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BETTER PROMO THAN NEVER – Free-range Oyster

Hail, well-met, and how y’all doin’? Today brings us a new batch of new books for your entertainment and edification. We even have a scholarly work for a change, raising the tone above the pulpy schlock we usually get around here (he says affectionately). So go, check out some new books from our lovely commenters and lurkers. Read, enjoy, leave reviews, spread the word.

Now, a few housekeeping notes. First, I am not Sarah Hoyt. The emails for the promo post do not go to her; queries for her appended to a promo submission are unlikely to reach her, since I generally assemble these posts at an ungodly hour Friday night and haven’t the brainspace for anything more. Second, all I need for a promo submission is a link to the listing online. I get everything I need there. If you want a different blurb than what’s on Amazon (or wherever), go ahead and include that. If you want to send me large stacks of unmarked, non-sequential bills, that can be arranged, but is not required. Lastly, some of you have contacted me about editing services. I would love to, and you’re welcome to get in line if you insist, but I’m already a year overdue with one of my favorite clients because I cannot seem to keep that many balls in the air. I love having a regular paycheck, but the workload is significant, and I’ve failed at squeezing in editing time. Mea maxima culpa. Here endeth the housekeeping. Now, all of you go read books! As always, future promo entries can (and should!) be sent to my email. Happy reading!

Jason Dyck, AKA The Free Range Oyster

Available boiled, fried, and occasionally stewing

Elizabeth Bruner

Copper Visions

Injured in a mining accident, Sophie was given a new life with mechanical arms. When she’s caught up in a plot that requires her new arms, or the technology behind them, she enlists the help of a mechanical friend. When the skeletons in his closet come out to dance, they realize they have more enemies than they first thought.

Their first mission is to escape those who would take them apart to see how they work.

M. S. O’Brien

Commentary on the Apocalypse (Translated): Part 2 – Four Horses and the Lamb

More of Beatus of Liebana’s massive commentary on the Book of Revelation! Part 2 covers the interpretation of Chapters 4-7, along with a little bit of Chapter 8, as John sees the Lamb unseal six out of seven seals. Beatus also examines the meaning of various signs of the Apocalypse, the meaning of the number six, the six ages of the world, possible calculations of the date of the world’s ending, and why it’s not a good idea to trust such calculations. Includes an appendix translating various mentions of Beatus by his contemporaries, extensive footnoting and bibliography of Beatus’ sources, and a big index of his Bible citations.

Martin Wilsey

The Broken Cage

Solstice 31 Saga Book 2

The deep space survey ship Ventura entered orbit and was immediately destroyed. Commander James Worthington and his crew were flying escort when the savage attack hit.

With his ship heavily damaged and half of his crew dead Worthington finds refuge on the dark side of this planet’s moon.

Plagued with threats from all around he finds his old friend Barcus and tries to bring the remaining survivors together as a team before time runs out.

C.J. Carella

Decisively Engaged

Warp Marine Corps Book 1

They picked a fight with the wrong species.

A NATION AT WAR: The United Stars of America. Born in the conflagration of unprovoked alien attack, the newest entrant to galactic politics took the few crumbs of hypertech gifted to it and ran with them, soon expanding over dozens of star systems and establishing a wide trade network, protected by its powerful Navy and the dreaded Warp Marines.

A FIGHT TO THE DEATH: A single Marine platoon, tasked with protecting an embassy on a hostile alien planet. An embassy – and the human enclave around it – that soon finds itself surrounded by armed mobs. Can the Marines and a ragtag band of civilian and Navy personnel survive long enough to be rescued?

WARNING: Contains violence, strong language and adult content

SPECIAL HOLIDAY SALE: Decisively Engaged will be on sale until January 10, after which its price will go up to $3.99

Aztecs Next Door? Freedom and Neighbors

Alma Boykin

What are the limits of certain rights? If we take the Declaration of Independence at face value, and accept that certain rights are granted by the fact of our existence as humans, including “life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness,” how do we square government limitations on practices that are also protected?

I use the example of Aztecs next door when I talk in class about reasonable limits on certain rights, notably the First Amendment. Setting aside the original definition of established churches, can a government limit or prohibit certain worship practices? If so, why? Or why not?

A bit of back ground on Aztec religion is probably in order, because knowing their cosmology explains some of the practices that their neighbors and the Spanish found to be a bit distasteful, either because of the problem of scale or for other reasons. The call for blood sacrifice is common to all Aztec creation stories, and even Quetzalcoatl offers his own blood, although he does not demand that others’ die for him. The story below is one example:

According to the Aztec creation stories, when the time came for a fifth sun to come into existence, none of the gods wanted to take the part. Becoming the sun involved, among other things, throwing yourself into a fire. When a volunteer was not forthcoming, the gods picked one of their number, Nanahuatl, a deity afflicted with (among other things) a skin disease, and insisted that he take the job. He agreed rather reluctantly, and after undergoing self-torture to purify himself, jumped into the fire, descended to the Land of the Dead and then became the sun. And then he stopped, hovering over the edge of the world and refusing to budge. When the gods told him to move, he refused, having become a lot more powerful than they were. They begged him, to which he replied that he would only do his part if they allowed themselves to be sacrificed and their hearts cut out. They refused and then threatened him, but he destroyed the Morning Star, the spirit sent against him. At this the other spirits gave up and allowed themselves to be sacrificed. Because the gods gave their blood for the lives of all creatures, according to the Aztecs, it was the least humans could do to repay the gift by offering blood and lives to keep the sun fed.

The Aztecs’ other gods also required human lives, as did the gods of the Maya, Toltec, and Inca (on a smaller scale). So too the gods of the Pawnee and other North American groups, but what set the Central American deities apart was the scale of the required sacrifices. We used to think that the Spanish exaggerated when they talked about thousands of people being offered to the gods at a single festival. It turns out that they were correct. And Aztec nobles (and others) made daily blood offerings via techniques I won’t mention here. You can look them up on your own. Suffice it to say that the Aztecs’ neighbors had very good reasons to want to be rid of the Aztec hegemony, and high taxes were not the only cause.

So, what does this have to do with modern government restrictions on rights? What would you do if a group moved into town, got permits for a step-pyramid (or sacred well) and started sacrificing humans to Tlaloc or Tezcatlipoca? They keep the skull rack indoors, and the priest does not wear the flayed skin outside the walls of the holy precinct, but still . . . You would call the police to report a murder. But what if the group is the First Reconstituted Aztec Church (Reformed), duly registered with the IRS et al as a religious group, and they swear that if they do not sacrifice people, the sun will not rise in the morning. And all their “victims” have been willing (or so the chief priests claim, and they have signed hold-harmless forms and legal released stating so.) Your town or city would probably whip up a new law saying that human sacrifice, for any reason, is illegal within municipal limits, and the county would do likewise.

Can that be done? Or does human sacrifice come under the clause of murder (or manslaughter)? What if the victim is willing, supposedly?

Replace human with animal and you have a legal quandary faced by the residents of Hialeah, FL some years back, in a case that ended up at the Supreme Court. A croup of Santeria practitioners, the Church of Lukumi Babaly Aye, wanted to build a new worship facility, school, and museum. Because Santeria requires animal sacrifice, the neighbors of the proposed worship and cultural complex balked, and the City of Hialeah drew up a new ordinance, augmenting extant rules against animal sacrifice that had allowed certain exemptions for kosher and halal slaughter. The new law was so worded that it obviously was an attempt to block the Santeria practitioners. They in turn sued on grounds of infringement of religion and the case went the the Supreme Court (Church of the Lukumi-Babalu Aye, Inc. v. City of Hialeah 508 U.S. 520 (1993).)

To quote http://www.uscourts.gov/educational-resources/educational-activities/exercise-religious-practices-rule-law:

(Kennedy, J.) Justice Kennedy concluded that the local laws violated the Free Exercise Clause because they were designed to persecute or oppress a religion or its practices.

The Free Exercise Clause provides that “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.” “The Free Exercise Clause commits government itself to religious tolerance, and upon even slight suspicion that proposals for state intervention stem from animosity to religion or distrust of it practices, all officials must pause to remember their own high duty to the Constitution and to the rights it secures.” Accordingly, “legislators may not devise mechanisms, overt or disguised to persecute or oppress a religion or its practice.” Under the constitution, a law that is not neutral, but targets a specific action, and that does not apply generally to all people, but targets a specific group, must be justified by a compelling governmental interest and narrowly tailored to advance that interest.

 

The Court held that the purpose of the laws was to suppress the Santeria religion. The only conduct subject to the ordinances was animal sacrifice, the central element of the Santeria worship services, and they were therefore not neutral. The Court also held that the ordinances were not of general applicability but selectively targeted to conduct motivated by religious belief. [End of Quote]

 

Having waded through that, you are probably nodding a little in agreement with the Court, even if you find animal sacrifice distasteful, unnecessary, primitive, or cruel. Interestingly, Justice Souter, although in agreement with the majority, pointed out that the Court skipped over the possibility of a law that was broadly applicable and just happened by accident to interfere with worship: which is the case of our (hypothetical) First Reconstituted Aztec Church (Reformed).

Outside of S. M. Sterling and other writers’ imaginations, I really do not think that anyone wants to bring back Aztec traditional worship, even those who call out for the “return” of “Aztlan” to the Indigenous Peoples of the Southwest. In part, I suspect they would suffer unfortunate accidents that their neighbors never happened to see or hear despite taking place in the middle of a block party. I also suspect, uncharitable person that I am, that the would-be neoAztec leaders have zero desire to endure the daily self torture and mutilation required by their desired positions.

But it raises an interesting question. Animal sacrifice is allowed under the First Amendment, because to forbid it interferes with the free exercise of worship. What about human sacrifice?

Despite strident denials there are large numbers of people who are Marxists without knowing they are Marxists.  In fact, it is because they’ve never read Marx or studied economics that they’re not aware of how much of their world-view is Marxist.  Well, that and because the Marxists took advantage of mass-media, mass-education and mass-entertainment to pound into their heads a uniform Marxist message that became what “Everybody knows.”

Yes, I imagine for some of them it is shocking to find themselves called Marxist when they’re just signaling they’re educated and have all the right thoughts by repeating everything their teachers told them was the “right” (left) way to think.  But let’s not forget the number of them who (not here, of course) also defend “Marxist” everything from economics to literary analysis as the best thing evah.  (And call us ignorant because we don’t like ideologies that killed a hundred million people, even though their professors ASSURED them that it’s never really been tried.)

However, as annoying as they are, they are not nearly as deluded as the children of Rousseau who have never read Rousseau and might not even know he existed.

But every possible portion of the media-industrial complex has blared at them a combined sense that Nature is always better and that one should go back to the simple ol’ days.  (BTW it’s amazing how many of these people are vileprogs, who keep telling us we can’t go back to taking the bill of rights seriously becaus e”times have changed”.)

I’ll forgive those of you who are devotees of camping.  I do sort of understand that most of you grew up with indoor bathrooms, warm water on demand, refrigerators, and enjoy camping as a break from modern life, simpler but not too scary.  So, rest easy.  I won’t even blame that on Rousseau.

No, what I want to blame on Rousseau or at least his misguided grandchildren, are the mother and daughter who sat next to us on Tuesday while we waiting for a table for burgers.  You see, I was writing late, and we needed food, and I didn’t feel like having leftover turkey.

Unfortunately, apparently, everyone had a rush to Red Robin at the same time.  (Okay, possibly it was the local buy one get one free special.  What can I say?  We’re cheap.)

So we were sitting there, and there’s a family with elementary schoolers right next to me, and the little girl is babbling about a project she did for school and how she wrote about the downside of technology.  Stuff like how people now just spend time talking on their cellphones, instead of connecting to each other.  And how they only talk to each other through the computer, instead of going out.

I excused this.  (I know, I know, how magnanimous of me.)  She was maybe 10, and you know, that’s the stuff they teach them in school (which is the point.)

BUT…. but then her mother chimed in.  She started talking about how much better life was without the internet.  How people wrote letters and visited family.

This was the point at which I decided I had a terrible need to go to the door and look at the snow outside.  Because it wasn’t this woman’s fault.  It’s what she heard starting when she was her daughter’s age or less.

I even understand it.  I understand the “nostalgia for simpler times”, something that has affected the super-wealthy forever.  And our society IS super wealthy.

So, in defense of the internet:

Yeah, we no longer write letters.  I’m cool with that.  Why should I hanker for the long lines at the post office.  Not to mention that when I wrote letters, I wrote super-long letters and it cost me a lot of money.

Nowadays I keep in touch with several friends via email, and via phone texting, too. I keep in touch with them regardless of where they are, and they get my messages instantly.

Then there is instant messenger, various forms of, which allow me to have very close friends who live halfway across the world.  And then there are ebooks, blogs, the ability to reach the reading public without having to go through the gatekeepers of the industrial-news-entertainment complex.

I remember when just talking to other writers was a difficult thing, particularly writers at my level, when I started getting published.

Beyond all that, and regardless of what one thinks of just-in-time technologies and others, and beyond the world of communication online, the internet, internet shopping and internet ordering has made it possible to cater to individual necessities, not just the average.

Take my older son.  Depending on how the shoes are shaped, he wears either 15 EEE or 17 EEE.  His feet grew to that size at 13.  The city we lived in didn’t have any stores which carried that size, or at least not regularly.  So finding shoes for him meant a trip to Denver and even then it was uncertain.

Now?  Well, I order from Amazon, because it’s convenient. But failing that I could order from a hundred places on line.  The thing is, people are making these shoes, and we are buying them.  Oh, and they’re cheaper than they were in the “good old days.”

And in defense of modern days, if I must make one:

Rousseau might have thought we’d have been happier naked and eating whatever grew naturally around us, but I can tell you, even though we were relatively well off for the village, life was not exactly fun in unheated houses, where electricity was sporadic, and where everything you do in life took a lot of work.

Most people lived worse off than us and lived on the edge of survival.

I like living in a house that’s heated, where I turn on the switch and the light comes on, where I have a working refrigerator, hot and cold water and (this is very important) plumbing so we don’t have to use a guzzunder and the house doesn’t smell.

Other things I like, in random order and not limited: aspirin, anti histamines, antibiotics, comfortable shoes, comfortable clothes, an embarrassing choice of entertainment from books to movies to music.  I can go 100 miles whenever we feel like it AND we don’t have to take the whole day to do it.  Oh, yeah, and if we need to go across the world, we take a plane, instead of a steam ship that takes weeks.

We can fly through the air, we live healthy lives a very long time, longer than our ancestors dreamed of, and we live lives even kings couldn’t dream of 100 years ago.  The world is our oyster.  And possibly our clam and our mussel too.

But all the children of Rousseau can say is that “Things were better before.”  I.e. in the days they never experienced; in the days when they would be either dead or servants, according to predominant likelihood.

So, let’s burn Rousseau in effigy and enjoy what we have.

 

 

Heroes Are Made, Not Born – Christopher Nuttall

Every so often, I come across an argument that, to borrow a line from Samuel Johnston, is ‘not worth the dignity of a rational response.’ Such arguments tend to be full of strawman arguments, pre-emptive accusations of Bad Thinking or Wrong Fun and generally are not worth the effort of countering their claims. And yet, the sheer prevalence of wrong-headed arguments demands an answer, if only to counter the strawman arguments and stereotypes that are otherwise used to taint people whose only crime is disagreeing with the elites.

One such article, in the New Statesman, had the depressing title of ‘What to do when you’re not the hero anymore.’ To summarise, the author believes there is a backlash against characters who are anything, but straight white males. That the mere prospect of a Black!Hermione Granger is enough to make fans outraged. (I haven’t heard many complaints.) That Rey is disliked by some aspects of the Star Wars fandom because she’s a woman. That forcing white men to identify with heroes who are not straight white males is regarded as an offence against the natural order.

It was depressingly easy to cut through the crap and see the flaw in the author’s arguments.

Following this logic, I must not like Will Smith. And yet, Men In Black and Men In Black III are among my favourite movies. When I watched Independence Day as a teenager, I wanted to be the jet fighter pilot; not the computer geek, or the president, or the slimy government official, or the UFO nut. And I must absolutely dislike Ben Sisko, even though he’s actually perhaps the most well-rounded captain in Star Trek. Mickey Smith wasn’t called the bravest human in Doctor Who for nothing, you know. Must I detest him?

While I’m at it, I shouldn’t enjoy reading Honour Harrington, which features a female starship captain.

But I do. Ergo, the author’s logic is flawed. And, in choosing to ascribe the worst possible motivations to the detractors, she undermines her own argument.

There are two aspects that should be considered. The first is that adapting source material is always a challenge. One has to please the fans, fans who will already have an impression of a character from the books. (And, in Hermione’s case, she was clearly depicted as white on the covers of Harry Potter 3 and 7.) JK Rowling supported the very white Emma Watson to play Hermione in the movies. It seems a little odd, to say the least, to change the character’s colour now.

Strange as it may seem, fans invest themselves in their fandoms. Fans come up with mental impressions of their characters that match what they’re told in the books – and, also, what they see in the movies. They find it hard to understand, therefore, why a character changes race and wonder, given the general tone of our PC era, if the actor was chosen for PC reasons as she doesn’t fit their mental impression of Hermione.

Let me reverse it for you. Peter Grant, the main character of the Rivers of London series (Ben Aaronovitch), is mixed-race. He’s described, several times, as a very dark man. Now, what if someone were to have him portrayed by David Tennant? It wouldn’t fit! Tennant is a great actor, but he just doesn’t look like anyone’s mental impression of Grant. Is it racist to insist on having Peter played by Will Smith or a slightly aged Noel Clarke?

Of course not. Nor is it racist to raise eyebrows at the casting of characters who don’t fit the established image. It’s merely human nature.

But there is a second point that should also be born in mind – the Mary Sue.

There are, in essence, two different Mary Sue tropes. The first is the self-insert, the story where the author goes to Hogwarts and befriends Harry (or is Harry.) The second is the character who is simply too good to be true.

Let me consider an example from Atlas Shrugged. Francisco d’Anconia is, without a doubt, a Mary Sue, Class II. Francisco is not just good, he’s super-good. Even as a child, he’s literally far more advanced and capable than Dagny, Eddie or James. Rand goes into raptures of prose describing his superhuman attributes, to the point where I wind up feeling sorry for James when he is effortlessly outclassed time and time again.

The problem with Francisco is two-fold. First, he is never seen to struggle, he is never seen to grow into a superhuman adult. Child-Francisco is just as precocious, smug and annoying as Adult-Francisco. Second, Francisco is effortlessly good at everything. He is, quite simply, too good to be true. Atlas Shrugged is not short on Mary Sue-like characters, but Francisco is far and away the worst offender.

Honour Harrington, by contrast, is not a Mary Sue. When we first meet her, she is in her early forties and taking over command of her second starship. We do not see her join the navy and rise in the ranks (at least not at that point), but there are strong reasons to ground her greatness in the real world. She does not test our suspension of disbelief to breaking point, unlike Francisco d’Anconia and his ilk, and she actually grows as a character over the series, while Francisco has literally nowhere to go. Indeed, as David Weber points out in this essay, Honour’s flaws are actually easy to discern if you bother to look.

The issue at hand is not the inclusion of characters who are not straight white males. The issue at hand is if those characters are real people or Mary Sues.

To paraphrase Robert Heinlein, don’t write [non-straight white male] characters, write characters who happen to be [non-straight white male].

If your character is good, you have to justify it. You don’t have to do much – you can tell everyone your character is a Navy SEAL, explaining his fighting skills, without having to go over his training in exhaustive detail – but you do have to do something. And your character needs to be human. They need to make mistakes, even if such mistakes are outside their competence zone (like Honour Harrington).

If your character is to be [non-straight white male], you cannot let that swallow up the plot. Nor can you afford allowing your character to become perfect, simply because they are a [non-straight white male]. One of the reasons Men In Black is such a good movie is because Agent J makes mistakes and learns from them, instead of being absolutely perfect in every way. Oscar Munroe of Pandora’s Star and its sequels is a great gay character because his homosexuality is merely mentioned in passing – it certainly isn’t a plot point.

There are two other problems that writers need to learn to avoid. The first is allowing one’s [non-straight white male] to shine at the expense of a [straight white male]. Movie-Hermione gains, at least in part, because she keeps stealing lines given (by Rowling) to Ron. I have a feeling that the proliferation of Ron The Death Eater fan fiction stories owes a great deal to Movie-Ron, who is (at best) the comic relief and (at worst) a cowardly jerk. One could quite reasonably ask why Movie-Harry is friends with Movie-Ron, when there are good reasons in the books, or why Movie-Hermione would marry him. Book-Ron is perhaps the most human of the trio; Book-Hermione is a person who has very clear and fundamental flaws. And yet Movie-Hermione is lessened by her effortless superiority over Ron (and by having her harder edges smoothed down).

The second is allowing one’s character to become insufferable, the sort of person whose presence is resented even when he’s needed. Francisco d’Anconia certainly fits into this mould, but so does Ia – the heroine of Theirs Not To Reason Why. Her skills do come with an explanation, unlike so many other characters, yet she is very much an insufferable character. She is simply unlikable.

Readers and viewers don’t want characters who look like them, I think. I don’t think there are many readers who care about such details. They want well-rounded characters, characters with their strengths and weaknesses, characters who rise above their flaws to become true heroes. Rico of Starship Troopers, Agent J of Men In Black, Princess Leia, Honour Harrington … they are true heroes, because they are human.

They’re not there because of diversity. They’re there because they’re heroes.

And ascribing the worst possible motives to fans who question a diversity character merely annoys people.

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A few days ago, I was notified that Vile 666 had agreed with me on something, which means I — of course — immediately checked myself to make sure I wasn’t off track.

No, I was still right about the mechanics of collapse not happening in the way it’s shown in the movies, ie. what I refer to fondly as a Mad Max future.  At any rate, and to make me stop doubting myself, they made a disparaging comment about my still having a problem with communism.

When I was told this (I don’t actually have time to waste on these sites, and if I did, I still wouldn’t because I’d rather be writing) it struck me as very funny.  Because, I mean, come on, let’s toll the bell of communist successes, from the Cultural Revolution to the Stalinist purges, from Holodomor to the immiseration of Cuba.

My first thought was Yeah, it sure is weird that I have a problem with such an ideology.  It would be like having a problem with the Aztec religion or the charming Carthaginian practice of baking babies en croute as an offering to the gods.

And then I remembered well meaning leftist/pagan friends who argued violently that the Aztecs had been innocent pacifists and that the Carthaginian’s had been maligned by the Catholic church (this was modified to “the Romans” when I pointed out their slight chronological slippage.

In fact, if you google either the Aztec sacrifices and/or the Carthaginian baby-killing you get varying degrees of apologist.

The Aztec ones because more recent, and I suppose more archeologically undeniable/well known are dressed up as “but they really believed this was needed.”  (Yes, and Charlie Manson really believed he was bringing about a race war that would bring about paradise.  Does this mean he’s innocent?)  The Carthaginian ones are blamed on everyone’s misreporting or the numerous Tophets still unearthed in the Iberian peninsula (I always suspected there was one under the heart of the village, because of regional names that indicate a Carthaginian cultic center.  I probably could point the right spot to archaeologists, though I’d frankly rather not know) and other Carthaginian colonies are either someone else’s problem attributed to the Carthaginians OR on this being a place to dispose of dead babies, but not sacrificed babies.  The archaeology of such sites makes this poppycock, of course, but our fuzzier fellow westerners hold on to this because it allows them to hold on to their idea of the noble savage, that creature who was never guilty of aggression, slavery or murder, unlike we, evil westerners.  (Jean Jacques Rosseau should be burned in effigy every year, for crimes against humanity.)

So if I say something about the horror that was the Aztec religion or the Carthaginian religion, they’ll jump all over me as racist (well, Carthaginians did settle in the North of Africa and probably were as tan as… as I am.)  Because these people in their heads are “little brown people” and therefore innocent of the manyfold sins of humanity, which are, of course, part of white privilege.  Or something.

In the same way I realized they were upset about my reviling of communists because what they are thinking of are not the same communists I’m thinking of.

No, the communists they are defending, the ones that they don’t wish maligned, are the communists they knew at college, which were probably the same communists I knew at college.  (Well, not the same, let’s face it, while I’m no spring chicken, most of these people could spot me ten to twenty years.  But the same model, give or take.)

They are the young men and women who don’t fit in, who continually critique the status quo.  Some of them are actually compassionate, quick to stick up for the underdog.  Some of them engage in extensive charity, or give money to beggars.  Others are more faux-charitable, and yell at you for using the wrong word to refer to the victim of the week, or concoct elaborate narratives to explain how the latest mass murderer is really a victim.

These people were often some variety of “cool” — in my day this involved peasant blouses and elaborate tapestry jackets, the later mostly for the boys — and more often than not from very wealthy backgrounds.

In my day too, they organized protests in solidarity with the people of Mozambique or Angola, the same people at that time being massacred in batch lots by Cuban guerrillas in the pay of the Soviet Union.  But of course, they were supposed to have a revolutionary government and so everything was okay.  In my day — and now — they wore t-shirts with Che Guevara whom they idolized as a sort of communist hippie (even in those days this was unforgivable, but now that the full history of this psychopath is available for anyone to read, including the glee with which he killed students [more on this later] this is frankly inexcusable.)

In their day, too, probably, since the left has ensconced itself in Academia, they met more of these “radical sons” that fit the model laid out by Agatha Christie, in a book whose title evades me just now: he read the Daily Worker and he lectured everyone about the rights of the workers and the coming Communist revolution, but really he was just an upper class Brit and had even secretly married his girlfriend.

Agatha Christie nurtures a certain fondness for this type of character, which comes through in her writing, and I even understand it.  Some of the nicer people I met growing up, some of the people I grew up with were of this mold.  The “communism” was a trendy veneer, to look “intelligent” and to afford the opportunity to critique everything, but at heart they were decent human beings.

They were however adolescent (or just past) human beings.  There is an age at which people naturally are at odds with everything around them, and communism offers a framework for this.

Other philosophies offer a frame work for this.  Mine at the time was rather chaotic and anarchic and later hardened into hard core Libertarianism, which was blown apart by 9/11.

However, of all the prisms that adolescents use to critique their world, Marxism has proven the most persistent pathology and also (that I know) the only one that has managed to fill 100 000 000 graves (a number the Colonel tells me is lowball, and it might very well be.)

Yeah, okay, so the mass deaths aren’t caused by the sort of college Marxists I described.  Except when they are, of course.

What I mean is that a lot of the most horrible things done by communists (and the less horrible but still terrible things done by socialists who kill economies softy and destroy futures in the name of equality) are done by people who started out exactly like those “radical sons” (and daughters) who were communists, but still decent human beings.

The philosophy itself, with its flaws, drives them to either greater radicalization OR…  to the wall.

You see, Marxism’s great flaw is its misunderstanding of economics.

But Sarah, you’ll say, how can economics fill that many mass graves?

Well, see, the great ink stained angry blot (which is how someone described Marx as a human being) understood about as much of economics as my cat understands of rhetoric.  Maybe less.

What he principally understood — in a life spent mooching off wealthy friends — is that he was done wrong! And that in a just world he would command a lot more power and money, but particularly power.

There are many errors in his damned (literally) theory, but the most important of them is that he visualized wealth as a closed pie.

Unfortunately this appeals to a certain instinctive human understanding of wealth, because in the hominid band there were only so many berries, or mammoth haunches and if someone was boggarting the food they were the villain.

If wealth really were a closed pie (nonsense on its face, else, our ancestors in the caves were all far wealthier than us, since there are more of us) then everyone who has more than average is by definition stealing.  And everyone who has less than average is by definition a victim.

And the implication that things are badly arranged appeals to every adolescent, EVER, particularly the wealthy ones who have more time to contemplate how they should have a lot more of whatever the heck other people have and they don’t: power or race cars, women/men or prestige.

The philosophy, in fact, appeals to anyone who is envious of others.  I remember reading a biography of the sainted (ptui) Evita saying that knowing there were rich people in the world made her unhappy.  This is a sentiment you see oft repeated by communists and their soft-sisters, the socialists.  Our very own president said that even if raising taxes decreased the amount collected (which it does, after a point) it was still “the right thing to do.”

Marxism/Communism/Socialism, by its belief in the closed pie, takes envy and removes all stigma from it, conferring upon it the power of a sacrament.

The problem with that is that envy is not just considered a sin by some religions, and is not just “a bad thing, ‘mkay” — envy is poison to the character.  When you make envy “righteous” and “justified” you empower people to completely wash their hands of any of their failings.  It’s not their fault “it’s the system.”  They’re only not rich because “behind every great fortune lies a great crime.”  It has nothing to do with their lack of application, talent or effort, no, it’s all “the man is keeping me down.”

Even if you start out sane, that way of thinking will slowly corrode anything worth saving in you.  Just by virtue of sanctifying envy, you’re going to start uplifting the despicable and hating the admirable.

If you want to figure out how slippery that slope is, just ask your “nice” communist friends (or even socialist friends) what they think of Mao, Stalin, Che, the Kims, and watch them make excuses.

Worse, though, is that this sort of philosophy, by its very nature attracts the crazy.  Of those, those who never grow past teen whining are the least threat.  They continue wearing their cool bandannas and complaining against the man, in their academic jobs.  But a certain number of those who present that way simply see that environment as a good one to hide.  And those are the certifiable psychopaths.  We’ll call them the Ches.

These are people who genuinely want power and who often want to kill people.  Because the philosophy enshrines those who are angry, and those who are envious, it leaves people with no defenses before these psychopaths.

Any philosophy that requires no personal sacrifice, no personal work, but just louder denunciations of “the enemy” is going to grow these like brambles.

And when people give power to communists, whom they imagine to be like those communists they knew in college, what they end up with is Che, or Mao, Stalin (no, Lenin wasn’t much better, he just disguised it more and didn’t get to the massive purges.)

Which is why eventually all communist revolutions end up as a sort of fanatic and sanguinary top-down hereditary monarchy, like the Kims in North Korea or the Castros in Cuba.  Unless of course the would be titular is too crazy even to establish an hereditary monarchy in which case you get fascist states like China.

The decent ones among those college “communists”?  The ones who really thought this was for the downtrodden, and who confused the Communist party with the order of St. Francis D’Assissi?

Those usually end up as splatter against whatever wall the Ches are using to satisfy their psychopathic urges.

So yes, I DO have it in for communism.  Yes, I am against Marxism.  Given the amount of poverty, death and desolation the philosophy dreamed up by the crazed scribbler has caused, I don’t see what other position is moral or sane.

I disapprove most heartily of a hundred million untimely deaths.  I disapprove of killing people and taking their stuff.

If you don’t, you should ask yourself why not, and precisely what is wrong with you.

 

 

 

The World on a Dinner Platter – Cedar Sanderson

It always comes back to food. It’s not just my personal pleasure in cooking, eating, and feeding others. It is literally the foundation of the human condition: good food and plenty of it.

I’m currently studying the history of the world, prior to 1500. In the first chapter of the book we were assigned to read, the point is made that humans have been around for a very long time, it took a long time to develop agriculture, but there weren’t many of them pre-agriculture. The crux of the matter is the ability to grow more food than you could hunt, or gather, in a small group. Large groups, which would build societies and cities, simply could not exist on a subsistence diet.

One of my classmates, in a discussion forum, stated that humans were desperate for nutrients and one of the main ways to get food was to graze which made me do a head-desk, and then start thinking. We take abundant food for granted. The child (in college, but still, a child) who seems to think that humans grazed on grass in pre-history has no doubt never missed a meal in their life unless it was by choice. The world we live in offers enough variety, enough abundance, that people can be ‘vegan’ and still survive, although thriving and being healthy are different matters.

The book tells me that women didn’t have as many children before agriculture, and that’s why population was lower. I snort and mutter something impolite under my breath. In reality hunter-gatherers have more in common with herds of animals, and again, it’s about the food. They were reliant on what was growing right there, right then. They had no way of producing a surplus nor of storing same. If they overhunted an area they were forced to move or die. If the tribe’s population grew too large, they starved or succumbed to disease, just like a deer herd or the snowshoe hare population collapses every few years to build slowly back up, limited by the supply of available food.

Humans lived that way for a very long time. Women having less babies? Probably, only it wasn’t through some kind of arcane desire to keep the population down. It was through the lack of food – nursing a child in the modern era is not terribly effective birth control, but in the time of subsistence the woman’s body simply couldn’t handle the dual load of nursing and pregnancy. I became pregnant with two of my children while nursing full time, I can speak to the enormous drain it is even on a well-fed body.

Because it’s fat. I have fat, on me, and in my diet. Fat is something you just don’t see prior to agriculture, and there’s a reason so many cultures revere the plump woman (just look at all the Venus statues from around the world). A fat woman could have babies and she could survive nursing and this meant the family could go on. And while we’re on the makin’ babies topic, here’s something: my history book laments the rise of the patriarchy alongside the rise of civilization after agriculture, constraining women and making them be under the thumb of the male. Well, that’s not patriarchy, that’s food. Men could hunt, and bring in the meat that was desperately needed for survival. Women gathered, but the men were the hunters.

Why didn’t the women hunt? Well, babies. Pregnant, nursing, malnourished…. The women were managing all they could, and the men were taking care of them. Women were better able to survive (yes, I am counting death in childbirth) in that harsh world than men were. Men were a valuable commodity in a time when hunting and protection of the tribe-family against others who wanted the same food they needed to live menaced the women and children. Female infanticide was practiced long before recorded history, evidence shows. Men were more valuable to the hunter-gatherers and it wasn’t even questioned it seems. But my history book complains that it was the rise of civilization post-agriculture that was to blame for the oppression of women and the gender inequality. Prior to ‘society’ it claims men and women were equal.

In reality, it’s all about the food. Only with the surplus of food that came with agriculture, and the animal husbandry it made possible, was civilization able to finally happen after long eons of death through starvation. While the hunter-gatherers had no ‘cushion’ against hard times, in a social setting people had a surplus and could support more people in one place through the creation of agriculture and other innovations. Cities came from towns, and villages, as the populations grew. As societies grew, the complexity of interpersonal relationships also grew. Men and women’s roles changed with each level of ‘class’ that developed, as did the concept of childhood, education, and family. Politics developed, conflicts grew into wars with the attendant need for armies. The concept of taxation came about to support the cities as they grew too large to draw from personal relationships with the farmers who produced the food. Money came into being as easier to handle than exchange of goods, and along with it, writing to record those exchanges.

From the perspective of epidemiology, disease came into its own. First, in the small agricultural hamlets where people lived with their animals, in the form of zoonosis transmitted to humans from other hosts. Later, in epidemics that raged through populations which would have been too diffuse to be affected at this level before cities were a thing. Also, people were no longer moving away from their own wastes. The balance of increasing population pressures against increased population support through agriculture and community is, in hindsight, obviously tilted toward a growing population but that wasn’t always clear in the past. There were times it looked like a close-run between collapse of civilization and a return to subsistence. In the end, the food was the weight on the balance toward success of mankind.

Despite plagues, and wars, though, humans just got bigger and better with the access to food. In fact, I would argue that the predominance of Western Civilization on world history is not due to some weird conspiracy, but to food. Or rather, the kinds and abundances of certain foods. Looking at a map of the rise of what my book calls “First Civilizations” you promptly see that several arose in disparate areas at about the same time (very roughly, but we’re talking in hundreds if not thousands of years here). One combined and arose out of two, and dominated global history. Indo-European civilizations had access to more variety of foodstuffs, and more of it. This led to the freedom of humanity to learn, explore, and express themselves in lasting ways.

More variety of food offers the benefit of not depending on one crop overmuch. We can look into modern history at the potato famine for a facile example (although there were also socio-political things going on there). Areas where only two or three staples grew plentifully were more vulnerable to viroids or other plant diseases, weather, and (don’t hit me!) climate change. Contrary to current urban legend, climate change is indeed a thing, and has been, independent of any human factor, for as long as mankind has been around and longer. It’s just that now we have the hubris to blame those changes on ourselves in some bizarre ritual of self-flagellation.

More plentiful food was a fluke of geographic location, mostly. The Nile River, with its gentle annual floods, was the breadbasket of the West. The Fertile Crescent was also, to a lesser extent, able to support a higher population level than dreamed possible as recent archaeological discoveries have shown. Look up Gobleki Tepe sometime, it is utterly fascinating.

Napoleon said that an army marched on its stomach, which always evoked an odd slug-like mental image to me. But it is equally true that the human condition rose on the belly of the well-fed man. Cities, wealth, power, vast libraries of knowledge, and it’s all because of a good dinner and a big pot of beer to chase it down with.

Yeah, I do have posts from Cedar and (I think) from Amanda waiting, but I woke up late, and so everything went by the way side and as you know I don’t like to put their posts up late.

For those who would worry about the slip ups in posting, the problem has been that for two weeks I’ve had all three guys at home.  An unaccustomed delight, but everything slips sideways and upside down.

Today I’m late because everyone returned to work/school, which included waking up at five am with younger son rummaging in the kitchen, looking for SOMETHING.  D*mned if I know what.  I remember waking up, coming down, and he said “I wanted to make sure I had–”  And then I think I just sleep-walked my way back to bed.

Now note above, I’m telling you a lot about my family.  I don’t mind that.  but believe it or not, I’m also very careful to make sure I never give out information that can lead to tracking us down/stopping us on the street or at a public event, or even coming to see us…

Let me explain that I don’t fear/despise my fans.  In fact, every time I met you lot, from conventions to just accidental bumping into each other, you’re by and large a pleasure.

And then let me explain that I never wanted fame.  I wanted fortune (sigh, don’t we all) but I’m by nature an introvert.  I am one of those few who handle themselves okay in person, but I still don’t LIKE to be out in public.

To finish let me add that while I love my fans, I really hate stalkers.  And before any of you who corresponds with me floods my pm or email saying “have I stalked?” No, you haven’t.  When I say stalkers, I MEAN stalkers.  As in, people who trace me, in real life, who follow me around, who camp in front of my house, and who would get a restraining order if we couldn’t get them to go away by any other means.

I seem to attract those, and did so BEFORE I had enough fans to fill a large room.  This is weird, as it’s been so long since I was young and beautiful that Ray Bradbury’s dictum that the old were never children seems about right to me.  (Even though I’m more middle-middle aged, but whatevs.)

What I say even on my blog is carefully contrived to make sure you don’t actually know where myself and the family are going to go/be at any given time because of those few (VERY FEW, to date about 7 people have been a problem) insane people.  For instance, if we’re going to go up to Denver and to Pete’s, I’m certainly not announcing it here.  If I have do say I’m doing something (i.e. why post is late) I’ll say something else.

Look, sure, if you haunt Pete’s, sooner or later you’ll see a gaggle of Hoyts come in.  In the same way if you haunt the Denver Museum of Nature and Science.  Sooner or later, you’ll see two, or three or even all four of us come in.  (In the later case you can recognize us by the semi-permanent rolling argument.)

However, if I’m out with the family it’s family time and not fan time.  It’s a different head space.  So, unless I make arrangements to meet one or the other of you (I must meet the one of you in Aurora next time I’m up there) it’s probably not a good time.  The normal etiquette for that is to approach, introduce yourself, and if the family says “No, come on, sit down” then it’s fine.

I LIKE and even trust most of you.

But I’ve had to deal with insulating various circles of acquaintance.  Until I know you decently enough, you’re not allowed to the inner circle, where you could probably trace me, the kids and the pets without any trouble.  In between that and the polite smile and autograph there’s layers of circles.

(BTW part of the reason I have no pictures of Greebo is that he used to be an outdoor cat, which means he was vulnerable.  Okay, being basically a chainsaw who purrs not that vulnerable, but still.)

I hate the necessity of this, and it makes me vulnerable, in a way, too.  Because what happens is that if anyone reports anything to me, something going on in fandom at large I’m likely to believe that person, particularly if it’s a fellow writer.  (For the idiots making hay of RAH believing MZB about her no good, very bad, craptastic second husband.  I can see this happening more easily than you can imagine.)

Part of this, too, is that people have started treating me like I’m someone special.  This is bizarre to me, as I’m just a chick who writes some stuff.  But the number of people who approach me on bended knee and are careful of what they say about me completely baffles me.

So–

Things you should realize: if I don’t give you my home address it doesn’t mean I think you’re a stalker.  It means that in the past people have naively given my address out to people who turned out to be stalkers.  (I understood, as the idea I HAD stalkers was completely bizarre.  So they gave it out without thinking.  However, I don’t want it to happen again.)

Actually if I don’t give you my home address right now, it might not mean anything more than that I don’t want you to get confused as we’re changing addresses probably within a couple of months.  (House under contract, now, but it’s complicated.)

If I DO brush you off at a convention (rare and unlikely) it’s not because you offended me/I’m too full of myself/whatever.  The only time I brush people off at cons is when I have been on panels through one meal already and am dying to get somewhere and eat something or at least have caffeine.  That, and, if it’s a local con, we’re headed home on a tight schedule.  So, don’t take it badly and approach me again later.

If you happen to recognize us in public and want to talk to us, approach anyway.  We are friendly people.  And if we’re on a family thing and don’t want to be interrupted, we’ll tell you.

If it seems to you I’m skirting the real truth in terms of where we’ll be, etc, on this blog, I probably am, because it’s either one of those family things I don’t want interrupted, or it’s something the guys don’t want to deal with.

When approaching my kids, remember they’re not me.  My career is not their responsibility/duty.  They might or might not wish to talk, but be mindful of where they are and who is with them.  They don’t usually broadcast that their mother is almost famous.

And if it seems to you that in the beginning of an acquaintance I’m very cautious, don’t take it wrongly.  I just don’t want to wake up to someone standing on my front lawn.  I’m not that special, and it’s bizarre, so they must be mentally ill, and that scares me. I learned that the hard way.

But most of all, stop fawning around me (no, seriously.)  I’m just a chick who writes stuff.  And if you do it in person and/or at a con, I’ll throw a small plastic fish at you.  And then you’ll be deep in the carp.

 

 

 

 

 

Dan and I have a joke that we’d like to have two cats.

This has never actually happened in our married life.  Someone or something thinks the normal number of cats for the house is five, so when we lose one another is provided.  Sometimes the replacement comes a little ahead of the loss, so we end up over-catted for a few months. Right now we have five spread over two households and no new arrivals (knock on wood) which leads me to believe that when the kids move out we MIGHT actually get to two cats? Maybe.

It’s always in circumstances where they are least convenient, of course, because you know that’s how life happens.  Or something about the cat makes him really inconvenient.  For instance Havelock cat is a turkish van, in a family allergic to cats, and with me not able to clean every day to defuzz the house.  (I really need to train him to accept a bath a week, because he needs it, and it helps with my breathing.)  But Havey was skinny, had sores on his face from a fox attack, a broken tail and was covered in a thick layer of grease from eating off the dumpster of the Vietnamese restaurant next door.  We couldn’t leave him in the mini-golf course where people were hitting him with clubs for playing with the balls.

We were dealing with problems with middle school, I was contracted for six books, it was the last convenient time ever to deal with little half-feral kitten.

But he is our most affectionate/funniest cat, and the number of times he’s gotten one or the other of us out of a blue funk, including this year, when he climbs on us for pets when we’re really stressed and helps, have been more than I can count.  He’s a little entertainment system and life support in one.

If it comes to that, take Euclid (please, he’s more neurotic than he should be) whom we rescued from death row at the humane society, a year before nine eleven.  We really didn’t want to take him/didn’t need another cat, but he had a URI and their policy for that is to put them down.  He was a year old and very affectionate.  I didn’t know that through the days after 9/11 he’d help mend my broken heart.  And yes, I know that sounds loony, but it felt like everything was broken and wrong, till he curled in my lap.

Then there’s the kids.  Despite the fact both are very much wanted, they managed to arrive at the most inconvenient times possible.  Robert came not only when we became unemployed (in my case due to being put on bed rest) but also when the local economy had just taken a nose dive, so we spent the next two years moving around a lot and eventually across the country and paying mortgage/rent with so little money that we lived off bulk bits of chicken (sparing) and mega bags of frozen vegetables from I THINK Sam’s club (the company here in CO gave us a membership.  In the Carolinas we lived from side-of-the-road vegetable stands.)  Oh, yeah, and rice, because rice is cheap.

I suspect the weight we gained those years will never leave us, and it certainly finished turning my hair white.  I wouldn’t re-live that time for all the tea in China.  BUT twenty four years later, our kid is fun to hang out with and might eventually do something of worth in the world.

His brother too, was born when we moved twice in a year (I think the only reason we don’t have a third kid this year is that it’s physically impossible.  Even so, I keep hoping– er expecting to find a newborn in the milk cooler on the front porch.

Anyway, second kid is also fun to hang out with, and at 21 is not only a more or less declared Son of Martha but the voice of reason in his friends’ circle.

Then there’s friends.  it never rains but it pours.  If we’re tight on money, house/car need repairs, I’m feeling poorly, boys and Dan are swamped with work, that’s when a friend needs help, monetary or labor.

And yeah, we usually sigh, and retrench and help, because we’ve so often been helped (often by other people) when we needed.  I don’t think we’d have survived, otherwise.

I was thinking about that as I woke up.  I think part of being an adult is embracing the inconveniences, dealing with them, and often — in the case of cats and kids — after a while realizing they’re blessings, even when they aren’t.

Because the thing is I’ve seen people who turn their backs on every inconvenience, every cry for help, every opportunity to make someone’s day just a little better at little cost of time/effort.

And my experience is they pay for it.  Now, this is not a religious thing, mind you.  It’s a here and right in this world, thing.

People who live only for themselves and what’s most convenient/pleasurable might even end up well off, monetarily, but they usually are unhappy/sad/resentful people.

They’re the people who obsess on micro-aggressions and spend forever talking about how this or the other segment of the population should be eliminated.  The most benign obsess on their health and become nearly entertaining hypochondriacs, usually complaining of diseases never known to man. The less entertaining worry endlessly about their sexuality, or how someone looked at them on the street, which are less entertaining but more modern forms of hypochondria.

But behind it all there is this impression of almost hysterical despair, as they worry/complain they’re not getting what they should out of life.

It never occurs to them you get what you should out of life by starting out embracing inconveniences: kids, animals, friends.

I’m not so perfect in charity that I embrace EVERY inconvenience, and yes, I had to learn over time that there are people and things you can’t help.  You could pour all of yourself into helping a person or a situation with no improvement except that you lost your time.

BUT embracing some inconveniences is part of being an adult.  No, more than that, it’s part of being human.  You don’t get up in the morning and go look for trouble, but if you come across something that’s sorely wrong and you can help, you do so.

Note that this form of help, the form adults do, never involves screaming for someone else to help the person.  Oh, yes, if it’s beyond your ability and there is something you can do in terms of filling governmental forms or helping someone get more permanent help, you might do it.  Even if you disagree with government help, right now it is what it is, and taxes and regulations often prevent people from helping in person.

But if you come across someone who wants a meal and you go marching off demanding the government give free food to everyone, it’s just another way of avoiding the inconvenience, and avoiding dealing with real need, while still feeling “special” because you “understand the need” and lobby someone to help.

The help adults give is more concrete and less glorious.  You find a dog lost in traffic and you take it home, feed it, trace its owner and/or find him a home.  You hear a friend is going through tough times, so you cook a big meal and have the family over. You hear someone is having trouble making rent, and you forego that vacation you were going to take and forward the money.

The personal aspect of this keeps it from going out of control or consistently going to people/critters who won’t take advantage of this.

And of course, it doesn’t allow you to preen about your passion for social justice.  Mostly because you’re too busy with personal justice to do so.

But not only does it, little by little and imperceptibly make the world a better place, but it makes your life happier.  Yeah, okay, you might never have that $500 a day spa visit, but that would have passed in a day, while having used the money to help someone enmeshes you in the weft and warp of humanity.  Do a few of these, and you find you have a circle, who comes without your even needing to call and helps you before you even realized you needed help.  Like, say, my old writers group, watching my kids so Dan could be with me when I was in ICU for 11 days 21 years ago.  I had done very minor things for them along the line, including hosting the group and providing meals (when meeting was right after work on a week day.)  Their rush to help allowed Dan to be with me, which saved my life more than once.

And their cleaning the house when I finally came back home.  And brought us food for two weeks, while I recovered.

I was more than paid for those minor inconvenient kindnesses.

And when someone asks “Why are you bothering to do this?” The answer is “because I can.”

There might be a pay off in the future or not, but there is a pay off right now.  It makes you the kind of person who does what he/she can, not the kind of person to whines that there should be someone else doing something.

One tends to be much happier than the other, even if poorer and more strapped for time.

.

 

 

You Ain’t Seen Nothing Like Us Yet A Blast From the Past, October 2013

It is a truism from psychology classes that you can’t stand at the window and watch yourself go by.  You also can’t grow up in a country and see it as outsiders see it.  And outsiders can’t see it as insiders see it.

If you ever see me standing somewhere and shaking my head and saying “Americans!” it’s not that I suddenly see myself as separate from you.  Or rather, it is, but it’s more that I see myself from separate and part of, which means I don’t fit anywhere.  The part of me that feels separate from the rest of you, though, is the girl who grew up overseas with an idea of America that you don’t see and probably can’t share.  The part that then came here, and adapted her notions, and figured out how you guys see yourselves.

In metaphorical terms, I’m the American that stands at the window and watches America go by. The caveat is that I grew up in a very particular time and place, and though I did see a lot of Europe and had a lot of European and anglosphere friends, I know next to nothing about Asia (though I had Japanese friends too.)  Still as far as I know though we share one or two traits with other nations, we’re the only ones who have all of them.

And I don’t mean some individuals in other nations don’t have these traits, or that some here don’t lack them (boy, I could tell you!) but that in general our culture has these traits and theirs doesn’t.  And that makes all the difference.

So I thought I’d hold the mirror up to you, because you guys keep trying to fit yourselves into roles that just aren’t there. “We’re Rome!”  or “We’re Carthage” or even “We’re the British Empire!”  (Which – Francis is right – is the closest and yet not a perfect fit.  In nation terms, the British take their laws as seriously as we do, but they’re more flexible.  In schoolroom terms, the British might be “in the spectrum” but they’re not full on Aspergers.)

No, we’re none of those.  By the Grace of G-d or the amazing concatenation of chance and self-selection, we’re something quite new in the history of the world.  And if there was something like us before – pre-history perhaps? – it is long since vanished from memory.

I’m going to list in no particular order the things that still strike the me-that-grew-up-elsewhere as amazing and wonderful about our country.  And yet I’m sure I’ll forget a dozen or so of them.  Maybe perhaps just enough of this will explain my view that while I think collapse is inevitable, I don’t think we can predict how it will turn out or what comes next.  The future is unwritten and being the special nation we are, it’s up to us to write it.

[BTW, I’m too lazy to look for it right now, but there’s a Facebook meme that encapsulates what I am: I’m an Apocaliptimist.  I believe everything is going to sh*t but I still think we’ll be all right through it all and it might turn out for the best. (The difference between me and the Libertarians who, like communists, expect their system to emerge spontaneously from the chaos, is that I think we’ll need to work like heck through the dark times to make sure we’re all right at the end.)]

So, here it is what I see when I stand at the window and watch America go by:

-We’re playful.  No, I don’t mean just in the sense that we have a sense of humor.  That too – and I was fully appreciative of the British humor before I came here, but the British humor has a back bite and a bit of the dour irony that American humor might have or not – but that’s not all.  We’re playful even when not making an outright joke.  For instance, the first thing that hit me about the High School I attended in the States for 12^th grade was that someone had labeled the corridors in hand lettered signs.  For instance, the math/computer area was labeled Nerd Alley.  And the teachers let it stay up.  And no one thought this hurt the dignity of the school/education.  In fact, I’m almost sure they had the school’s unofficial approval.

Then there’s the senior prank I took part in, where we kidnapped the secretary’s stuffed bulldog collection, and asked for $5 in unmarked pennies.  My counselor called me and very seriously counseled me to give up my accomplices and talked about my making this an international incident.

Right now you’re going “Standard kid stuff.”  And shaking your head and going “and?” – And nothing.  Those are perfectly normal pranks.

Yeah, they are, in the states.  Don’t even try to do it anywhere else.

-We spontaneously organize in clubs and associations.  I think we’re losing this now, because everyone is so infernally busy.  (But the structure is still there.  It would take more than a generation to erase.) It’s impossible to have a club in America – even our writers’ group – without rules that everyone takes very seriously indeed.  In other countries – maybe excepting England – this is reserved for associations that are “official” and “important.”  Here, if you form a club to give crumbs to ducklings in the park, within three months it will be run according  to Robert’s rules of order, (Which I’ve told the older kid should be the name of his blog) with motions and chairs and who knows what.

This is absolutely needed because

-We don’t take orders well.  Any of us, really.  When I came to the US I kept seeing this sign in every work place “The problem in this place is all chiefs no Indians.”  I suppose it is politically incorrect now, so you no longer see it.  BUT it baffled me.  It wasn’t just that these people were saying that their workplace was unorganized, or that they had issues taking orders, but that they were BRAGGING about it in posters and cross stitch pictures. … and that they were right.

Portugal is famously unorganized.  My kids have various colorful expressions for the way things are done in Portugal.  Let’s just say they’re convinced that most people drive with a part of their anatomy no one should use. But it’s different.  The average Portuguese recognizes his “betters” and assumes that someone else has the right to lead them.  They just exhibit a sullen “make me” attitude.

In the States, we just don’t see why anyone else should be in charge.  We don’t recognize social superiors, and we barely recognize technical superiors.  The forlorn cries for us to respect “the office” of this and that when we can’t respect the current *sshat are a measure of how little inclined we are to do that.  In other countries the President or the Premier or whatever is “Important” and you DO respect the office and it rubs off on the person, no matter how much you hate the current clown.

The flip side of this is that we’re all of us forever looking at what we can do.  (There are exceptions, of course.  I’m not talking individuals, I’m talking the American character as opposed to other nations.)  If you face a mess, you don’t sit around waiting for orders to fix it.  You don’t even wait for other people to “buy in.”  You roll up your sleeves and start fixing what you can reach.

This is why that sign in the seventies was a brag.  It was was “We’re all trying to do the best we can, and we’re so good at that we can barely coordinate with which other.”  There is no other country where I can visualize “An army of one” making sense.

-This “We fix it” thing is why Americans open their purses and their hearts to help the less fortunate, whether it’s the person with too many kittens to feed down the block, or the victims of the tsunami across the world, in numbers the rest of the world doesn’t even come close to matching.

It’s not just that we’re well off or generous.  Yeah, we’re that, but we also feel that it’s our duty, dang it.  We don’t wait for the organization or the go-varmint or someone else to do.  We’re an army of one, moving in our own uncoordinated way, and moving mountains without even noticing.

And that’s also because most of us at some time were in need and got help, and know better than to wait for officialdom.

I was never more proud than when science fiction forgot its petty inanities and closed ranks to help Dave Wolverton’s kid.  Because that’s what we do.  We’re Americans.  We fix, we help, we move on, and we don’t keep score of who helped whom, and who didn’t.  You need help we’re there, a mob with a purpose.

– We are flexible.  No, this is important.  We change, and the society allows us to change.  The sense of humor, the organization, the initiative, all of it adds up to us saying “just because I’ve always been like that, doesn’t mean I’ll be like that tomorrow.  And society doesn’t try to keep us in our appointed pigeon hole.

And this is probably why you can become an American.  Most other nationalities, while you can naturalize, you’ll never “really” be whatever they are.

Here?  Despite the idiots running around hyphenating themselves, you can be an American no matter how funny you look or how strange you sound.  (Trust me.  I know whence I speak.)

And people will be offended at the idea that you wouldn’t be able to become a real American.

Part of the unappreciated thing by all – PARTICULARLY progressives – is that for all its flaws America is the least racist, homophobic, sexist and any other discriminatory thing you can think of.  If you’re an American you are an American, no questions asked.  (And all the Americans who think otherwise only think so because they’ve only seen the rest of the world on their best behavior.  Listen to them in unguarded moments, in their native language, and the picture is quite different.  I wish we could get our oikophobic co-citizens to understand that they really shouldn’t take what people say of their own country at face value.  This is why they think we are the worst in the world – because we engage in self-critique, even more than the Europeans.)

-And this is why we have a positive craze for self-improvement.  This can get outright silly with New Age stuff and cleansing your aura, but it also means that most of us aspire to being life long learners, even those who aren’t.

Yes, in other countries people go for adult education or learning this or that, but it’s usually very focused, very serious.  Here, it’s not unusual to find that someone is taking some very serious subject on the side, in their spare time, just for fun.

For years I belonged to the History Book Club, where my royalty checks should just be made over every month.  (My husband said.)  I don’t now, because I can poke around Amazon till I find things.  But that sort of thing, the History Book Club and the Science Book Club, and the Mathematics Book Club, and heaven knows what flourishes in America more than anywhere else in the world.

I remember when my brother rather condescendingly told me about a book on Chinese History he’d just discovered and offered to send it to me “since you won’t have that in America.”  Ah.  I’d read it five years before, through the History Book Club.

This is why despite the fact that our secondary education (and primary too, for that matter) suck rotten eggs, we continue to have an educated populace.  It’s also why finding out someone “only” has a high school education means nothing.  My plumber is an expert on the civil war and its weapons. One of my friends who has “only” a high school education and from a part of the country not known for the excellence of its teaching could give lessons to most of my literature professors.

In the same way that there are second acts in American lives, there are second and third and fourth careers, and a continuing education, and structures to support that, and the fact that no one finds it weird that a computer programmer is “really” a medieval sword expert and a weekend blacksmith.

This makes us uniquely adapted to this world of fast-changing technology, because none of us (okay, again, I’m talking the culture not individuals.  We won’t discuss Wisconsin teachers) regards a job as a sinecure or the education as the hoops to jump through for the sinecure.  No, we regard jobs as things you do for a while, and learning as the way to get another/different job.

Which is good, because

– The future comes from America.  Yes, yes, I know Verne, Wells and all that “invented” science fiction, but the only nation in which it was popularized as a genre, and not an entertainment of intellectuals bent on social critique – the only place it could be so – is America.

Some countries – most countries – are shackled to the past, either in embrace or in denial, and sometimes in both.

Portugal is a tiny country trying to swim through time against the pull of the huge cement sack of history tied to its middle.  They can’t do this and that because it’s never been done, or they have to do this because they did that before.  I get the same sense about all the other countries I know well enough.

But not America.  Oh, no.  Not us.

Americans seem to have come here to make things better, and therefore, the future is always better than the past (Yes I realize this makes the glitterati not really American.  What you thought they were?)

Americans are mad in love with the future.  We’re adult enough to know sometimes there are (d*mnably) rough patches, but by and large “every day, in every way, we’re getting better and better.”  And just wait till we finish tinkering and cajoling and inventing tomorrow.

Come and give me a hand.  We’ll come out of this collapse thing better than ever, stronger than ever.  The future?  Man, is it going to be snazzy, and new, and completely unexpected.

Boy, are you going to love it!

You ain’t seen nothing like us yet!

This is the Fantasy portion of your free gift (in every box.  Be the first kid on your blog… ahem.)

The first story was published in Baen’s Big Book of Monsters and the third is The Camels of Christmas.  The middle one is a never before published short story, which I hope you enjoy.

Again, give it away to friends, relatives, enemies, acquaintances, strangers or aliens.  It was pointed out to me in my author’s conference on Facebook that you can also trade it for sexual favors.

Just don’t claim it’s yours and don’t sell it and we’ll remain friends and my lawyer won’t have to get bent out of shape.  (And you don’t know how interesting a shape he can bend into.)

Oh, and don’t revise it.  I know it will have typos, they’re the fault of the green dragon who lives under my desk (okay, he’s black and he’s a cat, but never mind.)  However those are my typos, and if you fix them you might add your own!

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