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*As I expected, I need to go over what I have on Rogue Magic, before I can go on.  In the meantime, enjoy a guest post from Alma Boykin, our very own TXRed. I’m going to be right here catching up on posts for PJM and writing Through Fire.  Also, it’s younger son’s birthday, so after he’s done spending time with his friends, I should block some time for hanging out.  Oh, Alma’s post is on Frontiers, and I want to add that working in indie is very much Life On The Wild Frontier, with circumstances changing and different things learned every week.  For instance, I have in my hands (well on the desk, I don’t have an extra set of fingers to type with) the first book I’ve designed — a trade paperback copy of Death of a Musketeer.  The surprising thing is how professional it looks — considering I designed it with word and a ten year old version of JASC paintshop, particularly (I chose clunkier methods over ramp up time.)  The other surprising thing is how much of a dits I can be.  For instance, the cover is great except on the blurb I got attacked by Sudden capitalization Syndrome, so it will have to be redone.  And inside one of the section breaks seems to have given way, leaving the filler pages numbered.  So I have to do that to, again.  But if you’d told me three years ago I could design and have a book printed… I’d have laughed. Now, it seems entirely “matter of course”.*

 Frontiers, New, Final, and Otherwise

by Alma Boykin

[Author’s note: This is a bit of a ramble and discussion piece as much as history bit.]

 

Frontier is an odd word, and probably an Odd word as well. It has fallen out of fashion with historians of the US West because of too many Davy Crockett and cowboy associations (thank you, House of Mouse). And then there’s the “high frontier” and “frontiers in medicine,” and “the final frontier” (space or Alaska, take your choice) to further muddy the wordy waters. Since we (historians) are supposed to be getting past the Euro-American-as-good-guy idea of western history, frontier is out and borderlands, cultural transition zone, and other such terms are in. Unless you are a geographer, or look at world history, which is what I’d like to do.

The word, its root, and its sense of “something past/beyond other things” go back to Indo-European. Latin gives us frons-frontes, meaning an eyebrow, a façade of a building, and the idea of something projecting out of something else. From there Latin added a military meaning, which became the Old French frontier meaning the front rank of an army or the prow of a ship (or of a fortification). The usage passed into English and by the 15^th century there are references to a borderland being a frontier. North America got its frontier in the 1670s, according to etymological sources and sites.

Prior to graduate school I’d never given much thought to frontiers. Then I decided that I needed the word. To cultural geographers, a frontier is a place where peoples and cultures interact, often exchanging ideas and practices in the process. Terry G. Jordan’s great book, The North American Cattle-Raising Frontiers, is one of the best examples of the geographical frontier, and provided the model I used in my non-fiction work. So a frontier can be anywhere that two different cultures intersect for long enough that information transfers occur. Those transfers often cause changes in behavior, as you would imagine.

Historians of Russia occasionally refer to the Russia’s far-eastern frontier, and point out surficial similarities between the Wild East and Wild West (fur-based extractive economy, contested lands, native peoples integrated by conquest, hostile physical environment.) There’s a sense of weak government presence and control and that the frontier is where real cultures meet before official culture arrives.

Did Europe have frontiers? Yes, several. The area east of the Elbe River formed a frontier for several centuries, as pagan (and later Catholic and Orthodox) Slavs collided with Catholic and Protestant Germans. Later, the plains of Hungary, Transylvania, and the Balkans fit the idea of frontier, as the Ottomans and Tartars battled with the Hapsburgs, Russians, and Poles, passing control back and forth for five hundred years. There are stories of heroism and depravity, of high honor and low treason, of cultural exchanges and ferocious rejections of the other side. As Andrew Wheatcroft points out in the introduction to his book about the Siege of Vienna and its aftermath, Hapsburg/ Austro-Hungarian policies take on a different cast when seen as efforts to secure and defend an eastern frontier. One reason Wilhelmine Germany/Prussia came to define citizenship by blood rather than by birthplace stemmed from the ongoing conflicts with Slavs who refused to assimilate. Brandenburg-Prussia and East Prussia faced an eastern frontier that lingered long after the end of the Teutonic Knights’ kingdom.

Southern Europe, most notably Spain and Portugal, were frontiers for 700 years. One reason why Spain never had quite the same feudal system as France and England stemmed from that frontier. Spanish Christians had to carry arms in order to fend off the Moors (and mercenaries). The Spaniards’ right and duty of self-defense made it a lot harder for the crown and nobles to impose control over the common people, no matter what early modern governments might have wanted to do. Geography played a large role as well, and explains why the conquistadores (many from Extremadura) reached the American Southwest and shrugged instead of blanching with dismay like Anglo-Americans did. And why they called the descendants of converted Indians genizarios, or janissaries.

Fredrick Jackson Turner, in his seminal essay about the frontier in American history, used the US Census definition of frontier as a place with less than 10 people per square mile. The Census Bureau declared the frontier closed in 1890. Turner thought this would have deleterious effects for the country, since it turned off a social relief valve of sorts. His frontier became the next generation’s Wild West. In the 1970s, New Western historians announced that “frontier” no longer served a purpose, because the idea had been shaped and defined by Anglo-American perceptions and ideology. Hispanos and Native Americans recognized no such place (wellllll, mostly didn’t recognize). At the same time popular culture latched onto it even harder, giving us the variations mentioned at the start of this ramble.

Some people talk about frontier values, either as good or as bad things. The frontiers I’ve looked at share some commonalities. Physical strength remains critical to survival, or the ability to use tools to give the advantages of greater strength. Men need to be strong, stable, willing to work hard and to fight to protect their holdings and families. Women have a somewhat separate area of work, concentrated on the home or on a home territory, but still need to be able to take care of themselves and their children/dependents when the fertilizer hits the impeller. Honor, trustworthiness, wary respect for others, and a willingness to learn from and about the “other” even as you fight/work against them are important, and appear again and again in legend and in practice. I’d note that the “other” can be the environment in some cases as well as other people.

So, is the frontier dead or just sleeping? Cultural collision points still exist, notably the Balkans, the Caucasus Mountains, and (potentially) the Himalayas. By Fredrick Jackson Turner’s definition, large swaths of the western US are once more frontiers, as the population has shifted and concentrated in towns and cities. Several readers of this blog have talked about space and extra-solar settlement as the next frontier, the next place of exploration, settlement, and possible cultural contact. Robert Ballard probably looks at deep oceans as a frontier, since they have less than ten people per square mile and large swaths remain only semi-explored and mapped. (Note that the population definition only includes humans and not Great Old Ones.)

It strikes me that Americans, including those who are Americans by spirit instead of by place-of-birth, need frontiers, need places “lost beyond the ranges.” They can be mental, cultural, or environmental, but some Odds are going to roam, and society benefits from a certain degree of self-reliance, a sense of identity, and the willingness to say “I protect my people” and “this I will not do.” Frontiers have shaped humans for ages, and I doubt they’ll disappear within my lifetime. No matter what some people might prefer.

 

As I’ve said before, I think that chapters are moving permanently to Saturdays because Fridays have, for various reasons, become impossible.

The main reason today, though, is that I not only have been grinding my teeth in my sleep – which is normal procedure.  I drive my dentist nuts, and once broke one of my teeth this way – but appear to have been chewing on my tongue all night, which for some reason made me very cross and not inclined to writing a chapter.

Though I’ll be honest with you, I might skip this week, because the novel is at that stage where I need to go back and read over it and “fix it up” before continuing.  This used to be a normal way of working for me 20 years ago, but now it’s only needed when writing something THIS slowly.

So instead, I’ll talk about how I got up feeling like I’d had very disturbing dreams or something (hard to tell what makes one chew one’s tongue) and groggily went down the stairs of our three-floor Victorian (not as posh as it seems, the third floor is an un-heated and largely stacked with boxes attic) to the kitchen, and made myself some tea, and just sat there, sipping it.

Not sure why but I thought how long the house has been standing here, and how it is in its way a piece of American history.  Some of the really old features are still present, and now there is added remuddling from the sixties and seventies, and the stuff we’ve clawed back (I mean, like removing the funeral-parlor wall paper from the kitchen.)

And I thought “this house was standing here when WWI happened.”  And “This house was standing through WWII” – I tried to imagine the people who lived here, what they must have felt and what they must have done.  (It is still very odd to me that we live in houses for ten years or so and move on, and strangers move in, considering I was born in a house where four generations of my family had lived before me – I know as a curious aside that another Sarah Hoyt lived here once, because Colorado College started sending me alumni stuff, until I called and asked them “What?”  Appears one of their first women graduates, way back, was a Sarah Hoyt who lodged at this address.  So they thought I was her.  Considering she graduated around the twenties, I had to point out to them I’d be over 100 years old, and while that’s not unlikely EXACTLY (Robert says he gets a lot of 100+ patients when volunteering at the hospital) it’s not terribly likely.)

Anyway, it made it all feel safe as… as houses.  But then I thought again.  The people who lived here through what were two conflicts of unprecedented scale and power didn’t know how those wars would end.

No, this is very important.

Look, I’m going to admit right now, I’m a book wussy.  If the suspense gets too strong and the writer has an history of killing main characters, I’ll actually go and look at the end of the book to make sure it turns out all right.  And this can apply even to cozy mysteries, where I NEED to make sure the character I like isn’t the murderer, so I can enjoy the book.

You can’t do that in real life, but there is a tendency to think we can.

I know this is all sounding like I’m hallucinating, and it’s probably because I haven’t had nearly enough caffeine (and my tongue still hurts.)  But bear with me.

Humans are creatures of story as much as of body.  What I mean is, you’ve been steeped in stories since you were born and part of how you learned language is stories.  Stories is how we learn, how we make sense of the chaotic information around us, and it might be what gave humans an evolutionary edge.

We are programmed to remember stories, so instead of just saying “don’t go into the woods” granny told you the story of Little Red Riding Hood.  Studies have shown that we remember stories told vividly enough as though they’d happened to us.  (This explains the false memory syndrome and also, btw, makes me question the “raped and hogtied” style of YA literature. Why would you want to traumatize an entire generation?)

The problem with stories is that they have a beginning, middle and end.  The present has only two of those, and we’re stuck in an eternal middle.

This matters, because particularly as the way to dress discontent in ideological clothes has become sophisticated enough, thanks to the media, the best narrative tends to win, whether or not it has any contact with reality.

Also because, looking back at WWII we tend to sneer and feel so superior we don’t engage in propaganda now, and we don’t give demeaning names to our opponents.

The first – the ability of the best narrative to win – explains why Marxism tends to get hold of a country again and again and again.  It presents itself as a political system, but it’s really a religion, complete with rousing redemption of the human race at the end, in the stateless system in which we’ll study war no more, and every one will be perfectly selfless.  It’s the type of story we’re programmed to like and for which countless martyrs have died.  Only because Marxism and its various step children don’t work in the real world, usually they make OTHER PEOPLE martyrs.

The second is sort of like our putting down our machine guns and refusing to fight with them, because, well, machine guns are such terrible weapons, even as the enemy advances on us, with every weapon in his arsenal.  Who knows?  Words might be more important than machine guns, in that they’re what make people willing to fight the machine guns.

Does war propaganda demean the enemy and make him a comic book hero?  Sure.  The equivalent of low information voters – low information fighters? – need things pointed to them in black and white.  Might they understand the more nuanced and realistic view?  Sure, of course they would.  Most of them.  But nuanced and realistic views rarely rouse anyone to fight.  Just like novels are better if you delineate a clear villain (even if you make him “tragic”) so with life.  Narratives that are clear cut might be less realistic, but they’re more rousing.  And they’re a weapon.

The third problem with stories is again and always that “we’re stuck in the middle.”  The temptation to write the end is enormous and either to believe we cannot lose, or that we are already defeated.  And both are fatal.

Look, like you I’ve read all the books about how WWII or the American revolution or whatever “could not have gone any other way.” – but if you go deeper, yes it could.  It all hung in the balance, several times.

So, I sit there in the kitchen and I think “Are we at the rebirth of liberty?”  I know and have said that the socialist illusion had to come to the States to die.  It’s that whole The Future Comes From America, thing.  If we let it flourish in our college campuses and take refuge in our “bien pensant” class, the rest of the world will continue embracing it.  It had to come here.  But will it infect us forever, and make us shoddy and not us anymore?  Or will we kick the fever and become more ourselves than ever?

I don’t know.  And neither do you.  And neither does anyone, no matter how convincing their reasons and accounts.  (And half of them, knowingly or not, are really Tokyo Rose.)

So – some things to remember:  Despair is a sin.  We have reality and human nature on our side, but they have a wonderful narrative.  There are no warranties.  But… despair is a sin.  The future is unwritten.  It’s up to us to write.

I say this is the rebirth of American liberty.  And I say we make it so.

Be not afraid.

 

 

I’ve been reading about the things that stress does to people.  This was by way of being a bad idea, but I think I get why this year I’ve stumbled from illness to illness, never being quite right and always being a little “off”.

This year has been interesting, because it started and continued with a lot of uncertainty in the family (mostly financial, but not all – and it’s not things I can talk about as it’s not my issue as such.) As always happens with these things, the house took its cue from our mental state, and things started breaking down left and right.

Now, I want to emphasize that since about the end of July things have been improving – slowly, but improving – so why is it that this is when my body decided it was time to really revel in virus infections, one after the other?  Don’t know.  I don’t even know if this is one long “thing” – though I don’t think so, because symptoms have changed every month or so.  It’s just been like I have a day or two okay, then fall again.  This has made writing very hard.  I PROBABLY could do fluffy romance of something, but the space opera takes energy and strength (don’t ask.  No, I don’t get it either.)

The good news is that both Through Fire and Darkship Revenge are at the tip over point, when they become easier.  The bad news of course, is that I THINK I’m finally well enough to them.  Keep your fingers crossed for me, will you?  The last week ahs involved an awful lot of sleep…

Now, here’s the question, and it is serious, and I suspect some of you have experience with this:

What does one do to distress?

Look, the problem is not so much this year.  This year is when the neurotic cats of stress came home to roost (carrying their catnip mice with them) but actually technically I think what I’m getting is stress-backlash.

Let me explain – in many ways the last two years have been a reduction of stress.  Partly because I gave up on working for traditional publisher other than Baen, partly – related – because I gave up on pretending to be what they expected me to be (and that’s not just politics), partly because it frees me to write only what I like/can get into. There is NOTHING on this green Earth worse than trying to write something you really don’t want to.  And I don’t mean overall.

When I say I never submitted anything I didn’t want to write, I was right, of course.  BUT there’s more to it than that.

The way things used to work is that I had to send in a proposal.  The proposal was three chapters and a full outline.  The outline was bad enough – took me years to twig to the fact that the publishers don’t expect you to stick to that come heck or high water.  It’s just to give them a full impression of your idea.  If you deviate, it’s okay – because I can’t write how the middle resolution will work, if I don’t KNOW the characters yet.  (Though I usually know the end.)  BUT the three chapters killed me.  I joke with my family that a book is halfway done once I have three chapters.  This is not strictly true.  Usually it takes about ten to get to the “easy point” where it’s easy from then on to finish the book.  BUT the first three chapters are the heaviest lifting I do  ever, because I have to get the voice, and the character, and the feel.

So, once I did three chapters, these characters were ALIVE in my head.  I wanted to do the rest of the book.  BUT I’d sent it in, wait for … well, in one case eight years.

The problem is by the time the book sold, I was in the middle of something else and frankly, not the same person.  (This is something to talk about another time.  I feel the same way about interrupted series, like the Shifters or even the musketeer mysteries.  I’m simply not the same writer I was – which btw, gives a very odd sense of having died and being someone else.)

Wrenching your mind back to this long abandoned novel was the HARDEST part of being a writer.

That stress is gone, thank heavens.  The fear that someone in NYC would decide to do something goofy with a book and make it impossible for me to sell again even to Baen is gone too.

So – why am I now suffering stress maladies?

Well – there’s been the money thing with both boys in college.  We sort of expected it, only by now I was supposed to be a bestseller (ah!), and there’s other stuff, including the fact we have too much house for us in many ways, including keeping it clean.  This will be taken care of, but there’s work and change on the way there you know, and that’s always difficult.

And truly, we ARE dealing with stuff, and it’s getting better.

So I’m going to guess this year is the equivalent of the “book flu” – it used to be if I had a difficult book to do, and I had to push myself, I’d get “book flu” when I finished.  I.e. I’d spend a week on the sofa, not feeing “quite well.”

But if this is that “book flu” it’s writ very large indeed, as the pressure of stress from this career was at a high peak for something like seven years…

Normally what I did to de-stress from finishing a book was to sit on the sofa for a week eating rocky road ice cream and watching silly rom coms.

I don’t think that will cut it.  For one, I can’t eat rocky road ice cream :-P but for another, really it never completely eliminated the stress, it just got me back to sort of functioning.

My idea right now is to finish the Baen books hopefully by the week before Christmas.  Dan is taking two weeks off around then, because there’s so many holidays he can take two weeks at very little vacation expense.  A friend suggested I do two weeks of guest and other posts – I’m not sure about that, as I enjoy this blog probably more than you guys do – but I might do a bunch of posts scheduled ahead.

But here’s the thing – how does one de-stress?  How does one stop worrying or thinking about what needs to be done?  We used to take three days in Denver, when the kids were smaller.  Dan used to drag me off and not let me take the laptop, but by the 3^rd day, I was desperate to write and started feeling guilty that I wasn’t.

The times I’ve not thought about writing are while doing something else: art or sewing or something like that.  The last “real” vacation I took was three years ago when I took the two weeks over Christmas and did a bunch of remodeling around the house. It helped – I’d become so depressed I couldn’t THINK – but this time, being that I’ve been sick, I’d rather not do violent effort, let alone paint fumes in a closed house in winter.  (And by violent effort I don’t mean exercise.  I mean keep going long after you’re ready to drop, because you have a time table for the remodeling.)

What do you guys suggest?  Right now I’m thinking two weeks off, I do a bunch of reading and staying late in bed and hopefully cook ahead so I don’t have to worry about meals on vacation (going out to eat every meal is NOT an option with four people.)  Play with the cats. Take walks with the boys (supposing our winter wonderland is not too bad,) go see the lights at the zoo and go bug the art museum.

Will that be enough to get me back on an even keel, after years of stress?

Of course, to earn even that, I have these books to finish, but what do you think?  Is it even worth taking time off, or will it just add to the “things undone” tab?

I need to do something because I can’t afford to lose weeks to being out of it.  On the other hand I have never done anything like this (and I’ve never had the pressure let off after being stressed for so many years) so I don’t know how to approach it.

Comments?  Hisses and boos?  Rotten tomatoes?  What say you?

Sometime ago I was talking to a friend who is an older science fiction writer.  This was so long ago that the kids were then in their early teens.  I was telling her how difficult it was, writing and (back then) unpacking into the new house, and cleaning, and keeping the boys on track for homework, and she said that yes, being a working mom was very difficult, and that they’d thought back in her day that by the time we got to now, with most moms working, there would be public refectories that would serve meals.

I remember I looked at her for a moment, then said “there is.  It’s called PF Chang’s.”

This was before 2008 and the entire economic crisis, and we’d just had friends from out of town visiting.  We’d driven from restaurant to restaurant, on a week night, trying to find some place with less than an hour wait where we could have a meal uninterrupted by servers trying to hurry us up.  (Right now, our go to for this is a little Thai restaurant, where the service proceeds at glacial pace, and which is easier on the purse – unless we go to Denver where, of course, we go to Pete’s kitchen, where we’ve been going since the kids were little, back when the neighborhood was actually dangerous instead of just being iffy as it is now.)

We finally did find a place to eat with our friends, but it was more expensive than we’d meant to spend and in the mean time we’d gone through a whole range that is well above our “I’m fried/we spent the day working, let’s grab something to eat.”  (These days that’s mostly Applebys and we try to make it on Monday for the discounted burgers, but never mind.)

All these places were full on a weekday night, and it didn’t take much listening in to realize most of the people waiting were people who came here twice or three times a week.

Now, I’m not going to cast stones.  Back before the boys were a glimmer in Dan’s eye, both Dan and I were working in high pressure jobs, which didn’t pay overtime but expected it.  When you’re both working 12 to 16 hour days, the last thing you want to do is go home and cook, or even assemble a sandwich.  And we rarely managed the time to go out grocery shopping, for that matter.  (In that year and a half we were both at those jobs, sometimes I bought clothes because I hadn’t had time to do wash – and I shopped by my usual method of running in, grabbing something that fit and running out.)

What surprised me about that tour of city restaurants, years ago, was not that they were packed, but that they were packed at that price range.  (Then again, I guess some people have less… skinflinty ways.  Also, most of them aren’t writers, so they get more regular payments, I guess.)

To return to the main point, any society that requires its women to work outside the home (and the combination of social and tax pressures more or less requires that) must have some way of doing the house work.

For the science fiction writers of the early to mid century (probably up to the seventies) in the US, the thing that made the most sense was to have the government provide nutritious meals at your local refectory.

Could it have worked?  In real life?

I fail to see how, short of a Stalinist regime, where you end up having turnips five times a week and like it.

Would it be possible to have them be something like a school cafeteria, with discounted food?  Sure.  But I bet you that absent compulsion or restriction, they’d be competing with all the restaurants providing the same service in the free market.  And while I imagine some of these centers would survive, particularly in the poorer neighborhoods, the customers would mostly be the desperately poor and derelicts, using government vouchers, and receiving the quality of food no one else would want, at prices that would come out as a big chunk out of the taxpayer’s pockets.

I don’t think I think this because my beliefs trend that way, but because I simply can’t imagine the level of complexity of planning and compliance of the populace necessary for this to work.  I think it would/could only work if individual food preparation were outlawed, and even then I bet you there would be a grey food market/preparation market.

Take my kids, (please, I sell them to you cheeeeeep.  You’ll have to feed them!) They went to an urban high school.  What this meant is that they went to school surrounded by restaurants, snack bars, fast food joints, etc.

Technically, only seniors had passes to go out at lunch, and everyone else was supposed to go to the cafeteria.  In point of fact, you had to be careful driving around downtown at lunch time, for the flocks of high school students headed to McDonald’s, Wendys, Carl’s Junior or, my kids’ favorite, Subway.  In four years in that school, when not brown bagging it, older son frequented Subways.  He didn’t even know where the cafeteria was until he had to find out because he was on crutches.  And then he found the reason everyone went out was that the choice was so bad and relatively expensive.

If high school students can do this, so can adults.  The whole “government provided meals” would never have worked.

Why, then, did it make sense to science fiction writers at one time?  Why did even Heinlein include it in at least one of his juveniles?

First of all, you have to understand we writers are creatures of iniquity.  We don’t necessarily write what we think is true, we write what we think sounds cool.  For instance, I’m – sigh – ninety percent sure flying cars will never be the main form of transportation, but I have them in my stories, because they sound cool.

In the same way, in an age when most women stayed home and tended to the home fires (quite literally) imagining a cool and liberating future involved imagining a future in which women could just grab their food ready-cooked, courtesy of the government.  And the government, which had just won WWII and done all sorts of big building projects across the land, had the “can do” image to provide this.

People didn’t think of what would happen if they couldn’t choose what to eat when, they thought “oh, cool.  This will be taken out of our hands, and we won’t have to worry.”

The end result of this form of thinking has stratified in many people’s heads this idea of the future where a cool and efficient government does everything humans have trouble with on an individual level.

It is a nice dream and it would be very good – if government were composed of telepathic creatures, capable of looking into everyone’s hearts and seeing what they wanted, and benevolent enough to want to grant it.

No government known to man has ever been that way.  Even in that post WWII time when government was doing and building, it was hardly the beneficent society of providing lollipops for all children.

Government is really good at force and indifferent bureaucracy, and while it did much that needed done, it often did it in a high handed and crushing way (talk to the people displaced by reservoirs, for instance.)

There are things that the government can do (I would argue not as efficiently as the free market, but never mind me) like put a man on the moon, and things the government can’t do, like take people out of poverty.  The difference is that one problem is susceptible to the application of brute force, and the other is too complex or too dependent on individual variables to work.

Yes, it looked good enough for a time.  And yes, it seemed – would seem – to be more efficient.  It would save on resources!  All that food uncooked/uneaten in the restaurants!  All the restaurants that go out of  business! And what about the people who can’t find a place to eat?  And those who can’t afford the restaurant they REALLY want?

But in the end, the people running the Public Feeding Cafeterias would not be super humans with no pity or favor, no confusion, no human feelings.  They would be as human as the rest of us, and some of them would be empire building little sh*ts while others would be just finishing their time and pushing paperwork around till Friday and maybe a few would be really devoted public servants (who get screwed by the empire building little sh*ts, since, this being the government it’s a really big organization and he who passes the buck fastest wins!)  And the cafeterias would offer burn turnips five days a week and burnt radishes the other two.  And people would start driving out into the country to buy eggs off farmers, under the table, and black market ovens would get sold, or things sold for other purposes repurposed “It’s really a foot warmer, but Bob fixed it so it heats to 350 degrees and has a door that closes.  I sell cakes out the back door of the mini-van by the side of I-75 on Sundays.  It allows us to buy fresh food to cook for ourselves, so we stay out of the government cafeteria.  I was so tired of turnips. Then there was that batch contaminated with uranium and all of Mary’s teeth fell off.”

That would be where the public feeding system would have ended up.  I prefer the imperfect and ‘wasteful’ system of private restaurants.

And what about all those dreams of a perfect, organized, top-down future?

Shhh.  It was just a nightmare.  Wake up and work for the real future.  Imperfect, flawed, sometimes more interesting than I want to think about – but possible, in a way those dreams of future past never were.

 

I’m not going to pound on the fiasco that is the “socialist convention named” Affordable Care Act.  (There is no affordable in the care act, just like there was no Democratic in the Deutshe Republic and there certainly is very little input from the people in China’s People Republic.)

I’m not going to pound on it, only examine why our reaction to the fiasco it is (and likely will continue being) is so immediate and in your face, when it is true that in most countries with centralized health care, people are fond/proud of it in some way.

Honestly, I think the left had convinced itself that even if it were a very rough start, as this is proving, we would swallow and go along, because other countries have/had.  They thought we would grumble, and moan, but eventually we’d be happy to have that government-provided-health care and not mind too much that it’s not the best it could be, that innovation is stagnant or that it turns out to be very expensive indeed, and have strangers dictating what we could and could not have.

It might still turn out that way, but I don’t think so.

Remember the nineties, when HMOs were the worst thing evah, because some anonymous bureaucrat decided some treatment you thought you needed was too expensive/risky for you?  Yeah, part of this was driven by the media-industrial complex and their continuous pounding on HMOs in service of promoting (then) Hilarycare.  But part of it was that people also felt a certain amount of resentment towards the more restrictive portions of the service and the fact that someone else decided on the treatment.  I think that they’re not going to feel any better towards something that is in essence a centralized HMO writ large and with the force of the government behind it.

It’s not just that it will have some problems, or whether those problems are massive or not…

I think it’s a matter of timing.

Look, over here we look at the problems of the NHS and other bureaucratized, centralized medical systems, and we shake our heads and go “Oh, that’s terrible” while over there (and occasionally on this blog) they go “yes, it has problems, but it’s good.”

But what I want you to keep in mind is what they have to compare it to.  NHS was introduced just after WWII.  If the books of the period are right, what existed before was patchy, not particularly good, and rural areas might have not particularly competent doctors.  It wasn’t modern medicine.  Modern medicine – and antibiotics – came in with the NHS.  So what people retained was the idea of how much better it got.

It’s kind of like Communism in the USSR.  It was awful and clamped down on society and took it on a poverty spiral, but what they compare it and contrast it to is not a free Western society but… feudalism.  In comparison to THAT, communism, at least while its predatory empire could assimilate resource rich places like Cuba and Africa was an improvement.

In most other countries, socialized medicine in a form or another, was introduced around that time.  Later in Africa and Australia, but then Australia has a massive interior which was probably as patchily served before as some parts of Africa.

What I’m trying to say is: what the people pushing for socialized medicine failed to comprehend is that it’s not the way of the future NOW.  It was the way of the future fifty years ago.  And if it had been introduced fifty years ago, it would probably have represented an improvement.  If nothing else, the very fact that antibiotics were introduced then would have made a difference towards better outcomes.

While people aren’t blind to the bad outcomes, they also compare them, not to what free-market medicine would be now, but to what it was when socialized medicine came into being in their country.  They compare it to patchy medical services and results, and they go “Well, it’s not wonderful, but—”

The problem from its advocates point of view is that, flawed and odd as the insurance market and therefore the medical market it distorts, is in the US, we have a system that’s better (or at least has more choice) than most socialized systems.

Oh, sure, if you don’t have insurance you can hesitate to go to the doctor sometimes with awful results.  And if you don’t have insurance, you might use the emergency room as your physician (but not, most of the people who do this live at the margins of society.  Most of the middle class who doesn’t have insurance goes to equivalents of emergicare, or as my friend Amanda calls them “doc in a box.”  We did, for the most part, till our mid thirties, and we still go there if our regular doctor is closed.)

Again, the problem is that we’ve experienced this.  All of us have some relatively bad experiences, but when it’s something really serious and really bad, we can usually get medical care.  Yeah, it might be expensive, but it’s there, and you don’t have to wait for months and get approved, and have the opinion of some total stranger on whether you CAN have it or not.  You can have the opinion of a stranger (insurance bureaucrat) on whether you have to pay for it or not, but that’s different from telling you you can’t have it.

All centralized systems end up restricting access to care, and the (UN)Affordable Care Act is not different, and I bet even if they can patch it (And frankly, they’d have stood a better chance of this if they’d introduced it in a time of great prosperity and money.  Right now most of the people simply can’t afford the extra fees) Americans aren’t going to take any too well to being told their cancer has too little of a chance of remission.  Go home and take pain killers.  I don’t think we’ll take at all well to that.  Because we won’t be comparing it to pre-WWII medicine.  We’ll be comparing it to two years ago.  And we’ll get mad.  This whole idea that you’re helping the unfortunate have care is all very warm and fuzzy, but not when it’s your life on the line.

So, how can they have made such a miscalculation?  Very easily.  If you realize they are going from the idea that centralized statism is “progress” and that everything moves towards it.  In other words, they’ve internalized this time table, where the state holds primacy and extends its power and hold over the individuals.  The only difference between their vision and that of fascists and communists is that in their imagined future, the government is always benevolent.

But the time line is there in their heads.  And when you measure progress not by better outcomes but by “is it being done by government with good intentions” the (U)ACA sounds like wild progress.

Only in real life people don’t judge you on your intentions or the time line in your head.  And just like they couldn’t have imposed soviet-style communism in England, with its Free, Western society, but they could impose it in Russia where it involved the transition of one feudalism to another – in the same way imposing centralized medicine on a country that has had the experience of (however flawed) choice in medical care is going to be tough.

More importantly, it’s a challenge they never anticipated.

Which makes this moment so uniquely interesting in history.

Will people see the flaw in the statist version, and realize it’s a dream whose time has passed?  Or will they forge ahead towards the future of the past – and the abyss?

The thing is, people don’t revolt against confiscatory tax systems even if you show them that — hypothetically — it has cost them colonies on Mars and vacations on the moon.  But if they had all that, and you took it all away and shuttered it, in favor of a confiscatory tax system, I think the reaction would be completely different.

And, metaphorically speaking, that’s what we’re facing.

I was moaning to my husband about how no matter what I do or how I smack them, we have some trolls who keep coming here.  There are the ones that are activated by any mention of Marx.  Mention Marx, and they pop up like a jack in the box, to issue their ukases and diktats, either condemning us to the hell of capitalists for you know, disagreeing with the great man, or trying to shame us for not following our supposed religion.

Their arguments are often incoherent and only marginally related to the post, and the huns always beat them up one side of the street and down the other, and yet… they come back.

Then there’s the misogynists, misandrists and assorted racists, who come in to make supposed “points.”  Some of these – I know, I look at the IPs – are actually the same as the Marxists and are, I presume, just making sure my blog shows up on lists of racist, misogynist, double plus ungood blogs.  This used to be their game back in the day at the blog that shall not be named.

I usually tolerate them, at least for a little while, so the huns have something to chew on, but then I ban them.  Only thanks to IP changing software (no, if you’re on dial up it doesn’t do that, so stop trying to convince me.  I was on dial up for years) they come back.  And back.  And back.  And no matter how much I pound on them, or you pound on them, they will return having learned nothing.

I’ve come to the conclusion they’re either being paid or this is some form of weird fetish where they like being beaten by free-market, non racist people.

As I said I was bemoaning this state of affairs, when my husband said, “you know, you had a similar problem getting the kids to help you clean.  How did you solve it?”

Well, in that case, I solved it by paying for the cleaning piece meal and allowing them to compete for chores.

So, Dan said, “What is the libertarian solution to the trolls getting their rocks off by being beat up on?”

And I thought… you know, there’s this old skit based on a story by Woody Allen, called The Whore of Mensa...

So I thought, if these people are coming here to get wildly turned on by watching Marx being flagellated, they should pay.  And if they’re leaving their scat so others can find it in obedience to some boss who is paying them by the line, yet they SHOULD pay me.

And thus, I’ve come up with the troll policy we shall call The Whore of Libertarianism.

Here’s the idea – whether you come here to get your yah yah’s off, or you come here because you think you’re enlightening the heathens, or you come here because you got this lousy job off craigslist, this blog is a libertarian blog and firmly rooted in capitalism.  If you want your comments to stand you shall most surely pay.*  Beneath is a fee simple schedule, going from highest to lowest.  Assuredly, it won’t cover everything, but in cases not covered, I’d go for the highest fee.

Troll Fee Charge List

Anti- Semitic Comment, particularly of the kind that believes in a Zionist conspiracy dominating the world – $1000

Racist comment, either proclaiming the superiority of your race – based on, of all things, your skin color – or the inferiority of others — $1000

Misogynistic comment/misandristic comment — $1000

One line comment calling me, the huns, or anyone on this blog a bad name — $500.  $200 to be added per non-pg=13 word used.

Link to your blog so you can tell us how stupid we are $500.

Comment lecturing us on the joys of communism – $500

Link directing us to wikipages on the joys of communism – $250  (Well, we don’t have to follow.)

Comment lecturing us on Marxism, particularly when applied to the soft sciences — $250.  (If you can successfully apply Marx to the hard sciences, no charge – it’s entertainment value.)

Comment lecturing us on the religious/historical/moral values you think we hold — $100 (because you have entertainment value!)

Insulting comment about my/ours moral intellect and beliefs, whether related to the post or not, but not using any profanity — $100  (With a $50 dollar surcharge for every 200 word increment.)

Random comment that leaves us wondering what the heck you think you’re talking about, $50 – with an extra $50 surcharge per 200 words.

Note that these fees are PER COMMENT, not per commenter.

Anyone failing to pay and repeatedly engaging in trolling behavior, will have his comments deleted and/or be banned from this blog.  Anyone paying will have a notice appended to his comment stating how much they paid.

The first idiot to complain that I’m violating his first amendment rights on a private blog, paid for and maintained from my own personal purse, shall owe me $1000 dollars, paid within ten minutes, or he’s banned.

Excluded from this “pay for me to keep the comment up” are obvious commercial trolls, of the sort that have links to various scams, comments written exclusively in Chinese and the ones touting naked anything including but not limited to mole rats.  The policy will be applied at the sole discretion of the blog owner.  Some non explicit restrictions may apply.  Void or invalid where prohibited.

*This doesn’t apply to merely stupid, misguided or otherwise ignorant souls, who engage in honest debate, but the moment I’ve determined you’re a troll, your comment being approved/staying visible depends on a donation hitting my paypal tout de suite.  I will then post a disclaimer saying that the comment stays up because you paid x amount.  Note this does not prevent the huns from pounding on you, since chances are that this is what you crave.

I first heard mention of Radical Losers when Gabby Giffords was shot.  I no longer remember where I heard it, and I have this feeling that there was an article/book by that title, but it’s late on Sunday and I’m too lazy to look for it.

Anyway, the original article was ranting about how when these shootings happen everyone looks for the least likely person (and for this, as a mystery writer, mea culpa, mea maxima culpa) but in fact, nine times out of ten, the culprit is a “radical loser” – someone so far out of touch with reality they couldn’t find it with a seeing eye dog and a cane, someone who has a Satanist temple with a real human skull in their backyard, someone who has fallen so far into a dream that “What’s the frequency Kenneth” has a meaning to them, someone who – in fact – would shock normal people and make them run away in terror.

They’re also usually people that have failed at everything, people who have trouble coping with the every day reality of being human and making human compromises.

I think the radical in the article referred to something else – to radicalization or “extreme” views.  It is of course very easy for people to get “radicalized” when they don’t fit in anywhere.  This accounts for why, if you polled the science fiction community Lenin might be too right wing.  (There is another effect there, the tendency of outcasts to form their own dogmatic communities that enforce weirdness, and also the pathetic attempt to out-cool the main stream, since left is perceived as cool they try to be “even more left.”)

But let’s leave that aside for a moment.

Every time I hear of one of these incidents, I cringe, and I think “One of ours, who went too far.”  “One of ours, who stepped out in the dark and lost his way.”

Here’s the thing with us – for lack of a better word – Odds: we don’t fit in even if we try to.

I don’t even quite know how to define us.  It’s not even a matter of intelligence.  Yes a lot of “odds” are intelligent or brilliant, but it’s also often in a rather specialized, narrow front, almost bordering on the idiot savant (myself, for instance, I write) but they could pose for the “absent minded genius” in most other fields.

I’m fairly functional, but I have friends who should get help to cross the street and who, really, really really (it’s on my list if I ever win the lottery) need a housekeeper.  As is, I could truly use a secretary/assistant.  (Stupid lottery, keeps drawing the wrong numbers.)

A lot of us, but not all – younger son and I don’t – have trouble reading people, and could if you squinted be considered to be on the autistic spectrum.  A lot of us are on the autistic spectrum.  And a lot of us have learned to cope with it so that no one would tell.

But it’s not true.  People can tell.  We can for instance.  Let’s go with Science Fiction, which is a good bet as a repository of “odds”.  I no longer remember when or where, but it was one of my first World Fantasy cons – we left out of a fairly large airport, and most of the flights headed any distance left a few hours after the con ended.  So we trickled in by ones, by twos, by masses, and mingled with large groups of “normal”.  There were, of course, some tells that didn’t need thinking about. A lot of us were wearing fannish t-shirts (me.  I never wear t-shirts for cons, except at liberty con or for the travel.  I try to be professional.  [Liberty is exempt because Liberty is family.]) or carrying sf/f books.  But there was the usual complement of editors who probably think they’re normal and certainly try to appear it in skirt suits and such.

We were in a relatively central area and this was pre-kindle.  I didn’t have anything to do but people-watch.

After a while I realized I could tell “our people” – and I would keep an eye on them till a “tell” emerged, like pulling out the latest sf/f novel, or talking to one of the con attendees and hailing him as an old acquaintance.

I was always right.  It wasn’t a 90% thing, which would already be impressive.  Even for the well-dressed and the aloof, I was always right.

Now if you asked me why I could not tell you.  I could tell you we hold ourselves differently, we walk differently and the way we pause to look at things is different too, but I couldn’t describe it.

I might be taking Dave Freer’s name in vain, but I have a vague memory that in one of our late night conversations years ago (we stopped them as we got old :-P  I actually think they were early morning conversations for him, they were very late night for me) we discussed social species and particularly the other great apes species.  If I’m remembering Dave right and not confusing him with something I read somewhere, he said that in all species that like ours are social, with a bit of learning and mimicry thrown in, most of the apes (eh) attune themselves to the group and “are like the group.”  There are ways of being fully integrated in the group, ways of following the leader, and most apes fall effortlessly into it.

But there is also a percentage – a tiny percentage to be sure – who are outliers.  Some radically out of step and out of norm.  Some subversively so.

I don’t think any of it is as bad as the pink monkey where its mates tore it limb from limb.  I think there is some aggression always towards outliers but outlier behavior is tolerated in some measure.  (The measure will vary with stress put on the group.)

I think that’s what we odds are.  We’re that minuscule percentage of outliers.  Yes, there are probably more of us than the usual ape – or hominid – band.  More on that later.

We can tell each other without being sure how, and other people sure can tell we’re odds.  Children are always better at discovering this, and most of us were probably more unguarded as children too.

Most of us had no idea we were odd or we stuck out until we hit elementary.  I know I didn’t. It was a combination, I think, of the family itself being on the odd spectrum and of my assuming my family members were a little weird.  So, no one out there would find anything strange about me, right?

Wrong.  In my case, I seem to elicit reactions of the love/hate type.  People either love me or they hate me, with nothing in between.  In elementary this often took the form of trying to bully me.  I have no idea what would have happened if I were bully-able.  I wasn’t.  So the result is that often hate turned to love, and I became a leader of sorts.  (As I said, unable to play sports – my coordination took a while to kick in, a result, probably of being very premature at birth – or the stupid elastic jumping game, I invented games for the school to play at recess.  In retrospect, I “invented” LARP games: Robin Hood, The Three Musketeers, WWII spies [ don’t even ask.  That one I wrote characters for.])  By fourth grade, everyone in that school played my games, and the lower classes missed us horribly when we moved on.

But in middle school, in a larger area and with no recess long enough to allow me to influence others, I just became a loner.  I had this game of walking around and around the playground on this little ledge.  Later, I’d just stay in the classroom and read or write stories.

I have talked with enough of my friends – and my husband – to find most of us had that reaction.  It was strange to find ourselves the butt of antagonism, to find that the rest of people weren’t in fact like us.

Those little shocks sometimes hit even today.  (“What do you mean you haven’t read a book since high school?  How is that even possible?”)

By high school I’d learned to masquerade well enough.  I wasn’t popular, exactly, but I had tons of acquaintances and a few really close friends.  And by college I’d learned to go totally submarine, and I was one of the glitzy and glamorous.

But I never forgot.  Somewhere, deep inside me, there’s still that little girl who walked round and round the playground, feeling excluded from everything and everyone else.

I don’t say this to elicit pity.  And I don’t think there’s much you can do about it, certainly not officially.

I say this because that little girl deep inside me still influences the things I do and the things I choose.  We all know about the nature and nurture thing, right?

Someone here – I think he’s the new incarnation of someone whose IP changes a lot – was trying to bait me (eh – I’d rise to the bait quicker if I weren’t feeling so out of it due to the flu)  — by asking me to write about how women shouldn’t work.  I think he miss typed.  I think he meant why women shouldn’t vote, because immediately after he went on this tirade on how all women are collectivists…

He’s wrong of course.  Women right now are collectivists, because they’re told that’s what they should be.  And most humans are really good at following those cues, except for the few radical outliers.  Women have had it dinged into their heads that they’re a discriminated against class.  Their entire learning of history from day one has been on how women were treated badly throughout history.  And of course, they’re told men did this and would do it again given a choice (and not that men and women are both captive of biology and before the pill neither had a choice.)  So most women believe that they need the state to protect them from the evil men.  It’s what they were taught.

The little lonely girl inside never believed this – partly because if they tell you, it’s probably bs.  These rules, these ideas are for normals.  They miss us like so many other things do.

Of course, the way to correct that is not to take women’s vote away, but to stop teaching women (and men too, while we’re at it) Bog STUPID Marxist Crap.

Because the state can’t protect women and will in fact happily collaborate in their enslavement – see, most Muslim states.

Odds should have the advantage there.  As I said, most of us realize that most of what we’re fed is pablum.  But not all of us.  There is the other force that acts on Odds – the desperate need to fit in, to be “cool.”

This leads into the extreme left odds.  At some internal, aching level, they want the state to make everyone love them.

Perhaps I was blessed with teachers who tended to pile on with the other kids rather than intervene.  Blessed?  Yes, because it’s always what a powerful state will do.

The business of the state is to enforce order.  Order and power over the masses are in the best interests of any state.  The more powerful the state, the less it will have a warm place for odds.  You might think, if you’re a radical, oh, Stalinist, that since every one of them you know is an odd, then if you were in power, Odds would be in power.

It’s never like that.  Even those odds who achieve power tend to enforce the “normal”.  The normal might be twisty and ridiculous, but it’s still herd behavior.

Take for instance the French revolution.  I was recently reading the biographies of the principals and all of them, from Robespierre to Danton, were clearly radical odds.  So once they took hold, the revolution came up with some spectacularly ODD ideas (changing month names, for instance.)  But in the end, at the heart of it, what they were trying to enforce was conformity.

Do I know what to do about it?  Oh, hell no.  I know how I dealt with my odd children, fortifying them before they entered school, explaining the low-value of social conformity and how it’s possible to fake it better when you’re old, and that being an outcast in elementary doesn’t blight anyone’s life (unless you let it.)  It seems to have worked.

And it’s all we have.  That and explaining that the “cool cult of the week” if it achieved power would turn on them as much as the current status quo, if not more.  And explaining that bringing society down would be worse, because societies under stress are less tolerant of us outliers.

And then you have to work the fine line between explaining they’re different and getting them to understand other people are still human, just differently wired – if you don’t want to create misanthropes.

This is all I’ve come up with and all I’ve managed.  It might have been/be easier to be an odd in a time with no strict normality-enforcing schools – and as such we can hope to be headed there.

Because here’s the thing – what the internet has already done is allow more of us odds to find each other.  To the extent this is a genetic component – and I think it is.  It tends to run in families, like other genetically-undefinable characteristics – it means more of us outliers will marry each other and produce uber-outliers.  To the extent it is an environmental component, it allows us to meet – in the science fiction community, among others – and reduce the tight control on ourselves, and be odder.

So there will be more of us in the future.  We’re not in the old society where an odd might find MAYBE another one in the entirety of his life and probably not of an age to marry/be friends.

And odds can get very odd.  They can become “radical losers” – rejected by school and family and their community, if they never stumble onto a reasonable enough and accepting enough community – they can, singly or in groups come up with totally twisty ideas of reality and fall off the edge, becoming mass murderers or worse (yes, Karl Marx was probably a radical loser.)

Since this community tends to be odd enough all I can say is ‘teach your children well’ and hope for a less conformist upbringing for your grandchildren – which of course means making sure we don’t lose the prosperity and security we enjoy.  Societies under stress are always more conformists.

The odds are quite literally the salt of the earth – not in the sense it’s used normally, but in the sense of a small minority that makes the whole thing work.  We’re the innovators, the ones who strike out in different directions.  We’re also the ones who point and say the emperor is naked.  There is a reason that the ape bands tolerate some odds.  We are the brakes, the valve, the safety mechanism.

Will there being more of us cause a problem?  Maybe.  I think not.  I think as a whole we’ll leaven society towards more individualistic, but we’ll still be a social species, and it’s impossible for the majority not to want to fit in.

But – absent guidance and comfort – that means we’ll also have more of those that fall off the ledge and become killers or bizarre philosophers.  And that we don’t need.

Work to keep us prosperous, safe and tolerant.  And teach your odd children well.

Ex libris — okay, I’m definitely going to have to go back and clean this up, as I’m sure I’m contradicting older parts of the story.  The problem is that Ginevra is such an incredibly unreliable narrator and an element of chaos.  That’s meant, but it ends up confusing.  So I need to go back, clean what I have and add more.

Also, as part of this explanation — I now have everything but the cover for Witchfinder.  Sometime in the next week I shall go over the copyedits and edits and supposing there’s no big structural thing, if I still haven’t a cover, I shall improvise something.  It’s being delayed by my getting sick way too much this year.  This too shall pass.

This weekend I’m making a big push to finish Through Fire.  We’ll see.  The flu is finally — I think — on its way out.  So I won’t threaten to ban people because they make me even more nauseated than the flu is doing. :P Oh, yeah, this week I learned to use Create Space, so there will soon be paper versions of the books I’m bringing out that have reverted.  And of the new ones too, soon enough– end ex libris

*This is the new free novel I’m posting here a chapter at a time.  This is pre-first-draft, as it comes out.  It is a sequel to Witchfinder which will soon be taken down (once edited) and put for sale on Amazon (It’s now done and with editor and we’re getting the cover done.  My wretched health this year delayed everything.  (Meanwhile, if you donate $6 or more, I’ll get you a copy of Rogue Magic, once finished and edited, in your favored ebook format when it’s done.  Of course, if you’re already subscribing to the blog at a level at which you get whichever books come out that year, you don’t need to worry. )*

NOTICE: For those unsure about copyright law and because there was a particularly weird case, just because I’m making the pre-first draft of my novel available to blog readers, it doesn’t mean that this isn’t copyrighted to me.  Rogue Magic as all the contents of this blog is © Sarah A. Hoyt 2013.  Do not copy, alter, distribute or resell without permission.  Exceptions made for ATTRIBUTED quotes as critique or linking to this blog. Credit for the cover image is © Ateliersommerland | Dreamstime.com

For previous chapters, read here

A Strange Spell

 

Miss Ginevra Mythborn

 

Jonathan Blythe, Earl of Savage, raised his eyebrow at me.  “What I think, my charmer,” he said, as I half-sat on that brothel’s bed, trying to look as prim and proper as my kind ever could.  “Is that you’ve been telling me a great deal of fairytales.”  And before I could open my mouth to protest, his own lips curled upward, in a wry expression, and he said, “Or whatever you wish to call them.  What I mean, my dear, is… what a great deal of lies you tell me.  Much worse, I’m sure, than the ones I told papa’s chaplain when he caught me with the faun in the rectory.”

I didn’t know what to make of that, and I was almost sure the faun was a red herring.  Or – I looked up at the man’s eyes, alight with mischief – perhaps not.  Maybe he had some satyr in him.

“I’m sure I don’t know what you mean,” I said, in my primmest voice.

“Oh, I think you do,” he said.

He advanced towards me and for a moment I thought he was about to take me in his arms.  That would be good, since mortal hasn’t been born who can resist the sort of spell I can cast in those circumstances.  Doubt me, would he?

But instead he grabbed at the bell pull.
As though called by it, there were very odd sounds from the room next door. It sounded like a giant chicken flapping wings and braying like a donkey.  Yes, I’m aware how idiotic that sounds, but I swear this is an accurate description.  It was all made worse by the sound of a male voice murmuring what I was sure would be found to be endearments.

Jonathan’s eyebrow went up at it, and he smiled at what must be my very shocked face.  “I told you this place caters to the exotic,” he said.

I sat up straighter and made very sure my skirt was covering my ankles.

Someone came to the door and moments later Jonathan came back into the room carrying  a tray with a bottle and a couple of glasses.  I wondered if he had an arranged signal, then stopped wondering.  He set the tray down and poured himself a glass of something amber that smelled alcoholic even at this distance and tossed it back.

“Why do you think I have been telling you tales?”I asked.

He grinned at me, and I realized what he was doing.  His intake of alcohol blurred my ability to spin anything on his magic, to attach any spell to him.

“I see,” I said.  “Are you sure Hermes—”

“If you mean am I sure I’m not one of the old gods?  Quite sure m’dear.  But I can feel you trying to attach spells to my magic, which you wouldn’t do if you weren’t telling me lies.”

I sighed.  “It’s just…” I said.  “It’s very complex.”

“Let’s start with Gabriel.  Even if he thought that this world must be destroyed to save fairyland, I don’t think he’d consider destroying this world while his whole family is in it.”

“Elves have a different view of family.”

“Elves, perhaps,” he said.  “But Gabriel isn’t an elf.  Not a proper elf.”

I took a deep breath.  When all else fails, one has to tell the truth.  It’s something the All Father never fully understood, and something he might not forgive me, but it must be done, anyway.  I doubted I could continue to fool Jonathan, with or without liquor and besides…

And besides there was that oddness about his magical pattern, that feeling that he shared more with me than with those other mortals who were, supposedly, his kin.  I took another deep breath and then I said, “Can’t you see that’s the problem, you stupid man,” the words came out before I could hold them in.  One thing is to tell the unvarnished truth, which is bad enough, and another and totally different to tell the truth and let my annoyance show.  The mortals, as the Pater reminds us, are but mice to our cat.  If we let the mouse know he’s got the cat annoyed, we’ve conceded part of our superiority and ability if we let the mice know they can frustrate us.

“What that Gabriel is an unconventional elf-king?” Jonathan said.  “Would do fairyland good if you ask me.  It would—”

“It might.  If he’d set about changing it, instead of…”  I’d said to much.  Or not enough.

“Instead of?”

“Instead of splitting.”

“What do you mean splitting?”

“I mean neither of his halves can abide the other.  He tried to subsume his human self in the elf self, but it wouldn’t work, because one hates the other and hates fairyland.”

“What do you mean splitting?”

“Exactly what it sounds like.  He’s become two people.  One is the sovereign of elf land, whom you met.  The other—“

“The other?”

“Is missing.  No one can find him.”

Jonathan looked at me a long time, his eyes hard.  “That’s not all is it?  Or perhaps it is.  I’m aware of how much myths dwell on twins.  Did you make him split?  And what have you done with the all-human Gabriel?  Surely he can’t survive like that.”

 

I’ll do the free chapter tomorrow.  I might move it to Saturday permanently because my Fridays are turning into a “thing”.

I was thinking about Autumn.  It was always my favorite season, partly because of my birthday, partly because in Portugal it’s the best season (in the area I was in) neither boiling nor cold — yet.

It was a sort of golden time, too, both light and the trees turning, often warm enough to spend the middle of the day at the beach, but you needed a coat in the evening.

I think at fifty this is the best image for the time of life I’m in.  There’s warmth still, but you feel the chills of winter.

For my parents’ generation — I know, they told me — this was the golden autumn of their lives, or as dad puts it “when we were financially stable enough not to make and scrape, and our health still held.”  They traveled the world, and got to do things like go out to eat if they didn’t feel like cooking. They’d worked and saved very very hard for thirty five years, and now they could relax a bit, once my brother and I were out of the house.

Some vague thoughts — and they’re vague, I have the flu — on this:

It was of course a luxury that most societies never had.  My parents worked insanely hard, often more than one job, for very long, and the savings included things like turning off the hot water in summer.  (I hated that one.)  They didn’t have a car till their forties (of course this is possible in Europe.)  First time we went out to a restaurant, I was fourteen — so they had to be also in their forties.  What I’m saying is that they deserved their golden autumn, but it was still a luxury compared to most history and most societies.

And at some level I always knew this wouldn’t apply to me: the boomer bulge before me, the blue model of paying for others, the lack of opportunities because of what the left had done to what used to be capitalism.  I always knew that I would have neither social security nor enough retirement.  Working till I drop was always the only option.  I don’t even resent it that much.  If my gamble with writing pays off, at least I’ll be working at what I love.

But there is more to that golden autumn.  There is the kids moving out and moving on, getting jobs, creating their own lives.  There is knowing your work is done and your all-too-brief time upon the earth will be followed by those you helped raise, by the generation who comes after.

I resent — like poison — that between educational loans and extortionate tuition that makes them required even for people like us, we’re stealing the next generation’s future.  I resent that the economic boondoogles to keep the older generations “prosperous” are killing job opportunities for the young.  I resent that now they want to fleece them for elderly health care.

I’ve given up on my golden autumn, but what is this blight that extends to the future to rob the young of their spring, and their chance at a future?

The winter comes soon.  And it’s a blighting one.

It is the duty of us who are aware of it to work and prepare so that one day, maybe, there will be a flowering.  To reverse the damage; to protect the hopeful seeds; to find shelter for those young we care about.

Before the winter comes.

We’ve had the normal (!) eruption of the Karl Marx groupie in the comments, as always when that great inkstained evil man is mentioned, (“If I invite/A girl some night/To dine and exchange sparks/I just adore/Her asking for more/But my heart belongs to Marx).

His whole thing is about caring/not caring for the poor, and how caring for the poor is your Christian duty (All you Jewish and Buddhist believers who read this blog, not counting the pagans and the Atheists, shut up and do your Christian Duty.  Yes, this entire thing will be revisited later.) Nothing says “Christian Duty” like robing from Peter to give to Paul.  I mean, if it’s not Christian why do they use apostle names?  (Forgive me.  The flu-thing is much milder than in other people, but it has right now all gathered in my head.  This makes writing fiction easier – don’t ask – but non fiction harder.  So there will be snark.)

This is an old discussion, the fact that government is force; and at what point is it moral to use force to achieve even what is perceived as a great social good.  We all agree – and more on this later – that the poor and helpless should be helped.  Heck, I even help hopeless (non deserving poor in the Pygmalion/My Fair Lady mold) far more than I should, though eventually I cut off to preserve myself/my sanity/their lives.

But at which point does it become immoral to take from “the better off” to give to the worse off?  At what point do these words lack meaning?

One of our closer friends has made far less money than we have over most of our working lives (well, than Dan has.  My income is at best odd and irregular.)  However, since he’s single and rents a relatively “cheap” – he probably could get cheaper, it was rented when rents were double here in town – place, while we have kids, mortgage, more than one car, two boys to feed, clothe and pay medical expenses and educational expenses for (they were in advanced programs and using college text books, even in high school and, man, is that a racket) – he’s often had more disposable income than we did.  (Not right now.  Right now, I think we’re both all out.)  At least when it came to “I can go out and have a meal out” – which for us has descended to the vanishingly rare and grand occasion.  (Not to mention a meal out for us is four people.)

Yes, I know all these tables are adjusted for number of people – but not really.  There are other choices too.  We’ve been well-night broke, but you’d never tell from the house we lived in, and our lifestyle.  The house was consuming (still is…) all our disposable income, the clothes were from the thrift store, the furniture was bought often so bad that it was multiple pieces, and then I fixed it, and the elaborate gourmet meals were mostly composed of flour that I’d made interesting things from.  (My pocket book resents that carbs make my eczema erupt.  I could use cheap.)

If you looked from the outside, and ignored my worried/tired expression, you’d think we had the same income as our dual-income friends and way above the people who had the same income we had.

Were we poor?  Heck, on paper yeah.  Like, right after Robert was born and then again a dozen years ago, there were a few years we’d have qualified for assistance – but no one in their right mind would call us that.  Meanwhile there are people with far more than us, who clearly needed help.

What I’m trying to say is that when you’re a human being who knows other human beings, you can account for that.  I’m not saying the people who needed help while making more money than we did, didn’t need help, or sneering at them.

Poor is a combination of lack of money and lack of skills to make the most of the money you have.  We never had a lot of money, but we’re rich in skills, and in fact only twice in my life have I come close to worrying on the “house losing” scale – and both times Baen came to the rescue like a white knight.  And you guys wonder why I love that publisher – and even then we weren’t THAT close, but I could sort of see it from where I was.

But we’ve acquaintances and we’ve heard of people who’ve run into trouble on FAR MORE money and far more leeway.  They don’t have the skills, see.  And arguably money is easier to acquire.

All of which comes down to “the government is an awful implement to help the poor” – the government is very bad at evaluating poverty, and though there is often talk of helping the poor acquire skills – this is where Marx comes in – these skills inevitably end up being stuff like “being assertive” and not “how to dress for an interview” and “know your rights” not “show up to work on time and do the unpalatable till you become indispensable.

Even when it’s help of the “finding a job” and “training for new tech” kind, the government is very hapless at giving it.  Take my friend who is a QA in software.  When she became unemployed, her state required she attend classes on tooling up for new tech… for line QA in factories.  You see, that state is losing a lot of factory jobs, and QA is QA, right?  (Rolls eyes.)

This is because government is a large and blunt instrument.  It’s quite good at doing big things.

The eternal “we could put a man on the moon, how can we not make sure every child is fed” should give people a clue of the problem. For large, visible, group projects, the government is good (I didn’t say the best.  I know some of you are going to talk about million dollar hammers.  Let it go. It’s still relatively good.  All large institutions, corporations included, are clumsy.)

But when it comes to things like helping people with what they actually need, and not with what vast numbers of their neighbors need, the government sucks big hairy dust bunnies.  Because you can’t actuarize the human character or make tables for individual skills, hopes and aspirations.

When the government tries to give health care to the poor, you end up with everyone working part time, with no benefits, and doctors dropping out because they can’t work for that little and pay their student loans, and afford the malpractice insurance and—

Which brings us to “is caring for the poor a partisan issue”?  Well… only if caring for the poor is interpreted in terms of having the government do big programs.  But does that really care for the poor?  We have plenty of evidence it creates poor (see devaluation of money to pay for the various governmental boondoogles despoiling the middle class; see lost opportunities for investment and improvement due to tax rate; see fact that it takes two incomes to pay taxes AND have a middle class life) but not that it helps any.

What if we gave a governmental war on poverty and it only got worse?

There is – probably – a function for government – at the regional and local level – in helping the poor who have nowhere else to go.  As local, as close, as personal as possible, so that people aren’t getting their “skills” (which is not the skill they have) upgraded into useless skills, and so there is less room for the sort of stupid Marxism that seeks to “empower” – i.e. teach to talk back and refuse to do the boring parts of the tasks – the poor over teaching them to support themselves.  (Yes, a lot of tasks people have to do for money are unpleasant.  Look, guys, I’m living my dream job.  I’m literally the only one of my friend group growing up who is doing what she wanted to do when she grew up.  But today I could really use being in bed with chicken soup – but I’m doing this blog, the blog for PJM and then I’ll work on Through Fire.  I sometimes take a day off a month, if I can. Do I like that part of it?  Oh, heck, no.  I’d rather be out with the guys at the zoo or the art museum.  But I do what I have to do to pay the bills.

Socialists are fond of saying no one should do that “for money” as though people were entitled to money without doing anything.  The truth is that the birds and the animals all work for a living, and humans have to also, even if work is convincing a bureaucrat to finance them.  It’s a law of nature.)

But none of this is about “caring for the poor.”  I suspect in real terms, of putting my money on the line – and my time, and my emotional well being – I’ve helped a ton more poor than any ten socialists who are supposedly “bleeding hearts.”

This is about letting the other side define you.

I totally understand why people think we can create our opposition, because our opposition is in fact creating THEIR opposition: these hard core Christian fundamentalists (which is why my Marxist commenter tends to try to bring Jesus into things – because that will sure show us!) who don’t care for the poor, are ignorant and live in trailer parks, sleep with their sisters, in their big mansions, while twirling their moustaches, and refusing to help the poor.

The image is contradictory and fits absolutely no one, but they make the image stick to the point that people see – not themselves but – others on their side that way.  And then we get compassionate conservatism where “We need to care more for the poor.”

I care a great deal for the poor.  The poor we shall always have with us, because it’s a comparative measure, but I grew up middle class (and for the village maybe UPPER middle class) with no indoor bathroom and maybe half a dozen pieces of clothing, not counting underwear, and eating fish and vegetables because meat was for Sundays and sweets for VERY special occasions, so I’m here to tell you poverty is relative.

For me, at a governmental level, caring for the poor means creating a society so frigging wealthy that even the more “disadvantaged” are still richer than our middle class is now.  Which necessitates unleashing individual innovation and using individual “greed” to create more wealth – not shackling the producers and the innovators into giving their money to the government who mostly uses it to make more government.

On the personal level, things are different.  Helping the poor might be finding someone a job or having a “come to Jesus” (See!  See!  Fundamentalist fanatic, me!) talk with them, where you explain that sometimes you have to do unpalatable things in jobs, and you have to show up even if you don’t feel like it, and–  But those are things you can do only with people you know.   If the government does that, you get one size fits all. And the thing is one size fits all means one size fits none.

(And please don’t come to me about the capitalist dehumanization that requires people to show up at the same time every day regardless, and which treats humans as cogs in a machine.  Yes, yes, in heaven, in a perfect state, we all express ourselves all day long and get paid for that.  BUT – nota bene – whatever dehumanization the capitalists engage in is not half as bad as socialist dehumanization where you’re a cypher in a column and you have to obey the state’s every dictate and smile while the boot stomps on your face forever.  At least in capitalism, you get a better life for the surrender of a little of your individuality, and that surrender is limited.  The boss doesn’t really care if you guzzle slurpies on your time off, unless you are well… a swimsuit model.  And being a swimsuit model is YOUR choice.)

So, is it only one side that “cares for the poor” – well, no, it’s only one side uses the rhetoric that has worked so well for them since the French revolution, of weaponizing the poor to the get their – bourgeois – way.

Can we do better than that?  Probably.  If the Federal government stays out of it.  If we don’t accept the left’s definition of us.  If we stop thinking “well, I’m not like that, but other people on my side must be, otherwise why would they say that?”

They say that because it helps keeps their troops in line.  And because a preening “care about others” is part of what they get for voting “right” (Which means left.)

NOT because it touches on reality at any point.

It’s just they have the echo chamber of the media to show it, in entertainment and news and everything.  BUT that doesn’t make it true.  It just means they drink their own ink and spin further and further away from reality.  As this (UN)affordable care act thing is showing.

They can’t even see reality anymore.

Don’t be like them.  Don’t buy the lie.  Strive as much as you can to believe your lying eyes, and not the opposition’s pretty spin.

Their model has spun so far out it’s about to crash.  In the end, we win, they lose, because reality is hard and has sharp corners, and we’ve been getting hit with it for years.

And when the time comes, rebuild a society as individually free and as lacking in perverse incentives as you can; a society of equality under the law and rewards for work and innovation.

It’s the least we can do.  For the children.  Even the poor children.  PARTICULARLY the poor children.  The wealthier we can make the entire society, the less deprived they’ll be.  And the more universal our laws, the clearer their path to success.

Justice is not one size fits all, but laws should be.  And their function is to preserve our life, liberty and pursuit of happiness.