Category: Uncategorized

Should we agree right here and now that people’s political opinions have nothing to do with how they do their job? Even when their job has an intellectual and emotional component.

There are — or should be — good teachers of all political stripes, more or less in proportion to those political stripes in the nation.  And there are — or should be — artists of all political stripes, more or less in proportion with the existence of those politics in the nation.  Also same proportion of psychiatrists, technicians, mathematicians, etc.

It doesn’t mean that the teacher wouldn’t, at times, let his politics influence him.  A leftist teacher, for instance, might give more group work.  But if he is a good teacher, he’ll balance this with experience, so it wouldn’t impair learning.  In the same way a good artist might be a leftist, but his work will still mirror the real world and have enough insights about it that non-leftists can appreciate him.  I give you sir Terry Pratchett, or Early Heinlein.

However, if you look around the nation, at artistic professions, news reporting, entertainment, art, education, some tech sectors, what you find is that the people there are either 99.9% leftist, or that the right is very, very quiet.

Several excuses have been adduced for that.  My favorite, which even people on the right in my field were using as little as ten years ago was “the right is not creative.  They just follow what they’re told.”  As indie has revealed, that is not only not true, it’s a damnable lie.  In fact, because the right is NOT the establishment, but the left is, the mavericks are almost all on the right.  But they were being determinedly kept out by the gatekeepers.  As they are in all these fields.

We could spend several posts analyzing (debunking) the left’s tendency to equate their political opinions with both moral superiority and intellectual superiority.  At the root of it it’s a refusal to look at how their ideas have played out in the world, but most of all it’s a brandishing of politics as a positional good that excuses you from actually having any accomplishments/making any sacrifices for others.  But it is real.  What I mean is that, against all sense, they REALLY believe that they are the good, moral and smart people.

Their illusions were abetted, once a certain critical mass had been reached, by the way they were portrayed in all media/entertainment/news and particularly the way their opponents are strawmanned in those same outlets.

How it started I don’t know, but probably with a little bit of agitprop to make the “progressive” view hip back in the days before WWII.  And with the taking of key positions.

But now?  Now it’s not a conspiracy.  It goes on its own.  When one of the prominent puppy kickers said that they didn’t have to give us a seat at the table, because they also wouldn’t give child molesters a seat at the table (he was probably wrong on that second one) he was absolutely sincere.  To them, when you advocate a cut back of onerous regulations, a flat tax or abolishing the department of education, it’s the equivalent of saying you want to have sex with toddlers.

Now this doesn’t make sense in any way, shape, form or even vague suspicion.  It’s not a rational thing.  It’s an emotional thing.

They KNOW they’re good and want all the GOOD things.  So if you don’t agree with them, you must want all the BAD things.

They never articulate it, of course.  If they did, even they would have to laugh at it.  They just conveniently project all their sins onto you and, no matter how little sense it makes, call you racist, sexist, homophobic.  And knee-jerk believe you are that, with such fierce intensity that no amount of proof would convince them otherwise.  This is how they call claim a man in an interracial marriage had planned this twenty years ago to cover up his racism.

The problem is that this non-conspiracy but sincere belief results exactly in the type of injustice that shouldn’t happen: competent or even brilliant people kept out of fields dominated by the left because they’re on the right.  (Or, in recent years, because they’re insufficiently left.)

It doesn’t happen the other way.  We on the right, because the left controlled all arts and entertainment learned to like the product and despise or even dislike the artist’s opinion.

But the result of that imbalance, while there are gatekeepers, is to make everyone to the right of Lenin, in a field dominated by the left, live in a state of fear.

You double think.  You watch your mouth.  You control everything you say and almost everything you think.

As someone who has been there, this isn’t good for you.  Little by little it poisons your soul, your ability to enjoy life, your ability to create anything new.  You become obsessed with detail and manner, so as to keep yourself from thinking heretical thoughts.  You become a little crazy.  Your health suffers.  You have bills to pay and people who depend on you.  You need the job.  You keep quiet.

I don’t know the percentage of people who — in America of all places — are living like this, every day, but I know it is staggering.

It has two effects: in fields totally taken over by what I’d call the punitive left, those who examine every moment and every gesture and every look for signs of deviance from the orthodoxy, whatever it is this week, creativity dries up.  People are afraid of where the slap will come from.  There are no true friendships.  And the product becomes an endless rehash of things done before, whether books or movies or, really, anything else.

And the other effect is that no one in the field, not even the most zealous keepers of orthodoxy know what people’s opinions really is.

In a totalitarian regime, you say what the top people want to hear.  Really — trust me, I’ve been there — you talk yourself into thinking what they want to hear.  You lie to yourself, first of all.

It hurts you.  But it also means they have an illusion of conformity, of uniformity.  They think they’re secure.

Until things turn.

I know that a great part of the reaction to Sad Puppies was that they didn’t know there were any dissenters in their ranks.  We’re not even all in any description “right wingers.”  (I’m… I’m for liberty.  Which means I’m against big government and its intrusive grip.  I never understood how the people with the bumperstickers enjoining us to “question authority” can be such lovers of big government.  Never mind.) But what we are is sick and tired of posturing fiction, giving itself airs of relevance.  And we’re tired of there only being one type of expression allowed.  They didn’t know that.  Because they’ve demanded the external rituals of compliance.  To step out of line, to be the nail that sticks up, was to get pounded.  Still is.  I mean, they’ve brought their full machine of slander against us and can’t imagine why we won’t shut up.

We won’t shut up because the mechanics of their power in my field are crumbling.  They can no longer gatekeep either distribution or even publication.  And so we’re free.  And they’ve found their hold is not absolute.  In fact, if more people were attuned to Indie and knew they don’t have to kowtow, they might find they’re a minority.

The thing is that pretty much all of entertainment, teaching, industry is going that way.  The industry of our time is an industry of personalization, of individualization, just as much as the industry of the fifties and sixties was a “mass” industry.

Which means more and more industries will be escaping their grip.  The shock the other side got when the Sad Puppy Movement talked back?  They have a lot of those in stock, in the years ahead.

And that should be some comfort for those of you who still must keep your mouth zipped and live in shadows.

Technology is running our way.  It’s freeing more people from the totalitarian control of the left, their dead ideology and their anti-competence policies.

And thinking how shocked they’ll be should make all those times you have to swallow your words easier to bear.

Be Not Afraid! In the end we win they lose.

 

 

How far down the slippery slope are we going to go? -Amanda S. Green

 

The other day, Sarah had a post that created a lot of discussion, both in the comments and elsewhere, about the reality of living in Communist Russia. The result of those discussions had me thinking back to a time when, it was still the USSR, that I happened to spend close to two months behind the Iron Curtain. Until then, I had read as much as I could about communism and Soviet Russia (I’m a history buff, what can I say). I had also done extensive research on those countries in Eastern Europe that had been given to the tender care of the Soviets at the end of World War II.

This was the time of the Carter presidency. Moscow, and the rest of the USSR and much of the Eastern Bloc, was preparing for the 1980 Olympics. What we didn’t know at the time was that just a few months after that trip, the Soviets would invade Afghanistan and Carter would order the boycott of the Summer Olympics. But that is another story.

I was younger then – weren’t we all? I wasn’t nearly as jaded by life as I am now. So I left on that trip with a sense of adventure and the desire to learn as much as I could about a part of the world I had never before visited. I had heard all the stories about the zero unemployment and the wonders of communist economics. Sure, I’d heard the about the evils as well but I wanted to make up my own mind.

And that didn’t take long – not only when it came to making up my mind about Communism but about the role this country and Great Britain, as well as others, when they basically betrayed those countries of the what would become the Eastern Bloc.

I’m not sure anyone who hasn’t been in Prague or other parts of the Czech Republic or Slovakia, two countries forced to form Czechoslovakia after the war, or who haven’t talked with people who were there at the end of the war can understand how many of the Czechs feel about that happened to their country. I certainly didn’t until our first night in town when some of us were on our way to a club one of us knew. Due to some of the construction going on in Prague, we had to take a way he wasn’t familiar with and we stopped to ask for directions. Now, we were far off the normal tourist routes. So my friend asked for directions in flawless Russian. Suddenly, we found ourselves not talking with one man but surrounded by half a dozen men, ranging in age from old enough to have served in World War II to their sons and grandsons. The friendly atmosphere turned decidedly antagonistic. Russian, you see, was the worst possible language we could have spoken. They had no love lost for the country that had laid claim to it in 1945 and strengthened its claim in 1968 when it invaded and quashed the Czech uprising.

Even then, I put down their reaction to the Soviet occupation of their country since 1968. That view was modified a few days later when we were in Plzen (Pilsen). There we met people who had been in Plzen in 1945. Their city, which had seen 2,000 or more Jews “deported” in 1942 by the Nazis, was liberated by part of Patton’s command. Plsen was the exception when it came to Czech liberation. Other cities and towns watched as American or British troops camped outside of their city limits, waiting for the Soviet troops to arrive to “liberate” them. What they didn’t know as that liberation would lead to yet another generation of occupation, this time by Soviet troops. Was it any wonder so many Czechs felt betrayed by the British and Americans?

Then, after seeing much the same in Hungary, which had its own Soviet invasion in 1957, and Romania, we entered the Soviet Union. Over the course of the next six or seven weeks, we visited Kiev (Ukraine), Moscow, Leningrad (once more called St. Petersburg), Soviet Georgia, Vilnius (Lithuania), Riga (Latvia) and Tallinn (Estonia). We learned to check for the cat or dog we saw hanging around the hotel or hostel we were staying at before eating meat. We dreamed of fresh fruit and real toilet paper. We learned what a true black market happened to be.

We also saw some of the worst medical conditions inside of supposedly modern hospitals any of us had seen outside of combat conditions. In a visit to what was lauded as one of the Ukraine’s newest and most advanced hospitals, we saw nurses treating patients, changing dressings and the like, without washing their hands before moving on to another patient. One of our members, a doctor, came back to talk about surgeries being conducted with minimal to no anesthesia. The infection rate was horrid and no one who has been in a room with someone with a seriously infected wound would have missed the smell in parts of the hospital. Without looking, you knew wounds had gone septic.

As for the so-called zero unemployment, well, I guess you could say that was true. If you count someone walking down the trolley tracks with a stick to make sure there was no dirt between the track and the street work. Or if you call work sitting in a chair in a room in a museum sleeping work. No, they weren’t what we would call docents. I knew enough Russian at that time to ask and these people were doing their “jobs”. The sad thing was, there was no pride in them, as a person or for the job they were doing.

That is what struck me the most during that trip. Most of those I saw, the people in Eastern Europe and those who were old enough to have somehow managed to survive Stalin and some of the rest of the more interesting times in Soviet history, were beaten down. It was as though all they could do was put one foot in front of the other and pray to live another day. Trust had been broken, by the State and by those politicians from the West who had so easily signed their lives away to living under Uncle Joe Stalin’s thumb.

Once back in the States, one of the first things I did – after eating my fill of fresh fruit and beef I knew was beef – was talk with a woman I knew who had fled Soviet Russia. She and her family had managed to survive living in the Ukraine during World War II. Some of the family had been sent to the camps where they died. Others had managed to hide from the Nazis and had fought in the Resistance, some in the Ukraine and others elsewhere in the Soviet Union or Eastern Europe.

They had managed to survive Stalin, barely. But the life of a Soviet Jew was not one they wanted for their children. So they did what others before and after them did. They begged, borrowed, bribed and who knows what else was necessary to get out of the country. They paid the price, both personally and financially. For years they would not be allowed to return to the Soviet Union to visit family who had remained behind. They were forced to leave behind most of their belongings and finances. But they were free.

Now, as I look back on that trip, as I remember the conversations I had then and later, I can only shake my head when I hear someone talking about how wonderful the Soviet Union and/or Communism happens to be. It is the killer of souls. In a system where there are more equals among equals, there is little to encourage independent thought, much less freedom. When all you feel from those around you is an air of resignation, that isn’t freedom. It is the slow collapse of a society.

I know I’m not doing this topic justice. It is difficult to put down in mere words the feelings and impressions I had during those days and weeks behind the Iron Curtain. The best analogy I can give you is this. While in Moscow, we were taken to where a new apartment building was being constructed. The material, at first glance, looked similar to cinder blocks. Not the best for long term construction but adequate, right? Wrong. The Soviet version could – and sometimes did – crumble in your hand. Yet they were erecting building after building with this sort of material and workers did their best to stay one step ahead of disaster, both as the buildings went up and after.

Gone, at least for a generation or three, were the proud people of Eastern Europe and Russia. In their places were people who had learned, often in the most difficult way possible, that the best way to get along was to simply go along. Keep your head down, don’t make eye contact and never, ever say anything against the government.

Now I look at our own country and I fear we are starting down that same road. Colleges are banning words, even removing names from their history, because they might hurt someone’s feelings (a college has removed a memorial of sorts to a man named Lynch because of the negative connotations to the word). We are raising an entire generation without knowing what it means to have consequences for their actions. Worse, they are such delicate flowers that they can’t handle reading or hearing a word that might hurt their feelings. So they have to be protected, even if it is at the cost of someone else’s right to express themselves.

The government is keeping track of our online activity and imposing more and more “checks” on what we can do. It has turned its back on our allies in order to appease those who want nothing more than our destruction. Our president, not satisfied to work within the framework of our government and the separation of powers, uses the power of the executive order like his own personal magic wand. The only thing we can be glad about where executive orders are concerned is that no president has tried to imitate FDR with his more than 3,000 executive orders (if I remember my history right).

But that’s not all. We are being encouraged to become our neighbors’ keeper and report them if they do anything we think is “suspicious”. Writers are having their livelihoods threatened because they don’t bow down and accept they should write only if they are going to embrace the cause du jour. Failure to comply will have you labeled sexist, racist, misogynist, and more – and usually without an ounce of truth in the accusations.

How far down this slippery slope are we going to go before we either stop and say “ENOUGH!”? Or are we going to let ourselves be so beaten down that we become like those I saw in the Soviet Union – or like those you can find in any number of other countries today?

*Amanda’s Honor From Ashes is available for preorder on Amazon:

This has been a commercial break from #IAMWRITING Sarah A. Hoyt*

*Only the ones of you who’ve been here from the beginning will remember the context for this post, which was the fifth or sixth in a sustained blog war with a non-fiction writer whining about how “real writing” was vanishing from the world with indie.  Turned out her problem was that she’d no longer get paid research trips.  The rest of us who never had paid research trips (not being special flowers) pointed and laughed.  She got nasty and said we weren’t real writers.  But this post goes beyond that whole mess, to change and implosion of fields and of expectations.  That part is still as relevant (or more) than it was 4 years ago, and it’s interesting to see how many people who are as unpleasant as this woman was are really scared out of their gourd. Change, really change, is chaotic and hard.  And as we’re heading into more of it, I thought this might provide some bracing.  Well, that and I’m writing fiction and just finished a revision of something due today.  BUT above all, you know, it’s to suggest pathways to survive the choppy waters ahead.  Chin up.  We’ll survive.  No.  We’ll thrive.*

DAYS OF WHINE AND FIRE – A Blast From the past post May 2012

Yesterday I said I did not mean to pick on the person’s fears for her job.  I meant that.  I realize that I sounded ever so slightly cranky (there are tons of reasons for the crankiness but “because I’m me” should suffice most of the time) but that was a reaction more to her tone than to her meaning.

Oh, her meaning was stupid beyond belief and amounted to little more than a long sustained whine.  BUT that doesn’t mean SHE is stupid, or even that WHINING is stupid as such.  A long sustained whine with no rationality behind it is how humans react to hitting a wall or feeling they’re about to.  It was probably how our ancestors reacted to a tiger springing out of the undergrowth in front of them.  “Ah, ARRRRRGH!”

The difference is what comes after.  Some got sharp sticks and played the Maasai lion trick on the leaping tiger.  And some went “glurb” and died.

I’m not going to rehash it, but what ticked me off about her post was the implication that a) fiction writers have it easy, they just make up cr*p and b)self-publishers don’t even understand what books are – the ignorant newbies.  (This was not helped by her follow up post, in which she first failed to grasp that not only do I have 21 novels traditionally published – at this point I don’t really have any novel non-traditionally published, except perhaps A Touch Of Night and the reissue of Death Of A Musketeer, each a special case. – and then, once this point was brought home to her, that she considers me “tainted” by self publishing…  Even though 99% of what I have out – all but three short stories – were published in magazines an anthologies before.  And the whole idea that self publishing “taints” is probably blow by the fact that those three are my biggest cash cows every month.)  It’s entirely too bad of me to react to “tone” but as my grandmother would have said, “if you don’t have feelings, you weren’t born of good people.”

But in a way it was too bad I got sidetracked by the tone, because what I actually wanted to go into was the panic reaction, what it means, and how to counter.

Every writer I know has hit that panic reaction at one time or another in recent months.  The exceptions are, perhaps, those who haven’t realized what is happening to publishing yet.  (Oh, you’d think there are none.  Or at least none who aren’t cognitively impaired.  But there are, I guarantee.  H*ll, in honest truth, but for my agency going odd and a couple of other things, I might have been one of them.  And I’ll explain why.)  When we hit the panic, we all run around for a week or two or a month, or a year, as if our hair were on fire, screaming “the world is ending.”  And then…  And then we find paths out.  Which is what I want to talk about.

First of all, if you’re a writer, or a journalist, or one of the other professions where, looking ahead, you see the conveyor belt disappearing into a furnace – take a deep breath and realize you’re not alone.  This is being masked – somewhat – by the recession.  But, without going into politics, the recession is – IMO – a creature of unspeakable economic stupidity imposed from above.  (Partly from the hopeful and amiable belief that hobbling the US improves the lot of other people.  This is the sort of stupidity it takes years of education [and a willingness to ignore the real world] to achieve, which means … nothing.  If I ever get a time machine, I’m throttling Karl Marx in his swaddling blanket.)  That means sooner or later the idiocy from above quits (or we’ll all be more worried about whether we can get a leg of squirrel for telling a good story around the camp fire of what remains of human civilization) and when it does, if anything the pace of tech change is going to accelerate as we recover.  Part of it, of course, will be to cut out the severely dysfunctional parts of the economy without sinking more money into them.  And part of it will be because new tech HAS come on line but no one has invested in propagating it through society.  When they have money, they will, and the effect will be…  As though some evil villain just pushed the “fast” button on that furnace-headed conveyor belt.

(No, I’m not going to unpack the previous paragraph, not only because it’s unavoidably political, but also because it is, ultimately, fodder for several essays.  Just nod and say “Okay, Sarah, whatever, let’s assume what you said is true.”)

So, just trust me, that when economy recovers, we writers are going to be joined on the line of people going “argh” as the tiger springs out at them, by: in some order – journalists, teachers, photographers, artists, software engineers (trust me.  They’ve been in crisis since 2000 mostly because their skill is becoming less needed with machines that are more friendly to programming) and eventually real engineers (printable pieces will make a lot of difference.)  Worse, I can’t even imagine all the people who will be hit by the change – literally – and though I’d laugh if you said something like “chefs” or “car mechanics” I could think of a way – and not far off – that their professions AS EXERTED RIGHT NOW will be obsolete in no time.  I don’t even need to mention the two professions my kids are training for, right?  Doctor and aerospace engineer will FOR SURE change shortly after they start working.  Which feels many levels of wrong, but probably no “wronger” than where most writers find themselves.

You see most of my friends are between 30 and 50 or a little either way.  These were the ages at which you used to know what you were doing in your profession, and just take off.  Peak earning years and all that.  Oh, brother.

Part of the long sustained whine is because we writers, perhaps more than other humans – but we humans in general too – believe in stories.  We’re raised with stories.  Oh, sure, little Red Riding Hood, but also “don’t cross the street in front of a semi, or you’ll be a pancake on the pavement.”  It’s a story.  A just so story.

All of us absorbed such stories growing up, as well as stories about uncle Hubert who worked hard and made good and uncle Eggbert (oh, him!) who went down to Rio where he lives in a compound peopled entirely by hookers and fueled solely by cocaine.

Okay, fine, my family has several uncle Eggberts, and it’s entirely possible that some boring families out there have none.  The point is that all of us absorbed, at some point, the idea of what it takes to make good at several points in life – what’s expected of us, as we were.  We are after all social monkeys, and monkey does what he sees, and, in this case, what he hears.

At my time of life – and a lot of the people panicking are somewhere between 40 and 50 – we expect our profession to be clear and the path ahead to make sense and be… well… expected.  And now, you know, instead of “rising acclaim, secure retirement” there’s the furnace.  Worse, because of the way things have gone in the most recent years – and no, not just in writing.  As tech change came in every field turned odd and sometimes evil (read Dilbert!)  – we are, most of us, nowhere near the acclaim and security we thought we’d attain.  And this might be “as good as it gets.”

Amazing thing is not that we’re indulging in long, sustained whining.  What IS amazing is that none of us has yet gone postal somewhere conspicuous.  My people must be better balanced than I thought.  (Or more confused.  Some psychology researcher should count the massacres in books recently.  We’ve always had trouble with that reality thing.)

The thing is, after the whine, for everyone so far, there is the moment of shaking yourself up and looking at the way of life that is dying.  Because in most cases it was SO dysfunctional these last ten or twenty years that constitute our entire working life, there is usually a time of looking at the field (whatever field) and seeing everything that was screwing us over and holding us down, and going “oh.” in relief.  Sometimes for those of us full of piss and vinegar there is – to quote a writer who is FAR more established than I – “If this new model works, I’m going to be very rude to a lot of people.”  And then… and then there is a time of thinking, a time of rebuilding.  And, at this point friends and I have been on THAT phase long enough that we have checked back with each other and compared notes.  I’m going to pass the notes along for those of you, writers and non writers alike, who are staring the furnace in the face.  Remember those are the notes NOW – for me about a year after the whine – and that the operative part of that catastrophic change thing is the “change.”  Things are changing all the time.  Retailers, tech, etc. change minutely almost daily.  We’re not at the end of the wave of change.  We’re barely at the first swell.  So, don’t take what I say and go, this is the plan for the next fifty years.  Go, rather “Um… good thing for a year or so, if I’m lucky.”  And note how much of it is the same you’d tell someone walking through a jungle full of hungry tigers – “be alert” – that’s what most of these translate to.

So, here’s the distilled wisdom from staring into the furnace (and by the way, the furnace, in most cases, is only a temporary fire, and it’s possible that you’ll emerge from it stronger than you went in, like steel.)

1 – You have to change.
Yes, I know, you’re settled into your routine, and one of the things I’ve learned through the last year of various physical ailments, is that ANYTHING can become routine.  You get used to doing six books a year, under pressure, upside down, in a sewer pipe.  (Okay, I’m exaggerating a little.)  And you like what it means: you’re still publishing.  You’re making money.  And you convince yourself things will get better.  But you don’t expect them to get better suddenly.  Truth is and you don’t really, ever expect them to get worse and yes suddenly.  And you want “better” to happen TO YOU not that you’ll have to make it happen.  So when you realize that the money or the publication is diminishing your first instinct is to panic, because it means you’ll have to change how you do things, and it’s going to be uncomfortable.  The bad news?  Yep, you have to change.  (The good news is that almost for sure things will get better – in the long run.)

2- It’s going to be a lot of work up front
Oh, G-d, is it a lot of work up front.  Part of this is because for a good long while, for many of us perhaps forever, you’ll have to work in both worlds.  Or you’ll have to work at what is bringing money in right then, and what will bring money in in the future, both of which will change as things change.  For me, right now, this means keeping up deadlines, helping NRP with covers AND trying to figure out how in heaven’s name to get my backlist up in a modicum of time.

3 – Take a deep breath and give yourself time
This will be different for each of you/each field.  Right now I have 25 (I think) short stories out, and I’m netting $100 a month from Amazon (other places take longer to report.)  I have about 250 in total stories I could put up, and I haven’t put any up in two months.  If you’re going “Are you crazy woman?  MONEY!  If the ratio holds – and so far it has – you could be making 1k a month.  Why aren’t you?”  Oh, G-d.  In this house we have a trinity of excuses we invoke for the “I just can’t” – it’s not logical, but it’s what we’ve heard someone use at some time – “Cheese, lasers, wife!”  Or in this case: “Health, kids, work.”  Or perhaps just a manifestation of Kris’ post about things bringing you to your knees.  Life has been VERY complicated, and emotionally I think I’m healing, as much has I’m (hopefully) healing physically.
I hate being late.  I’m compulsive.  But pushing seems to tie me up more.  So I’m taking deep breaths and going “I’m giving myself time.”  It will happen, once the kid graduates; once I know what is causing the endocrine disturbances, once a couple of other dominos fall in place, once life establishes itself again.
3a A caution – make sure you keep trying to fit the stuff into the routine.  Like, I’m trying to tell myself Saturday is publishing day.  So when normalcy comes back, that’s not squeezed out.
3b – you’ll make mistakes.  You’ll take the wrong projects indie and sell the wrong projects.  You’ll put awful covers on your stories (guaranteed); you’ll put up at least a story with ten typos (the others will have more, no matter how you hunt them.)  You’ll glorp a few formats.  You’ll forget the legal notice on a story.  You’ll make mistakes.  Don’t worry.  It’s more work, not the end of the world.  You’re only human. The goal is ALWAYS survive to fight another day.  If you’re alive, you’re learning.  Tomorrow YOU’ll be better.

4- Don’t Put ALL Your Eggs In the Same Henhouse.

Don’t put all your faith on one stream of income.

Don’t go “traditional publishing is dying, so I’ll now make all my money from indie publishing.  CERTAINLY don’t go “I’ll now make all my money from writing epic novels about gay warriors” (What?  I’m sure there’s some people are!  I don’t have time to google it.  You’ll have to be pervie on your own time.)

In the end doing that puts you in the same boat as if you’d stayed in traditional publishing.  Remember the thing about we’re only in the first swells of a tsunami of change?  If all you do is sell space nuns (what?) on Amazon, you’re setting yourself up to go under on the next wave.

For one at least at first, your stream of income from indie will be small – much less from one type of indie.  So you want to keep all your legs going.  Think of yourself as a multilegged mechanical, self-balancing spider (really?  I think of myself as that sort of thing ALL the time.)  In my case, say one leg is traditional.  One is indie.  One is art – and I need to put some of that up and on merchandise to sell.  From yesterday’s kerfuffle I realized another can be non-fiction.  As soon as I have time, I’ll resume the journalism one (two dying fields are better than none.)  And, who knows, as things stabilize health wise, there might even be stuffed dragons and fairy princess porcelain dolls to sell at cons.  (Maybe.  If I can find the time.)

5- Network
I come from a culture in which nepotism is viewed as a virtue.  A basic proverb is “He who has no godfather dies in jail.”  Being me, I rebelled against it.  And I still think that nepotism qua nepotism is a bad idea and makes a society sclerotic and not nimble at all.

BUT

We are social animals.  One thing I had to learn is that people reject you MUCH more easily if they’ve never met you – beyond the quality of your story.  Now it’s a little different, but networking is more important.  Networking and having a large group of friends is how you hear what is working and what isn’t, because the knowledge is so new there are no manuals yet – and no manuals that aren’t superannuated in five minutes.  Have as many friends as possible everywhere, particularly friends who are also trying to figure out the change.

6- Brainstorm
Every so often get together with your friends and brainstorm – not ideas.  Not stories.  Brainstorm how to make money.  Shoot wild ideas out.  Make crazy suggestions.  Look, until the kerfuffle yesterday, it never occurred to me I could sell my research as non-fiction BEFORE selling it as fiction/integrating it into stories.  But of course it should be possible (though the time thing might delay it.)  And I AM trying to be aware of new opportunities.  It’s just that the new model is so different we have to make tiny incremental changes.  So every so often, get your friends together, break out the alcohol (or whatever) and just talk.  “Hey, can you think of any other way to make money?  What if–”

And that’s all I know so far.  Like a traveler on the move in strange, mutable terrain, stay alert, move fast, be ready to see things in a completely different way (Sometimes a schmerp ISN’T a rabbit, even if he looks like one) and keep all your several legs on the run.

There’s gold in them there hills.  You just have to survive to get there.

*There might be another post later, but right now I’m mid-fixing up/restructuring Darkship Revenge and I’m away at an undisclosed writing-holing-up location, so I don’t have access to my email or most of my online presence, save for here and face book.  This is something to hold you until I get home later today.*

When Worlds Collide

 

A spaceship mechanic has no place in a fairytale, not even when she’s dressed in a flowing gown and being courted by one of Earth’s most powerful men.

I was designed to be able to repair spaceships and to navigate them home safely. I had calluses on my hands from working with heavy tools on delicate machinery. I was strong enough to kill a grown man with a casual blow. And I had burner strapped to my ankle under my ball-gown.

The man courting me was a scoundrel, a dictator, and likely a murderer. And we were dancing at a spun-sugar palace, atop a fairytale island. It was his ballroom, his palace and his island. He was my only protector on Earth and my host for the last six months. He wanted me. He had been gentle and caring and solicitous of me. I wanted to escape the happy-ever-after fairytale ending.

You should be careful what you wish for.

It was a relief when the palace exploded.

We’d been dancing, Simon and I and more than a hundred other couples, twirling on the black polished dimatough floor of his ballroom while the light of massive chandeliers shone from softly glistening white walls.

It used to be the palace of the Good Man of Liberte Seacity. Simon was a Good Man, one of fifty hereditary rulers who, between them, split the vastness and wealth of the Earth. Or at least he had been.

The people gathered in the ballroom sported outfits that seemed to be spun of butterfly wings, and those that defied the shape of the human body. Other clothing harked back to the fantastical age of empires almost seven hundred years before – long, sweeping dresses and molding outfits in materials that were better than velvet and silk. My own dress was made of a form of ceramic. It felt like satin to the touch, but its dull black heft shone with pinpoints of light, as if stars were caught in its depths.   Simon, had picked it for me and had it carried in by proud couturiers, its fine, slippery folds wrapped in silk and beribboned, like a fantastic gift, that very morning.

Liberte Seacity had been formed by a bankers’ consortium at the close of the twenty first century, and like the other seacities back then it was created as a refuge from high taxes and excessive government regulation and oversight.   Unlike other seacities, it had never been designed to have any industry, any useful output. Instead, it owned other seacities – Shangri-la, Xanadu and, later, after the fish war, several European territories – where the workday business took place. Liberte itself had been designed as a resort for those at the pinnacle of that long-vanished world. It climbed up in terraces, all carefully landscaped gardens and idyllic beaches, like a dream of an Arcadia that never was. Its inevitable utilitarian levels, where valets and maids, law enforcers and garbage collectors lived were hidden, out of sight, by ceilings that formed the ground of the next level.

Approaching Liberte from the air, as I’d first done, one saw it only as a sort of white and green confection, something like an idealized wedding cake.

The palace of the Good Man topped the cake: white and surrounded by columns and terraces, built with an airy grace that would have been impossible without poured dimatough and sculpted ceramite, it might have fit a previous age’s dream of a fairy palace, an immortal fantasy.

The ballroom sat at the very top of it all, and its walls alternated with vast panels of transparent dimatough, through which – as the night fell – you could watch the sea, glistening in every direction, all around us, blue and still like a perfect mirror.

As we twirled to a tune called Liberte and composed for this ball, I faltered, looking through the window at the troop transports moored in that smooth sea. I’d known they were there: a vast, dark menace that encircled us, the much larger forces massed against Simon and the other rebels against the regime of the Good Men that had held the Earth for three hundred years. Simon and the other rebels were, at least in theory, trying to free their particular portions of the world. Even if I had my doubts about Simon’s sincerity.

“Why are you looking out the window?” asked Simon St. Cyr, ci-devant Good Man of Liberty Seacity, who, by a stroke of the pen, had made himself “Protector of the People and Head of the Glorious Revolution.”

He was slightly shorter than I, had brown hair, brown eyes and looked unremarkable. Which I’d come to believe was protective coloration to stop people wondering what he might be plotting. He had been created as the clone of a man once designed as a superspy, and for the last ten years he’d lived a life where his only safety came from acting foolish and shallow. Sometimes I wondered if he knew where the act started. And where it stopped.

His hand rested on my waist, long fingers transmitting an impression of controlled strength through the pliable fabric.

“I’m looking at those troop carriers,” I said concentrating on the music and the movement of my feet. It didn’t take that much effort, because I too had been created, not born in the normal way, and I’d been designed for speed and agility and grace.

Simon looked over my shoulder at the transports, and made a face half dismissal and half amusement. “Oh, that,” he said and shrugged a little, contriving to give the impression the glistening transports, each of them able to carry more than a thousand armed men, were a negligible detail like a spec of dust on the floor of his polished ballroom. “Don’t worry, ma petite.”

I’d not yet decided if Simon’s habit of larding his speech with archaic French words annoyed me or amused me, but calling me “little” pushed it, since I was at least two inches taller than him. Impatience colored my tone, as I said, “But shouldn’t you be worried? These people depend on you for their safety.” And this was true. As far as there was an authority in the seacity, it was Simon, whose predecessors had commanded it form time immemorial, and who had the loyalty of all troops and functionaries. At least in theory. Whether he called himself Good Man or Protector, he reigned here.

He made a sound, not quite a chuckle at the back of his throat. “And they’re perfectly safe,” he said. “Listen, those troop carriers aren’t going to do anything, pour cause.”

“And the cause is?”

“Oh, ma petite. The cause is I have it on good authority they’re mostly empty. The Usaian revolution over in Olympus and Seayork and their territories, is keeping the Good Men fully busy, and costing them more men than they can recruit, unless they start creating people in vats, as they did at the end of the twenty first century. Until they do that, though, the Usaians are giving them more trouble than they can handle. And since people created in vats still have to grow up, I’d say we have a good fifteen years respite.” He looked at me, and his brown eyes danced with unmitigated amusement, like an adult laughing at the preoccupations of a toddler. His body moved seamlessly with the music, even as he smiled at me. “Listen, Zen. I wouldn’t have declared the revolution if I hadn’t thought there were next to no chances of reprisal by the ancien regime, the global might of what used to be the Good Men consortium. I’m a revolutionary, yes, m’amie, but I’m not stupid.”

I gave him a dubious look, but something I’d decided shortly after arriving on Earth was that Simon was not in fact stupid. Truth be told, he might be too smart for his own good. He was certainly very good at keeping Simon safe and sound and at knowing the best means of doing so. And he was completely amoral about it too.

The pressure of his hand on my waist increased fractionally. I let him lead me, as I cast one last glance at the transports on the bronze-gilded sea, bobbing slightly in the current. They’d been there for twenty four hours, and they’d done nothing. Simon had to be right. He had to. Those transports were air-and-surface. Had they been filled with troops enough to overwhelm the Seacity defenses, they’d have flown in, landed and taken over, long ago. They were for show. For intimidation. They weren’t real. I could, at least, trust Simon to see what was a threat to him and what wasn’t.

We danced.

Though I came from a very different culture, born and raised as I’d been in a small and secret lost colony of Earth, as a guest of the Good Man – oh, pardon me, the Protector – I’d been taught to dance anything that might be played at the ball. This was a waltz, an ancient dance that had once been scandalous. We segued from it to the glide, a modern dance that was considered very difficult. Our bodies moved in unison as though we’d practiced together. Which we hadn’t. We’d simply been created to be good at most things physical. Both of us were made, not conceived, assembled protein by proteins in a lab, and both faster and more coordinated than normal people.

The dance floor filled to repletion with twirling people, as the sun sank completely into the sea. In the darkness that followed, the troop transports became mere black dots on the inky water.

We took a break for drinks and food, then returned to the dance floor. It was in the middle of this dance when Simon said, “Zen, listen, I need to ask you a very important question.”

My whole body tensed, and I stopped, trying to think of a gentle way of refusing his hand in marriage. I owed him so much, and though I wouldn’t marry for such a reason, I also didn’t know what form his displeasure might take if I said no. He was the sole ruler of a vast territory. If he got angry, he might exact terrible vengeance. I looked at him out of the corner of my eye, not sure how to refuse him without hurting him, and, more importantly, without inviting his wrath. I couldn’t accept him. I’d been married once. I didn’t love Simon unreservedly, as one should love one’s husband.

“Don’t be afraid,” he said.

And then an explosion rocked us.

At first, I wasn’t sure it hadn’t been part of the music, then the concussion hit, making the floor shake, and the entire airy palace tremble and resonate, like a platter that’s been struck a blow with a hard object. From somewhere below came an orange reflection, a bloom of light, immediately extinguished.

Simon stopped completely, his hands on my waist, his brow wrinkling and said, “Merde!”

I cast a look at the sea, but it remained unlit and the darker points of the transports still bobbed on the water.

Another explosion, this one more deafening. Above us, a glistening crystal chandelier swayed. Bits of crystal rained down on couples who lurched to a stop. The orchestra struck another tune but it petered out as only half the members even started playing. People screamed.

A third explosion hit. The palace rocked and Simon wrapped an arm around me and leapt, carrying me with him to the edge of the ballroom, up against the wall. I could smell him. Sweat from our exertions on the dance floor had been joined by something sharper that spoke of fear.

He lay on top of me but not crushing me, his body forming a defensive cover over mine, blocking my view, blocking my movement.

“Simon,” I said, half-protest, half entreaty. I twisted to get the burner from my ankle, but he had already grabbed it. He pointed it over my head at the ballroom’s main door. “It’s not the armies of the Good Men,” he said.

“No,” I said. I didn’t say damn it, give me my burner because he was firing it at someone, and I couldn’t really fire with his bulk atop of me. I had no idea why he was protecting me this way. I’d never needed protection. I tried to look around his shoulder, but he put his arm across to hold me in place.

I wasn’t sure if I could knock Simon out. Probably, by sheer force alone. That I knew he wasn’t plate-armored. But he was as fast as I was, and he might stop my attack midway through. Worse, attacking him would distract him from defending himself and I suppose me too. And knocking him out would leave him vulnerable to attackers. We were obviously under attack.

“Damn it,” I said. “Why weren’t you armed?”

He didn’t answer. He was breathing very fast, and he now stank of fear.

“Simon,” I said, “Let me go. I can fight.”

“No,” he said. His voice hoarse. “It’s a mob. They’ll kill you, or worse. It’s my fight.”

A fourth explosion and from outside the ballroom, echoing like it had started somewhere beneath us, came a song. Loud, and inharmonious, it seemed full of threats I only half understood, because it was in the local patois, formed when the city itself had been founded: a mix of archaic French, archaic English, some Spanish words, and a lot of Glaish overlay. Something about setting fire to the world and enjoying the flames. Something about the blood of tyrants.

I felt Simon shake. I won’t say he trembled with fear. It was more like shock, or surprise. “Merde,” he said again. Then in a louder voice, “Alexis. Alexis! Alexis, for the love of God, get her out of here.”

I’d just managed to wriggle upward, to look over Simon’s shoulder. I had no idea who Alexis was, and I’d be damned if I was going to be got out of anywhere. The ballroom as a mess, and I got the impression of violence and blood. The air smelled of burner and flame.

Someone bulky and dark, a stranger, crawled up close to us. He loomed close to us in the darkness, his body a suggestion of the white satin and golden braid constituting the uniform of Simon’s personal guard, and said, “I called my men.”

“Too late. Get her the hell out of here,” Simon said and rolled off me. The stranger reached for me.

“No,” I said sitting up. “Simon, give me my burner back.”   I had never needed, would never need some person – much less two persons – who were wholly unrelated to me, to take control. I was the one who should take control and save other people. My foster parents had taught me early on that my gifts should be used for the good of others. There were people in danger. I should protect them.

“Go. I can’t fight while you’re in danger. Go,” Simon said. “Alexis, take her.”

He pushed me upward, and before I could resist, Alexis grabbed me around the waist. He was a large man, muscular. There was no hesitation, no pause. He nodded to Simon and loped along, dragging me with him, even as I scrabbled to free myself and protested, “No, you don’t understand. I’d rather fight. I can fight. I’m stronger than—”

“Can’t do anything,” he said. “Can’t fight a mob.” He looked around. “Even my men can’t.”

I wanted to say he was wrong but then I realized I didn’t even know where the threat was coming from or against whom to retaliate and the damn man was pulling me along too fast to let me get my footing, much less get my bearings.

I ground my teeth, tried ineffectually to stop. “Give me a burner.”

But he just pulled me along amid crowds of fighting people. Burners shot this way and that. Alexis seemed to have the supernatural ability to be where no one was, cutting through the crowd, very fast, avoiding the turmoil, ducking before a burner ray flashed where we’d been. Someone bumped me. Friend or foe I didn’t know and regretted only not having the time to steal their burner.

I could no longer see Simon in the crowd. I smelled blood and fire. I stopped resisting Alexis’ pull. Impossible to fight when I didn’t know whom to fight. I might be able to shoot better than most people, but not when friend and foe rolled over, screaming and fighting. And as for hitting someone, I didn’t have time to identify the people I bumped into, much less to fight all of them. So many people. Fighting all around.

The situation was out of control and I hated being out of control.

Another two explosions, below, getting closer. The nearest dimatough pane cracked, top to bottom. They weren’t supposed to crack. The crystal chandelier fell, bits of crystal flying in all directions.

Alexis said, “Run,” and grabbed my hand and took off. I ran. Nothing else I could do in this. There was nothing to be gained in dying alongside those being killed.

Dead women can’t fight, I thought. First, stay alive, then fight.

Alexis ran into the melee, fast, his arm an iron band around my waist. People careened into me and shot at us. No shot landed. No blow either, beyond the feeling of being bruised and scraped.

He dragged me through what seemed like a concealed door, down a couple of staircases, onto a dark terrace by the seaside, in the middle of Simon’s gardens.

“Come on,” Alexis said, sounding desperate. He pulled at me. “Trust the Good—Trust the protector. He says I should keep you safe. He knows what he’s doing, if we leave his hand free.” As he spoke, explosions sounded, coming ever closer. I could hear the barbarous song from the ballroom, faint, like a haunting echo, but drawing near. It seemed to me the sounds of fighting were more muted which in the circumstances was not a good thing.

“But can Simon defend himself in this? And what about everyone else?” He as a dictator. He might be a murderer. But he had been kind to me. He might have loved me.

“We were taken by surprise,” he said. He panted, and it was good to know our race had rendered him out of breath. “I don’t know who our attackers are. We have to escape and reconnoiter. If I could fight effectively, I’d fight. The protector will take care of himself.” He pulled me down a dark path on the palace grounds and clattered down a set of staircases. His hand was too warm, rough, holding me as though it were the most important thing in the world that he take me along. “We’ll leave the Good Man a free hand. He knows what he’s doing. We’ll live to fight another day.”

We ran across an expanse of lawn and down a brick path and up to a terrace where a row of fliers were parked. Simon’s official fleet for his servants, I thought, since the vehicles all looked alike.

Alexis threw me into the passenger seat, got into the driver’s, closed the doors from the control panel. We took off almost vertically.

At once an explosion rocked us, then another.

Alexis said, “Merde.” It was a popular word.

“There’s more than the mob in the palace. Whoever these people are, they’re organized enough to control the skies. We can’t fly away.” He brought the flier down, almost straight down, but into a massif of trees, well away from the palace. I was impressed. It took training to fly like that. “We won’t be allowed to escape by air. At least… not this easily. And whatever is going on is much bigger than the palace.”

I leaned back on the seat, exhausted, feeling like I should go back and fight, but knowing it was quixotic and not very sane. There was only one of me, even if I felt I should be an army. I couldn’t believe how fast the ball had degenerated into a scene of death and mayhem. And I was starting to think even Simon’s proposal and even accepting it would have been better than this. “Those people who came in. The intruders. Were they carrying heads on poles?” I asked.

“Yes,” Brisbois said.

 

On pre-order.

 

 

Witty Promo Title by Free Range Oyster

Max Florschutz

Unusual Events: A “Short” Story Collection

Alaskan adventures. Haunted Hospitals. Something lurking under the kitchen… stove?

Nothing is as it first seems in this new collection of ten thrilling tales from author Max Florschutz. Magic intertwines with the ordinary in five new stories set in the Unusual universe, while in the world of Indrim steam and high fantasy intersect. Elsewhere, men struggle against the elements in the last frontier, a reporter delves deep into the mysteries surrounding her city’s heroic figure, and a young man heads off to war for his people.

Ten fantastic tales of wonder and excitement. It’s nothing ordinary.

It’s Unusual Events.

Alma Boykin

The Lion of Judah

The Lion of Judah – Who guards the innocents of the urban jungle? A Presbyterian minister with a shifting secret.

Feeling Needled – Three sisters take on a quilt. And a curse.

Ben Zwycky

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.

Declan Finn

Honor at Stake

One is a heartless, merciless killer. The other is a vampire.

College freshman, Amanda Colt knows few people and wants to know fewer still. She enjoys fencing and prefers facing a challenge every once in a while. She is beautiful, smart, and possibly the most interesting person on campus…and most people stop after the first adjective.

Then she finds Marco Catalano in her fencing class. He is tall, attractive, and very intense. With a mind like a computer and manners of a medieval knight, he scares most people. Except Amanda. They both have secrets, for they are both monsters.

As they draw closer, they must find the line between how much they can trust each other, and how much they can care for each other. Each carries a secret that can destroy the other. They must come to grips with their personal drama soon, because a darkness is rising. Bodies are turning up all over New York, and an army of vampires is closing in on all sides.

They have only one hope—each other.

Somehow Kate Paulk has managed to give me her sinus infection/throat thingy.  Since she’s in Pennsylvania and I’m in Colorado and we haven’t seen each other in the flesh in what? three years? this is very odd indeed.  And yet, having survived both kids sick and home for the holidays I’m now felled by the dreaded Paulk Computer Virus.  You heard it here first! ATH is science.  Breakthrough science, even.  And now you can pick on Kate over it.  Two benefits.

I only figured out I was sick when after a muddled conversation with older son, in which I mixed up Shakespeare quotes not once but twice, he told me I sounded like I had a fever.  What I wrote yesterday reads that way to me this morning too.

Anyway, I was sitting here, holding my head and thinking of what to write, and mostly thinking “I don’t have time to be sick” (though to be honest I’m much better than yesterday) when younger son came downstairs.  The pantless (he’s taken to walking around in his underwear.  I hope he finds a girl to tame him soon.  Either that or make it pay like Stephen Kruiser does) embryonic engineer told me that the problem of progressivism is that they treat people like animals and objects, and objects and animals like people.

And perhaps because I’m sinused (totally a word) which is sort of like being hungover without any of the benefits (I’ve always had issues with sinus infections.  Yes, I do use the neti, but I still do.  My mom used to think I was hungover whenever I had one.  You know, if I could have afforded that much alcohol…) I realized he was right, and also that it makes no sense whatsoever.

I had real troubles with math as a kid, until I developed a workaround for my tendency to twist digits around, but I always liked the… “cleanliness” of science.  So I read a lot of popular biology books.  And kept running into books that insisted we’re really just animals, that’s it.  Now, without getting into religion, yeah, of course we’re animals, but we have to assume there is a little difference, right?  I mean, you don’t see the other animals having to go around arguing that they’re really animals, right?

Lately this has become a “you don’t really think, you just think you’re thinking” and the “you’re just a programmed meat robot and don’t make any real decisions.  It’s all foreordained from the time you were born.”  (Of course, this runs into trajectories like mine which would require an active foreordainer.  I’m almost afraid to ask a philosophy that is mostly atheistic whom they’d like in that role.)

At the same time we see ridiculous anthropomorphization of animals — Cecil the lion and Tenderoo, really? — when everyone knows only domestic cats and maybe dogs are even vaguely human and that probably because they rubbed with us so long.

I’m only half joking.  It’s actually not cats and dogs, but any animal taken young and raised by humans will partake the Stranger in A Strange Land effect and not be quite like their wild counterparts. Interestingly those “animal companions” those who chose the human fire over the wild, the progressives are at great pains to lecture us on how they shouldn’t reproduce, we shouldn’t keep them, and they’d be better off (for cats and dogs) exterminated.

And things?  Oh, boy, the paeans to old houses that can’t be demolished because they’ve “seen” things make me roll my eyes so much they threaten to fall off.

I’m not sure why this confusion.

I mean, the philosophy they embrace, of necessity strips them of normal empathy and compassion.  When the philosophy treats humans as “units” that fit into a pre-determined “class” it will do that.  (And incidentally make their literature cryingly awful.)  Also what prevents their philosophy from working is that humans AREN’T objects.  You really can’t raise taxes to 100% and then distribute things equally because people find ways to prevent you taking their stuff and hurting them (even if it’s jumping the border, one reason that all socialist countries have obstacles to LEAVING which are directly proportional to how socialist they are.  When they reach the deep red tincture of communism, they have to erect walls or mine the border and become a maximum security prison.  (Fun fact: you can tell which system works by whether border walls are supposed to keep people IN or OUT.  Hint, it’s the in that’s a bad thing.)  Also giving the same to everyone doesn’t work very well, because some people make a lot of very little and vice versa.

But even knowing that: what kind of insanity leads you to want to hurt/humiliate/devalue your own species in favor not just of animals but of inanimate objects too?

At the heart of every progressive “bright idea” TM is this confusion.  They believe humans are little objects that can be moved around at will.  (Notice their insistence on diversity in awards.  They don’t care if the work is good or not, or if the IDEAS are diverse.  No.  They’re going for “units of many colors.”  And if you say you want good stuff, then they assume you’re racist, because… I don’t know.  In their heads, I guess units of different colors don’t produce good stuff?  Or all stuff is the same, because widgets, and you’re just trying to avoid having units of many colors?  My head hurts too much for this.)

How can one get so lost that a building is a human but a human is a thing?  That a domestic animal should be exterminated, but man eating lions (which older lions tend to be) should be mourned for weeks.

I don’t know.  If I knew how, I’d know how to cure it, and we wouldn’t be in nearly the trouble we’re in.

And now I go write.  And have more decongestant.

Yesterday, on a private forum a friend of mine who here will go under the name Sam Anderson said the following:

Patriotism is good. Nationalism through a patriotic lens, seeing your country as worthwhile, as having prospects and things to be proud of, is not only acceptable but necessary for the health of any nation. But MOST especially the United States, because it’s one thing for the French to be ashamed of being French, but at the end of the day, they’re still going to be French. France is established on ethnic and historical foundations, and even if the French think they suck, there can still be citizens of France. Just not very long, since self-loathing aligns you, first metaphorically, then inevitably in practice, with enemies who ALSO loathe you.

But an American just CAN’T believe in nothing, CAN’T reject the philosophy underpinning America, and be one. Philosophy IS America. There’s nothing else to base it on, and there’s no “philosophy on the side” option. There’s no “shared values” or that bullshit. There’s a piece of paper that lays out precisely how the government functions, tells it what it doesn’t get to do, and tells YOU to go shift for yourself. Now yeah, maybe you can quibble with a point or two of it. Lots of people did then, too. But people who reject, wholesale, that that makes sense as the foundation of a country- who complain about negative rights, who call the constitution outdated- de facto, aren’t American, the same way you couldn’t be a Catholic but not believe in G*d. Aphilosophical American is a contradiction in terms. The most they can do is live somewhere between Mexico and Canada. We’ve got a lot of that kind of “American”.

But nationalism is only a problem when it starts to supersede rather than represent a people. The American people, left mostly to their own devices, with most of their own money and most of their own time, even if they only SORT OF try to adhere to their founding principles, can turn the world upside down. It’s not because of any particular genetic, ethnographic, economic, or so on reason. You could do it with anyone… they’d just have to agree to the challenging but rewarding terms of freedom, which historically much of humanity would rather trade for security. But America, the national body- the government bureaucrats meant to represent the people, who increasingly act in contravention of same- that America cannot find its ass with both hands. It’s just the resurgence of a far inferior product coming back under a much more successful and respected brand.

One of the lines you can draw between right and left is, when a conservative roots for America, they mean the individual entrepreneurs, athletes, artists, and scholars- the millions of little people who even now, every so often, by the grace of determination, judicious risk taking, and hard work, manage to do a few really big things. When a liberal roots for “America”, they back the bully-boys in the government with the private jets… the big institutions that nevertheless manage routinely to fuck up thousands of little things.

THAT’S the form of nationalism that’s toxic.

Let’s go back to what Sam said “Philosophy IS America.”  If you don’t believe in the founding principles, you’re not an American.  You’re at best a permanent resident who grew up here and behaves generally within the law.

We’re a volitional citizenship.  Yes, if you were born here, you are LEGALLY an American.  You can legally be a lot of things that you’re not even close to being in reality.  Take all the college people running around screaming they want to be protected from micro-micro aggressions.  They are legally adults.

My younger kid is also legally an adult, and although closer to an adult than most of the micro-aggressed, he still lives at home and has never had to provide for his daily upkeep.  He’s a legal adult, but not an adult like say any of you who have to work for a living.  (We let him only because he’s taking two stem degrees concurrently and not taking accommodations for his sensory issues.)

Do I think it was a mistake of the founders to allow citizenship of birth in a nation of volition?  You bet your beepy I do.  They got so much right, though, and they were only human.  They couldn’t believe anyone born here, enjoying the blessings of liberty could possibly wish to believe that a system where “we belong to the government” is better.

They were wrong.  In a way, again, understandable, since they’d given their life, their fortunes, their sacred honor for this endeavor and many lost it.  (Read a book called Signing their lives away, if you haven’t yet.)  On the other hand, not understandable, since they knew how revolutionary their system was.  Life, liberty, the pursuit of happiness?  You must be mad.  The government as a servant to the sovereign citizen?  Cooee, what world do you come from?  Separation of powers to make it difficult to “get things done”?  Mister, you must be one of them escapees from the asylum.

And yet — and yet — some of us are very much citizens of the volitional nation.  We embrace the vision of the founders, we work to protect the constitution from all enemies foreign and domestic.  We took an oath, and we keep it.

Come on.  Go ahead and take it.  Take it by yourself in the privacy of your heart; take it with your family; take it with a co-worker.

Take the oath.  Then keep it.

“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 [or a moonstruck admirer for those on the right and left who think those people abroad have a better idea- sah]; 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.”

 

Ungovernable – a blast from the past from December 2012

I’ve said before that I became an American by reading Heinlein books.  This is true at least to an extent, though I’d be at a loss to explain the process to you.  I mean, if you knew how to do that, book by book, chipping away, so someone starts out wondering what’s wrong with all those Americans who don’t like taxes (don’t they know taxes are civilization?  And have always existed) and ends up thinking getting a Don’t Tread On Me tattoo is a brilliant idea, even while immersed in a socialist, communism-admiring system, we’d have no problems.  We’d just use “the process.”

Mind, you, it is likely that the er… Heinleinizing (totally a word.  Don’t worry your pretty head) of my opinions came from watching socialism up close and personal.  Heinlein had help.  But all the same, and even so, by the time I came to the States as an exchange student I had been, so to put it, primed to react to the US as “home.”

Even so, things about the US surprised me – things that Americans thought were completely logical.  For instance, the fact that classes are – objectively – a zoo.  No, we’re not talking about a war-zone type school.  Stow High School had good teachers, by and large, enthusiastic about teaching and their subjects.

I’m just talking about classroom behavior.  People just TALKED.  In Portugal, once the teacher entered, absolute silence reigned, unless he asked a question.  More conducive to learning?  Sure.  Maybe.  But in the US it just didn’t happen.  There wasn’t that built in respect for the “master” who got up front and spoke, and therefore all must fall silent.

There were other things – a distinct lack of respect based solely on someone’s age and position (respect for real accomplishments was granted, of course.) – a wicked sense of humor that showed up in signs on hallways and doors of classes, the fact that people could talk back or joke with teachers.

But possibly the most surprising thing in the US was … how people interacted.  You could have ornaments and decorated trees in your front yard and no one stole them.  This made my jaw drop, particularly since my host family’s house didn’t even have a nominal fence.  (This  might be gone in certain areas.  At least someone stole both a cement giraffe and – months later – a cheap composite fountain from our front yard.)

And when something went wrong, say a massive snowfall, people grabbed shovels and went to the street, to shovel not just their driveway, but as much of the sidewalk as they could, and to make their area as functional as possible, before official rescue/help arrived.

This would be unheard of most other places in the world.

This image/these ideas gelled for me as I read P.J. O’Rourke’s comment about a restaurant somewhere – the Soviet Union – and said “An American would grab a bottle of windex and solve most of the problem.”  Or something like that.

Every time I go back to Portugal, now, I find myself thinking about that type of thing or wanting to do that type of thing about ten times a day.  Most of the time I don’t, because there’s a crab bucket thing over there, you know, the crabs pull the others down, i.e. if I – say – grabbed a bottle of cleaner to save a sanitation problem, I’d get asked “Who do you think you are?”   And my parents live there.  (If they didn’t, and didn’t have to live with the consequences of my actions, I’d probably do it anyway.)

Yeah, Americans talk back, and make classrooms noisy, and can sometimes be counterproductive.  On the other hand, Americans, faced with a gadawful mess don’t look around and wait for “the proper person” to fix it.  They roll up their sleeves and each of them goes “Well, I’ll do this.”

It’s hard to explain how different that makes us.  To most Americans it seems logical behavior (it is) and I only get the difference because I remember being brand new here and how ALIEN it was.  And I remember living in Portugal without the constant “oh, for heavens’ sake, just do it” moments I have when I go back now.  (I should possibly point out that most Europeans find most middle aged American women bossy, interfering and a bit terrifying.)

Yes, I know some of you are going to tell me that spirit is now lost.

It’s not.  It is, of course, in certain areas – but certain areas always had issues – and for certain people.  And it is more muted than it used to be.

Part of the thing with Europe is the worship of the “experts.”  “We’ll take it to the expert” or “We’ll have the expert do it.”  There is now some do it yourself (and my mom was always one of nature’s do-it-yourselvers.  I think given time to acculture, and if she’d come here early enough mom would have made a great American) but it’s nothing like in the US and it would never have started without the US.

They’ve – by which I mean the cultural establishment – tried to bring the same here.  I’ve railed here before about how cozies were – in effect – blacklisted by the publishing establishment because “amateurs can’t be better than the professionals.”  And how my books couldn’t have funny policemen because “Policemen are professionals and must be respected.”  And I’ve talked about how shocked I was when a bunch of high school kids came to beat me on my blog because I’d criticized their teacher (I actually hadn’t.  I’d criticized the curriculum which is is not teacher set, but they lacked the semantic ability to distinguish these) and how dare I?  She’s a TEACHER.  I’m supposed to respect her.  (She also was considerably less educated than I, much younger and I have reason to believe she sent the kids over to harass me – the harassment stopped when I threatened to scan in some of her (outrageous) grading handiwork and post it. – which leaves me in doubt of her moral character.)

While these things annoy me and shock me, as does anyone preventing my questioning him by saying “I’m the expert” – it is still new here.

The people on top are trying to do it, but I wonder how much of it will stick.

No, listen.  We’re still… Us.  Still likely to roll up our sleeves and do it.

Look at blogs.  Sure, there are blogs abroad.  I hear Portugal is one of the most connected countries in the world.  But are there newsblogs?  Big enough to rival, say instapundit?  Drudge? (There might be something like DU or the others – because, well, they’re funded and organized by organizations.  But, you know, I have problems enough without tampering with my blood pressure.)

Oh, please.  News have to be reported by experts.  It’s not the individual’s job.  And besides, why undertake that mass of work if no one will pay you?

There are tons of interesting recipe blogs, etc, but I have yet to find something with the scope that Americans cheerfully undertake.

The same could be said for ebooks and indie publishing.  They have access to the same facilities we do (though more regulations in the way) but do you see a flood of books in foreign languages appearing?  Some, sure (there are displaced and unaware Americans everywhere, in the sense that being American is to an extent a place in the heart) there are some.  But nothing like you’d expect.

This is to an extent why  – to quote Bill Whittle – the future comes from America.  We are willing to go ahead and try it, and see how it plays.

The spirit is still there.  Diminished, perhaps, but still much stronger than in the rest of the world.

And this is why I say we also don’t know what the result of what the people on the top – publishing, politics, news, etc – are doing to us.  We know how it works in other countries, but I don’t think they realize how different we are.

When people’s lives are made impossible, they find ways to live.  This was true, even in Portugal in the seventies, with a  flourishing black market and most regulations ignored.  How much more true will it be here, at the first signs of true pinching?

And then there’s the fact that in the rest of the world, if things get unbearable, you can always go to America.  But we don’t have an America to go to.  Which will only make us more determined to “ignore the order, buck the directive, roll up our sleeves and do for ourselves.”

This is why statists of any stripe so often throw their hands up and call us ungovernable.  Not that this gives them the idea they shouldn’t try.  No.  Instead, they try to devise more cunning ways of governing us.  You have them to give credit for dreaming the impossible dream.  It’s the one proof we have that the sons of beetles are Americans.

So…  after sixty years of creeping statism, they’ve now “captured the flag” – they have actually got all of the important systems sewn up: news, entertainment, education, government.

They think – can you blame them? – that they won.

I won’t say they can’t hurt us.  They can.  The mechanisms they’ve seized hold of are important and they are – natch – misusing them.

I’m not saying that this will be easy.  It won’t.  Our economy is likely to be an incredible shambles, and I’ve said before I think we’ll lose at least one city.

But, listen, the problem with these sons of… Babel is that they might be American, but they’re not American ENOUGH.  If they were, they’d understand “ungovernable” and this willingness for each of us to go it alone (often for common benefit, but on own recognizance, nonetheless) is not a bug.  It’s a feature.  And that it’s baked in the cake of a people who came here to escape the top-down spirit of other places.  Some of the black sheep (or as one friend of mine calls it, the plaid sheep) attitude is genetic, hereditary, inborn.  And enough of us have it.

Push harder and we escape harder, through crevices they don’t even know are there.  Forbid us from making a living, and we’ll find a way to go around you.  Make it impossible to defend ourselves, and I shudder to think what some of my friends and neighbors will come up with.  Make the economy impossible, and we’ll create another one you can’t reach.  Make regulations too binding and we’ll either ignore them or – more likely – creatively subvert them.

They captured the flag, and they think they captured the nation.  It’s the type of mistake that the bureaucratic mind makes.

Poor rats.  Try not to laugh at them too hard, as you go about the business of undermining them.

We have them surrounded.

There is a technique in writing that, possibly because I had to do everything wrong before I learned to do it right, took me a long time to understand.

I only understood it when reading it in a mystery.  The detective points out that she believed the murderer’s excuse because the murderer had said something about having a bad headache that exactly mimicked the detective’s own bad headaches.

Suddenly I understood.  If you want people to believe the most outrageous things, you have to tell them something that is true and that they know is true.  This is why the crazier philosophies that sell themselves to humans sell themselves by telling them something that the people know is true.

Communists used to be really good at this. They told people what everyone knew to be true.  The Noblemen had it better.  And they’d (by and large) had done nothing to deserve it.  Or they told them what people wanted to be true: your failure is not your fault, the rich are holding you down.  Or a million other such things.  And then on top of that they slid the nutcakes: because you can’t trust any other human you can trust the government (which is, of course, composed of angels.)  Or if you make the state big enough, it will eventually disappear.  (Wait, what?) Or even if you just take other people’s things, you’ll be happy (because no one can take them from you, right?)  And of course, a lot of other crazy cakes stuff, including but not limited to that value is created by labor and that things are worth the labor put into them.

No one would believe any of those things undiluted.  But they believe them when they’re packaged among homey truths that everyone knows to be true.

In the same way, those people who have puzzled about the rise of Hitler and thought it was all because of that evil patriotism thing can stop puzzling.  Yeah, Hitler had a lot of fricking crazy ideas the most normal of which might have been the hollow earth.  HOWEVER he packaged it under “Germany was handed a raw deal in WWI” which was true.  Whether it was the aggressor or not (it was, but what led there might have happened a million of other ways) it got a raw deal when it came to war’s end and reparations. World War I has been called the war where both sides lost, and to an extent that is right.  But only Germany got an outsize punishment.  And the German people knew this, so it was easy to slide all the crazy ideas behind the one thing none of the sane people were saying “We were done wrong by.”  Note, btw the sane people weren’t saying this because they were afraid of inflaming the German’s people desire for vengeance, and therefore starting the war anew.

Keep that in mind.

There are any number of crazy ideas you can pack behind a sufficiently powerful true one.  Truth is good that way.  It is so blinding in matching what people see with their own eyes, that it’s impossible not to respond and not to believe all the crazy stuff that goes along with it.

Truth is all the more powerful, when everyone with power and authority has been denying it, and then one person dares tell the truth.  Suddenly, the guy on the street who is tired of being told that they are wrong, and that they should believe what they’re told and not what they see with their lying eyes, has someone tell them that what they see is true.  And that means that the guy (or gal) on the street anywhere.

The problem is that the age of mass communications, as long as you coordinated the lie between news, entertainment and art/literature, you could convince people of the most outrageous things.  Or at least convince all the “educated” and better off people.  Mind you, some of those people might still believe their lying eyes, but they won’t/wouldn’t say anything.  Because to say anything meant the loss of a social circle and the loss of respectability.

That Heinlein said and I can say as well that anything I ever participated in/was involved in/witnessed that was also reported in Time was misreported to the point that there was no resemblance between it and reality might only be anedacta but when you consider the breadth of experience comprised, it’s also pretty telling.

Enter the internet.  Enter social media.  Enter blogs.  Enter disintermediated news.

Would we ever have known about the events on New Years in Cologne without the new media?  I doubt it.  Even now, that the same events happened in other cities of Northern Europe is only SLOWLY trickling out.

But it is trickling out.  It’s coming out before the eyes of the world.  And it can’t be stopped.  People were there, and people are talking.

The reactions of not only those in power, but the opinion makers, meanwhile, are completely insane.

One of Germany’s bureaucrats admitted that yes, this was caused by a bunch of unassimilated Arab males, that it was obviously coordinated, but then went on to sneer that it was all somehow the fault of “right wingers.”

What he’s doing makes sense in his world, just like the roll left of magazines and newspapers used to make sense.  You do what you have to do to attain the next level of the ladder.  And if he came out in public and said there seemed to be a coordinated “rape Jihad” going on without also saying that “racism” or the “right wing” were worse he’d not have a career left.  Or at least, not in the short term.

It is rather telling that Germany turned the water cannons and gas on their own nationals protesting rape that they couldn’t be bothered to turn on the people actually doing the rape.

And there is no way to keep the news quiet.  There is no way to allow for that uniformity of narrative that — in that past — made the craziest stuff stick.

And the problem is that the German minister was right on both counts.  First of all, yep, this obviously was organized across several countries.  (The alternative is to assume that whenever sufficient Muslim males are together, at any given time, on a city street, massive rape ensues. And yes, I’ve heard stories, but sorry, not on this scale.) And yes, this obviously will create an opening for the right wing.  Here’s the problem, the establishment is misidentifying the right wing or at least the right wing that will cause trouble.

The right wing that will be trouble are not those saying that this is a rape Jihad, that some of the Muslims admitted are trouble, that more effort needs to be made to stop the criminal elements (and send them back, if needed) and to make people who came in understand if they want to stay in Germany they have to assimilate.  Despite the cries of the establishment, one of the greatest proponents of assimilation in Germany is Turkish in origin and is one of the people that the sane persons listen to.

No, the problem is THE OTHER right wing, who aren’t actually often “right” in anything but nationalism.

These are the people who, like Hitler, will come in when the sane opposition has been silenced with water cannons and tear gas and tell you a little bit of truth and use that to build their absolutely crazy cakes, outlandish theories on.

We’re seeing this in the United States with Trump.  Maybe Trump will turn out (somehow) to be a pragmatic ruler, but make no mistake, he will be a RULER, not a leader, because he has no concept of limits or of individual rights.  His concept is of socialism, only more national.  But people here are so tired of being told that the United States is the worst thing ever, when they see it isn’t, that they are willing to accept even an outright socialist, if he’ll just assure them they’re not going crazy and they’re not evil for loving their country.

He doesn’t try to get them to believe completely insane and observable lies like that fighting “climate change” is a rebuke to terrorists, or that what we really need to protect ourselves against terrorists is to disarm law abiding citizens.  And so Trump, though a lot of his ideas are completely insane, benefits from using truth.  At least a little bit of truth.  And it’s likely he’ll get elected on the strength of it.

I’ve made my peace with this.  By tamping down on everyone sane who tried to point out they were out of control, the left has created Trump.  And if they think he’ll deal fairly with them, they haven’t taken the measure of the man.  They will not only lose control, but their favorite weapons of control, of calling someone “racist and sexist” and all the other stuff that silenced the reasonable people?  That’s done away with. And Trump really only cares about one thing, and that’s Trump, so if being racist or sexist suits him, he’ll do just that. Hold on to your hats, boys and girls, it’s going to be a wild ride.

As for Europe…  Europe is further down the road of big lies than we are, and though they’re not as active in social media, they’re getting there.  And the lies they’ve been told are so humongous that it amounts to their elites being at war with their people.

If they’re lucky — very very lucky — there will be one big convulsion, and then things will right themselves, more or less.

The chances of this diminish the longer it takes, the greater the outrage builds, and the more the backlash potential grows.

If the backlash is only against their elites, it won’t be so bad.  But I’m afraid when the backlash comes it will be opposite day.  All the things the elites have tried to sell them on will turn on their head.  There will be real sexism and the real racism will swallow up even thoroughly assimilated writers of Turkish origin.

And the rivers of Europe will once more run red with blood.

All for lack of understanding the power of truth, or even what truth is.  It is said Queen Marie Antoinette played the farmer in her little Triannon.  She would pretend to look after animals, only there was never any of the icky aspects of farm life. Just growing flowers, and petting cute little animals.

At least in Marie Antoinette’s defense, looking after a little farm wasn’t her job.  Her job was to look good, smile, and make people adore her, things she did pretty well until the pamphleteers and propagandists decided to create a horrible image of her.

But our elites, alas, those misguided would be aristos, are bad at their actual job.  They are fourth generation progressives, you see, and were taught to see everything in terms of Hegelian dialectic, a system that works perfectly well inside itself, but always fails in terms of the real world.

Our aristos couldn’t find the truth with two hands and a seeing eye dog.  They are playing at being “leaders of men” and “opinion makers’ without realizing that their own little Trianons are increasingly more divorced from reality.

Truth and reality can’t be kept at bay forever.

And what can’t go on won’t.

Oh So Special – Amanda Green

 

Everywhere you look these days, it seems like you will find someone who feels they are entitled to whatever they want simply because of who they happen to be. This isn’t anything new. There have always been people like that. Today, however, it seems like that attitude is becoming the norm and not the exception. Worse, this sense of entitlement extends not to just economic goals or even social standing, the main form a sense of entitlement used to take. Now we have the attitude of “you can’t do that because it makes me feel bad” or “you can’t do that because I don’t want you to.” We have children going through public school who don’t have to face the consequences of their decisions not to study. We have an entire generation that has been raised to think it is special, only to discover that the world isn’t one of equality or, gasp, one that believes that they are as special as they have been told for the last 18 years.

The prime example of this attitude is the farce of a defense that was somehow accepted by District Court Judge Jean Boyd (who thankfully did not run for re-election). Affluenza. Sounds pretty awful doesn’t it? Poor little Ethan Couch, convicted of killing four and injuring many more in a drunk driving crash, didn’t know what he was doing. Not because he had a blood alcohol content more than twice the legal limit at the time of the accident. No, poor little Ethan didn’t know better because he had been raised too rich and without any discipline. You see, his parents never put any consequences on him for his actions. So, according to the defense no one believed would be taken seriously by the court, he shouldn’t be held truly accountable for his actions in killing and injuring so many people that dark night almost three years ago.

I blogged about poor little Ethan – yes, the snark meter runs high when I say that – this past New Year’s Eve. Here is the timeline for what happened regarding Ethan.

• 19, 2013 – Couch is found in a pickup with a beer and a bottle of vodka. The result of this is a citation for minor in possession of alcohol.
• June 15, 2013 — Couch first steals alcohol from a local convenience store. Then the accident that killed four and injured nine occurs. His blood alcohol content measured at more than three times the legal limit.
• 10, 2013 — Couch is sentenced to 10 years probation, in-house treatment.
• 19, 2014 — Couch begins his in-house treatment at taxpayer expense.
• 14, 2014 — his father is arrested for impersonating a police officer. (Another indication that his parents have more than a few issues of their own?)
• 2, 2015 — the Youtube video goes viral.
• 11, 2015 — arrest warrant issued after authorities learn Couch failed to report as ordered to his probation officer and after finding the home he shared with his mother empty.
• 18, 2015 — U. S. Marshals join the search for Couch and his mother.
• 28, 2015 — Couch and his mother arrested in Puerto Vallarta.

A week later, his mother, Tonya Couch, was returned to the United States. Ethan, however, has been transferred to a holding facility in Mexico City where he is fighting his extradition. The legal authorities are almost unanimous that this is only delaying the inevitable and adding to the frustration of the authorities in Texas who have had more than enough of poor little Ethan and his refusal to take responsibility for his actions.

Yes, refuses. This is no longer the 16 year old who stood before the judge and was determined that he had had such a poor upbringing by his parents that he couldn’t be held truly responsible for his actions. This is an 18 year old man who knew that he faced a possible violation of his probation because of a Youtube video that surfaced and apparently showed him taking part at a party beer pong game. This is an 18 year old who made the decision to skip his upcoming meeting with his probation officer where, presumably, he would have been tested for alcohol and possibly drugs. This is an 18 year old who made the decision to leave not only the state but the country with his mother in an effort to avoid prosecution. This is an 18 year old who did so even though the most he could have received as a probation violation was 120 days, if I remember correctly, behind bars because the case is still resting in the juvenile courts.

Justice will come for Ethan Couch and probably much sooner than he would prefer. But he is only part of this story. His mother, Tonya, is the star and she is a prime example of the attitude I mentioned at the beginning of this post. Her attitude of “I can do whatever I want” is what led to the problems her son finds himself in and now she is continuing to play the same game. It is going to be interesting today to see what sort of arguments her attorney puts forth in an effort to get her $1 million bail reduced.

As I write this, Tonya Couch sits in a Tarrant County jail cell awaiting her bond reduction trial. On Friday, she made a brief appearance in court where no plea was made because her attorney had been held up in traffic. Sorry, but really? Anyway, true to form, Tonya apparently complained about not being able to get enough sleep in her cell because it was too bright, etc. Sheriff Dee Anderson’s response was indicative of what many people feel. He told her she was in jail, not at a vacation resort. That byplay, according to her attorney, was inappropriate. Riiight.

So today Tonya appears before a judge to argue that the bail is unreasonably high. She is charged with a third degree felony, basically with hindering the apprehension and prosecution of another. The standard bail for such a charge is $25,000 or less. So her attorney wants the bail reduced to $15,000. If granted, all Tonya would have to post is $1,500 and then she could walk out of the county jail.

Am I the only one who believes she would then walk down the street, never to be seen again – at least not until she was once more found and arrested?

But, Amanda, surely they took her passport away from her.

Nope. She claims that somehow in transit from Mexico to Los Angeles to Fort Worth it was lost.

But, Amanda, her attorney has assured everyone that Tonya would abide by any restriction the court would put on her.

Sorry, don’t buy it. This is the woman who knew her son had to regularly report to the probation office to meet the terms of his probation. This is the woman who sold the house she and her son were living in and then allegedly threw a going away party for the two of them. This is the woman who withdrew $30,000 prior to leaving the United States. This is the woman who called Ethan’s father and her now ex-husband to say he would never see her or Ethan again. This is the woman who paid an approximately $2,000 bar tab her son managed to run up a club in Mexico (said tab was for booze and lap dances and said bar is one favored by El Chapo. So it was probably a good thing for Ethan that she had all that cash on hand.)

So pardon me if I don’t have any faith in Tonya Couch living up to any provisions the court might place on her if she manages to bail out of jail, no matter what the bail amount.

But, Amanda, the court will have her wear a monitor so the probation office always knows where she is.

Again, riiiiight. The same sort of monitor that others before her have managed to get out of.

Perhaps it is finally time for someone to put their foot down and make sure Tonya, and through her Ethan, learn that there are consequences to their actions. This wasn’t some accidental crossing over the border where they were picked up by the Mexican police for having weapons in their possession. Although, there has been a report that a handgun was found in their hotel room after their arrest. If true, that could cause some problems for poor little Ethan since Mommy Dearest isn’t available for the Mexican authorities to make an example of.

Tonya Couch has shown a complete disregard of the law. Whether she agreed with it or not, running with her son was not the way to deal with the situation. She and her husband had managed to find themselves a convincing shyster once. Hence the affluenza defense no one thought would ever be taken seriously. Clearly, Judge Boyd was moved by the argument that being rich and raised without rules can make you unable to know that getting behind the wheel of a car could lead to bad things happening. Why else give Ethan only a 10 year probation when, in an earlier and remarkably similar case, she sentenced another 16 year old 20 years in prison? There is no doubt Tonya Couch knows how to manipulate the system and, when she steps into the courtroom today, she plans to do so once again.

I have a word of warning for her. Should she manage to get her bail reduced to an amount she can afford to post it, slipping away from the jurisdiction might not be as easy as she thinks. Even if she manages to get rid of the electronic monitoring device, I have a feeling members of the law enforcement agencies locally will be more than glad to sit on her, even if it is on their off time. What she and her son have done is spit in all their faces. Worse, not once has there been a showing of remorse on her part or, more importantly, on Ethan’s for what happened that dark night in 2013.

As for the judge hearing the case today, I don’t envy him. it has been some time since there has been such an emotionally charged case in Tarrant County. Following the law is a must but there will also have to be some common sense applied as well. That is the nice thing about bond hearings. The judge has a framework of recommended bonds to be guided by but he can also look at things like the financial health of the accused, the likelihood of the accused remaining in the jurisdiction, the danger the accused presents to the public-at-large and, if you want to be honest about it, the danger the accused faces if released.

I have no doubt that when the case is called later today, there will be people in the gallery looking on that Tonya should fall on her knees before and beg forgiveness from, not only for what she did but for what her son has done. She won’t. Remorse and responsibility don’t appear to be in her lexicon. Perhaps it is time someone made sure she learns the meaning of the words. Today can and should be the first step in doing so.