. He said his forebearers were Confederates, but he couldn’t stand for the racism that these Southern Republicans were clamoring for. In fact, he’s the guy who mandated that the Armed Forces end all racial segregation, after reacting in horror to reports of what would happen to African-American GIs.

Well, he was the VP for Roosevelt, which means he must have been a good Democrat too, right? But . . . nuclear bombs . . .

Okay, we’re just going to ignore Truman.

He was followed by Eisenhower, a Democrat . . . who strongly opposed communism in all forms. But he’s the one who completed racial integration of the military, and directed the Justice Department to investigate, for the first time in a coordinated fashion, civil rights abuses. In fact, Martin Luther King, Jr., a R– I mean, a good Democrat, wrote to Eisenhower to thank him for his efforts to keep Southern Republicans from standing in schoolhouse doors after Brown v. Board of Education.

Obviously, more allowances have to be made; he probably just didn’t get the memo that communism is a good thing. In fact, he opposed McCarthy’s outlandish efforts to combat communist “threats,” even though McCarthy was . . . wait . . . a name-switch Democrat?

Well, obviously he was part of the new waves of people trying to make the good party bad. He was actually part of the first modern Republicans. It’s the only explanation.

And don’t forget that this is the same era when my grandfather was an evil Southern Republican, and when Reagan realized that the Republicans were going bad and therefore he had to become a Democrat.

After that, we get to Kennedy, the great Re . . . Republican? Wait. He’s the poster boy for the Democrats! The modern, good Democrats, I mean. He didn’t even live to see the Civil Rights Act pass! He’s before the singularity!

Wait, no, I keep forgetting. We can have fudge factors. After all, it didn’t all happen over night, right? So he really was a good Democrat, and called himself a Democrat. It was just that the majority of the party members hadn’t switched over yet. So he dies, the Civil Rights Act is passed by good Democrats, and then those good Democrats join the real Democratic Party, and all is well!

It’s fact. You can’t dispute it.

So there you have it, folks. That’s the story of how the Republican and Democratic Parties decided to switch their brands. Sure, it takes a lot of fudge to make it work, but what’s that next to the narrative? It’s still flawless logic.

Hey, I can only do so much. Polish a turd, and it’s still a turd . . .

Still, the mind boggles to think of just how much effort people have to go through to keep their myths and conspiracy theories alive. But then, the people who espouse this particular myth tend to be the ones who can’t stand studying history in the first place. They think the Constitution is complicated because it was written on four pages over two and a quarter centuries ago; and they think Obamacare is simple, because it was written on eight hundred pages a mere six years ago. History begins when they were born, and contradictions are simply to be ignored.

The truth of the matter (and here I finally abandon this silly name-switching game) is that the Republican Party was founded in response to slavery, within living memory of the founding of the country, because that evil had not yet been eradicated and those who wished to abolish it needed to do more than the Whig Party would let them. The Democrats opposed them, in order to preserve their interests and sources of power and influence. Today, the Democrats still preserve this goal, but by other means. Denied their previous standing as overseers in a literal plantation, they have worked hard at selling all minorities — myself included — on the lie that in order to do anything, we must depend on the government. We must depend on Massah.

Republicans, at least those who have not become complacent and overly-attached to their country clubs, belong to the party that frees slaves. They free all people, and do so by helping them stand on their own two feet — a helping hand to get off the floor, and then moving on to the next person, trusting the previous one to continue after that first step has been achieved. A helping hand, and not a government-issued wetnurse.

That is how these parties have diverged: not because one side has always said the individual is bad, but because of two different ways of preserving the good of the individual. One side did so by changing what it saw as oppressive law; the other side made government punish what it saw as oppressors.

Whether or not the the Republican Party itself will live up to its origins remains to be seen. It’s dwindling fast, and perhaps it’s time for it to be replaced by the next party of freedom, that can take over the cause like the Republicans did for the Whigs. The one thing that’s certain in this comparison is that the Democratic Party is living high on the hog of shelling out government money to buy votes and media adoration.

And there’s an important thing to remember about that. With all those government handouts, with all that whitewash from reporters, the Democratic Party still can’t carry a guaranteed majority of the electorate. Even with bribery and collusion, they’re in a neck-and-neck race with the Republicans, whom I might fairly characterize at this time as the party of layabouts. Their opposition might as well be rolling over and playing dead, and the Democrats still can’t count on victory.

They can’t hide their history or their methods. No matter how you disguise the plantation, it’s still visible; when you look, the truth is all too plain.

Let’s not repeat history, please – Amanda S. Green

Back in January, I wrote a post asking “how far down the slippery slope are going to go?”. That phrase came back to me this morning as I was reading my way through the interwebs. Between the different posts speculating about yesterday’s primary in New Hampshire and what the results mean, the continued discussion of whether or not Cam Newton is a bad sport – He is and he admits it – there was a story about a 20-something leaving San Francisco for Austin and complaining about the capitalist culture there because “socialism is great”. Of course, he had come to Austin because he couldn’t find a job in San Francisco and it all brought me back to that post from January.

Let’s start with the facts. New Hampshire is just one primary. Yes, there have been times when the winner of the primary, on either side of the political spectrum won the presidency. However, let’s look at the numbers to see just how much of a predictor it really is.

Since 1952, there have been 17 primaries held in New Hampshire. On the Democratic side, only five times has the winner of the primary gone on to win the election. Those winners were Kennedy, Johnson, Carter, Bill Clinton and Obama. On the Republican side, there were nine primary winners who went on to become president. Those winners were Eisenhower (twice), Nixon (twice), Ford, Regan (twice), George H. W. Bush and George W. Bush. That means, if my limited early morning math skills are working, the Democratic winner from New Hampshire has won the presidency less than a third of the time since 1952 and the Republican winner a little more than half the time. So, the election is still a coin flip, no matter what the candidates or the media wants us to believe.

In the meantime, we need to be keeping our eye on what is happening in the nation’s capital. We have a lame duck president sitting there who has shown that he has no problem at all of using his power, real or imagined, to push his agenda through. Now, before his supporters start jumping all over me, I do know that other presidents have done so as well. But none, in my opinion, has done as much damage to this nation, except for FDR, as has Obama. Despite his proclamations that our health care system is so much better now, especially with his Affordable Care Act, than ever before, it’s not. More and more doctors are moving away from accepting traditional insurance and going to boutique practices where you buy memberships to belong. More insurance companies are withdrawing from the pool because they can’t afford it. Insurance premiums, instead of becoming more affordable for those with jobs, have gone up double and triple and more for many of them. Others are willing to take the tax penalty because that is less than the so-called affordable policies – and don’t get me started on how HCA is not a tax.

What concerns me the most regarding the long term effects this presidency will have on our country are some of the decisions that have been made regarding our military and the way we treat some of our allies in order to placate those who would happily destroy this country. With the military, we have not only Secretary of Defense Ashton Carter saying that all military jobs should be open to women – ignoring studies and historical precedents that show the problems with having women on the front line – but now we have the Pentagon ordering commanders to take climate change into account when they do things like training and battle planning. Yep, you read that right. When drawing up battle plans, our military commanders have to worry about climate change. Now, I don’t know about you, but the last thing I want our military worrying about when they are under enemy fire is if shooting off that cannon will impact the environment. Sorry all you politicians who have never had your boots on the ground in combat but the lives of our troops should not take a backseat in battle to a so-called scientific theory that is still in dispute. (and no, this is not an invitation to debate climate change.)

What worries me the most about the legacy the Obama Administration is leaving us is the way it has turned its back on some of our allies and Israel in particular. I might not always agree with what the Israelis do but they have been our allies for years. They have supported this country when we’ve needed it and, in a mere eight years, Israel has become almost persona non grata in Washington because the Administration has been bending over backwards to court the enemies of Israel, enemies that would happily see this nation in ruin.

And that brings me back around to the January post and the realization that we are repeating history with this administration and not in a good way.

As I noted in the article back in January, I spent several months behind the Iron Curtain when I was younger. Our first stop was in Prague. Before World War II, Prague had been a thriving city, known for art and fashion and much more. In many ways, it had challenged Paris as the place where the creative minds of the time went to, well, be creative. Then Hitler rose to power and his Nazi machine went rolling across Europe.

Here in the U. S. we are familiar with how western Europe felt the terror of the Nazis as Hitler pressed for domination. We aren’t as familiar with what he did in Eastern Europe. Oh, we know Hitler made the mistake of trying to fight a two front war and that mistake was compounded by trying to invade the then U.S.S.R. during winter. (Obviously, he hadn’t learned from Napoleon’s mistakes) But we aren’t taught in our schools the full impact of what happened to nations such as Czechoslovakia or Hungary or Romania. We aren’t told how people in those nations, and especially in Czechoslovakia, waited at the end of the war to see who would liberate their cities and towns. Worse, we don’t realize that some of those people could see from the second story windows of their homes and businesses the U. S. and British troops camped outside of town but not coming in because the Allies had agreed to let Stalin and his troops “liberate” those territories.

Oh, sure, there were political reasons for doing so at the time. There are always political reasons and, all too often, they come back and bite you in the butt. What Roosevelt and Churchill did was sentence those countries to decades under the Soviet hammer. The damage done by Hitler was compounded by that inflicted upon them by Stalin and some of his successors. Stalin’s purges made the pogroms under the Tsars look tame.

How did I find out about this? By going to those countries. By being out one night in a small group and stopping to ask directions. One of the men in my group was fluent in a number of different languages, including German and Russian. For whatever reason, that evening Charles decided to ask how to get to our destination in Russian. The up until then friendly Czechs turned decidedly hostile. Not that I could blame them. Between the actions taken immediately after the war when Stalin made sure no collaborators – at least none he couldn’t make use of – continued to live and then the 1968 invasion when the Czechs weren’t falling into line, there happened to be two to three generations of bad blood.

Charles quickly turned to German, which wasn’t much better. Finally, one of us and I don’t remember which one, said something in English. We eventually got our direction but only after we received a history lesson and a warning. We needed to look around and see what was there if you looked beneath the surface. A once proud country had been brought to its knees and our country was at least partially responsible for it.

It was a story we heard more than once. The Czechs are a proud people. They remembered, either personally or through the tales of older family and friends, what the country had been like before the war and they remembered how they were handed to Stalin on a silver platter. And they resented the hell out of it and I can’t blame them. How many of their people died, not only to repel Hitler but in the aftermath of living under the Soviet regime?

This is what I see happening with Israel and some of our other allies as well. The boots Obama promised would not be on the ground months ago, years ago, are still there. He continues to try to disarm our populace through ever increasing regulation on private ownership of firearms and yet he does all he can to avoid calling attacks on our citizens here and overseas as acts of terrorism when it is clear they are. He condemns Israel when it acts to protect itself and then welcomes our enemies with open arms.

I pray I’m wrong about what Obama’s legacy will be but I have visions of Czechoslovakia so long ago mixing with nightmares of what is happening in France and Germany and elsewhere in Europe because of an inability to reliably screen the “refugees” being allowed to seek asylum there. Obama has once again opened his arms to allow these refugees in here. I hope our screening process is better than we have seen elsewhere but I have no faith in it. How can I when reports are coming out now that our border agents are being told not to arrest those they find coming across the border illegally?

So here’s what I guess I’m saying. Don’t throw your hands up in the air and give up on your candidate just because of one primary election. Let those candidates you support know how you feel about the issues and demand an answer from them on where they stand. As I said in another post, stand up and be heard. If that means climbing onto a chair and raising your voice, do it. This is not the time to sit quietly as the nation crumbles around us.

Bernie Sanders said that this is the time for political revolution. That is one thing I agree with him on, even though I don’t agree with him on what type of political revolution. Now is the time to take the country back. To remember what it was that made it great and return to that time. We were a country of innovation and progress, of individuality and pride. We need to remember that and strive to attain those goals again.