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One of the enduring and nonsensical elements of human myth is the “paradise lost.”

Enduring?  Yep.  It is everywhere from Eden (no, no, the original one) to the rebellion of the angels in heaven, to the academic feminist myth of the great-rule-of-women-in-a-pre-history-no-one-can-prove [Or disprove, you tool of the patriarchy.  Right, sorry. I must have an academic feminist character somewhere in the backbrain.  That’s going to be … interesting.  I think that story will need a dragon.  Yes.  A dragon.  Anyway, moving right on.]

The story goes something like this “the world was perfect, and then people rebelled against it” (shuddup my story and angels are people) “and everything went to hell.”

This makes perfect sense in a purely mythological/theological concept, like the first two stories.  The fall in Eden was inherent in the contradictions inside woman and in the existence of the serpent.  (The first of you to snigger stays after school to clean the blackboards.)

If you’re a believer (I am, by the way) you sort of go along with RES and assume that what we don’t get about the first two instances – like, aren’t angels sort of ineffable automata?  How can they rebel, as such – is the result of describing a multi-dimensional event in human terms.

On the other hand if you’re a believer in the third you sort of assume that men are all evil and oppressy (totally a word, shut up) and willing to wreck paradise to oppress like oppressors because oppressive.

It is harder to do this sort of thing when it comes to history, and yet we get it over and over and over again, too “this time of history was paradise and then—“

The most inexplicable believers in this, btw, are female fantasy fans who seem to think we should all go back to the middle ages, because that was paradise.  (Not all female fantasy fans but a significant number of them.  This usually coincides with the Green Madness that says that “of course we’ll have to lose 9/10ths of the population.  They never seem to think that yay and verily in a catastrophe of those proportions airy dreamers who think of the middle ages as sort of an Earthly paradise would be the first to go.  You know, I often think that everyone would be vastly improved by knowing where their food comes from and working the land for a year.  Then I realize that Mao thought so too, and I let it go.)

There was always this bliss and perfect place from which we came tumbling down.

Hegel (stopped clock all that) came up with a mechanism to explain the continuous paradise lost.  (The idea was not originally his, not that he gave credit, but I write these blogs for free, have a novel to finish, and will be d*mned if I’m about to run off and try to find references  after only one cup of tea.  Deal.)

Any system while running accumulated contradictions, and it was those contradictions that brought it down.  What does that mean?  Oh, say a system is supposed to feed all the poor, but this is impossible, so it feeds some poor very well and others not at all.  For the very well fed poor it’s paradise, but then the others rebel.  (This is a made up and oversimplified example, but if you apply it to say the change between feudalism and the renaissance, you’ll see it work out.)

There are two things this system doesn’t take into account, flaws that were made worse by Marx borrowing his friend (and patron) Hegel’s theory and making it into ersatz theology.

A)    It was a closed loop system.  The contradictions that accumulated were those inherent in the system, without outside influence.  Nothing on Earth runs that way, not even the Earth itself.  (No?  You do realize we get water from space, right? In the form of ice meteorites.  Go look it up, I’ll still be here.)

B)    There is no perfect system without contradictions.  (This is the part that makes Marxism theology.  It aims to a perfect system that will end history.  And before idiots tell me I’m wrong because that’s not precisely what Marx said – it’s what every socialist state believes.  That they’re the end of history and the perfect, non-contradictory state.)

 

These two flaws mean that Hegelian analysis as performed by Marxists is perfect nonsense, even without adding in the concept of (flawed) class theory, which was being broken even in the industrial revolution, let alone now.  Any analysis performed by any theological system (including the one I believe in) upon the real world is nonsense to those who don’t belong to the church, because theology doesn’t make sense in practical terms.  Or if you prefer “One man’s religion is another man’s belly laugh.” As Robert A. Heinlein said.  (The only problem with Marxism is that the poor dahlings don’t think they’re a religion.  The whole thing about “scientific Marxism” see.  Ah, the illusions of the early industrial age, how quaint, how precious.)

 

However, if you include those two factors, you get a pretty good explanation for Paradise Lost and Lost and Lost and also for the lurching history of mankind.  You also get a clearer view of where we are.

First, let’s dispose of weird uncle Karl’s idea of perfection and of nothing bad ever happening to anyone under the perfect state.  To achieve that humans would need to become either angels or automatons, something that has proven impossible for all systems that depended on turning men into such, no matter how many people they killed or how many they tortured or scared.

Second, let’s add in the external change.  This change often is not “external” as such, as it is (quite often) the result of things humans in that society do.  BUT it is external in the sense of philosophy.  When new types of plow made the cultivation of different fields possible in the eleventh (or is it thirteenth?  I have Medieval historians among my readers, and they WILL tell me) and villains started leaving the enclosed cities to settle in the new land, they weren’t going “hey, now, let’s start an agricultural revolution that will give us a surplus of food beyond bare subsistence and incidentally increase the population.”  Oh, and the man who invented the plow wasn’t going “Let’s do this.”  They certainly weren’t doing it for philosophical reasons. So, they are external to the philosophical framework of society.

One of the problems with philosophers is that to a philosopher everything looks like an idea problem.  But humans live – yes, even we – closer to nature than that.  We don’t eat ontological states and excrete paradoxes.

Looking at it from the point of view of philosophy also dislocates where the real external influence comes in.  The French Revolution might have seemed to come out of nowhere to most people, and its proximate cause was the bad harvest and the lack of bread and the surging bourgeoisie, but if you go to the physical cause that influenced all of that, you go back to that plow and the surplus of bread, that allowed for the creation of machines, that allowed for greater surplus and more people, which in turn–  In the middle there is a France with a young and restless population supporting the American revolution and that not going well for them in financial terms.

It all becomes the old woman who swallowed a fly.  Which of course is what history is.  One thing driving the other, driving the other.

But here’s the point: It is said every society has the governance it deserves.  (This leaves me wondering just how naughty the poor average North Korean, born after the idiots took over can be to deserve that.  Never mind.  It’s a comforting saying not an accurate one.)

What is more accurate is to say that any society has the governance its technology will tolerate.

Technology too follows a sort Hegelian pattern, if you will, of accumulating contradictions which are then resolved. Only, it’s more complex than that, because Technology too is not a closed system, neat as the philosophers would have it, but it’s enmeshed with science.  Science will come up with something new, (real science, guys, no one HAS invented political SCIENCE yet.  Possibly because the laboratory is massive and the observations flawed, and the subjects keep changing) which some bright tech chappie will run with and make an improvement in some machine with, and then–  Suddenly the old system is out and the new system is in.  (And then you’re on the phone to tech support wondering why it won’t boot, but that’s another story.)

Then you throw in government as a distorting factor, both pushing money into and taking money away from some branches of science, and those things that – really – humans can’t predict, like human genius.  (They are born, sometimes, only you never know when one will be born.  And if you tell me that’s because it depends on the untidy mating practices of humans and that we should create geniuses in labs, we can’t be friends anymore.)

At this point the neat cog and wheel of contradiction-and-resolution that Hegel designed looks like something out of a steampunk cartoon, with four weels, a pseudopod, and a horn stuck in an amusing place, and it moves by crisscrossing its on path.

Now, if there WERE such a thing as the “perfect government” – a creature that, like the perfect man has failed to materialize – we could totally simplify this buggy and make it fit the present technology perfectly, etc.

BUT since there isn’t what we can do is observe how tech and governance go together, and how the governance comes to pieces when the tech changes ENOUGH (tech and science change are an incremental thing.)

Each society has the governance its TECH deserves.

Start with feudalism (yes, we could go further, to roving bands, but we won’t.)  A society of people producing barely enough to keep body and soul together could manage, if a lot of them contributed to the upkeep of a few, keep a group whose sole job was to defend them.  The system worked.  Or at least, the system allowed people to survive when it worked.  Yes, some of the lords were worse than the raiders he was supposed to defend people from.  Yes, some lords taxed too much.  BUT when that happened they either died or lost all their villains.  Which means that those places didn’t survive.  Others did.

It worked, as did the pyramid of fealty upwards.  Supported by the contributions of all their Lords the kings of countries generally large enough to swing a cat in without needing a passport could live in about as much comfort as our poorest citizens.  (The people under them could advantageously have traded up for a sleeping bag over a vent in the streets of New York City.)

Then along came improved agricultural technology, which burst the bounds of the walled cities, made the wilderness into habited areas (yes, I am simplifying brutally.  This is already three pages) and allowed peasants to raise a lot more kids.  (As the amusing horn stuck in the middle of this juggernaut’s body, consider either the fact that the Moors got kicked out of Europe and their raiding and the raiding of those they displaced by raiding subsided OR that the world went through a warming period, though off the top of my head I can’t tell when.  I know it wasn’t the fourteenth century.  There are, I’m sure, other factors I don’t have the time to cover nor the disposition to look up right now.)

This in turn gave time for people to start thinking how to improve things further.  Shake a bit, add a bit of personal genius and voila, you have the machines that started the industrial revolution.

The industrial revolution started with family enterprises and small factories.  By its very nature, it was a tech of small communities… at the beginning.  It fed into the entire ethos of the enlightenment.  Which in turn fed the revolutions.  BUT as it went on and became bigger and better, the industrial revolution became a thing of proletariat as a displaced mass, away from its community (the theory that this is because they were kicked out of their fields applies in some places, but is insufficient to explain what we see in the now-industrializing countries like India and China.  It’s entirely possible peasants voluntarily became proletarians, by walking of the land, because endless shifts tending a machine are better and more productive than looking at the southward end of a northbound mule.)

This was the stage that Marx analyzed and where he decided that left to its own devices, it would just become this massive exploitation-of-peasants machine.  So, the proletariat must rise up…  And make sure it became that way.

No, that’s not what he said, but that’s what happened in the places where the intellectuals rose up and convinced the proletariat that this entirely bourgeois “revolution” was in their best interests.  The tech froze, the intellectuals (and the brutal sadists) stepped into the place of the mill owners or what the mill owners would have been if they were intellectuals and brutal sadists.  The end stage of that state as observed in the Soviet Union, in Cuba, in North Korea, is sort of like feudalism with the addition of enough technology to keep the peasants down forever.  (Only it doesn’t because like feudalism, eventually the peasants starve enough that the Lord crashes too.)  This is why those countries seem like they’re stuck in a decaying version of former times.

But in the rest of the world, the industrial revolution went on.  Yes, the tech induced a top-down governance everywhere even where there was no ideological straight jacket dictating it be so.  BUT where there was enough room for human creativity, it went on, and tech cycled back around to personal/small/driven by creativity and innovation.

Oh, we’re not completely there yet.  But we’re most of the way there.  My field is careening head first into “there” right now.  Every man his own boss, etc.

The people whose mind is still stuck in the “big/manufacturing/top down” are looking around and treating this like the end of the world.  “Oh, no.  People will now be unemployed like FOREVER.  We must take things back to where top-down forces people to work together, to work in the old style factories, where everyone can earn a living, because—”

Because they think the industrial age was paradise and they want to keep it going forever.  (This has the additional problem that the people who had the top-down power want to retain it.)  This is a lot of what our government (right and left) is flaylingly (totally a word) trying to do.  They have this idea that if they make us broke enough he heyday of the fifties will be back.  (Okay, the left would like its fifties with more social freedom.  Maybe.  If you scratch deep down they’d treat integration and women’s lib as nothing, if they could just have their unity and shoulder to shoulder.)

In the early stages of the turning, humans can’t visualize what comes next and always always treat it as chaos and dissolution, which then goes to feed the myth of paradise lost.

Depending on how much government tries to apply the brakes or take us back to paradise, the transition can become a thing of horror and blood.  (See, French Revolution.  Also, the various English upheavals.  In fact, the only place transitions haven’t been horror and blood is here, where the government has been too disperse and powerless to make it so.  Uh… in former times.)

But no government yet has succeeded in completely STOPPING the change.  (North Korea?  It’s not over, is it? If they keep up, it’s likely to kill them)  And no one on Earth can completely undo technology once the genii is out of the bottle.

The way the technology is going is not the way Uncle Karl expected, towards bigger and bigger and more and more concentrated (which necessitated his “revolution.”)  Don’t hold that against the despicable mooch, though.  A lot of better men than him envisioned the future like that.  No?  Read Brave New World and 1984.

The transition will come, and the way tech is going it will be towards smaller, more fragmented, more PERSONAL.

This means two things – we have to stop already with the even vague equality of outcomes.  It can’t be managed.  And – again from the way things are going – this doesn’t mean anyone will starve, because the new tech seems to produce far more with less labor.

What I mean by equality can’t be managed is that I suspect in 50 years (or more or less, depending on how we manage the transition) their poor will have the material goods our rich have now, and the material comforts.  But since it will be a highly personal tech, they might not have the acclaim or the … improvements.  For instance, there’s a world of difference, now, between someone who scrounges used furniture, throws it in his apartment and never so much as dusts it, and someone who refinishes it, arranges it tastefully and keeps it clean.

Now multiply that by someone who improve what his 3-d printer creates to be unique AND more functional and someone who just takes it, half made, and uses it that way.

These are crude examples, but what I mean is in a future where how well you live is entirely in the individual hands – above subsistence, which will be higher than we have – the discrepancies will make your head spin.

But, you say, if more will be done with less labor, won’t masses be unemployed and have to be looked after?

I don’t think so.  That’s sort of like saying back in the fourteenth century “But if one day only 2% of the people will be farmers, what will the rest of the people do?  Starve or be pensioners?”

That’s not the way humans work.  They’ll find things to do and ways to improve their lot even in the new world.  No, it won’t be things anyone expects.

Which is why no government can manage it.

The government can flail around and honk (maybe it’s the amusing horn in the middle) and desperately try to bring back the fifties.  Or the thirties.  Or that idealized Middle Ages with shampoo and deodorizer.

All they can do is make this very hard and very bloody.  They can’t stop the change, though.

In the end, we win they lose.

Because we’re not mourning a paradise lost.

And the future is ours.

Yesterday on Facebook, someone took exception to my saying that Marxist ideas are ascendant in the world.  This shocked me so much I didn’t know how to react, and before I had time to explain – I was trying to finish the novel.  No, it’s not done yet.  Long story, but hey HVAC people this afternoon – people were in a big argument over whether or not we’re living in a police state.

I have opinions on that too (duh) but it has nothing to do with the incontrovertible fact that we’re soaked in Marxist philosophy on all sides.

It’s entirely possible, in fact, that my commenter isn’t aware of that, because fish aren’t particularly aware of water.  It takes an effort to become aware of the Marxist premises underlying everything because they’re taken for granted.  No one studies Marx himself, because we assume his theories as proven, and the stuff we live in, all over the world, is dictated by his premises.

This would be a little less damaging if the Hairy Grifter (he was once described as an angry, hairy inkspot) weren’t wrong about … everything, really.

You want to look at the decay of Western civilization?  It’s mostly the unexamined absorption of Marxist ideas.

Now, I’m one of those people who live too much in books and theories, and, as such, I can tell you why they’re absorbed and treated as gospel: it’s because they make internal sense.  This is not the same as having even a glimmer of real world application, of course, but they satisfy the minds of intellectuals by dividing everything into categories and presenting a (false but deceptively smooth) system for historical change and, in general, sounding REALLY plausible.

Take the Marxist theory of value.  It is utter nonsense of course. The idea is that what gives value to something is the labor put into it.  You can see how this would appeal to Marx, or, indeed, to any intellectual.  Laboring forever over a book that sells one copy is now a genuine, bonafide “injustice”.  The book is valuable.  Just look how much work you put into it.

The REAL theory of value, is much messier and doesn’t fit nicely within the pages of a book, even if you beat it with a hammer, because then the blood oozes out all over the theory.  The REAL theory of value goes something like this: something is worth what people are willing to pay for it.

This means if caveman Grog just was LUCKY to be near where the thunderbolt struck dry wood, the caveman could then sell the flaming branches for a year’s worth of hunt.  No work involved.  He just was there.

Our monkey brains want things to be “fair” (Dave Freer tells me fairness is wired into simians, part of being a social species that lives in small bands.  It helps survival.)

The fact that the Marxist theory of labor has buggerall to do with real life – you can spend seventy years polishing a dog turd.  It still won’t be worth a million – doesn’t matter.  It has such BEAUTIFUL internal logic.  (By which you should read no logic at all but an appeal to our back brains.)  It allows serious people behind desks to make decisions on what everything is worth.

No?

Well, let’s say that we’ve got out of mandatory prices in every day goods – the crash was that big when we tried that – but what do you think Obamacare will do but set prices for highly specialized knowledge and services.  And what do they set them based on?  Well, they set them based on how much effort they think is involved.  This is where we get that doctors should be paid like teachers.

It’s also part of the trite, ridiculous idea that professional athletes should make less than teachers, because teachers “work harder” or are “More important to society” or whatever.

It’s all bokum, but it’s penetrated through the society to such an extent that people – with a  serious air of much learning – will tell you that books will be better (of course) if they take longer to produce.  They will say the same about any art work, or discovery REGARDLESS OF WHAT HISTORY TELLS THEM ABOUT REAL BOOKS OR ART.

That last about teachers being more important to society than professional athletes?  Marx again.  We’re supposed to prioritize the good of the collective over the good of the individual.

You want to see a good basketball game or a good wrestling match and are willing to pay for it?  Why you selfish capitalist pig.  Don’t you know the children need better teachers?  We should pay more to the teachers, so they’ll be better.  It’s for the good of society.

This has penetrated everything, too, including literary criticism.  It’s now all “is this book socially relevant?”

What in living daylight this has to do with being a good book (or poem or play) is beyond me.  No, seriously. Look, Shakespeare wrote his “socially relevant” works.  They’re the historical plays and by and large we ignore them.  They’re certainly not among the most watched/read.  Those are the ones where he touched humanity on the raw and took us, despite ourselves, on an emotional ride: Hamlet, Romeo and Juliet, Twelfth Night, yes, even Midsummer Night’s Dream and the Scottish Play.

I’m fairly sure if asked about relevance, Jane Austen would think Mansfield Park, having to do with raising kids and the behavior of young women, and the division between classes was the most relevant of her works.  To us it reads turgid and infused with a totally alien morality (unless we belong to particularly strict sects.)  Pride and Prejudice, though, which, again captures humanity in a nutshell?  THAT we have read and watched and dreamed ragged.

BUT publishing is being run according to “relevant” works, which of course means agreeing with the social vision of those in power which is – largely – Marxist.

This is because it is the vision being promoted in college, where they actually DO Marxist literary analysis.  (Even if Marxism had any point of contact with reality, using a political theory to analyze why a book is good or enduring is sort of like using an ax to comb your hair.)

Then we get into sociology/politics/moral/religion, where the idea of collective guilt and collective punishment has taken hold.  And it’s insane.  (It’s particularly insane in Christianity where for the sake of ten righteous men G-d would have spared an entire corrupt city. [He probably would have gone to one, except he could tell the one to skeedadle with his family.])

It’s not just that they assign guilt to people on the basis of what group they belong to.  It’s that they throw people into groups based on characteristics that don’t mean anything.  Take White Males (not mine. Okay, the boys are technically Latin and look it.  But they’re still mine.  You can’t take them.)  I live with three of them, and they’re all very different people.  I have a multitude of male friends, gay and straight (I always got along better with men than with women.  Probably the result of growing up with an older brother and HIS friend group.  In fact, right now I have more women in my inner circle than ever before, and it startles me a little, but I still have more men.) None of them is guilty of slavery, sexism, exploitation.  If  any of them enjoys white male privilege they haven’t done it where I could see it.  Most of them work really hard and don’t get any breaks that they didn’t fight for for years.  In fact, particularly in federal jobs, women are likely to be promoted ahead of them.

Mostly what they get is blamed for the “historical oppression of women” and slavery and stuff that wasn’t happening when they were born, wasn’t happening when their fathers were born, and into which they had absolutely no say.

Now take white women.  Look, do you really think their ancestors didn’t participate in any oppression going among white men?  Why, of course they did.  Good heavens, we had white female queens.  But they’re “victims” because women are in the victim class of Marxism.  And so women now are born without sin and OWED.  No, it doesn’t matter what they’re owed.  Whatever their little heart desires, I guess.  They also always get to claim discrimination when things don’t go their way.

(Were women oppressed?  Some of them, undoubtedly.  Some still are.  Look at Islam and some of the more traditional cultures.  Mostly it has to do with the horrors of biology and the fact women couldn’t control their own reproduction until we had the pill.  But that doesn’t fit in Marxists’ pointy heads, see.)

Entire tribes in Africa subsisted from hunting other tribes and putting them on boats headed for slavery.  But these days anyone born of those slave-selling tribes is considered as much of a victim as the rest, because he’s black and he’s from Africa and therefore he’s a “victim.”  He’s a “victim” even if he was born to one of the Kleptocrats of Africa and his pampered feet never left the limo to touch the ground.

And let’s not get into social classes.  That will make your head hurt.  Is a small businessman, owner of his own business, a worker?  No? Because Marx said the workers didn’t own the means of production?  BUT what if this poor guy paints houses for a living and spends his time schlepping paint and ladder around and working REALLY HARD.  Nope, he’s still not a worker, because you see, Marx’s vision was limited to industrial revolution England and limited is the point.  He wasn’t even very up to date on his reading.

AND if that small business man hires an employee to help schlep the paint cans, he’s suddenly a guilty part and an exploiter.  Even though most small businessmen will make payroll before they pay themselves, and work into the night, while the employee keeps regular hours.

But, you say, Sarah, no one takes the Marxist theory of classes seriously anymore!

Really?  No?  That is why we have people talking about the “one percent” as though they were an homogeneous group?  That’s why we have taxes on people who “make too much.”  (Too much for what?) That’s why our entire tax system is based on redistribution.  Because for a long time it was believed that extreme redistribution was the way to stop communist revolution, which the scientific theory of history said would come otherwise.  This is how the Scandinavian countries got in the trap they’re in, and we too, just later and slower.

And that’s why people can’t be IQ tested the old way, because IQ tests are “inherently racist” – let alone that this theory is based on the idea that every race is alike within itself, and therefore is a racist claim in itself.  That’s why women are given breaks to get into STEM degrees, because even if their performance is inferior to keep them out would be sexist.  Their under performance is because their group are traditional victims!

ALL our society is run according to the theory of classes and designated historical victims.  And our churches.  Don’t get me started on our churches.

There was, circulating on Facebook, the story of this minister, hired by a mainstream congregation, who decided to try a stunt and come to his first service dirty, disheveled and looking like a homeless man.  He then “discovered” that his congregation didn’t “behave like Christians.”  They didn’t eject the man, mind you, but they gave him a seat in the back, and clearly kept an eye on him.

They didn’t ask him to sit up front and treat him as an honored guest, therefore they weren’t Christ-like, and when the minister did his big reveal, he excoriated them, and this got written about and distributed with approval.

Had I had hiring power in that congregation, I’d have called him aside after that stunt, told him that sorry, but the holy book in this church isn’t bound in red, given him his paycheck and a handshake.

But, SARAH, you’ll say. Christ got beggars and…

Yes, indeed.  And Christ’s world was very different.  It was very easy – in fact it was the norm – for hard working people to find themselves starving and destitute.  Without help, without any form of social services, MOST PEOPLE WERE POOR.  Helping the poor, and yes, even the prostitutes (I still wonder what He was up to with tax collectors. Never mind) most people starved or worse.

BUT we don’t live in Christ’s world.  There are layers of government services and private charities.  Most of our homeless are in fact mentally ill, drug addicted or both.

How many of us have NEVER seen a homeless man expose himself/been threatened by a homeless person/been pursued by a beggar yelling curses?  If you haven’t, you must either be very lucky or live in a very small place.

I’m sorry, but people go to church with their families, including small and vulnerable children.  When a dirty, disheveled homeless person shows up, you’re going to wonder what he’s going to do next.  Putting him at the back and watching him isn’t lack of charity.  It’s lack of death wish.  (Not too many years ago, a man shot himself in the bathroom of a church in town.  A homeless, mentally disturbed man.  If they’d watched him and kept an eye, perhaps that wouldn’t have happened.  Before the elections in 2008, two naked men showed up outside the church door of a church in town, supposedly to protest priestly abuse but in fact they were both mentally ill.)

These days, in the world we live in, keeping the homeless at a distance is called “self preservation instinct.”  It doesn’t mean we don’t help them, but we can’t treat any homeless person who shows up, particularly a dirty disheveled one, as an innocent victim who IS NOT going to do something awful suddenly and for no reason.  (Look, the sane homeless aren’t usually dirty and disheveled and you won’t know they’re homeless unless they tell you.  Yes, I’ve seen someone wash AND PUT ON FULL MAKE UP in a public bathroom.  People do that when they care and are trying to find help.)

A priest/minister who doesn’t see that is in fact drinking Marx by the cupful and thinks in terms of classes.  And in the world of classes the homeless are just “victims” and thus entitled to the best treatment REGARLESS of personal safety or the facts of life about most of the homeless today.

I suspect Christ might tell the man a thing or two about causing scandal, in fact.  It was, if nothing else, a piece of self-aggrandizing, showing a lack of respect and priory condemnation of his future congregation based on class.  “They’re comfortable, therefore they must be afflicted.”

SOCIAL justice was never part of the gospel or of any Western religion.  Justice, guilt and sin are individual and expiated as such.  (Yes, ancient Judaism, but it’s different when you’re in a land RULED by G-d.  And even there… ten men would spare a city.)

Only Marx thinks that on the terrible day of judgment in which he doesn’t believe, people will come before their Lord in classes and ranks of standing, and be condemned or forgiven according to things they could do nothing about.

In fact making the homeless into a Marxist victim-class precludes helping them as individuals.  You can’t say they need to be clean or moderate their behavior, even if you offer them help towards that.  Because they’re discriminated against, see?  And heaven forbid you try to help the mentally ill, because then you’re the Soviet Union, incarcerating “dissenters.”  Yay and verily, ask a college sociology professor and he’ll tell you that by standing on the corner and peeing himself, a homeless man is protesting heartless capitalism.  (The same heartless capitalism that allows him to eat at a soup kitchen and gives him clothes and sundries, no questions asked.  You got it.)

And don’t get me into the Marxist view of history.  Faced with the fact that the proletariat has not risen up as the great master predicted, they keep finding surrogates, mostly in third world countries, and treating THOSE as the international equivalent of homeless people.

You know, Somalia is starving because you’re rich, you bastard!

The fact that the aid western countries sent is pilfered or left to rot, the fact that their – Marxist, most of them educated at the Patrice Lumumba university in Moscow – are kleptocrats who line their pockets over those of their citizens, the fact that our surplus of donated goods destroy local industry has nothing to do with it.

You see, Marx thought that wealth was a finite pie.  That meant that for you to be rich someone else had to be poor.  And colleges still teach it that way.  No, seriously.

Apparently knowing that what kept a tenth of the population in bare subsistence in medieval times now keeps ten times as many beyond the dreams of medieval kings means NOTHING to them.  There’s finite wealth in the world, and if you take more than you “need” (from each according… yeah) then someone else will starve.

And those countries are by the way, always victims, because the “colonialists” took their “raw materials.”

No, I kid you not.  Seriously.  They are poor because people in the eighteenth century got gold or iron or cotton or something from them.  That makes them poor forever.  It’s the evil of Colonialism.  The kid’s college Geography book tried to sell that one.  I pointed out to the kid that Portugal was colony and colonizer and if it were a matter of stealing raw materials, then Portugal should be the richest country on Earth.  (And we won’t go into how fair trade isn’t stealing, even if fair trade for the time was something else.)

I’m sorry, Portuguese culture and the made infatuation with various forms of socialism probably has more to do with the mess the country is in then the fact that the Romans took all our gold.  (Which is why the area beneath the village looks like swiss cheese and sometimes vast portions cave after a heavy rain.)  Or is it Portugal is comfortable (relatively) for reasons having nothing to do with the fact it stole piles of gold from South America.  Which one is it?  It makes my head hurt.

None of Marx’s theories stands up to real world examination or real world scrutiny.  And yet you have people running around declaring themselves Marxist and neo-Marxist.  And, inexplicably, people don’t point and laugh.

His ideas have penetrated how things are done UNEXAMINED.  Which is the only way they could penetrate because if you examine them they crumble into incoherence.

The last time I pounded on Marx some twit informed me that it was very useful for literary analysis by which he (she? I don’t remember) meant that it’s a handy self-contained system that you can apply to books and decide what is good and what isn’t by what conforms and what doesn’t.

It makes me think of that mythical king who cut off the parts of men who didn’t fit into his box.

It might be easy to apply, but it doesn’t touch reality at ANY point.

And this is where Western civilization is.  Admitted (and a lot of is admitted on college campus) or not, we’re bound in fifty shades of Marx.

And no one has given us a safe word.

*By which we mean Karl and not one of the three geniuses of comedy.  If we’d arranged the world according to NHUK NHUK NHUK it would be less of a mess. UPDATE: I’m reliably informed I confused my pop culture references.  Never mind.  Any three comedians are interchangeable.  I still say Nhuk Nhuk Nhuk is a better organizing principle!

I realized yesterday I would need to write this post.  I didn’t want to, because I’ll have to change details to protect the guilty and even so, there are people who, if they read this, will be very upset.  However…

My friend Patrick Richardson pinged me yesterday and pointed me to a post on Facebook, where the most brazen racist stuff was being posted in broad daylight.  As in “this race is better at this, and this race will never do that.”

Other people – a lot of you who read here – were piping in with “no, it’s not the race, it’s the culture.”

And I had to tell Pat, “No, it’s not even the culture, unless Marxism is the culture. These are self-forged chains.”

Then I explained how I KNOW so, how I know a lot of the recent results in the US are because it’s very hard for human beings to overcome… well… their natural inclinations (which are common to all humans) when they’re given a ready made excuse and when all their failures will count as sort of laurels of glory on the heads of martyrs.

First, let’s start by admitting that yes, different races – AS A WHOLE, ON AVERAGE – have different characteristics. But in this case we have to chop races very fine, and it becomes really hard to tell race from culture.

I’m the first to make jokes about my organization skills and point out I’m Latin and some stereotypes exist because they are true.  But the fact is I grew up in Portugal, and the CULTURE there discourages exactitude.  There is this sort of pride in “we do it haphazardly.”  In fact, because I’ve always been hyper-busy I had to develop some organization skills, which often resulted in my being called “Teutonic” and not in an approving manner. Now there might – or might not – be a genetic component.  Both my kids have had to work really hard at organization, but how much of that is from being raised with a devil-may-care-artistic (Ugh, I hate admitting that) – mother who was likely to forget lunch time, or to put them down for a nap on time, because she got caught up in a novel?

For that matter, how much of the chaos that tends to envelope my life has to do with my genetic origin and how much with the fact that I work for multiple bosses and have more duties than time to fit them in?

Which bring us to the whole “but certain races have lower IQs and certain races have lower organizational skills and certain races are naturally—”

Oy.  Under the microscope, and without looking at melanin it’s REALLY hard to tell what race anyone is.  My son did a cartoon image of me for my birthday 2 years ago.  He likes to give me gifts, and he was broke.  As he was coloring it, he got a shock.  He used a little darker pen, and came back to me and said, “Mom, did you know that your features are African?”  I laughed and told him that when I got a tan and wore an afro perm in the seventies, people IN PORTUGAL (who have a much finer range for what they consider “African”.  I.e. the (I)reverend Wright is “normal white.”) called me “the young lady of color” in stores.  As in “Go help the young lady of color next.”

Now, my hair is poke-straight (as in it’s hard to style it so it doesn’t look like a witch’s broom, my eyes are hazel and when my hair had color – shuddup wretches.  Color I didn’t BUY – it was a deep dark mahogany red/brown, almost black inside, but turning fiery when it caught the sun.  [My kids, finding a picture of me in full sun in the eighties, “Mom, why did you dye your hair to look like Ronald McDonald’s?”  Me “I didn’t dye my hair back then.”  Them “Oh.”  Yep, they’re both off my will.]) Most people seeing me don’t even think “Hispanic” or “Latin.”  They do think that of my sons who are both darker than I, and whose features have just a little of the Amerindian about the eyes.  But not of me.

Again, we’re all more mixed than you think.  Ancient statues in South America show people with African features.  Remains found here from way before Amerindian arrival (Sorry, but Native American is a politically correct abomination.  NO race of humans evolved here, that we know.  Calling Amerindians Native Americans is buying into their prevailing myths.  Kind of like calling all westerns Sons of Eve.  Even if you believe in it, you know there’s a difference between religion and proven fact.  Oh, wait, no you don’t.  Which is why it’s not taught that the oldest remains found in North America are Caucasian and why the tribes were allowed to claim them for burial because “Our legends say we were created here.”  PFUI.  I treat them like normal human beings.  And give them the same credence I give anyone else.  I no more believe their legends than I believe some of my ancestors were suckled by a wolf.  Deal.  And as for “they were named in error because Columbus was an ignoramus” – again, deal.  So were most people.  Look at the Pensylvannia Dutch, descended from GERMANS.  Look at the poor Germans whom the Portuguese call Alemoes (after the Alans, only ONE tribe.)  Look at any Portuguese from the North, called Luso even though the Lusitans only occupied from the middle of the country down.  The fact they’re called Amerindians because they were “named in error” just makes them like the rest of the human race.  Throughout history the name for other tribes was “those weirdos over there” however pronounced.  And the name for every mountain in a foreign language is as Pratchett pointed out “your finger, you fool.”)

Even in Europe, where every country has this mania for thinking they’re a separate race (and coming from a country with tons of tourism, I’ll tell you I could distinguish French tourists from Germans at a glance 90% of the time) they’re really all mixed.  For instance, I found while reading a book on 18^th century England that after the Peninsular war a LOT of Portuguese went to England as servants to the point it was hard to find a servant who wasn’t at least half Portuguese.  Their descendants, by the late 19^th century were as English as John Bull and probably talked in scathing tones of all those Portuguese who were undisciplined and unorganized.

On the subject of organization, what it seems to correlate to is how early the country was industrialized.  The same for most of the bourgeois virtues, which don’t really pay off in a rural society.  Now, there isn’t enough time for that to be evolution, so it must be acquired through the culture.

I’ll say my son, the biologist, says that genes flick off and on and that certain characteristics show up in humans depending on what the instinctive back of the brain perceives as advantageous.  (Which might have bloody nothing to do with what IS rationally advantageous.)  Say you’re in a family where an artistic temperament is viewed as a mark of genius.  You’re going to develop very differently than if you’re in a family where order and performing rote tasks are valued. Since most of these “decisions” are made before you can talk, chances are that you’ll end up thinking you’re that way naturally.  (Not that there AREN’T situations in which parents are complete mysteries to the kids and vice versa.  Genetic inclination for this or that is a sliding scale.)

So, what I’m saying is that all humans are portions of this and that, and most humans have talents and abilities they’ve never developed.  I, for instance, have no talent for languages.  And I’ve produced two sons who have no talent for languages.  Foreign language learning, that is.

However, I took to English like a duck to water, right?  Um… sort of.  I studied English as I never studied any other language (and do keep in mind at one time I was fluent in six.)  Why?  Because my favorite writers wrote in English and I wanted to get at them in the original.  I studied far more than the people who were naturally gifted (drop my brother naked in an Amazonian jungle and two weeks later he’ll emerge speaking the tribal language without an accent.  Also, likely, with three wives.  Never mind.)  I studied more than should be possible.  But by my third year, I was coasting, and the acquisition of more English was easy, because I scrounged hotel lobbies for books discarded by American tourists.  Reading added vocabulary and colloquial constructions, and no one meeting me would think I don’t have a talent for languages.

Now, that said, yes, some populations consistently test lower for this and that, or do better at this and that.  Part of it might be culture.  (Do you know how hard it is to tell the effects of say nutrition on the brain as it develops? Or how the effect of not using the brain in a certain way from VERY early on show up later on?)  And part, yes, is hereditary.

But just like when you talk about men and women, when you talk of racial characteristics, you’re talking “mean” – no, I don’t mean you’re making people cry – I mean you’re talking about a statistical creation that might or might not apply to anyone in particular.

For instance, most men are better than most women at mechanical/math tasks.  But when I was taking those courses, I rarely found a man who could beat me.  (And this again brings up culture, or at least a different wiring.  A lot of the smarter – yes, I said that – girls didn’t even compete.  They wanted to get married and be looked after.  Since the “be looked after” doesn’t compute and I’m competitive as heck, I never pulled back. However, pushing girls to do what they don’t want to/aren’t by instinct inclined to do is a mug’s game and no one has ever explained why this is a conclusion devoutly to be hoped for.  Sure you can use your coffeepot to dig a trench and you can brew coffee in your shovel, but WHY would you want to do it?)

What I mean is, no one should, at any time, look at a person’s skin color or listen to a person’s accent and go “He will be a great basketball star” or “he should be a mathematician.”  Because people don’t come in neat packages.  And people CAN if they want to overcome all their natural “advantages” or “disadvantages.”

Which brings me to self-forged chains.

When I got married, we knew another couple, exactly like us.  They got married a week before us, and the woman was Portuguese, same degree I had.  She was from slightly better families (think regency.  While Dad’s family was probably older and “better” we were from the poorest branch and – this is my guess – from a long line of Odds, so we didn’t have the CONNECTIONS, let alone the money that came with being “of good families.”)  Her family had a vacation home in Spain (this is important later.)  My family went on vacation for the first time when I was 14 and stayed with friends for two weeks.  Oh, she is also blue eyed.

Anyway, when we came to the states, I had a year to go on my degree, and since Dan had just started work at a beginner programmer’s salary, and since my parents weren’t willing to pay for me to enter college here (and might not have been able to afford it, anyway.  I didn’t ask.  I put myself through college, including buying books) my only choice was to go back and take the exams for my degree at the end of the year (they didn’t take attendance.)  Which is in fact how I got my degree, and which has served me for about two years total employment in the US, but never mind that.

My friend’s family was better off, or perhaps more hands on.  They paid for her to go to graduate school in the US.  Because she had been in a slightly different track (Portuguese/English, I think) and they didn’t offer Portuguese here, she went with Spanish, in which she was also fluent.

Next I heard of her she was involved in all these Latin “causes” and student unions and attributed anything that didn’t go right to “discrimination.”

Meanwhile I got my first job in the US as a retail clerk, and yes, I can tell you there was discrimination.  Every one of my co-workers (including the one with a record) were taught to open the store safe, except myself and the black woman. However, when money was missing, we were the first asked about it.  At which point I walked and found a much better job as a multilingual secretary.  (The other woman walked some weeks later.)

Are there stupid *ssholes in the world?  Sure there are.  And some of them are racist.  (And not all of those are white.)  However, all that idiot’s actions did was propel me to a much better job.  Because I thought “I can do better than this.” And then forgot about him.

So, after working as an international secretary for a while, I worked as a free lance translator, and then I got pregnant and we moved, and I decided to try to become a writer.

We won’t go into (often reverse) racist *sses in publishing, shall we?  Asking me to write my biography and emphasize how Portuguese were oppressed by the US (this was implied, since it was supposed to be like “Rigoberta Menchu”) so they “could promote” me was nothing if not a piece of racism, or at least culturism.

However, — this is not a brag – I always have the greatest distaste to conforming to what people in authority want me to do.  So I continued my own path, often sideways.

Do I still meet with “discrimination” – oh, sure, but so does my husband, whose family has been here since the revolution.  So do you.  Yes, every one of you.  People will make assumptions about you based on how you look, how you dress, your weight…

I read that people are being turned away from grad school because “if you don’t have the discipline to stay away from carbs, you can’t make it.”  Well, take older son.  He’s been carb free (more than low carb) for 4 years.  He’s still overweight.  He’s just not morbidly obese.  He’s also the most self-disciplined person I know and takes a huge load of classes as well as starting two businesses on the side.  But he’s a pre-eclampsia baby and some studies indicate this creates a permanent metabolic problem.

So, every one of you, be you ever so lily white, will meet with *sses of another or the same race who will discriminate against you.  Because we’re human and distinguishing our tribe from “those weirdos over there” is the first thing humans do.

What is the best way to deal with it?

Sigh and go on.  Not associate with those people, if you can help it.  Go around, go under, go through.

BUT unfortunately Marxism, taught not just at our universities but on a grand scale across the world, teaches people that it is impossible to succeed in the face of discrimination.

EVERY minority in the US is taught this. EVERY nation that’s poorer than the US (all of them, pretty much) is told that they are poor BECAUSE the US is rich and “discriminates” against them.

Add in political correctness and teachers who’ll demand less from certain kids because of… well, the “soft racism of lowered expectations.”  (Like, my younger kid managing to get to sixth grade without learning anything and with massive sensory issues.  One idiot told me she thought his speech impediment was because “you have an accent.” And “you speak Portuguese at home.”  The second is not and never was true, and the first means every American would have a severe speech impediment [You British readers want to hold your tongues.  No, really.])

Do minorities test lower because there’s something genetic?  Even if there is something genetic, is it because certain genes got flipped very early?  We don’t know.  No one does.

What we do know is this – if you go through life adhering to Marxism, believing victimhood is a sort of glorious condition, and excusing all your failures by someone else holding you down, you WILL FAIL.  And anything you try to administer will be a completely mess.  And any country where everyone believes this will fail gloriously and from on high (so to put it.)

I haven’t studied the history well enough to pronounce, but superficially Argentina pre and post Marxism would seem to be a case study.  Marxism is also largely why Brazil is the nation of the future…. And always will be.  The characteristic of the future is that it never arrives.

Which brings us to…

It’s impossible to assume someone is failing because of their race, when their race is likely – through indoctrination in our schools – endow them with the certainty everyone is doing them down.

And it’s impossible to assume a nation is failing because of this or that genetic characteristic because in fact it’s more likely to fail because of its Marxist beliefs.

Take Portugal (I’m not using it!) – once the leader of the world.  Now perpetually broke (to be fair it was that even while leader of the world, but that’s something else) and begging on the international street corner.  Years ago some member of a racist organization posted here the link to a site that claimed this was because Portugal had got so much darker.  They used as “proof” the fact that Portugal’s last kings looked German.  I almost hurt myself laughing.  The Portuguese kings were always – like every other king in Europe – related to NO ONE BUT OTHER ROYAL FAMILIES.  And to those they were VERY intimately related, if you know what I mean.

Now there are reasons for that spiral, having to do with too much money foolishly spent, and with certain cultural idiosyncrasies.  Race would be a hard one to swallow, since Portuguese are a mixed lot with a lot of English in the North (three of my grandparents were blue eyed and two were blond.)  And to be fair Marxism is a late comer to the mess, though it hasn’t helped anyone.

So about those startlingly racist comments – they should remain out of bounds, not because all humans are equal – which is a piece of nonsense – but because we have absolutely no clue what part of a human’s performance (if any) is influenced by his/her race and in fact, it’s far more likely to be influenced by his/her Marxism (acknowledged or not.)

Now, if we could set up this experiment, where every human being is equal under the law (you can’t stop racist *ssholes, but you can make them irrelevant.  Most people, in my experience, are decent) then maybe we could actually eventually determine if there are genetic differences and discuss how to help those who need help.  BUT a country where everyone is equal under the law is, as we all know, a pipe dream.

Oh, and my friend?  Yeah.  She doesn’t talk to me anymore.  You see, the professors discriminated against her, so she never finished her degree.  And her bosses discriminate against her too, so she’s  retail clerk.  And I am stuck up because I’m a published author (this was the reason given for hanging up on me when I called her.  Okay, I hadn’t called her in a year or so, because I’d lost the number.  But neither had SHE called me.  Also, btw, at that time was right after my first series tanked.  “Stuck up” had very little to do with my state at the time.)

Also, I’m just lucky, because people have never discriminated against me.

I guess I am.

 

 

 

I hesitated very long at writing this post, partly because a friend told me it might feed hothead talk and nothing else.  But I think I know how to explain it.

The title of the post is from an episode of Robin Hood.  I thought from the costumes/look that it was from the eighties, but it’s apparently from 2006, BBC America.  This explains its overtones of anti-government rage.  (Notice to those who write political-message stories.  When the administration changes, the other side might REALLY like them. :-P  Not that there is anything wrong with that.)

I had no clue when it was made, because I watch TV primarily while I iron clothes.  (Shud up.  Ironing clothes is my Zen practice.  It calms the wandering mind.)  And when I watch it, I turn on Amazon Prime free streaming and browse till something catches my eye.

Robin Hood was a childhood hero. I always understood him as anti-government, not redistribution, since the series I read he was always stealing the TAX money to give back to the people. (Okay, yes, I guess I was myself even at six.)  This series has the same thrust, so I decided to watch it.  (BTW, if you decide to, the visuals are unappetizing.  I have trouble buying a metrosexual, hipster Robin.  He simply doesn’t look up to it.  And the love interest bears a disturbing resemblance to Ms. Lewinski. There’s also much insanity on the subject of the crusades and, I SWEAR TO BOG, casting by the numbers, which results in a black woman as a con artist in one of the books – in 13^th century England.  If there had been a black – non Moorish woman – in England at the time, I should hope to shout she’d be known to history.  Never mind.)

The first episode is called Will You Tolerate This? from the pivotal scene in which Robin Hood, returned from the crusades, finds his people oppressed and overtaxed, his land badly treated, and all the local barons going along with the Sheriff’s/Prince John’s rule.

In council he turns to them and says “Will you tolerate this?” They clearly would.  So he takes to the Green Wood and the life of the outlaw.

This scene struck me particularly since it was a revolt of the barons against John Lackland which secured the basics of the English common law, and, eventually, started Anglophone nations on a different path than the rest of the world, for good and ill.  Much of the fundamentals of the “classical liberal” way hark back to the Magna Carta, imperfect, blinkered and of course feudalist as it was.

And this brings us to where I’ve been this last week – having trouble writing blog posts.  Yes, part of this is the book I’m in the middle of and a recrudescence of whatever the heck is wrong with me in the upper respiratory.  But part of it – a big part – that I’ve been too incandescent with rage to function.

What has me incandescent with rage?  The walling off of monuments, the blocking of views like at Mount Rushmore (and old faithful), the closing of farms that are run at a profit and at no cost to the government – the thuggish behavior of government employees which is COSTING money during the shutdown.  All this, as a means of “spanking” the American public for not falling into line.

What makes me even crazier are their apologists on Facebook and elsewhere.  No, really.  I KNOW my colleagues are by and large to the left of Lenin, but REALLY.  Shouldn’t they think, you know, now and then?

Telling us that these things are closed because “what if someone were to hurt himself” doesn’t cut it.  Because those things are open normally without government support, and if someone were to hurt himself, he’d have the recourse of civil society.  As always.  It’s not – no, it’s not, not yet – as though the Federal government runs the hospitals or the ambulances.  (And, btw, the very fact that they’re doing the shut down this way is proof that  they should never be trusted with hospitals or ambulances.)

This is, of course, an old tactic from local governments.  Refuse to raise the tax that they want to setup a choo choo train, and suddenly they’re turning off the lights downtown, or telling you they don’t have money for something needed, even while they keep buying Crappy Sculpture ™ for downtown and starting to build the choo choo train, so when you give in they can finish it.

It’s bad enough from the regional governments.  It’s also, I note, working less and less.  BUT from the Federal government it is intolerable.

Years ago – bear with me – there was a lice epidemic in schools in Portugal.  A new regulation went out country wide.  Students in public schools could only have hair ye long and ALL of them had to shower with disinfectant shampoo/soap before starting school.  Many schools only had cold water, but people obeyed this, quietly.

My husband asked why, and I tried to explain.  Portugal, you see, at least until recently, had built into its law assumptions (It might still.) that the country belonged to the State.  People were allowed to “Hold” land and houses, but they weren’t the real, ultimate owners.

When that’s true, then the people belong to the State too.  They’re SUBJECTS of the state.

This is not true in America.  It might seem a difference without a distinction, but it isn’t. In America the people OWN the country.  They’re citizens.  The government are our servants, hired to serve our purpose.

They do not have the right to “spank” us because they didn’t get their way.

Watching the Barry-Cades erected by minions of President Stompyfoot, I keep thinking “Will you tolerate this?”

Apparently not.  Apparently we are not dead yet.  The veterans are doing what should be done – moving the barricades in front of the White House and mocking the man who would wall us off from OUR OWN PROPERTY.  And treating his minions as beneath contempt, which they are.

Look, we have suffered outrages to our individual rights – a local libertarian group is setting up an individual rights cemetery for Halloween.  I’m tempted to go help, but they’re all kids – not just these past five years, but starting in the thirties under FDR.  In fact, the current insanity is because they got away with the erosion of the constitution for so long.  It’s what allows constitutional scholar™ Nancy Pelosi to say, when asked if Obamacare violates the Constitution “Are you kidding me.”

It is that long history that lets them think they own us and that we’re subjects.  That we will in fact “Tolerate this.”

Now, yesterday we had some talk on this blog about when it’s appropriate to take up arms.  Let me be very clear™ on why I don’t like that talk.  First, it’s because it plays into the stereotype that the left keeps trying to hang around the neck of anyone who opposes them.  For the love of Bob, when an argument over CONVENTIONS on MGC results in this guy going sniveling off that “They’re all wingnuts, armed to the teeth” you know this is a talking point.  It’s also not believed, and you talking about it won’t be taken seriously.  How do I know that?  Because if it were believed, they wouldn’t do this stupid stuff.  If they thought we were really dangerous, they wouldn’t push us and call us names.  So, it’s useless and it plays into their whining points.  On top of that, mark my words, it provides an excuse.  Should they wish to put us away and make us a bad example, they can always claim we’re “dangerous and armed to the teeth, and look what they write, in public.”

Look, remember Clinton.  Come on it wasn’t that long ago.  For a while the Militia movement flourished.  BUT they managed to hang the Oklahoma bombing around the Militia necks (the links were much fewer and more tenuous than you might think, if you haven’t studied it deeply.  In fact, the links point out of the country, but never mind that.)  Suddenly, the Militia deserved all that could be done to them, and the common people, faced with the image of dead children went along with it.  (And every movie even today has “racist” militias as the villains.)

Does this mean we’re helpless?  No.  I’m not Gandhi.  I’m not going to tell you – as The Most Overrated Sage In History told the Jews – to go singing into the ovens.  Yes, there’s a place for martyrdom, and the early Christians won by losing.  But that’s a faith not a system of governance.

They are overreaching.  If they attack, we will defend.  And it’s almost certain they’ll attack, particularly if we will not tolerate this.

Look, they’re looking for a crystal nacht.  Loose talk will give them that without the danger of actually facing armed opposition.

Heinlein came to believe FDR provoked Pearl Harbor to have an excuse to go into the war.  Some historians say this isn’t true.  I don’t know.

BUT if it’s true, note that he waited for the attack before attacking, thereby securing moral high ground.

It’s much easier to start hunting dangerous subversives when there’s a crime to hang around their necks.

No, we shouldn’t put the idea of armed defense out of reach.  The people who do that are wrong.  We were never lambs, we Americans.  HOWEVER neither should we initiate it.

Is it a likelihood.  I don’t know.  My writer sense is very good at picking these things out of the air, and lately as I’ve told you I’ve been feeling “I stand before the gates of hell, and death is at my side.”

However, do not let yourself believe that if we have an armed conflict it will be easily won OR that what comes after is what we want.  I don’t believe it will be another Cuba, but it might be for parts of the US.  For other parts… Guys we remain the wealthiest land in the world.  Our enemies – foreign – are not going to stand by while our enemies – domestic – slug it out with us.  An occupied US is not out of the cards.  Foreign occupied.

Forgive me, I’m an American, the prospect makes me shudder.

So, do I resign myself to letting America die for fear a violent intervention will kill her deader?

By no means.  The epitaph writers and the would be insurrectionists are two sides of the same coin.  Both give the enemy an unwarranted victory already.  The epitaph writers assume it’s all over and the enemies domestic won.  And the insurrectionists assume the enemies domestic won hearts and minds and we need to rule our country like occupied land.

I think they’re both full of it.  The schools have been preaching the joys of state control, of European style statism since FDR at least.  And yet, most people, if they get what is going on, don’t buy it.  This is why the health care monstrosity had to be passed by a trick.  This is why they have to lie and spin in the news and refuse to mention some things.

Because we’re still Americans.  We’re still a sovereign people.  Granted we’re suffering under the yoke of the oppressor, but at heart we remember this is OUR country, not theirs.

And besides, just like in the 30s industry was running towards greater centralization and less individual importance, now tech is running the other way, making each of us more self-sufficient than we’ve been when our ancestors were starving in the grasslands.  (They mostly needed the group to hunt.)

The future is ours.

Does this mean you should tolerate this?  Oh, by no means.  No you shouldn’t.  You should disrespect, subvert, mock – particularly mock.  Most of these people are swollen with self importance and very susceptible to mockery – at every possible opportunity.

Remember, this is our land not – by their behavior – theirs.  They have no right to do that.  If your servant told you that you could no longer come in the house, because you didn’t let her have the new apron, you’d push her aside and go on in, right?

That – civil disobedience.  And mockery.  Don’t forget the mockery.

Will this avoid the shooting war?  I don’t know.  I rather hope it does than trust it will.

However, it is the appropriate thing to do right now.  Over and over again “You don’t have the right to stop me seeing/enjoying/having fun with that.  I am an American citizen.  I own this nation and I pay you.”

And meanwhile, just in case we can’t avoid the bad stuff, prepare, build under, build your network, prepare for the long haul.

In the end, we win, they lose.  But we have to make sure we win as quickly as possible and with as little time as possible lost to the dark ages.  I have children.  I’d like to secure liberty THIS generation.

Point, laugh, mock, explain to the stooges of a prepotent, runaway state that has nothing to do with the Constitutional authority they’re supposed to have, that they’re out of line and out of their minds.  Ignore them as much as possible. Go around, go under, go over.  Just like Mark Twain never let school interfere with his education, don’t let government interfere with your living your life and going about your (should be) lawful business.

And keep your powder dry.

UPDATE: And some of you are excellent at mocking.

Being American – A Guest Post by Eamon

Our gracious host asked me to write a guest post expanding on a comment I made on America Aeterna so I’ve put my shoulder to it, and scrabbled at the hard ground, and here it is:

It’s 9/11/2013 as I write this. It’s become a complex anniversary, one that does not pass easily. Nor should it. It should burn in our blood and resonate in our bones. There’s an unquenched anger compounded by recent frustrations underlying this day. And there’s a pain, when we turn long enough from our daily concerns to see, a compelling pain that won’t leave us. A pull toward the sound of American cries.

But I want to talk about hope, here. There is hope. A dark hope, to be sure. Stained with more than a little smoke, and tears without number, but hope it remains. Walk with me now, the next bit is a little bleak, but I see a glow over the ridge before us. Fix your eyes ahead.

There is a strain in American thought these days which regrets the violence visited upon our culture and our people, but are helpless before it. A belief that it’s horrible and wrenching and hard, but we can’t act in the face of it. This strain is spreading, insidious and cunning in its maneuvers.

Many individuals adamantly defend their right to self-defense and go on to explain how they’ll only exercise that right for them and theirs. Faced with violence, pain and horror they’ll turn away because it’s none of their concern. There are police who say that their number one priority each day is going home safe each night. Confronted with a threat to the innocent, they’ll hesitate and delay. Some in the military have sought to avoid deployments, because it’s not their fight. Faced with an attack against their country and their brothers and sisters, they step aside saying they didn’t want this war.

This corrupted thought is being abetted by many who seek power. They deny American exceptionalism, decry our cultural foundations, and seek to destroy our national soul. Some do this because they seek a ‘higher’ purpose, an ill-conceived greater good. Some because they’ve been taught to hate the very things that brought them to life and prominence. Still others are hollow and cold inside and believe everyone else must be as well.

These misguided ‘leaders’ seek to promote this helplessness in the face of attack, and encourage this turning from the suffering of our fellows. They want this crippled narcissism to continue and spread. Perhaps because it leaves them free to accrue more power. Or they plan to break the American spirit and bend it to their ideology. Maybe they feel broken and hopeless and strike out to render all else the same. Many, no doubt, act on the sincere belief that this is the right path. That reconciliation with the world and our better nature requires us to set aside these ‘arrogances.’ That it is penitence to suffer these incidents and when we’ve suffered sufficiently we’ll be welcomed into the enlightened community.

The dangerous strain in American thought is abetted by others, who hold to the deadly philosophy of low expectations. “This anniversary is supposed to be significant?,” they ask. This has happened before, and worse, and will again. Others before us have mis-stepped and others after will again. Outrage now is pointless because history is long and you cannot rise above our collective past. This and more they say.

These seek to undermine our anger, and pain. And most of all they seek to undermine that pull.

But there’s that glow, beyond the ridge.

***

There’s another strain in American thought. One I think runs deep in our blood and curls about our soul. One which regrets the violence visited upon our culture and our people, and is angry before it. One which believes it’s horrible and wrenching and hard, and we are equal to its challenge.

This strain is in the foundations of our American culture.

To reprise my comment on America Aeterna:

There is a deep, in the bone, tradition in the American military. It is an informal pact. It underlies why, and how, sane and rational people walk into horror of their own free will. We will come for you. We will send many to save few. I may die, but I will walk into that hell to pull you out. And the man beside me will drag us both home. It can be tempered, by the mission, by the needs of our nation, by our deference to civilian authority, but it must be tempered. The urge to act is innate.
…The in the bone tradition was not born in the military. It comes from a strain in our culture, from the heart of being American. Firefighters and Police and Citizens rushed to the Towers. College students walked into the recruitment office during Vietnam. Teachers and mechanics and bakers stormed the beaches of Normandy. Farmers faced down the mightiest empire in the world.

It is this strain that runs through the heart of educators who run to the sound of guns to stand and die between violence and their children. It is in the blood of the people who rush the madman before he can take another life. In the bones of the police officers who flock to the call of distress to interpose their bodies between violent disorder and civilization. In the souls of the military when they shove down their doubts and fears and shoulder the sword and shield of our nation.

I believe it is this strain that prompted Sarah Hoyt to say:

When an American is cut, everyone who is an American at heart bleeds.

And why she felt pain watching the Iran hostage crisis and the failed rescue, even as she sat in Portugal.

It’s not a geographical thing, nor a matter of birth or genetics. It is a deeply American philosophy that calls out to those around the world who would be of us. Those who are American in their bones and blood and soul. Who, despite rabid individuality, feel the call to face violent horror visited upon their fellows with resolve and to step toward that horror in response. Not in retribution, but to stand beside those fellows and do what must be done.

Those who follow this strain of thought feel that pull toward the sound of American cries. That pull comes not because we are invested in nationalism, but because we are invested in individualism. Our founding, our Constitution and our culture are replete with the fundamental understanding that the individual is the unit of value in our society. It is this understanding that shines forth around the world and draws people to our shores. It is this belief that each of us, in ourselves, is worth fighting to defend that gives the desolate hope. It is this truth that threatens the foundations of tyranny.

Seeing this, many nations give service to the idea of individual value, but their actions reveal a different truth. Many play upon our reverence to manipulate us; many co-opt our values to lessen us. They show the truth of their character by attacking the innocent and spilling the blood of their own people. Then they call on us to abide by our reverence. And we do. They take combat to the non-combatants with brutality and without regard, and then dare us to fracture our own foundations by responding in kind. And we do not.

Through all of this we hold to that truth. And through all of this, that light shines and nascent Americans around the globe feel the pull, and they know the promise.

Those who follow this strain of thought believe the promise that should have been made in Benghazi was this: You stand. We’ll have fighters overhead soonest. Behind them our bombers prepare. Behind them we have birds in the air bringing special operations personnel your way. Behind them the Airborne and the Marines. Behind them the light mech, and the heavy mech and the infantry. Behind them the American divisions muster, starting now. Pushing toward you, as we speak, churning the water to froth, the American carrier groups. Behind them, running deep, our submarines. Behind them the Coast Guard secures your home. You stand, we will come for you. And know this while you stand: if you should fall before we reach you, before your blood dries on that fallen soil we will stand in your stead in that very dust. We will own the hallowed ground where you lay, even if in the doing we must lay down beside you. And we will bring you home.

Some will call it jingoism. And perhaps they’re right, if you see this as a reverence of the state, of nationalism. Perhaps they’re right if you believe this pull we feel is because our national pride has been hurt. Or our leadership has been embarrassed. But, if you understand this pull…if you understand from where inside you it comes and toward whom it pulls you… then they are wrong. And it is not too late to hold to our promises.

We will come for you.

Okay, guys, please don’t hit me, but I think I need to take a week off on Rogue magic.

The reason for this is that I’m finally writing Through Fire total immersion — really going on it.

Novels are weird.  Sometimes I can write two at the same time.  Sometimes I HAVE to write two at the same time.  And sometimes, the voice of the character is so immersive that I can’t do anything else.

Zen is proving to be that sort of character.  She fought me in getting into her head (no woman was EVER more deceptively named.  She makes Athena tame and well balanced, while having a good bit of Kit’s reserve and protective instincts.)  And now that it finally clicked and I’m writing/rewriting (some portions will stay, just rewritten) at speed, I can’t pop back out to do stuff.  I can do non-fiction but not fiction.

In fact, this made this week very frustrating because I had a short story overdue, and it was for someone I like in the field and with whom I’ve worked before.  I wrote it three times, but it still read “flat” and “by the numbers” to me, because my head just couldn’t shift to be THERE.  Finally, on Thursday, I made an enormous effort and recast the story again.  I still have doubts, but the editor liked it.  However the effort from doing that, left me feeling like I’d been working in the fields all day. How?  I don’t know.  It was all desk work.  But I felt SO exhausted at night, that I ended up being more than half ill yesterday.  It was like I’d taken it upon me to climb a mountain or something, with no preparation.

So, yesterday I cleaned the house and redid two covers.  I’m going to put the books up and I’ll let you see them when it’s up.  Well… some of you have seen them.  Let’s just say I’m finally satisfied with them.

And this morning I tried to convince myself I COULD do a chapter of Rogue Magic.  But I think it would require the same effort as writing that short, and it would stop all my other work.  And see, I REALLY want to finish Through Fire, because it’s very loud right now.

No, I’m not giving up on Rogue Magic (though I might take a break tomorrow on Elf Blood on MGC too.  We’ll see how I feel in the morning and where I am in Through Fire.)  And I apologize for this being really choppy — I’ve just been sick, and now I am possessed by a book.  I promise there will be make-up chapters later.

Meanwhile I want to apologize to my subscribers for not having put up new material.  What I’ve been writing is mostly for Baen, and it’s not that I’m afraid they won’t like that I’ve shown it to you in advance.  What I’m afraid of, frankly, is critique.  At this stage, when I’m wholly immersed in the book, the wrong QUESTION can send me spinning down a path that makes no sense, if you’re just reading the book after it’s printed.  Yes, I promise to make it up to you guys later, too, including with some posts on the future history.

For now, let me shower, do some quick publishing, and then sit down and write the demon-book.  (Well, what would you call an entity that possesses you.)

And not as a teaser, but as an explanation, here is the beginning (and yes, there are typos and bad word choices.  Don’t fret your head about it.  It will be gone over with a fine tooth comb before I send it in.)

Breach in The Wall

 

When men forged weapons of metal, they did it by putting them through fire repeatedly then beating them almost to the breaking point, then putting them through the fire again and again.

There are times I wonder if that’s what’s been done to me.  Not that I think this is true precisely.  It’s just that we, humans, tend to think of ways to justify the weird turns of our destiny.  Since mine is odder than most, I often try to find a reason and a point.  It would be easier, I think, if I could believe in any divinity or even a pre-ordained destiny.

Since I don’t, I’m not absolutely sure how to start this story.

I could start with that moment when I stood in front of the mirror, trying to find a way to disfigure myself, or to make myself look, at best, average, and the armed man by the door said, “You’re going about it all wrong.”

Or I could start when I left the small and forgotten colony planet where everyone knew me, and where everyone thought they knew what to to expect of me.  Or I could start when I shot my husband.  But no.  That last still makes my heart turn within me, with thoughts of what might have been.

So I’ll start with the ball.

It was the first ball I attended and, though I might be wrong, likely the last.  The place where I grew up, an asteroid colony started by refuges from Earth, had never run to balls or grand state occasions.  Oh, we had a cultural center and sometimes there were dances there.  But it’s not the same.  You see, we had no government.  At least we had no official government.  And for the sort of ball that starts this story, a government is needed – something that controls central resources and can do things in style.  I’d say more than that was needed too: a sense of hereditary splendor, of being the last of a line entitled and accustomed to this sort of thing.

Perhaps even more.  Perhaps for the grandeur and pomp of that first and last ball, a sense is needed of decadence and falling glory.  That ball had all of them.

It took place in the ballroom of what used to be the palace of the Good Men of Liberte Seacity: a glittering room formed of molded dimatough from its glistening black floor to its softly shining white walls.

Within it, enough people assembled to form a hundred couples, all of them dressed in fantastical finery.  There were outfits that seemed to be spun of butterfly wings, and those that seemed to defy the shape of the human body.  And there was clothing that harked back to the fantastical age of empires almost seven hundred years before – long, sweeping dresses and molding outfits in thing that were better than velvet and silk. My own dress was made – I understood – of a form of ceramic. Though it felt like satin to the touch, its dull black glimmer shone with pinpoints of light, as if stars were caught in its depths.

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

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

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

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

You could also see the troop transports moored in that sea, the vast, dark menace that encircled us metaphorically as well as in reality.

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

I turned.  Simon – who has at least another dozen given names to his credit – stood just behind me.  He was slightly shorter than I, had brown hair, brown eyes and looked unremarkable.  Which I’d come to believe was protective coloring to stop people wondering what he might be plotting.  He put a hand out and rested it on my waist.

“I’m looking at those troop carriers,” I said.

“Oh, that,” he said, contriving to give the impression the glistening transports, each of them able to carry more than a thousand armed men, were a negligible detail like a spec of dust on the floor of his polished ballroom.  “Don’t worry, ma petit.”

I’d not yet decided if Simon’s habit of larding his speech with archaic French words annoyed me or amused me, but calling me “little” was beyond reason, since I had at least two inches on him.  Impatience colored my tone, as I said, “But shouldn’t you be worried?  These people depend on you for their safety.”

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

“And the cause is?”

“Oh, my.  The cause is I have it on good authority they’re mostly empty.  The Usaian revolution is keeping them fully busy, and costing them more men than they can recruit, unless they start creating them in vats, as they did at the end of the twenty first century.  Until they do that, though, the Usaians are giving them more trouble than they can handle.”  He looked at me, and his brown eyes danced with unmitigated amusement, like an adult laughing at the preoccupations of a toddler.  “Listen, Zen.  I wouldn’t have declared the revolution if I hadn’t thought there were next to no chances of reprisal by the ancien regime, the global might of what used to be the Good Men consortium.  I’m a revolutionary, yes, ma amie, but I’m not stupid.”

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

The pressure of his hand on my waist increased fractionally.  I became aware of the orchestra striking the sort of melody that indicates the prelude to dance music, and he said, “Madame Sienna, would you do me the very great honor of opening the ball with me?”

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

We danced.

As a guest of the Good Man – oh, pardon me, the Protector – I’d been taught to dance anything that might be played at the ball.  This was a waltz, an ancient dance that had once been scandalous.  We segued from it to the glide, a modern dance that was considered very difficult.  Our bodies moved in unison as though we’d been trained to it.  Which wasn’t true, but we’d been designed for it, you might say.

Other couples joined us.  The dance floor filled with twirling people, as the sun sank completely within the sea and, in the darkness that followed, the troop transports became mere darker dots in the darkness of the sea.

We took a break for drinks and food, then returned to the dance floor.  It was in the middle of this dance that the explosion came.

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

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

I cast a look at the sea, but it was still all dark, and the darker points of the transports were still there, bobbing on the water.

Another explosion, this one more deafening.  Above us, a glistening crystal chandelier swayed.  Bits of crystal rained down on the couples.  People screamed.

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

He lay on top of me but not crushing me, more forming a defensive cover over me.

“Simon,” I said, urgently, not sure how to ask, but trusting him to understand what I meant.

He pulled a burner from his pocket, and pointed it somewhere over my head.  “It’s not the armies of the Good Men,” he said.

“No,” I said.

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

I felt Simon shake.  I won’t say he trembled with fear.  It was more like shock, or surprise.  “Merde,” he said again.  Then in a louder voice, “Jean.  Jean!”  This was pronounced as in the French male name, not the Glaish female name.  “Jean, for the love of God, get her out of here.”

Someone tall and dark, a man I didn’t know but who had crawled up close to us said, “But–  Shouldn’t we—”

“Too late.  Get her the hell out of here,” Simon said.

I didn’t want to go.  I’d been taking care of myself since I was three at least.  I had never needed, would never need some man – much less two men – who were wholly unrelated to me, to take control.

I tried to say that, but I had no weapon on me – stupid, but I’d thought a burner might prove awkward at a ball – and Jean was a large man and was dragging me backwards, at a crouch, along the wall.

I’m faster and stronger than most men.  Most women too.  I was engineered that way.  But strength and speed go for nothing when you don’t know where the threat is coming from or whom to attack.

The ballroom was full of people fighting.  Burners shot this way and that.  I could no longer see Simon in the crowd.  I smelled blood and fire.

Another two explosions, below, getting closer.  The nearest dimatough pane cracked, top to bottom.  The crystal chandelier fell, bits of crystal flying in all directions.

Jean said, “Run,” and grabbed my hand and pulled.  Through what seemed like a concealed door, down a couple of staircases, onto a dark terrace by the seaside, we ran, and into a small, non-descript flyer.  We took off almost vertically.  An explosion rocked us, then another.

Jean said, “Merde.”  It was a popular word.  “We have to come down in the seacity,” he said.  “We won’t be allowed to escape.”

“Escape what?” I said, and then remembering the last, vivid image of the people who’d come into the ballroom.  “Were they carrying heads on pikes?”

“Yes,” he said.

 

 

It will not do.  I can’t write a chapter this morning.  Sorry.  I woke up feeling icky.  Have called HVAC people and asked what in heck they’re doing that they haven’t repaired this thing yet.  I’m going to try to write a chapter this afternoon, but right now, I’m going to clean the house and try to clear my head.

Apologies.

This will seem to be a post about publishing.  It actually isn’t.

Yesterday at Mad Genius Club we had someone get very snooty over one of my covers – which, btw, I know it’s not the best it COULD be.  I’ve seen the work of professional cover designer and I couldn’t do it. Not yet. – completely ignoring what I’d said I was trying to do and say with the cover.  (Long story, but so far as I can tell – and I confess I haven’t spent an awful lot of time looking at the publisher name, though I did look at the covers – the only people still doing historical mysteries are my old publisher Prime Crime.  Being cheap and in a sub-branch they think will never sell well, they mostly seem to use photoshop of buildings and/or figures cut out of paintings.  So, my cover was trying to imitate that.)

The reason my covers don’t look as though they came out of a professional designer is because they didn’t – they came from me.  I’m at best a semi-trained beginner.

So, Sarah, you’ll say, why didn’t you hire a professional cover designer?

Two reasons.  The first one is the vile metal.  Yes, I know.  “If you’re going to do this you should do it right.  You should hire someone.”  It’s a lovely idea except that most professional cover designers are working on SALARY for the publishing companies.  As with everything else, if you find one willing to work piecemeal, they’re likely to either be in a completely different field (there’s a lot of non-fiction book designers, but that’s not the same cues, and they might in fact be worse, since they THINK they know what they’re doing and won’t look) or to be youn’ ones laid off in the current crunch.

Does that mean there are NO good cover designers out there for hire?  Oh, by no means.  Kris and Dean have an excellent cover designer.  On salary.  (I’m taking a cover design workshop with her.)

As with artists (I found one, and hope the cover he’s doing for Witchfinder works out, even if I’m very new at cover direction and he’s very new at covers.  We’ll see.  I know he’ll work for Shadow Gods, but for this one I’m afraid it will signal either “funny” or “young” which the book isn’t.  Though a lot can be countered with cover design, but non funny/YA is new for him) the problem with cover designers is only partly money.  The other part is finding them.  And the problem is related – the cover designers I can find and/or pay for are likely to be just a little better than I, and that advantage might be lost between the things they know that just ain’t so and my inability to explain myself as to what I want.

Add to that the fact that I have to bring out 11 novels as soon as I can, and you’ll start seeing the scope of my problem.  Say I pay a cover designer $250 – a really low price – to do a cover design.  Now multiply that by 11.  Then add in the fact that the two times I tried to hire a cover designer, it got dropped on the floor, and I wasn’t even told that it was no longer being worked on (maybe my instructions offended them mortally.  Maybe they got better work.  I don’t know.)  And consider that my main job is/should be writing, and that riding herd on artists/cover designers takes time from that, which is – after the all – the main way I make money.

There was this publisher – Science Fiction Age – that used to send out rejection letters that started with “In an ideal world this would be an acceptance.”

Well, in an ideal world, there would be battalions of cover designers out there waiting to work for every indie writer, for a very reasonable fee — or any fee.  They would be prompt and courteous and versed in the signaling for every genre and sub-genre and it would be much like hiring out proof reading.

As I screamed back at SFA rejections “This is not an ideal world.”

Some writers start off at a much higher peak for cover design.  My friend Cedar Sanderson, for instance, or Kevin J. Anderson.  (Maybe you need to have a name ending in “son” – how does Hoytson sound, ya’ll?)

While I’m not wholly without artistic training, I have been shorting my art for the last five years (because I’ve been so busy) and as with any artistic thing (yes, including writing) a lot of it is training.  In this case, training the eye.  You can know everything cerebrally, but – I swear this is most of art classes – if your eye isn’t trained, you will still suck.  Most of my art classes were “learning to see.”  And like things that are muscle memory – piano playing, painting, or even running – if you’re away from it for a while, you lose it.  Mea culpa, and all that.  Amanda Green has told me I need to go back to classes and practicing, though I think she meant it for mental health.  Well, I need it for helping to design things too.  And one of the legend-artists of SF tells me that I’m actually quite gifted, (okay, what he told me is that as much as he enjoyed my books, I’d missed my real calling. It hurt a little.) but “gifted and out of practice” still boils down to “amateur.”

So I’m not one of those “comes in with a lot on the ball” designers.  It’s all cerebral, not eye yet.  So it will scream “beginner.”

Does this mean I should either spend the next year going door to door trying to find someone who can professionally design my covers or sit on my hands until I can do it at the “required” level?

Oh, for the love of Bob.

First of all, not all the books that come out of NYC look like “best professional designer.”  The reason for this is obvious.

As in everything else, from proof reading to editing, there are the main people at the houses, who are extremely well paid and who work only for the high least.  And then there are the low-level trainees, who are just learning some of whom are just out of high school/college.

I’m not here going on the “most of what comes out of NYC is cr*p.”  A lot of it is, of course, because they don’t invest money on it.  But most of it is “good enough.”

Well, my intention with cover design is “good enough” – though of course, I aim higher.  But I know where I fall.

In fact, when I audit cover designers – by looking at their stuff on line – most of them are about as good as I am, with a difference.  A lot of them get stuck in one genre.  Like literary.

There was a page of “clever” cover designs going around – I can’t find the link now – for things like 1984 and Metamorphosis.  They were very nice, but here’s the thing: if they weren’t classics and most people didn’t know what was in them, they’d make no sense.  Like the 1984 cover with silhouettes of rats around the front cover.  Would a potential reader of anti-totalitarian books buy it on that?  Probably not.  It could work with a great blurb, but it wasn’t, by itself, a “selling cover.”

Most people out of college try to be similarly clever and “high class”, just like most editors and agents just out of college want to do “literary.”

Anyway, so…

What I’ve been doing is going over to Amazon and looking at the bestsellers in print, then trying to imitate that.  I discard “made famous by a movie” books like GRRM because, well, his series was doing okay before the movie, and now they’re designed to fit with the movie.  And then I look at the genre and subgenre, to see not only what is being done, but what is being signaled.

For instance, I started out with the Musketeer series, wanting the cover to show a scene from the novel.  I tried to draw it, so I could show it to an artist who could then improve on it.  (Believe it or not artists understand pictures better than words.  Shocking.)

Then I went and looked at the covers in mystery-cozy-historical (yes, it’s a cozy in the sense it’s not a hard boiled.)  And got a shock.  What they’re using now – foreshadowed by the last two covers for Musketeers, which seem to be stock paintings, for some reason involving apples – is something evocative of the time, like, a piece of architecture (for Victorian) or a figure from a painting (for everything else.)

To put the scene I wanted to put on the front cover would simply date the books as being abt. 10 years old.

Having determined this, I raided pictures of musketeers from paintings.  I learned not to put the entire painting in, because it gives off a “classical” and “literary” feel.  I still feel the background is not textured enough, but overlaying say a wood cut of the time, no matter how faded, becomes “cluttered” with all the lettering these books have.

The covers still feel cluttered to me, because I’m reclaiming the books.  Having found out that at least half of my readers on either side don’t know Sarah D’Almeida is in fact Sarah A. Hoyt, I am doing them as Sarah A. Hoyt writing as Sarah D’Almeida.  This is a hope to integrate both readerships, or at least a significant portion.  (The musketeers have a “fantasy” feel to them, anyway.)  And I know I’m not doing what professionals do with balance of mass and lettering.  I am sort of at the edge where I can “sense” that, but not do it reliably yet.  Because knowing it intellectually is not the same as learning to see.

So, the book won’t say “High push.”  Well… it’s the reprint of a midlist series.  It’s possible – I still get fan mail for it, five years after the last came out – that doing the sixth book will revive the series, in which case it might very well pay off.  BUT even if it pays off, it will be at around the 10 to 20k per book, not the millions.  (Oh, I’d love to be proven wrong, but historical mystery is one of those genres that has run off its own readers and it will take a while to find their way back. So I’m looking at it as “old faithful” not “gusher of money.”  Frankly neither is science fiction.  If I were doing this JUST for the cash, I’d just be doing Paranormal Romance.  I’m not. — though I might do some in the future, of course.  But never the only thing.)

This is the part where this is not about publishing: I know I’m doing an imperfect job.  I also know I’m improving.

I was never one of the worst cover designers out there.  For one, as an author, I’ve seen a lot of covers.  I can go back to the styles of my youth, because that happens to everyone, and sometimes I missunderestimate what a font says (I think that’s a cultural issue, too.  I didn’t grow up here) but when I started I already understood “the cover is a sales tool.”  I never had that kind of cover you used to see at Smashwords, with the wrong aspect and the letters that looked like a ransom note.

That said, my early covers were pretty bad. One or two, unexpectedly, rose to the sublime.  But most sucked. Fortunately, in the herd of authors putting their back stuff up, they were fairly normal and passed unnoticed.

However, every few months, everyone ups their game, and I look at the old covers and go “OMG” and redo some – I wish I had the time to redo them all.  (That said, I also buy books in the store and go “OMG” at their covers.)

Does this mean I should wait until I get good at it? Or wait till I had the money and the perfect cover designer?

Sigh.

Keep in mind every week those books aren’t out is lost income.  Even if it’s less than a hundred per book per month.  It’s still income.  And every little bit helps.  An imperfect cover out there will earn me more money than the perfect cover in a year or two.  (I can always change it in a year or two.)  And the chances of my even recognizing the perfect cover if a designer did it in a year or two, if I have no experience, are zilch.

As I said, this is the part where it’s not about publishing.  There are things you can only learn by doing.  Writing is one of them.  Cover design is another. (Though if I can find a design course in the local community college, I’ll take it.  Like writers’ workshops it won’t be a magic bullet, but it will probably help.  And I am taking Dean’s cover workshop.)

I could sit around and wait for that time when I’ll be perfect.

Somehow that time never comes, and it’s even less likely to come if I sit around waiting for it (witness what five years of no practice – part of it born of the frustration of seeing my mistakes and not knowing how to fix them – have done to my drawing.)

Look, I feel the exact same thing about writing.  When my first trilogy was published, I knew I wasn’t up to snuff.  I kept expecting people to come along and say “Hey, who let the amateur in?”  Now?  I don’t read it.  I’m sure the thumbs would show all over the clay. They would to me at least.  And yet, people love it.

But then, even though now I think I’m pretty up on my craft, if you force me to re-read one of my books (something I must do when getting back into a series) you’ll see me cringe.  Yes, even Darkship Thieves.

This is merely a sign I’m progressing.  Am I perfect?  Oh, heck no.  I hope never to be.  If I’m still working, I hope I’m still progressing… which means I’ll never be perfect.

So, what is this post all about?

Some things you only learn by doing.  You know those “Might have beens” – try them.  Make an effort.  If what stands between you and what might be is the consciousness of your own failure, give things a try.

First, you’re always your own worst critic (in fact, you should only worry if you think you’re perfect.)  Second, you will improve in the doing.  Third, while it’s embarrassing as heck, some things have to be learned in the public eye and on stage, as it were.  Because I can spend my life doing covers (or writing) and putting nothing up, but the ultimate test (“How does this sell?”) just won’t be there, and my subconscious will treat it as “just play” and eventually I’ll stop doing it. (Like my art.)

If what’s stopping you is that you aren’t perfect, consider that no one is ever perfect.  And you certainly won’t be if you don’t practice.

I don’t know why in certain artistic fields – and in a lot of non-artistic others, like public speaking or even software design – people think they have to be good to start.  In others: painting, music playing, dancing, sewing – people know that they’ll spend years practicing and years as apprentices.  All talent does is give you a leg up.  BUT it doesn’t make you perfect.

You aren’t a good writer?  Try it anyway.  You aren’t a good painter?  Try it and learn in the doing.  You aren’t a good cover designer?  Well, honey, neither is most of NYC.  You can’t explain politics eloquently?  Hon, give it a shot anyway, your voice is needed.  You want to do a podcast and aren’t sure about your voice?  Study what others are doing and learn.  You’ll improve.  You want a date, but don’t know how to approach women?  Well, as Jane Austen pointed out in Pride and Prejudice, that too is a matter of practice.

You learn in the doing.  You don’t do, you don’t learn.

You pays your money, you takes your bets.  Sometimes the paying down is in money, sometimes in time, sometimes it’s in effort.  And sometimes, after all your time and effort you find you’ll never rise above “competent” (if you really put time and effort in it, you’re unlikely to be lower than that.)?

Well, that would be tough.  But  if you don’t bet you can’t win.  And you’re left sitting by the fire with the memories of the life unlived.

What’s worse, you’ll never know how good you could get – if you’d only try and work at it.

 

 

I am  — right now – writing a character who is emotionally maimed because she FAILED to take crazy chances.  What I mean is, faced with a situation in which she could follow the rules and things would end badly or not follow them and have things end even worse, with a slim to non-existent chance of it all ending up well, she took the “follow the rules” and the lesser of two evils.  And she forever regrets the “what might have been.”

This has set me in a mode of thinking about it.  “What might have been” might be the toughest words in the English language, and I bet all of us over the age of twenty have an extensive collection of “what might have been.”  I do, you do, everyone does.

What might have been if we’d taken our meager savings and invested in Amazon, for instance.  (It’s not like I ever had any doubts they’d do well, either.  We just never got around to it.) What might have been if I’d ignored the agents and editors and continued writing space opera and throwing it at Baen, ten years before I did.  What might have been if I’d attended cons when we lived in the Southeast.

Now of my various regrets, most of them I can exonerate myself from.  To have done otherwise would have required either supernatural ability to see into the future – for instance, if I’d known twenty years ago what I know now about ebooks and indie selling, instead of spending my time writing short stories to submit to the small presses, etc, I’d just have done novels, some for Baen and some for the drawer.  But that would have required second sight or future-telling, or something, and though I have the occasional prophetic dreams and less occasional “feelings” (and yes, I’m still having the feeling that collectively we stand before the gates of hell and death is at our side, thank you so much for asking) I don’t actually have prophetic visions (what price the ability to call my younger self?  And besides, she’d ignore me, she’s a stubborn b*tch.)

Then there’s the fact that I look back and go “What was I doing?  Why did I think I could only write a book a year?  What was wrong with me?”  But that’s easy to say now, from where I stand, where I a) have a lot more practice, so book writing is faster, and b) don’t have toddlers around my ankles all day while rebuilding a house that we bought in a condition that needed rebuilding.  (And btw, I’m not saying that the 18 and 22 year old don’t get in the way but I – thank heavens – don’t need to bathe them or feed them with a spoon.)

But then there are other regrets, on the same order as my characters, and stuff like ‘Why didn’t I go to the cons in the Southeast’ fall under them.  I want to say “because I didn’t even know they existed” but that’s only part of the truth.  For one, one of my casual acquaintances back then was a published member of Horror Writers of America and I’m sure he HAD to have told me about the cons, right?  It’s more that I hated going out in public, was even more conscious of my accent than I’m now, and it was all too easy to convince myself not to do it and then ignore them.

Yet, at the time, taking the risk, meeting editors… Yes, maybe they’d hate me, but I have a feeling they wouldn’t.

And other stuff.  I still with that when we found ourselves profoundly unhappy with Dan’s job we had packed the car with cats and the few things we wanted to keep, sold everything else at a garage sale, announced the house for assuming with nothing done and driven to Denver.  People would have thought we were nuts, of course, but financially – not to mention emotionally – we’d have saved two years of h*ll, not to mention untold financial burdens.

Of course, that’s “what might have been” and what about that accident on the way to Colorado, where the escort (!) went off the street in snow and we all died, cats and all?  What accident?  Well, that too might have been, you know?  And it’s good to keep that in mind.

But on the other hand there is no reason not to… How do I explain this?

Pretend you’re a time traveler.  You just managed to come back to here now: your body, but a future mind.  Look around.  What aren’t you doing?  What are you failing to allow yourself to do: creative stuff, interesting stuff, learning stuff.

And then there’s the risks.  Last year Kevin J Anderson allowed to me audit his Superstars Writing Seminar, (which is happening again this year, and the early bird prices are about to go off.)  Listening to people tell the stories of how they broke in, how they had a massive breakthrough, how they got there, how they got attention, just about blew my mind.

I’ve never scaled the heights these people have been to, but I’ve also never taken the risks they have, the desperate all or nothing gambles.  Let’s just say that if I were in debt to my ears, and my lights were turned off, and there was no food in the fridge, I’d take whatever advance they gave me, instead of holding off for a big release.

And maybe that’s a mistake.  Ever since the seminar, I’ve been listening to other stories of great success (not just in writing) and almost every single time the gamble was enormous, far higher than everything I’ve done, than everything I’ve even considered.

And of course, part of this is my obligations.  I can gamble my money (could, if I had any) but not my family’s money and the kids’ educations.

Still, maybe a little more gambling is needed, a little more getting out of my comfort zone.  And not just in terms of “how can I advance my career” but – taking in account the feelings (not good) I have of what’s ahead (very not good) – how can I optimize my chances of surviving and of being able to support my family in the future.

This is where I am today.  My regrets unlike my character’s aren’t huge and irretrievable, but all the same, like Zen, I’m wondering “what’s the slightly crazy alternative I can take?  And how might it pay off?”

Saner blogging tomorrow – and a post at MGC in about half an hour or so.

 

So, I was listening to The Door Into Summer the other day, and as a throw away line on “how language has changed” he has a man threaten to punch out the main character for using “that word” in front of a lady.  I don’t remember what the word was.  (Weirdly, in Portuguese translation, which of course I read first and is still what I always remember, it was “queer.”)

I didn’t think much about it.  Why?  Because I’ve read/heard the book a million times, give or take a hundred thousand.

But yesterday I was reading Lileks Gallery of Regretable Food, and right at the beginning he apologizes (in essence) for making fun of food writing in the fifties because … well, he shows an advertisement for a supermarket, and there are all these baby carts and children parked outside, waiting for mommy and he said something like “Who are we to make fun of them when, in their society, it was safe to do this?”  (This was not news to me, btw, because some years ago a Scandinavian visitor got charged with child neglect for leaving her baby in a carriage outside a coffee shop while she went in.  Apparently it was still done wherever she came from.)

In the same vein – you know I read a lot of Rex Stout and for that matter a lot of pulp SF.  I won’t say that guys are always getting in fist fights, but there is often the threat of one, usually for something done to women and children.  (The most candid of the Heinleins on this is For Us The Living, in which the custom of fist fighting between men has been eliminated with the elimination of sexual jealousy, which is rather, you know, one of those ideas he got stuck in his head and couldn’t get out.  In his defense no one had tried it.  Now, fifty years of that great experiment later, we known added promiscuity doesn’t eliminate sexual jealousy, it just eliminates attachment.  Never mind.)

It’s funny, if you look at the early books, because the women aren’t at all upset by this – though they might get upset if a bigger guy hits a smaller one.  But only sometimes, which is why the Atlas systems commercials worked.  Women preferred the big brutes.

It is only in the sixties, with the rather stern pushing of the “sensitive man”  that women start acting like men fighting over them is some sort of terrible offense, and in fact men fighting at all is the sign of an oppressive patriarchy and stuff.

The culmination of the stupidity of women’s behavior in books and movies since then is the scene in Pirates of the Caribbean II where the woman has ONE JOB and that is to guard the stupid trunk, and instead she’s running after the men telling them not to fight.

Do women behave this way?  Sure they do.  Indoctrination works, and they’ve become convinced men fighting over them – or anything, in fact – is a sign of oppression and brutishness and stuff.  (You say that like it’s a bad thing, honey!)  I have in mind the idiot who was all upset because her boyfriend defended her in public from a drunk, because well, if she were upset she could defend herself.  (No, she couldn’t.  Men and women are different sizes and strengths.  She can only “defend  herself” because she can call on daddy government to put the mean evil man away.  That’s not adulthood, that’s simpering folly.  Daddy government also has troops, and if he turns on her, she’ll have no defense from HIM.  Sure it won’t happen.  Sure it won’t.  And what stops it, exactly?  Are you going to call on another government to punch government’s nose?  You probably think you are…)

It has become a trope to consider men doing this sort of jostling for position, even in defense of women and children as uncouth and uncivilized and, oh, yeah, patriarchal.

I never fully understood why “Patriarchal” is baaaad, but “matriarchal” is devoutly to be wished for.  Unless, of course, you never met any women, and your idea of mothers is a housewife in the fifties, ready to wipe every nose and tie every shoelace.

In fact, there have been very few real matriarchies (I’m not interested in your pre-historic fantasies.  Sex with dinos is more realistic) and those that have existed didn’t last very long, because, well – see that thing where women aren’t as strong or as large as men.  Also, for the record, this causes women rulers to behave in a different way.  For how, exactly, go and read about our cousins, monkeys and apes, in the wild.  Males establish their dominance by fighting, sometimes to the death.  But females – ah, females are something special, and anyone who has ever gone to an all girls’ school will know our species uses the same method – establish their dominance by bullying to such an extent that underling females stop ovulating, due to extreme stress.

The only people who believe a female hierarchy is peaceful and caring are males who look at it from the outside and see the dominant female’s constant interfering and “bless her heart” as a “caring” thing and not the horrible oppression it is.

The problem is women in the US – and little by little in the rest of the world, but not so much – have either bought into or found it convenient to pretend that male view of females was right.  (The women who buy into it tend to be chunky, middle aged, wear home made jewelry and talk about the Earth Mother a lot.)

They pretend that the male form of dominance is just wrong and barbaric, but the female is sainted, and leads to peace and caring.

So – this is where we are.  Men no longer fight in public, not even to defend women.  But women do still bully and push and shove in private, and drive other women insane.

Is society better for it?

I don’t know.  Someone was talking in the comments yesterday about the coarsening of society.

I’m one of those women who never felt much need to have a man protect me, but that was because in the time and place I came of age I was larger and stronger than most men (this doesn’t mean I was Helga.  I wore a size 7.  But, different food and stuff… and most men were shorter and smaller than I.  Also I am and have always been stronger than I look.)  So I not only would stop nonsense cold, but I often protected weaker females (often from other females.)

And I’m not going to tell you I ever found men punching each other out attractive as such.  I can even understand the roll of eyes, particularly with juvenile males, as they fought over nothing at all.

However, it is important to remember that humans aren’t angels.  Whether you believe someone created us or we “just growed” the truth is that we’re built on an ape frame.  And ape societies are established in a certain way.

Now we’ve made it impossible for men to establish their dominance structures but, more importantly, we made it impossible for men to police themselves.  A man can no longer come along and say “Hey, Miss, is this ape bothering you?” without risking the woman turning on HIM.

Is our society better for it?

As Lileks in the intro to his book, I have to say “Who are we to make fun of them?”

Instead of men jostling and threatening each other, we have women appealing to an all powerful government whom they want to guard, protect and look after them.

Again, what are you going to do when your government turns on you?  And what are you going to do if all those cozy things you voted for become oppressive?  The one who pays for you to give birth might also decide you need a forced abortion.  Why not?  Most other countries who have that kind of power have, at some point or another.  The one who pays to keep you in comfort will at some point decide that you’ve lived long enough.

Look, no one is arguing that some aspects of patriarchy could be very bad indeed, when patriarchy was taken to the extreme.  In the Victorian age, a woman could be a helpless prisoner of an awful marriage (though not as much as our literature would make it sound.)

But now women, who still need protection, and who still, instinctively, seek the most powerful male, are de facto hankering for a marriage with government.  Which can be the worst marriage of all, because there is no escape.

And as for aspects of the matriarchy – ask any woman who lives with her mother in law in a traditional society how loving and caring a tribe of females can be.

It takes decades of college education  indoctrination to believe that women rulers and kinder and more caring…

So, now when I read novels and two guys are bandying words (if novels reflect the truth it hardly ever came to actual blows.  A warning sufficed most of the time) over the way one of them was treating a woman or a child, I can’t even roll my eyes anymore.

Are we superior?  How are we superior?  How is it keeping the violent members of society from policing each other making us more civilized?  How is pretending men and women are exactly the same and their relationships are exactly the same even sane?

What happens when you build your entire society on a lie?  The lie that women need no protection might seem to favor women – but if it did, how many women would now be at the mercy of government, and how many children growing up fatherless.

It is always wrong to think of human genders as existing in isolation.  You can’t suppress patriarchy in its place without suppressing matriarchy in its place.  If men aren’t jostling for dominance, they also are not suppressing the bad actors in their midst and the women who think they’ve now become all powerful are in fact handed the dirty end of the stick and left powerless.

This Heinlein quote is wrong only because now many of the starry eyed idealists are female, but the rest stands:

All societies are based on rules to protect pregnant women and young children. All else is surplusage, excrescence, adornment, luxury, or folly, which can — and must — be dumped in emergency to preserve this prime function. As racial survival is the only universal morality, no other basic is possible. Attempts to formulate a “perfect society” on any foundation other than “Women and children first!” is not only witless, it is automatically genocidal. Nevertheless, starry-eyed idealists (all of them male) have tried endlessly — and no doubt will keep on trying.

You might not like it.  You might not think it applies to you.  You might think you’re all powerful and self-sufficient as a female – but sooner or later you’re going to need protection from the bad actors in the male community.

Why do you think it’s better to get it from a bureaucratic society that you cannot hope to stop or even to influence very far than from the decent man down the street?

You can laugh at the punching out matches in old books and movies, but look at our illegitimacy rate, our drugged-to-the-gills young women, our fatherless children, our dropping-out-of-society male youth.

Who are you to laugh at the structures of the past?