Born Free
Chapter of Rogue Magic later today. Meanwhile, will you kindly put anything you want promoted in comments? I’ll do a round up Sunday or so.
And don’t forget to send your book promos to book.plug.friday@gmail.com. Also, anything to do with working for writers, like editing, copy editing, type setting, etc. We’ll do a round up of those next week, if we have enough.
Sorry, but my hair is starting to bother me, so I have to go get it cut and shaped.
I’m not a happy warrior. Some people are. My friend Larry Correia, for instance. I’m relentless and non-stop, but I’d much rather avoid conflict altogether.
This is not because I don’t have the courage of my convictions, but because I feel sorry for most people on the other side, whether what we’re talking about is writing, technological change (in writing and education and myriad other things) or politics.
I can see being them, with very little change in circumstances.
Take writing, for instance. Until Kris Rusch opened the door of the jail cell I was where they were, but more so… Or perhaps less. I’m not even sure where the fact that my income had been a good supplement but never enough to make a living puts me in relation to people who had been receiving lavish advances and living from them, as most of the inner circle of what remains of SF have. Yes, I have friends caught in that position (most of the people concerned in the SFWA kerfuffle are aquaintances, sometimes friendly, but not friends) where the writing income dropped precipitously. But my friends are resourceful, smart people and are getting into other avenues and widening the feed on their streams of income. I.e. instead of being scared, they’re active and busy.
But until Kris Rusch opened the jail cell I was sitting here thinking “Well, hell. If no one but small presses will take me” (look, it was an agent-induced perception. Let it go.) “And all the presses are slashing advances in half… I might as well quit now.” Three years ago, I actually told my husband I thought I was going to quit and spend six months familiarizing myself with translation.
I want to emphasize that what I’m doing with indie is still not paying more than about a novel and not from Baen, (about half a novel from Baen) and that once I’m done with covers, editing, etc for the stuff I’m bringing out, it will be gone (mostly because I’m buying 1k of ISBNs and maybe 2k if I put stuff up fast.) So it’s not like I have guarantees that it will be an income, if my stuff from Baen stops selling and I have to go it on my own. (Right now, strictly indie, not advance purchase for the novels on installments or donations to the blog, it covers about “a normal electricity bill in summer.” That’s it. Granted this is the slump of summer, and I’m hoping as I get more up it will cover heating in winter. It’s a stage indie income goes through. That’s where we are.
I’m used to no guarantees. Look, at 22 I took up my roots, everything I knew and everything I was – and you truly can’t get this unless you are a girl raised in a Latin country – and came across the ocean to live with a man my parents didn’t approve of, among people they’d never met. Furthermore, I gave up the security of my degree, which I’d taken precisely because it guaranteed me employment. (Having seen my brother and older cousins finish STEM degrees and cool their heels for six to ten years before someone who knew someone got them their first break, I decided I’d take a degree which – failing the high road of translation for and/or the diplomatic service [which oddly, I had a very good chance of getting/was being groomed for had I stayed] or a teaching post at college [which I was tactically offered, should I stay] – offered guaranteed employment as a highschool teacher, with three months off in summer, and two sets of two weeks vacation and a middle-class salary. (Now teachers have other requirements in Portugal, but not at the time.) Here my degree meant nothing, and finding a job as a translator is like finding a job as a writer: someone has to give you a break, and you have to fight each step up. If I’d stuck with translation – and I want to point out even when I came here that’s ALL I expected. I never expected writing to be more than a hobby until my love pointed out that if that’s what I wanted I should go for it, and he’d support me while I tried – I’d probably be making more than I am (I can/could do scientific translation from four languages and that’s OBSCENELY well paid. Free lance, twenty one years ago, it paid $70 a page, and numbers counted towards “page” even though often the page was mostly numbers I just copied over.) On the other hand I’d be about where I am, career wise: solid, but nowhere near the top of the pile.
Anyway, I abandoned all guarantees, all expectations, all my visions of the future once.
It’s sort of like being in an accident. It’s terrifying the first time, less so the second, and I have friends who routinely get cut out of cars and don’t seem to care. (I don’t advise getting to that state.)
It’s a very different mind set than most people – and frankly one I’d never have navigated had I not already been divided by being brought up in Heinlein books and therefore not have fit in in Portugal. Most people like a predictable future and the rewards of that which they worked toward.
Writers, right now, at all levels, are being denied that certainty. Hence the rip and scratch. The Titanic has sunk, there are insufficient boats and we (they – I am blissfully floating away on a raft made of whiskey crates. Crazy but effective) are fighting for a spot atop the grand piano with the certainty that if you get too many people on it, it will sink.
That is all you need to know about the psychodrama between Sci Fi writers. I haven’t been around that long but I’m given to understand the field is PARTICULARLY prone to it, having had major seismic rifts over WWII and Vietnam as well as every change along the way. I know at cons I met people who hadn’t talked to each other for years over something one of them had said thirty years ago.
If it were only that, it could be let go, but this is happening in every group, every fandom, every casual association I belong to. People go off on weird tangents and then start ripping up at each other.
And then there’s politics. I don’t know if anyone actually believes the course we’re on, economically, socially, internationally, is sustainable. I don’t believe it, but then I’m a little more clued in about history and economics than others (though many on this blog leave me in the dust, since my research tends to be in terms of “How do I fake someone living in this era” which doesn’t exactly lend itself to macro-movements.) It’s truly astounding how many people think the closed-pie Marxism they were taught in school is economics, and who will therefore bow their heads and accept being poorer so “others can be richer” – and how long it will take them to get that they were lied to is a guess.
I suspect however there’s a lot more awareness than people would admit to, otherwise we wouldn’t go from zero to shouted swearwords in ten seconds, when you’re just expounding facts, or even your opinion (like my I Am Spartacus post, which seems to have got needles under a lot of people’s nails.)
I think at some level, almost every one of us is aware that we’re carrying on a party on top very thin ice, and we’re all listening for the crack.
The difference is, some of us have hope for the future, hope of a contact with reality that will bring us into a more aligned state with it (almost anything is.) Something that will stop the crazy “but I want a pony because France has a pony and France says his pony never poops, so you don’t need to worry about that.”
But they… they see the system they want, the system for which many of them have given their whole lives in work and devotion, crumble and reveal itself as a farce and a form of feudalism. They might say they don’t believe it, but the bankruptcies, the cracks in Europe are registering. Otherwise they wouldn’t shout so loudly, and they wouldn’t go from zero to screaming obscenities.
Mind you, most of us here – and elsewhere – are aware that we’re going to eat a lot of dirt on the way to rebuilding the American Republic. But we think that’s possible, if not probable. It’s something to work toward.
On the other hand, if you’re a collectivist, and you believe in the entire world singing Kumbaya, the last dozen years have administered a series of shocks to the system. There have to be doubts and questions deep in your heart, which makes you shout all the louder.
A friend of mine told me that before the 2004 election “the louder they shout the less secure they are.” Only this isn’t an electoral context. This is life. And at some level they know it.
So, where does that leave me?
It leaves me where I am. I hate arguing. I hate arguing with people I like in other respects.
But the hour is late and the journey perilous. I can’t in conscience stay quiet while we print the country into financial oblivion. I can’t remain quiet when we practically invite enemies to strike us. I can’t remain quiet while our liberties are torn apart.
In my ideal world, I’m living in a Victorian by the sea. (In Colorado? You say. Shut up wretches, this is my ideal world, okay?) and I have this little tower where I write, and no matter if my villains or heroes are male or female, straight or gay, white or purple with yellow pokadots, no one comes to call me names. In my ideal world, this blog is about what the squirrels did in the night, and recipes, and how to clean your house, and my cute, cute cats.
… This is not my ideal world. In all the rifts going on around us, I respect (and sometimes love) people on the other side. I can see how they got there. They either can’t or they ignore this. They project ignoble motives onto me and mine. And they pursue a fantasist course towards a paradise that can’t exist.
The past has shown a tendency for people in that unenviable position to amass a pile of corpses of those who oppose them, before the would-be-paradise collapses.
I will not go quietly into that good night, and so I talk.
I talk though I’d much rather stay quiet and not engage in conflict. I talk, though it will cost me friends.
It’s not easy. At heart all I want to do is write stories. This will never be a full-fledged politics blog, because that’s all I really want to do.
But we’re put into a time and a place. And sometimes it’s necessary to talk – even when it gets us called names by people who should know better. Even when it’s unpleasant.
Perhaps after it all settles, I can sit around writing stories and ignoring the world. Perhaps this will go by without a horrible implosion.
Perhaps. Let’s hope so.
But right here, right now, and though it pains me to say so, sometimes I have to talk. Night is falling and every position is thrown into stark relief, and the ice beneath us is cracking loudly.
Perhaps if we stop dancing and make for the banks fast, something will be saved. And perhaps there is a convenient whiskey crate some can row ashore.
But continuing dancing would be betrayal. Of me, of you, and even of those who think the dance can go on forever.
Should someone else be doing it? Undoubtedly. I’m just a bum writer who only wants to write. But somehow I find myself here, and I have this small and defective megaphone.
And we must each use what we can to light the idea of a right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness — regardless of race, credo or gender. Against the night that falls.
I come not to debate the case of going to war in Syria but to rant about “liberal” – in the rather corrupt form the term is applied to right now –might as well call them defrocked communists – ideas of when force is needed and how opposite (not to say suicidal) they are to history and historical necessity.
No, it’s not what I wanted to talk about today – note how late I am in posting – but it is what I can talk about today.
I think it was in the run up to the war in Iraq — when I belonged to an international fandom group and had to enlighten people getting their news canned-by-Europeans how useless and counterproductive it was for Bush to go to the UN hat in hand – that I first fully realized the craziness of the leftist case for war.
Okay, I should have got it with Clinton’s Balkan adventures (mea culpa mea maxima culpa) but I was actually distracted by the fact that Clinton was trying to do handwavium to keep us from noticing the intern under his desk. (Spare me the “private” and the “impinging on his sex life” – a) if he’s being paid from my taxes, he has no private, certainly not in the people’s office. B) If he were working for any company or corporation, he’d not only have been fired for abuse of power, he’d also have probably gone to jail if they could cram it under “undue influence” and call it rape. Yes, I know that successful men have always bedded hotties who work for them. But since Clinton and his ilk are the ones who made it a capital crime: Live by the PC, die by the PC, I say.)
I might even have got it before, if I’d lived in the US earlier, or studied US history. I didn’t. One of my friends swears that we went into Vietnam because Kennedy wanted to design uniforms. (I think there were probably other reasons. Heinlein quoted treaties.) And of course I know adventurism abroad is a thing of democrat administrations (no, seriously.)
But I only realized the full on dysfunction when they started opposing the Iraq war before it started – and the Afghanistan campaign too – because we HAD been attacked. That is, we were going to war to defend our interests. Apparently this is bad, bad, bad, in the vile prog mind.
Why is it bad? I don’t know. I assume it’s uncouth, like defending your own race, your own species, or chewing with your mouth open.
I hang out with enough of them to have this idea they don’t have principles or reasons, they have good manners – things you say and do to “fit in” with your peer group. And these are things they started learning very early from their parents, their teachers and other figures of authority and they never once thought about them.
Because if they thought about them, they would realize that while there is virtue in not attacking other groups sight unseen, there is no virtue in letting the group you belong to be attacked just because. Of course there is no virtue in my defending any group (except maybe the Chinese) considering the salad in my DNA. (Have I mentioned Asian guys are hot? What? Deal.)
No, I confess I never heard a pre-school teacher say “we don’t have the right to defend our group, our nation or ourselves” – but I think it’s an extension from “you can’t defend yourself, because then you’re being as bad as the other guy.” That they do say. They say it all the time along with “Violence never solved anything.” I found out older son was reading Starship Troopers when in a conference, in front of me, he growled back “Tell it to the city fathers of Carthage.” (So proud.)
But I think that’s it. It’s this internalized good manner stuff. (And those on the right, stop preening. You don’t use it against foreign aggressors, but you use it in internal political fights. I’ve heard more than one of you reply, in response to an even mildly satirical and exaggerated take down of the left “we can’t lower ourselves to their level.” PFUI. Playing by the Marquess de Queensberry rules just gets your *ss handed to you.)
And that’s what I realized in the run up to the Iraq (and Afghanistan) war. It’s apparently the thing of uncouth barbarians to actually defend ourselves and our country (no? Iraq might not have been directly involved in 9/11 but in a region where half of it is inspiration and bravado, they were definite enablers.)
Now, we’re seeing the reverse of this coin, foreshadowed by Clinton’s Balkan adventurism. War is good and just when we have absolutely no interests of our own to defend. Hence, Libya. Hence us actually collaborating with Al Quaeda groups. Hence our not avenging the clear casus belli that was the murder of our ambassador. (A colleague of mine, in pre-history, in Techniques of Translation, when finding casus belli in the middle of an English document translated it as “the case for bells” – ask not for whom the bell tolls.)
And now we’ll go into Syria for the same ill-defined reasons. And probably cack it because this president has the mierdas touch. Everything he touches turns to sh*t.
The problem here is that the left claims to be against war, but they love some of the aspects of war. Remember the whole kindergarten thing? Yep. The aspects they love about war come straight out of there.
They love the uniforms, and having everyone do the same at the same time. They think of war as a sort of synchronized dance. And, you know, war causes support for the president to surge at home, and there’s national unity which they love. (Except they hated it after nine eleven, and a week in they were complaining about all the flags. They also missed that those are the circumstances under which fervor arises spontaneously. When we’ve been attacked. When our president is trying to do good abroad and appear manly? Not so much.)
They long for that imaginary time in WWII when the nation as one sacrificed and worked for victory. If they could they would have a war with rationing “so we’re all equal.” They have the bizarre idea that it was that unity, (and not the fact that most of the world except us was rubble afterwards) that caused the boom afterwards.
Again, war is sort of a synchronized dance crossed with the do-goodism of a particularly blinkered boy-scout troop.
So, is there anything we can do?
No. We’re going to war. That’s that. And it’s going to be run with crazy ROE and it’s going to be bad for everything, from our standing abroad to our interests in the world. Because that’s what’s considered an acceptable war by the vile progs.
So what can we do? We can teach our children well. I know it’s not being done in the schools, but our household at least reads and discusses history books, and has for years. (Starting at levels the kids could digest when very young.)
Note to the kids – and this might involve subsiding your own training – that nations are not moral entities. Nations are entities of self interest. Yeah, okay, the communists dressed the self interest as “liberating” other people. So did Napoleon. But in the end, they invaded other countries, not to overthrow oppressors but because communism in the world stage is like the ancient empires. The only way it can survive is by stealing. It fails to produce even enough to keep people in meager rations. So, like Napoleon, dealing with a devastated France, they make war to survive. The ideology just prettifies it.
I’m not saying the US hasn’t been moral abroad. We can all debate WWI till we’re blue in the face, and yes, it’s quite possible that FDR entered WWII so as to eliminate a rival for world domination – but it’s hard to deny that at least intervention in WWII was benign. The aftermath, including keeping the communists in power and supplied with wheat is something else again. BUT that was one good thing. And there have been other good interventions, yes, including the ones to support allies.
However, the vile progs love to beat up on the fact that we also do things for self interest – like keep dictators in power – as though it were a sin for a nation to look after its own interests.
It’s time to drum back that it isn’t. It’s only a sin if you believe in “the brotherhood of man” something communists (and French revolutionaries) preached as they filled mass graves. A nation is not a moral entity but a grouping for survival. The purpose of war is to ensure that the group survives.
A group that forgets this, doesn’t.
And our children will need to know this basic truth, because what is going on right now will make their survival and the survival of their children difficult enough. They’ll have to wake up.
Let the wakening start now.
Teach your children well.
War is not synchronized dancing. War is dirty, horror-filled and painful to innocents. It should be. And it should be engaged in only when your survival as a nation is at stake (though that often involves going in ahead of the enemy at your door.) And then it should be engaged in with full force, with gusto and with no holds barred.
So it doesn’t have to happen again. Or not with the same people. And so you live, to fight another day.
UPDATE: Different post over at Mad Genius Club.
So, this morning I woke up to a spam email that had a title “Pee like a horse.” Robert who was standing behind me, looking in my medieval history bookcase (yes, he’s taking a STEM degree. NO, I don’t know what he wanted with medieval history. I don’t ask these questions, I just go to his room every month or so and bring back the stuff he forgot to return. Yes, this was in my office, and no, there is no privacy – so if you send me a video of naked cats skating, one of the kids or Dan are likely to see it.) Anyway, where were we? Oh, yes, he looked over my shoulder at the screen at “Pee like a horse” and said “What? On all fours in a field? I suppose I could do that, but I don’t think there are any fields around college.”
To which I said, “Ijit. It’s a prostate health add, which means I’m now on some list as an old male.”
I think I’ve talked about the multiple people I am here before, right? I get adds to increase what I don’t have, to increase what I have [but if they were more than DD – it’s hard as is finding 36 DD, most DDs are forty and above, unless you go really expensive – I’d need a brace for my back], to kill foot fungus (this might be somewhat justified as I try EVERY sort of anti-itch product on the market, because of eczema, of course), to refinance my mortgage, to vacation in exotic places, to look after babies, to choose an old age home etc.
The guys tease me because none of them gets as varied a spam load as I do. And it’s become a joke in the house to see what ads are on the sidebar of my facebook because, mostly I think depending on whom I’ve been pming on FB, it can be anything from bedpans to diapers, from vanity presses to courses to become a Social Worker.
I think part of this is the inability to pin down what I am based on what I look for or what I read.
It’s not just that I’m a writer. I mean, I’m sure there are certain types of writers who only look up one thing or another. I can imagine Agatha Christie with an internet account looking up poisons and the effects of hitting someone on a certain portion of the cranium, and how one recovers from arsenic, say. I can’t imagine her waking up one morning and feeling that what she really, really, really needed to know was how much one could buy a castle in Scotland for, or alternately what type of wheels went on carts in 14th century France, or even “What was the police force in Paris in the time of Louis XIII” (Does anyone know? I haven’t been able to find that, d*mn it, because the one service that seems to have the info is a subscription service for French historians. I don’t mind that it’s in French. The only languages I’ve totally lost are German and Swedish, though weirdly Swedish might come back with a little effort. I can still read French fluently – and speak it, given two days to switch to that track – but I can’t – I really can’t spend $600 to see if it even has what I need. Someday maybe, but today is not that day.)
And she almost for sure wouldn’t lose an entire morning trying to read Space stuff to come up with a plausible FTL.
It’s not just that I write in all those genres. I think I’d be that way even if I weren’t a writer, because I read in all those genres. If it hit me right, I’d read it. And if it raised a question I’d hare up after it.
Call it an insatiable curiosity for the world. (It’s actually a satiable curiosity, if I had, say, three times the life span and no other job. Or maybe not, after all more things will be discovered.)
I remember when reading Friday, when the internet was in its mewling and crawling infancy, that I was very jealous of her net search (which is what it amounted to.) I thought “if I could only have that, I’d be rich.”
Actually now that I have that, it eats my life, because I end up checking up on stray thoughts in the middle of working on something else. It’s kind of like the kid in the candy shop, right? And if I don’t use the penguin, nothing coherent will come out.
What is this all about, you say?
I was talking to a colleague this morning, and he said he and Larry (Correia) have been schooled by the left SEVERAL times that there’s no political bias in Science fiction or in fact in publishing.
Pfui.
Perhaps it is because I choose my friends among those who are like me. When you go haring off in search of this or that stray curious thought, you end up – of course – coming up with STERN opinions on very odd things.
Like, I can go on for hours about panspermia. (No, seriously, I can. And no, seriously, you don’t want to start this. It was the subject of a three month reading spree when I was recovering from pneumonia and couldn’t write.) Or the Habsburgs. Or for that matter the inflationary pressures in Portugal in the seventeenth century.
Inevitably, I come across a friend who has read the same thing and formed the contrary opinion. Sometimes one convinces the other, sometimes we have fun and lengthy battles. And sometimes – sometimes – I retreat from the field before I start calling names and friend and I put that on box of “no one will be convinced.” (This is why I stop theological discussions here, when they get to the point you’re just going neener, neener at each other.)
You would think it was absolutely impossible for two close friends to shout that the other is “evil” because of his beliefs on medieval agriculture. And you’d be wrong. I’ve had this type of argument (I think that one was with Kate) with every one of my friends, at some point. Or avoided having that argument (As in, I narrow my eyes at the screen and go “okay, he thinks that. That’s his right.” And let it be.))
So how is it possible that the majority of fiction has rather improbable uniformity? You should read Dave Freer’s column on that, where he mentions the villain is always white and male and usually a businessman or religious.
PFUI.
The people who made it from slush/through the ranks to regular publication JUST all happened to have the same opinions. Wow. “It just growed that way.”
To believe that you have to believe everyone — even supposedly very creative people — are completely categorizeable, and that you can pick political and other opinions, not ala carte but only from a fixed menu. And that, my friends, is nonsense at least for free people who aren’t completely insane.
The uniformity is even greater if you look at bestsellers, because when publishing was an oligopsony ( A literary lycanthropic oligopsony — say it three times.) it took buy in from your publishers to get into the top ranks. Otherwise you ended up in midlist hell… or if you wrote SF you went with Baen… who was held down by the bookstores enmity, but still managed to produce more field bestsellers and more lasting ones than practically anyone else.
Baen is hated because it shows them that there is rigging in the other houses.
So, what do we do about it? I mean, not everyone writes SF.
Someone posted in comments about a woman who writes mystery for one of the big houses and sighs because she can’t come out as Larry and I did. (And I bet I know which house it is, too!)
Sister – and I mean that – what are you doing? That house (either of the two it could be) is dying anyway, and unless you’re way better at faking it than I ever was, you can’t make a long term career there.
But you don’t want to throw away what you have?
Okay, but look – for years now we weren’t allowed to send things in under closed pen names. Our agents wouldn’t let us. And why not, if not to monitor who we really were and what we really thought? – but the world is wide open. You have indie. Check your contracts. The most important thing is to make sure your agent hasn’t laid claim to EVERYTHING you write, indie or not. If he/she has drop them like a boat anchor.
If your publisher has hair of the dog contracts that don’t permit you to publish/write anything outside them, ignore it. The way you’re going to do it, they’re unlikely to track it, and might drive themselves nuts trying (which is always good.)
Now, pick a pen name. Pick a press name, or a small press to submit to. Either register a dba with your state (some states don’t need this. You just open a dba bank account, so check that first) so you can cash those checks. OR use the name of your husband or your kid or your sister or something (Obviously someone who lives with you and shares your money is best.) Of course, if like me you were blessed with a plethora of family names, you don’t even need that. I can cash checks for Sarah Marques, Sarah de Almeida, and Sarah Hoyt. (It also helps my banker knows us.)
Then – and this is the big effort – write a book FOR YOU every time you write one for the big boys. Come the collapse, you’ll have your own career ready to go. You can then get out of the closet and announce “Marques de Almeida is a pen name and…” And you can publish your books as collaborations and put on the cover “Mary Smith, writing as Jane Michaels.”
Think of it as insurance. Think of it too as mental health help. Because, if you’ve got an outlet, you’ll both stealth better, and you won’t feel so bad about it.
And think of it as going mini-Galt – avoid giving your best to the liberal establishment.
And then, most of all, think of it as driving the establishment crazy. They can no longer control who makes it, and the more of us who make it and who don’t agree with them, the more we shatter their self image of “We’re on top because people who think like us are just smartest.”
Yes, I know writing two books a year is a pain and if you’re on the four books a year houses are putting newbies on, writing eight books a year is murder (try six, truly. It’s doable.)
But the sound of the exploding heads of the dahlings makes it all worth.
This is your job – I won’t say your duty. You know your duties. If you can at all, write for you as well as for the sclerotic oligopsony.
(Sorry for scattered post – not only did that email subject throw me off track, but today is a crazy day. I have a million things to do and only about twelve hours to do them in. Wish me luck.)
No, weirdly this is not about western fiction. It is not – also – about SFWA, though it will tangentially touch on what’s going on there.
Yesterday I was pinged by a fan who told me that – having found my Human Wave essay – he finaly stopped felling guilty because most award winning SF/F leaves him unmoved. “There’s just no there, there. It’s all politically correct pap, the “happy ending” is always human extinction or defeat, there’s nothing to make the soul sing.”
I got to thinking about this – it’s a bad habit, but what can you do – and what I thought about, specifically, was how the second sf/f book I read was almost for sure a “the soviet union is right and America will just decay and fall further behind” book – from what I remember of it. I can no longer remember the title.
Mind you, at that age I wasn’t exactly anti-communist, because I didn’t understand communism, but I was already fairly sure the USA was good and the USSR was bad. (No, this wasn’t a reasoned thought. That came later. But I saw movies from both sides, and I knew which side I liked.) So, why in heavens’ name didn’t that book turn me off sf/f forever? Particularly since the next one was A Canticle for Leibowitz. (Okay, I’m sick. I still love that book.)
And then I realized that though I didn’t like that second book – not as such – it wasn’t bad enough to turn me off, because there was force and hope in it. It was a stupid hope “in the future we’re all communists” but I could roll my eyes at it and go on.
There wasn’t this dyspeptic and invincible hatred of everything that was human, this scorching thirst for nothing.
And then it occurred to me what is wrong with … not all. About half the books being published that conform to the “rightly done” ideals of the establishment (a lot don’t, though – we’ll go into that later.) are desperado-written. They come apart in your mind, because the animating principle is a hatred of humanity or a hatred of life, or a hatred of existence.
There is no vision to hold on to. All the dangerous visions are gone. There is no radical “this will fix it.” It’s more of a rage of “since you destroyed my dream, you can’t have yours either. I hate you, I hate you, I hate you.” (Think teen girls.)
There was to the New Wave in its heyday a sort of “this is the way things are going to be” that no matter how odd the principles propounded (in most cases a hot mess of experimentalism, sexual transgression, communitarism and noble savage myth) made them work. They wanted something. They worked towards something.
Now the least offensive of the conventional books are, if not actively hating of mankind, filled with a vision of Man (though mostly woman) carrying on negative virtues: not being sexist, not being racist, not being– Well, since there’s also a cult of victimhood, they’re usually not very effective, either, but I don’t think that’s intentional.
I think it’s because they’re desperadoes.
I spent about an hour this morning looking for the opposite of “apostates.” Apostates are those who walk away from a religious or political belief, and though they’re often filled with rage, it’s focused rage: focused on what they abandoned and the pretty lies they believed.
They might be unfair. They might be tiresome. They might make you boil with suppressed rage if the goat they’re skewering is yours. But they are usually very bright and strong and well… interesting.
This lot (not just in SFWA but in the world at large) aren’t apostates. If they were apostates, here wouldn’t be young Hegelian clubs in American high schools. There would be no band of “young communists” in SFF. It would be – it should be – as acceptable to label yourself a communist as to label yourself a Nazi.
No – this lot hasn’t abandoned their religion. In fact, they cling to it by trying to create reformed versions that “will work this time, really.”
The problem is, except for the very young, who weren’t alive in the late eighties, I don’t think they believe it. Not really.
You have to put yourself back then, back when people my age and just a little younger grew up. Even those who weren’t communists, expected communism would win. It was logical right? Planned was better than unplanned. If someone made decisions, there would be less waste. And look at the big things government had done. Could individuals have won the long war of the twentieth century?
Then we found out the battlefield is not the same as everyday life, that economy in the industrial age is too complex and chaotic for event he very bright man to control, and that, well, people know their own business best. (there are indications that the economy was too complex and chaotic to control back in rural societies, too, hence the periodic famines. It wasn’t just horrible agricultural technique. Never mind.)
I never bought the vision of the Sov Union was an Earthly paradise of sorts. I never bought it because frankly it looked too “perfect” as packaged in all those Soviet Life magazines. It … I have the sort of personality that goes up to a perfectly painted wall and scratches a little to see what it’s hiding. And then there was Gulag Archipelago. It passed hand to hand like Samizdat (I don’t think it was illegal, though at the time it was illegal to listen to the BBC, so who knows? But we knew we’d get failed if we were caught with it) through my class when I was 14. There were other memoirs of the Soviet Union and for those with ears to hear there were indications not all was polished gold and shining comfort over there.
I suspect it was not the same in the US. I suspect it was not the same because the left had infiltrated all niches that had power over the mind of the young, and because the right was complacent. “They’ve seen Paree, what would they want with Stalingrad?” But there’s always discontent. There was after all the “broken children of WWII” and after. The pursuit of “my actualization” didn’t make for raising balanced children. One thing I noticed in Portugal is that boys from fatherless homes were almost uniformly communist. One actually told me “if this were a communist country they wouldn’t have let my dad leave.” But I suspect there was also “and the government would have taken care of me.”
And then there were the brightest and the best, often the creative best – no, seriously. It’s very hard for us creative types and for all those (eh, most of my friends) who are very good in the realm of the mind but not in the realm of social interaction to realize that, hey, pure mental agility is NOT the only thing that counts for success in life.
One of the things I keep running across in reading about the French revolution is people like Robespierre going “You know, society would be best if it were run by the brightest of us.”
But being good with words and even with abstract concepts, doesn’t mean you can run the world. Heck, it doesn’t mean (she looks around her cluttered desk) you can run your office. And I’m only middling bright. Eventually younger son will need someone to tie his shoes for him and make sure he doesn’t leave the house wearing a shirt three sizes too small because he swiped it from his father’s closet and doesn’t notice sizes are different because math. Also, engineering.
Still the very bright know themselves to be superior (they are, in some areas) and to be ill treated (they’re right there too, though they’re essential for creating/improving industrial society, our society runs on iron age models and really can’t tell the difference between “very smart” and “wears underpants on head.” (often because there’s no real difference.)) This might change, but it will change glacially slow. Not in the lifetimes of my great grand kids.
The best thing to do is to drag the little geniuses into the world and make them understand the virtue of conforming to the extent they can. (Usually it’s not very far, but it might make the difference between a recluse in a trash-filled room and a respected scientists.)
But again, our society is failing at raising kids. Particularly very smart kids. It’s been doing so since the world wars, partly through the “self actualization” movement, and partly because, well… when women join the work force something has to give and by and largely the something has been child rearing.
So there were many brands ready for the burning. And communism was a dazzling flame that told them they could be in charge, that here was a society that valued intellect, and look how well it worked. They always knew the world would fare well in their hands.
Most of the intellectual class and many of the teaching class, and other intellectual workers embraced the ideals of communism, even if they didn’t call it by name. It is my impression that they took things like Gulag Archipelago and said well of course there would be failures, but look – just look – at how we failed every day. We had poor, sick, unemployed. We were a bad society. At least under a planned society, the damage was limited, right?
Then came the fall. And what a fall it was. Even though our newspapers refused to report it, even though it wasn’t treated as it would be, everyone knew. Everyone knew about the shoddy, tawdry, little lives behind the curtain. Everyone knew of the mean compromises, the double thing, the poverty of mind and body. Everyone KNEW.
They knew. They couldn’t avoid knowing. Umberto Ecco for a time more or less unblinking, referred to them as “defrocked.”
In a way he was right. They’d embraced the communist future as one embraces religion. It made their passage through this vale of tears worthwhile, it aggrandized their sufferings, their lack of success. “I’m poor, but I’m working for the great communist future.”
And then it collapsed. Behind the golden throne, there was dirty, ash, and the oldest form of dictatorship of mankind: the hereditary monarchy.
They couldn’t stay defrocked long – particularly the older ones. They had to grab onto something. They did. They grabbed onto “socialism” and “political correctness.”
But both of those are sterile credos. Sweden can be held up as an ideal, but heck they know that it doesn’t translate to a country the size and diversity of ours. And besides, Sweden is starting to show cracks, and they know that. They run to Australia and draw quite the wrong conclusions from the Australian recovery, but the cracks are showing there too. Ten years ago they lectured us endlessly about the EEC, but heck, you know, it never did that well, and if they go on vacation and venture even slightly off the beaten path, they can’t avoid knowing the truth. It’s shabby. It’s drab. It’s the Soviet Union with a softer face. Communism in installment plans. And the news from the PIIGS are grim.
Where can they run? What can they do?
When I was researching the US Civil War (I will still eventually write that book of alien invasion in the civil war, yes – it’s just… time.) I came across desperadoes. The original ones, before the name came to apply to any western evil-doer.
They were called desperadoes for a reason. They were desperate. If the book described them accurately, men who fought for the South and came back in utter defeat to find themselves dispossessed, their families gone, and themselves disenfranchised for their lifetime, couldn’t do anything. There was nothing to build. Nothing to believe in. There was only the certainty their dream had been defeated and they could do NOTHING constructive.
But Ah, they could destroy. They could pillage, rob, rape, and have fun while doing it.
Desperadoes.
In literature, there are those who cling to the political correctness, the fixing of wrongs that no one alive is responsible for. Let’s be happy for that. They’re empty and often silly – and often the wrongs they want to correct are those their ancestors suffered, and so to Mary-Sue comfort themselves in retrospect – but it’s not burning hatred of humanity.
That’s the ones who want all humanity to die, who write – time and again – humanity ultimately defeated by MORE MORAL aliens. Because if the world isn’t going to be run by their kind, if the communism they dreamed of isn’t going to come, world without end, and bring happiness to all, then they want to see the world burn.
This is bad enough in the arts – frankly, anything that produces Avatar or even the Matrix, where humans are used as an energy source (pfui) is very bad indeed – but it’s worse in government. We’re now being governed by desperadoes. They want to take our system apart, not because they have something that works better but because “if I can’t have my system, I’ll break yours.”
This is what’s behind Obamacare. It’s not some cunning plan. They can’t avoid knowing (well the peons can, but not the people at the top) that single payer doesn’t work well anywhere and barely works in some areas, and even there is decaying. They aren’t trying to push us towards anything – except destruction.
They’ll be happy if Obamacare destroys our system, and it’s a bonus for destroying our economy too. Because they can’t have what they wanted and so we can’t either. The peons, the people with no education, and even those of us who are educated, but clearly stupid (because we don’t believe as they do) CAN’T be vindicated. It can’t be. Our future must be burned, as theirs was.
They’re desperadoes. And instead of roaming the Western part of the country with two six shooters and rage in their hearts, they have power.
But desperadoes can’t build. And they can’t win. They know they can’t win, which is why they’re desperadoes. It’s all pain and black rage. And what they’re teaching the kids is bland pap. It won’t hold. Not when life goes pear shaped. Not when the destruction they’re trying to bring on occurs.
Build under, build around, create networks, learn specialties. When it all falls, we can build again.
And we must be ready.
So, what is the state of the writer and this writer’s business these days?
Well, I’m still grossly derelict in selling the little money-makers. I have had my copyrights back since March, but it’s taken time to get the books back up in new editions. Partly this is because this business has been very much a one-woman show. I write, I send out, I do everything but the books because husband found early on I’m really bad at both keeping track of what’s due and not transposing digits in the accounting. When time comes to pay taxes, it matters rather whether a payment was 135 or 531. So he pulled that away from me as soon as my earnings went over $500 a year.
Would you believe that was only 12 years ago? And that for most of the first five years I made 3 to 5k a year? Stupid career this, if you need to survive. Of course, that’s the other part of this: I took on all sorts of additional duties, because for most of our married life, I was making next to nothing (and often nothing, though the first year I made anything (19 years ago) I made $50. We went out and had pizza. We were so excited.
What I mean is, because we were living on one income and most of our friends were on two, and because I appreciated Dan’s putting his own art (composing, music, writing – like I do drawing and painting and writing) on hold so I could pursue mine with a roof over head and three meals a day, I viewed it as my duty to bridge that gap.
We were recently doing financials for the last 20 years (too long a story to tell) and our sons who were part of it of necessity were shocked on how little we actually lived on most of that time, because they know what their friends’ parents made. I had to explain “Well, think about it, they were taking trips to Europe for weeks every year, and we were taking three days in Denver, at Embassy Suites, because it was cheaper than two rooms, and gaming the free breakfast so we didn’t need to have lunch, and having dinner at Pete’s Kitchen, and going to Lakeside Amusement park instead of Elitch Gardens.” And the kids blinked and said “But that never felt deprived. It felt QUIRKY. I mean, we were eccentric, sure, not poor.” Of course we were poor too, but no we didn’t feel it, because as the kids put it “we had so much fun.”
But part of that coping – beyond vacation, and even to afford those vacations – was that I did a lot behind the scenes. When we found a decent ARC I stopped making clothes (I actually enjoy it, but it took a lot of time) but I still reupholstered every sofa we had until the last two sets (and the last two sets were bought used but in good condition. The last but one perished by cat – sigh.)
I got furniture free or very cheap and refinished/rehabilitated. I painted our own walls. I cooked our own food from scratch, often in batch jobs and froze when there was a difficult scheduling time ahead. We have laid carpet, built porches, seeded lawns, planned gardens (which is what upsets me about our current house. NOTHING but weeds grows there. I’m going to try mint.) The house before this one was bought in need of major rehabilitation, which I mostly did myself, painstakingly. (This one needs some, if I can find time, but it’s not in real trouble.)
The kids saw none of this. It was just what mom did (and they helped with as they got older.) It never occurred to them part of the reason we lived like this and not like their friends whose moms never sewed a curtain or hemmed a pair of pants was not because mom was quirky but because mom was poor. They naturally assumed our way was better. (In many things it is. We have a tendency to gain weight on both sides of this family and I shudder to think what the kids would be like if we’d fed them on fast food and never asked them to lift a finger.)
But that’s part of it, in time this because “the way we live” even for me. There are things I do because I’ve done them that way for thirty years.
Right now it’s interfering with my work –which does pay – because I have clue zero how to delegate. For instance #1 son cooks – better than I – and #2 is willing to learn. BUT I keep forgetting when they say “Give me two days a week to cook and clean.” To do just that. Because it’s been my job so long.
Same with laundry. I’ll hold on to ironing, thank you, partly because I’m in love with my industrial steam iron (shuddup. You have your kinks, I have mine) partly because that’s what I do while watching TV. BUT I should be delegating laundry, and they’re willing. I just keep FORGETTING to say “Let’s go downstairs and I’ll teach you how to separate out a load and the settings.”
(I don’t think I can get any of the guys to do the yard. Dan keeps muttering about buying Astroturf. I don’t blame them. It’s like heartbreak yard. One of these weekends I need to get one of them to help me build raised beds, plant those with bulbs next spring, and see if some form of creeping mint will do for the front beds.)
Anyway, we’ve got far afield. Sorry. My mind is going in all directions this morning – and I woke up very late – but part of the issue is that my habit of not delegating because we couldn’t has become ingrained. I don’t think of it even for writing.
I had a major breakthrough with contracting out editing, and I’ll do the same for putting it in create space, having found someone who will do it for me. And I have a cover being made, and will contract out another probably this week. BUT it took me months to even be able to let go to that level where I could say “I can let someone else do this.”
It took that long because it’s an habit of mind of and things established over years that MUST be broken, and that’s as hard for individuals as for society.
So… I’ve been remiss and my little whores novels haven’t been walking the literary streets selling their sassy selves, which means that I’m making less money than I should be, which – frankly – with the kids in college at the same time, is stupid and possibly criminal.
Among other things I don’t have anything in Kobo or Apple, except through NRP. And that needs to happen.
Also for things like No Will But His All Romance will need to happen.
I also must redo the early, fairly appalling covers.
Then there is the stuff I must or should write. Under MUST is of course the stuff contracted to Baen which is Through Fire this month – I might extend into first week of September, but I hope not – the second book of the Earth revolution, and then Darkship Revenge in December. But if I can, I’d like to wedge Bowl of Red between them – the next shifter book – because they’re bringing out an omnibus of the first two shifters and we should pound while the iron is hot.
But as Pam Uphoff pointed out, I need to get used to thinking of my indie stuff as “Must” too. Witchfinder is almost ready to go to betas (I now decided to obsess over “did I foreshadow enough?” At this point foreshadowing is more or less automatic, but this doing a chapter a week thing can bollix it.) And then I need three days to finish Shadow Gods (and as soon as I get going on that, I will commission cover for it.) That’s YA fantasy. There’s also another waiting in the wings which is YA SF. And I have promised a new one of the Musketeer Mysteries in December.
Then there’s stuff I’d LIKE to do, like the rest of the bios for Henry VIII’s queens. This is good to do because they’re perennial sellers, no matter who writes them, and because they would help support No Will But His, one of my reversals. I wrote Plain Jane in three days, so it should be possible, right?
And there are others, of course. The guys and I were talking about each of us taking one of the Bennet girls and writing their post P & P story – shorttish novel. (I want Lydia.)
And there’s my half finished stuff that the earstwhile agent wouldn’t send out.
The question is: HOW do I do all that.
I’ve been talking to Kevin Anderson (yes, he IS a bad influence) and I’ve isolated three factors that should allow me to increase production:
1- Get healthy. This involves not just reducing stress, but getting the hvac fixed, which hopefully happens this September. (I’ll call them and remind them next week that I’m waiting on a part.)
2- Figure out everything I can offload, including editing, illustration, etc – this is harder than it seems because until stuff IS out and earning, I have to do all this on a shoe string budget. Ditto for household work. Until the boys move out, household work will eat some amount of time, the trick is to minimize how much.
3- Systematize (totally a word, shut up – actually it is, it’s just an abomination) my production. What this means is that you can train your mind to do certain tasks at a certain time. So, schedule things in at this time or that. This is very hard to do because in this business there’s always snags and emergencies. But if I set myself into doing creative writing mornings, research for next book afternoons, publishing on Saturdays, I think life will be easier.
The snag with that last, of course, is scheduling in off time, which must be done.
How fast could I write? I don’t know.
Look I can and have written books in three days or two weeks. The issue was the days/weeks/months of silence in between.
How many of those silences were caused by knowing what I was writing would never be sent out, let alone sell? How many were caused by knowing that the babies would just be dropped down the volcano? And how many were the natural result of “refilling” the well?
I don’t know. Traditional publishing was such a warm bucket of fail that it’s hard to distinguish what Dave Freer calls “Battle fatigue” from the necessary breaks of a creative mind between projects.
What I mean is, there are things all of us in publishing have accepted as “natural” that are no more natural than my economizing housekeeping ways – but just the way things were, and what we got used to.
Kevin tells me he’s now at a place that he’s thinking “Why not a book a month?”
I’m not there yet, but I can see being there, maybe in two years, when the boys are out of the house (hopefully, barring disaster) and I can afford (if the indie earns) to pay someone to come clean and do the boxes twice a week and if I’ve managed to create new habits of work.
So, at fifty, I’m embarking on an adventure where everything is new. This is good. Wouldn’t want to live in boring times. (Oh, wouldn’t I ever!)
Fortunately on the way there, I have a lot of half-finished/almost finished/needs rewriting stuff like Shadow Gods. And I am now (WHY? WHY? WHY?) doing two novels at a chapter a week, and that will also feed it.
First – very first goal, though is distressing and getting healthy. (Yes, a program of exercise is part of this. The challenge is always winter because I HATE cold.)
To that end this weekend has been a success. In the writing end… — waggles hand – only so so. This weekend was plagued with equipment failure TM including Dan’s laptop having the megrims, so it made it hard to get stuff done.
But I am much less stressed, and hopefully the state of the writer will progress… And there will be more stuff up for you to buy.
There will be a new chapter of Elf’s Blood in an hour or so up at MGC.
It is a truth universally acknowledged that it is a bad thing – a very bad thing – to make Sarah berserk out over breakfast, which is why most sentient species, some invertebrates and some single-cell life forms have learned to avoid it.
No, this doesn’t mean Dan and the boys are in trouble. No, that’s fine. What happens is this – after week from hell, I was running around with a headache so bad I could barely think through it. In case it wasn’t obvious from the rate of typo to word in the last few posts, I also could barely write through it.
As happens we found a hotel that met our low-price-to-low-flea rate and Dan and I ran away so I could get work done on the overdue Baen novel. (It is unique in writers that our vacations involve the chance to write MORE. Shouldn’t be a great shock, though. Our “let’s go out to dinner” nights involved “I need to work out a novel plot.)
This was particularly needed because on top of the situation with our friend Alan – who should go home from the hospital today and start a new course of chemotherapy, so that’s good news – my kids are having beginning of school year issues. Since it is written (I don’t know where, but if I ever find out, I’m setting fire to it) that nothing the Hoyts do can be easy or simple, they’re both adding second majors and weird ones at that, and giving the bureaucracy hissy fits. This for some reason causes them to run into my office at the rate of a kid every five minutes, to p*ss and moan. So, the office gets impossible to work in (also smelly. The cats hate competition) and I lost two entire days to this. Which also added to my blazing stress headache.
So we ran away for three days and two nights to “get writing done.” So far so good, right?
Yeah. Except that breakfast is included in the room special promo sale. Which is why we stayed here. Have breakfast latish and you don’t need lunch, so that’s one meal less to pay for. (Hey, we’re writers. We’re cheap. Also, largely poor, our days of being rich beyond the dreams of average – sic – having crashed at the same time the towers turned to rubble and the tech boom collapsed.)
So we went down to breakfast.
Just when you thought it was safe to go down to breakfast…
We were in a little isolated table but separated by a curtain from a large group table. I heard the words “They can’t expect Obama to fix everything with one measure. I mean, things were so bad it doesn’t have a quick solution,” and I told Dan “Right then, I’m going to order an omelet, before I start ranting.”
When my calmer half said “I don’t know. I’m kind of hoping they make you start ranting.”
So I went down to get the omelet, and I came back and sat down. The large group of unmitigated stupid seemed to be talking lower – at least. If I said the multiplication tables backward in my head, I could tune out the occasional break through sentence like “What we need is more business regulation.”
And then, zero to nothing, I heard something, and I started shaking – painful body-long shakes – trying to suppress the berserker.
The phrase was “the problem is we have too many liberties in this country.” Like that. Like that, I found I was putting my head through the curtain and saying “If you discuss politics in public, I’m going to intervene.”
I want to point out that when I’m fighting the berserker, my voice gets really weird, and my eyes get this bizarre “one step over the line and you’re dead, Mister.”
I’ve been known to make postal workers run away (true) and airline employees bend over backward to give me anything I want, while I’m being perfectly polite and suppressing the berserker.
But these people were wrapped in an invincible mantel of stupidity. They said – I swear to Bob – “What? This is a public space, we can talk about anything we want.”
I said “Absolutely. And I can correct you anyway I want.”
At that point the better half who is a New England gentleman intervened. “Yes, it’s a public space,” he said. “And we’d like to have breakfast without your politics intruding on it. Can you keep it down, please? Particularly if you insist on being ill informed.” (When calmer half feels the need to put in the knife, imagine what my excitable self was feeling.)
And so I downed as much warm coffee as I could, because if you can’t find alcohol, warm liquids will help, and eventually the shakes subsided.
Too many liberties…
There are three things to take from this encounter: first, it is polite and proper, if sharing a public space with other sentient beings, to try not to say anything offensive out loud. I tend to discuss the latest scientific developments, a novel I just read, anything innocuous. I’ve gone to dinner with PJM colleagues and not discussed politics loud enough for the other tables to hear – and shut up when the waitress approached.
Look, guys, there was a reason that Englishmen who had servants said “not in front of the help” – it wasn’t just to avoid gossip. It was also to avoid making another human being, not in a position to retaliate, uncomfortable.
Good manners and all that.
So, if you have politics to discuss, keep your voice down or save it to your room. UNLESS you’re sure that the entire room is taken up with your coreligionists.
Another thing is that these people looked fairly normal. I didn’t see any badges of the little Satanists for Stalin or anything of the kind. This scares me beyond belief and I’m trying not to be depressed. They really think Obama is fixing “this mess.” I… Look, go over to the Zero Hedge guys… just read this.
A tiny excerpt:
#1 When Barack Obama entered the White House, 60.6 percent of working age Americans had a job. Today, only 58.7 percent of working age Americans have a job.
#2 Since Obama has been president, seven out of every eight jobs that have been “created” in the U.S. economy have been part-time jobs.
#3 The number of full-time workers in the United States is still nearly 6 million below the old record that was set back in 2007.
#4 It is hard to believe, but an astounding 53 percent of all American workers now make less than $30,000 a year.
#5 40 percent of all workers in the United States actually make less than what a full-time minimum wage worker made back in 1968.
#6 When the Obama era began, the average duration of unemployment in this country was 19.8 weeks. Today, it is 36.6 weeks.
#7 During the first four years of Obama, the number of Americans “not in the labor force” soared by an astounding 8,332,000. That far exceeds any previous four year total.
There is more. Oh, yes, there are 33 of these facts. But the mainstream media won’t report it, and those who are dumb beyond the dreams of average swallow it, hook, line and sinker. And what can we do? I’m serious. WHAT can we do? This is sort of like before the French Revolution when people demanded Necker be returned to power because when he was borrowing and spending everyone was doing so well. There are no words. To paraphrase Heinlein, stupidity is the only capital crime. The punishment is always death. Unfortunately when it’s public stupidity, the death often follows on those who weren’t stupid.
Those who don’t know history are doomed to repeat it and take the rest of us along for the ride.
The third point though…
There are few things you can say that are so HEINOUS that they send me into automatic “Must suppress the berserker” mode. Look, guys I’ve got through entire dinners with communists without getting there, and without looking speculatively at the silverware and considering how to kill someone with a fork. (Okay, I lie about the second one, but all the same. Thoughts are, thank you, private, and my hobbies are my own.)
But that “we have too many liberties” got under my shield and went directly to the “attack” and immediately as well to the “you can’t go berserk in a public space. No, really.”
How can anyone think we have too many liberties?
Oh, I know. They think that because they believe in the myth of the “superior man” who will take care of them. The man on the white horse who knows better than everyone, and who can run everything so that no one is ever afraid or poor or sick or marginalized.
In other words, they dream of the ideal childhood.
The rest of us know that never in the history of the world, not even the calmest, has there been a time when a leader could guarantee safety, health and contentment to everyone. There will always be poor, unloved, suffering people. You can’t help that.
You behave in a way you help those around you and you try not to be a burden, but even then at times that will fail.
Those of us who are religious believe a time will come when we will live like that, in perfect harmony and contentment with a superior being watching over us.
But last time I looked, neither king, premier, president, emperor or satrap had the power to look into the hearts and minds and judge everyone perfectly. And no, the NSA spying ain’t it. And none of the above were the creators of the universe.
They are all, in fact, fallible men, usually fallible men attracted to power over others, who want to run you not for your own good but for their own internal satisfaction. And since people who crave this sort of power tend to be more broken than writers, their internal satisfaction might be something that even they don’t understand.
There is no man on a white horse. There is, always, an old trickster, coming to town and promising eternal peace. If you look carefully, you can see the horse is a mule that has been painted white. And the man is just using the same old promises the human brain is wired to crave, but what he wants is quite different. And even if he truly believes what he says, he can’t deliver. He’s just a man. He can’t know what each individual wants and needs. Only each of you can know what he wants and needs. And sometimes not even that.
Clearly the people on the next table would like to believe in the man on the painted mule. I would too. The idea someone will look after you perfectly is SO appealing. But I’m grown up. You can’t go back to kindergarten. And even my kindergarten teacher had no clue how to handle me.
I’ll handle myself, thank you. Even to the point of making sure I don’t berserk out at the breakfast table. It can be done. It’s just not easy, or comforting or pretty.
It’s a horrible way to live. Except for every other one. I’ll keep my liberties, thank you. You want to give yours up, I can give you a list of destinations willing to oblige you. It starts with Cuba.
No kings, no queens, no lords, no ladies. We won’t be fooled again.
For previous chapters, click here
*This is the new free novel I’m posting here a chapter at a time. This is pre-first-draft, as it comes out. It is a sequel to Witchfinder which will soon be taken down (once edited) and put for sale on Amazon (It’s half done. My wretched health this year delayed everything. I hope to finish MY edits and cut and add this weekend — I almost made it last weekend — at which point it will take another two weeks at the editor). Meanwhile, if you donate $6 or more, I’ll get you a copy of Rogue Magic, once finished and edited, in your favored ebook format. Of course, if you’re already subscribing to the blog at a level at which you get whichever books come out that year, you don’t need to worry. *
The Earl In The Ointment
Jonathan Blythe, Earl of Savage,
Not only was I not nearly drunk enough, but my demmed brain was trying to work, despite the alcohol I’d ingested. The thing in my pocket had started glowing and tugging me in a specific direction, and after a long, stumbling walk, I found myself in front of Seraphim’s offices.
The worst part was that a cold breeze, from the river, had almost completely cleared my head by then.
Thoughts were assembling themselves, painfully, slowly, against the remnants of magic glamour, against the confusion of the gin.
It went something like this,
“Strap me, when have I found Seraphim to be on the wrong side of things?”
“And if he’s not, why am I trying to fool him.”
This was followed by, my own mind trying to be reasonable, something it had never been very good at, and which the encounter with fairyland’s king hadn’t helped,
“Gabriel Penn says his brother is too honorable for what needs to be done.”
This was not a good enough comeback and my sarcastic side was ready to pounce, “Is he now? The same Seraphim Ainsling who eloped with the Princess Royale on the eve of her marrying a foreign prince, and who presented king and court with a consummated marriage is too honorable for what needs to be done? Damme, Jon. How many infants will you have to throttle and how many maidens rape?”
This almost sobered me up completely, and the thought wouldn’t leave my mind. What I mean is, well, Seraphim is honorable, I suppose, in comparison to me, but then so are most creatures, including some cut purses. What I mean is, I’m my father’s son, not honorable at all, or dear Papa would still be alive and causing trouble in the world for the sake of his purse.
But the thing is, the thing is, Seraphim is the son of his father, too, the old soot we knew as Old Darkwater, and who, frankly, wasn’t that far off my father’s morals, only in different ways. You’d be safe around him for loyalty, and you’d probably come away better off for money because he was no good at holding on to his, but strap me if you could trust him with your peculiar, or your monkey for that matter. Not that I blamed him exactly. I’d never tried bestiality – had even less interest in it than in boys, so it hardly seemed worth the trouble – but Freddie had once told me that—
I brought my reeling thoughts back in order. The thing was that Seraphim was not a dead bore, either. When he came across me in Eton and I was up to some jolly prank, he never told. He might pull me aside and beat the startch out of me if he thought what I was doing would hurt others, but most of the time he’d just roll his eyes and say “you’re going to come home weeping from that one, Jon.” And he wouldn’t tell anyone, not even afterwards, when the cockatoo had been found in the master’s umbrella. Which goes to show you. He wasn’t a tell tale either.
And if something were right to do, if there were really kidnapped warrior maidens, if I really had to find them to keep the world of myth away, if– If any of that was true, then Seraphim would listen and help. There was no need to go behind his back. And it might be very ill advised. Because Seraphim… what I mean is, he’s a right one.
I became aware too, that I was far more befuddled than the blue ruin I’d drunk would account for. Which meant that Gabriel Penn – or Night Arrow, or whatever he was just now – had given me a whopping shot of magic to confuse me.
Question, why confuse the senses of someone you just enlisted as an helper?
Answer, You’d only do that if you thought the fully awake man would discover something you didn’t want him to know. And the shot of believe-me and I-am-right magic he’d given me, meant the truth was either right in front of my eyes, or truly heinous, and definitely not what his elf majesty had told me.
Which meant…
Which meant my instinct to get drunk had been right. There’s only one thing against that kind of spell and it is to tilt yourself off your magical axis enough it loses its grip. Alcohol will do it. So will a good petit-mort but I hardly had the time for that. Besides I was used to being drunk. During the last year of Papa’s plot, as I caught hints of what it was, I’d been drunk all the time, at least at a low level, just to keep myself from jabbering with fear.
It also meant I should trust my instincts. Jonathan Blythe, himself, might not be very smart. None of my masters thought so, at lest. And as for the Earl of Savage, I wouldn’t give two nubbins for the blighter. I’d known his predecessor. But the instinct of the inner Jon, the creature who’d got me out of scrapes more often than not, was, if not infallible, at least pretty close to it.
So the inner Jon said trust Seraphim and I’d trust Seraphim. It was as well the magical device was pulling me that way, anyway.
I walked up to the sentinels, tipped my hat, “I need to see Seraphim,” I said, purposely not calling him His Grace or The Witchfinder, to let them know I was an old and valued acquaintance. Damme, my brother in law who was his brother out-of-law had married his ex-fiance who was my late sister. What I mean is, his half-brother’s lover was raising my nephew who was his own half brother. That made us relatives, I think. Though the coils of connection would make a village gossip’s head hurt.
They took a moment to recover from the familiarity, and by then I was hallway into the entrance room. One of the guards ran after me, “Sir, Milord! His Grace is in conference – he said not to be disturbed!”
“Trust me, he needs to see me,” I said, and smiled, my best smile, which seemed to confuse him. Possibly because I never learned a respectable way to smile.
“Milord!” he said, but I was already ahead of him and knocking on the door to the office proper.”
From inside came Seraphim’s voice, “Who knocks?” I had the impression of a hastily suppressed babble of voices at the knock, but couldn’t be sure.
“Savage,” I said, which it occurred to me if we hadn’t been thrown together so much since Papa’s demise might be misinterpreted.
“Come,” Seraphim answered from within.
The gadget in my pocket was pounding against my high and felt hot.
The guard retreated muttering, “First Lord Michael, now this. As well hang a curtain.”
I opened the door. And stopped, in sheer shock. Because you see, in the office was my beautiful unconue, or to put it another way – since I was also the despair of my French masters – that beautiful piece of ginger nonsense I’d met when fairyland met Avalon and who’d helped me fight off demons and then disappeared without a trace. Except from my heart.
She was wearing a rather tight on the bodice … looked like a ballgown. Peach. Or pink. And definitely mouth watering, even if an odd choice for a ginger.
And she was between two guards. And Seraphim was half standing out of his chair. And his brother stood nearby.
I had a second, to take in the entire tableau, and then Miss whatever her name was, dove towards me, and the guards restrained her just in time.
But she screamed, “Oh, please. He has a magical bomb in his pocket. If you won’t let me do it, you defuse it. Or we all die in seconds.”
So, yesterday, while cruising Instapundit in the five minutes between penguins (I use a penguin timer instead of a tomato for the Pomodoro Technique. Deal.) I came across a thing where fast food workers were threatening to strike.
So I sashayed over to the link. (Part of the reason I need the discipline of Pomodoro is that I’m really, really (REALLY) bad at not getting distracted by news articles.)
Someone here – I think it was Rick – had asked me to write about the controversy over a living wage. I’ve avoided it because every time I state economic facts (remember, there’s a reason they call economics the dismal science) some lefty blogger links me saying I want poor people to die or some similar excreta. For instance, the post called “If you don’t work you die” – which applies to society as a whole, i.e. a society that doesn’t produce enough to support itself will die out – got some left chickie (might have been male, I didn’t check. Was still a chickie.) ranting how I should have been a Nazi prison guard.
But this article finally got me to tackling the whole “living wage” controversy, because the article itself and the interviews with the people are so full of unmitigated fail that… well…
Let’s start by stating my goal: I would like everyone to make a living wage working at whatever they want to or are best at. I’d like it to start with me, frankly, because thought I’m doing all right, if you parse out my hours weekends and evenings and all I’m making far less than that. But of course, I have a hope of escape, or at least a hope of supporting myself from all this hard work in my old age, when work slows down. (I have no illusions I’ll ever be able to retire.) And I do realize fast-food and low level retail workers can’t. And I wish they could from the bottom of my heart. But—
But economics is a science, which means it’s something that studies nature to discover its laws. This means our laws cannot change nature. You can’t legislate economics, any more than you can legislate the weather. For instance, I would love it for it to rain only at night because then when we go anywhere during the day it would always be sunny. Also, could we get snow to melt after a few hours of looking scenic? I hate walking in subzero weather. And so many elderly die from extremes in weather. We should make the temperature 62 degrees year around. Think how much we’d save on fuel, too. Why wouldn’t you do that? What do you have against the elderly and the poor.
Because it doesn’t work. Because the government in DC can pass all the laws it wants, but the weather still will do exactly what it will do.
Now imagine that the government could affect the weather in a limited way. Say, shave off the hardest cold and the worst heat. Wouldn’t that be great?
No. Pray they never do. Why? Because while it might produce the “desired” result in a limited way, in a limited area, over time it will cause much more damage in other places. Because the weather system is interconnected, dependent on myriad factors some of which we don’t know yet, and if you push one way to make it the way you want, you’re going to cause disaster elsewhere. And if you’re callous enough not to care what happens elsewhere, yet the disaster will eventually come around to you, too.
And that’s sort of what the living wage is like. The article plays fast and lose with statististics, when it says most of these people are neither teenagers nor part timers. To quote what a friend told me “I love the abuse of statistics. “The EPI says that roughly eight out of 10 workers in the country earning minimum wage are 20 or older and that half of them work 40 hours a week” followed by “It is clear that the bulk of minimum-wage workers are mid- or full-time adult employees, not teenagers or part-timers”. Well if 8/10 are 20 or older and half do NOT work 40 hours, AT LEAST 4/10 or 40% are, in fact, “part-timers”. Since the other 2/10 are under 20, that means that 60% are teenagers or part-timers. Um, that IS the “bulk”. (These calculations are not mine, but from a friend, but they seem accurate to me.
But let’s leave that aside – there are reasons teenagers might be paid a living wage – reasons teenagers might need a living wage. My mom got married at eighteen and was technically a teenager. Only a crazy society considers “teen pregnancy” a problem, when it’s been the norm throughout history. And if teens can be parents, they “should” have a living wage, right? Besides, a lot of the part timers probably want to be full timers.
The problem here, the problem with this article, the problem with the whole controversy over a living wage is that it mixes ethics and science. The two never mix. You can’t question the morality of the formula H2O. You can’t ask if it would be a more balanced world if it were H2O2. You can’t really say “Should humans have tails?” (Well, you could, but then you’d be my older child.) Or “Is it fair that humans have opposable thumbs when most species don’t?” – it is what it is.
Economics is what it is. We can discuss the ethics of it, of course. Older son, in his bio major, studied ethics. But he studied them as a separate discipline, NOT AS BIOLOGY.
Meanwhile, younger son, whose engineering major requires a hefty dose of Business classes had to take an economics course where the professor seemed to think he was teaching Sunday school. It was all about what is more moral, and what is better for the community. Oh, please! Do have Ethics of Business Practices (not getting in bed with government to create a virtual monopoly would be something to teach the kids – because it’s bad for the economy and the community. Curiously, this was not something ever discussed in this very confused class. Go figure.) BUT don’t call them “basic economics.” Basic economics are matters of investment and profit, of marketing and selling.
This is because people get confused. You find some of the confusion in the article. They interview a Ms. Dukes who makes 8.65 and rarely is given forty hours a week, and she says she’s striking for a living wage and full time, because there are no other jobs, and she can’t live from this.
Sigh.
I’m fully willing to believe she can’t live from that. It takes one heck of a juggling act. (I know. We’ve gone through periods of doing just that.) However, if she is supporting children on that, she qualifies for several government subsidies, ranging from earned income credit, to children support subsidies. (We didn’t because our situation was temporary.) So, her income will be more than that.
But let’s say she’d prefer to get off the dole and support herself, a noble and worthy goal. I sympathize with her. I understand her issues. But striking will not achieve her goal. Not only if it’s massive and widespread.
It’s more likely to get her replaced with a robot.
This is not because as her colleague Mr. Wise puts it upward on the article, “Executives make millions of dollars,” and aren’t sharing – or something – his point is confused beyond being upset at the idea that people – other people – make a great deal of money and he’s barely surviving.
It’s easy to go on about the obscene profits of executives. In fact, I think they perhaps should show some common decorum and not flaunt it – but the top of any profession pays like that, and the top of entertainment and sports often pays better.
I resent obscenely paid executives, who make enough to buy a Paraguay or two (ah!) only when they do so by getting in bed with the government and making life harder for the rest of us, including preventing competitors from rising up. BUT even I confess that sometimes getting in bed with the government is necessary to allow your business to survive.
If people insist on electing economic fascists, then you have to work with economic fascists.
And as for ostentatiousness, a) we’re Americans. Our top of the heap is SUPPOSED to be loud, ostentatious and vulgar. At least according to Europeans. And that’s just our GOOD side. B) There are people who crave that sort of thing. The wisdom of capitalism (if such thing can be spoken of, since it’s not in any way a planned system, at least not when it works right) is to allow them to satisfy it cleanly in business and not by force in politics. And, in a system that’s working well, their thirst for much more than they can consume redounds to the benefit of others by growing businesses and industries.
Which bring us to Ms. Dukes and Mr. Wise and their horrible situation. I’m the first to admit their situation is horrible. I’ve been stuck making far less than minimum wage but unable to quit for over ten years, and let me tell you, it does eat your soul. Even if what you’re working at – as I am – is something you love to begin with. Now I feel better because Indie provides hope of reward commensurate to my effort. (Only hope for now.) BUT to be stuck working less than minimum wage at a job you dislike but can’t quit? Year after year after year? Sweet Lord, it would eat you from the inside out.
And I do realize neither of them is probably a graduate of economics. Mind, I’m not putting them down. They’re right when they say people can’t find other jobs. It’s that bad out there. We know someone who used to work in IT who was last seen as a fry cook at Dennys. Assuming that everyone stuck at a low-level job is a dummy or uneducated is one of the things I hate about liberals. A lot of Mensans work minimum wage jobs. It’s the lack of social skills.
But even if either of them took economics in college, it was likely to have been the chimera of ethoeconomics and not science.
What they could figure out, with pencil and paper, and even if they’re as digit dyslexic as I am, is that let’s say the top executives of MacDonalds make ten million a piece and there are three of them.
I don’t know how many MacDonalds there throughout the land – but I’m going to estimate a million for ease of handling. Our little town has at least ten, and the little mountain village I used to live in boasted one, so I suspect if anything I’m underestimating.
Let’s say that all of the MacDonald’s top execs DONATED their entire wages. They’re all probably rich toffs, right, and don’t need to get any more money, right? So they donated all thirty million. Which, distributed through all the franchises would give each… $30 That allows them to give three and a half extra hours to ONE of their workers at the current pay.
But let’s raise that hypothetical executive pay to 300 million (not unusual these days) and let’s say they donated it whole. Each MacDonald’s gets… $300. So one of the half time employees can now become full time… for a week. Even if MacDonald’s has 100 executives at that obscene pay level… one might be able to become full time for a year — ONE employee per franchise.
But let’s go further. I’m sure MacDonald’s has a ton of investors, and let’s say that these investors profits are all donated back, instead of being disbursed. They MIGHT – might, although there’s other considerations such as health care being mandated after 40 hours – be able to take their entire force full time. Maybe. Or give them each a $2 raise per hour. (But probably not both.)
However, then the investors with withhold investment and run away. The company would go into bankruptcy and, like Twinkies, go out of business. After a glorious month or so, there would be fewer jobs and Mr. Wise and Ms Dukes would be out on the street.
But wait, there’s more – because the above still confuses economics and ethics. WHY should the executives/investors give all their profits to the employees?
Because, of course, the employees need it. They have families to support.
Yes, but…
Why are the employees HIRED in the first place? What is the work they do called? No, not wage slavery. It’s called “a job.” They’re hired because there’s a job to do.
Let’s say that tomorrow there was enough money from investments or donations or government support to take all of them full time. WHAT WOULD THEY BE DOING?
These are NOT salaried workers. I know tons of people who are doing two or three jobs in addition to their own and not paid for them because they’re salaried. (Pretty much everyone who still has a job is doing this these days.) BUT these are hourly workers.
If a store took half of its part-timers full time, it would run out of stuff for them to do. It would have to lay off some of the other part-timers or full timers. Who then would have no job at all. That’s just what it is.
And as for paying better per hour – yes, the executives make obscene salaries and bonuses – but that’s because there are economies of scale. When you add up millions of franchises, you end up with a lot at the top. It’s kind of like the whole “if you took a penny from everyone’s bank account you’d be rich beyond the dreams of avarice, but the theft wouldn’t be noticed.” Economies of scale. The same applies to investors who, btw, in America are not normally mustache twirling, top-hat wearing villains, but pension funds. If you take the profit off investment, a lot of grandmas will end up destitute.
But most fast foods are franchises and, from what I understand from people I’ve known who’ve owned these, they work on a razor thin margin. The only way to raise wages is to raise the price of food. And if you raise the price of food any number of people now using you in this pinched economy will not be able to. You’ll close or find a cheaper solution.
The same btw applies to most retail. I know of someone who runs a used bookstore as sort of a side thing to various SUCCESSFUL businesses, because he likes books (Or perhaps is running a numbers game out of the store. Who knows?)
Most people I know are either working insanely (which is good for fast food but bad for books) and/or underemployed/paid and sinking into more and more debt every month. What this means is that a lot of the things people buy in good times are being cut out: new clothes; luxury food; high class entertainment – anything non essential.
I’ve noticed in the last six to seven years that the restaurants closing are those in the middle price range. Why? Because people will flock to fast food for the “dollar menu” because it’s a quicky you can get when you just worked a sixteen hour day.
And the high price, high class restaurants go on because their people are those few at the top who are still making enough (or people like us who forego mid-restaurants and even fast food for convenience reasons and SAVE in order to go out somewhere NICE four times a year.)
In between is a vast desert. Raising the prices of fast food would put them in-between and take them out.
But then, of course, there’s robots. The robots that CAN operate most fast food chains exist. They’re not being bought because – like when I spent a summer in Germany ironing sheets, despite their having an ironing machine – humans are cheaper. Or at least they don’t require upfront investment.
Make it so humans are more expensive than machines and the machines will be bought. And there will be more people out of work.
Confusing ethics with economics leads to HIGHLY unethical economics and ruin.
Can the strikes force fast food establishments to pay more/give more hours. Probably. But as the auto-industry shows, there’s a vast difference between what is good for workers and what is good for the company. (Except when the company is forced to fold, it’s ALSO bad for workers.)
And the same goes for the nation. Let alone that the idea of a national minimum wage is obscene when you consider the lifestyle cost in NYC is not even close to that in Hays, Kansas. 9.95 in NYC might get you a comfier sewer grating. In Hays, Kansas, it’s more than a living wage.
BUT beyond that, the idea is obscene because it will cause the closing of innumerable establishments and throw any number of people out of employment, which means many people will never get their first work experience, many children will grow up never seeing their parents work, etc.
But Sarah, you say, places like Australia have lavish minimum wage and their economy hasn’t collapsed. (A few years ago you’d have quoted Europe too!)
Well, no.
First of all there’s that scale thing – Australia – and most other countries, even those that are our area – are much smaller and less diverse in population. Second, lavish minimum wage sacrifices business startups and indie businesses. Why? Well, our distinguished commenter from Finland has explained this: Because it’s impossible to make the jump between being a sole/proprietor/employee and the kind of money that can pay for employees. So, businesses don’t start, which makes the economy top heavy with corporations and government boondoogles projects. This works for a while, but not forever.
Second, Australia might avoid the collapse that comes at the end of that longer than most because it has wilderness, a tradition of self-sufficiency AND is not stupid enough to give lavish benefits to the unemployed – their unemployment benefits are JUST enough to barely keep body and soul together. So, people go and get a job. Europe didn’t take that precaution. We all know where Europe is headed, or at least what it’s circling.
Well – who is going to cut benefits to those who can’t find jobs (at all) in the US. The aggregate of welfare benefits will keep someone in decent comfort, if not in luxury. Getting all the benefits you can is a full time job (which makes it a trap) and the more people we throw at that particular boondoogle government program, the fewer will EVER be able to work.
Then there’s third – we maintain a level of defense higher than ANY OTHER FREE COUNTRY, except perhaps Israel. I don’t think this is unnecessary. We’re large, we’re loud, and sometimes we elect incredible dumb*sses who practically hang signs on our forehead begging other people to attack us. We need the defense. We also defend most of our allies (though these days some people up top seem to have reversed the ally/enemy sign. I understand. That type of mistake is why I couldn’t go into engineering. But at least I never set fire to Egypt and armed the enemy. Never mind. Let it go.) This is money the government takes in taxes from individuals and from establishments throughout the land. (Something to consider about obscene compensation. When we were rich beyond the dreams of average (sic) – the three years Dan worked a stressful traveling job {think the special forces of programming. If no one else could fix it, you called them. They were ridiculously high paid, plus you paid hotel and travel. Even if someone worked half the year, the company that contracted them out still made an obscene profit}—we made twice as much as we’d been making for a year (after that they cut salaries. The economy, you know.) What was amazing was that after taxes and expenses we cleared about 10k more over when Dan was making half as much. Yes, there were other expenses which included things I had to pay for because he wasn’t home to do it. Like garden work. BUT still. Our tax bill was massive and ridiculous. I shudder to think what it is once you hit that dreaded 250k, which we didn’t come close to. And remember that in some parts of the country t250k JUST gets you by.)
What I mean is everything government does – and common defense is one of the legitimate functions – comes out of the economy. The government doesn’t CREATE wealth. This means that by being the world police, we can afford less of the goodies our allies take for granted. It also means that we have more innovation and more small businesses, but that’s just a side benefit.
Right now, of course, we’re trapped in a place where the government is doing its best to kill innovation and small business by regulation, while people fail to find work/struggle to survive on low pay.
I sympathize. I sympathize with the Mr. Wises and the Ms. Dukes of the world. They are trapped in a horrible place. I’ve had friends there. One of them went on to get her doctorate because “I had to have an escape plan” – but not everyone can be a doctor. And not everyone has some artistic talent to pursue which AT LEAST gives hope of escape. And not everyone is cut out to be an entrepreneur and start cleaning houses for a living, or something.
BUT demanding more money and more hours is confusing the economy for a machine that is supposed to give you what you want, or supposed to “morally” provide this or that.
It won’t.
It might be ethical to pour sugar into your gas tank, but all that will happen is that the engine will seize and stop. Same with the economy.
And then we can all be equally poor. And maybe, for some people, that is enough.
The more I read your comments, the more it becomes obvious I need to talk about collapses again. I don’t want to. I was going to write a funny story about when the squirrel got in my attic, but I tried three runs at it, and it’s not gelling, because I need to talk to you about collapse – yeah, I’m a gateway blogger. Deal. – So I’ll do the squirrel tomorrow.
Collapses are difficult in a country that either never experienced one or that – if you count the 30s – experienced one very long ago.
Whenever collapse is mentioned you guys go into this weird mode that ranges from “in preparation, I’m learning to chip flint” to “I am training to kill squirrels with my bare hands and cook them over a camping fire.”
Now, do I know that the collapse when it happens (I think we’ve passed the if chilluns) won’t take that?
No, of course I’m not. I’m not sure because the collapse hasn’t happened, and when it does happen it will be suis generis by definition. The collapse of something this big hasn’t happened, unless we go back all the way to Rome and a different level of civilization.
(This “big” in terms of world-civilization-supporting presence. Yes, the British empire collapsed, but when that Atlas shrugged we were there to take up the burden. Yes, our ways were different, but we still were ready. Only the less rational of the progressives expect China to take our place. And that’s because they don’t GET China. The rest of the progressives (weirdly more in touch with reality than those that think China will become a benevolent world wide trade facilitator) think that as soon as we collapse the world becomes rich and holds hands and sings Koombaya. Oh, brother, can you spare some reality?)
So, it’s entirely possible that the collapse will send those of us who survive – and if the collapse is that massive, those who survive will be maybe one sixth of us, with luck – to hunt squirrels with flint knives.
However, I read a lot of history, and that’s not how any collapse has happened, ever.
Take the French Revolution – please. I don’t want it in my head anymore – few people know it started with a currency collapse. Few people know this because it’s much more fun for teachers to talk about the oppressed poor and going to jail for stealing a loaf of bread (something that was pretty much widespread throughout Europe and, btw, rightly so. They were ALL much poorer. A loaf of bread was worth much more in relative terms, and so a baker who lost too many would be endangered. Also, there were, in most civilized nations, alms houses. They were hell on Earth, but better than dying or being thrown in jail for a loaf of bread. We’re not that much more “civilized” or “compassionate” than people then. We’re just richer, so a loaf of bread seems trivial to us, but it wasn’t to them. Then as now, some people chose risky ways to get what they needed. You places your bets, you takes your winnings.)
As I’ve been reading this, I’ve become convinced we’re sort of going to experience that sort of collapse but at a higher level. You know, the economy implodes, we turn to civil war, and meanwhile our enemies invade.
So, that’s all we’re looking at, not the end of the world.
What? Really?
No, look, seriously, it’s not the end of the world. It’s survivable. It’s buildable after. It’s just a messy and bloody practical reflection of catastrophic change.
What I mean is, yes, there’s something we can do to come out of this more free than before, and to rebuild on better lines.
Is it guaranteed? Oh, come on. The only thing that’s sure is death and taxes, even when the taxes kill you. But there is just a chance.
However, to do it what you need to prepare is not along the lines of learning to chip flint. Or even to build log cabins. Or trap squirrels. (Both of those might come in handy and under general knowledge you should at least have a book that shows you how to do it. But don’t count on making a living from it.)
So, let’s look at the thing with a clear eye: did France recede into, say, middle ages civilization? Emphatically no. The industrial revolution continued THROUGHOUT the revolution. Did their way of life go back to more primitive forms? Well, yes. But more primitive forms meant being sure you weren’t going to be the victim of a riot on the way to the baker, and learned to bake your own bread (in the cities, in the countryside they still did) if the baker had shut down because there was a riot.
Yes, if you were in Paris, your life became hell, and you might get killed for no particular reason – depending on who you were and the neighborhood – BUT note Paris didn’t depopulate, which it would have if people were genuinely starving in place, and if life became that horrible.
When reading history it’s very important to distinguish what the narrator is saying and the truth. If I wrote something around last summer “It seems all of Colorado is on fire” and then the super volcano erupted, sealing us in lava, and a thousand years from now my note was all they found, they might think “All of Colorado was on fire before the volcano. She was there, she’d know.” In fact, most of Colorado was fine and not even all areas were getting smoke.
Most of France was all right. Some was emphatically not all right (there was a region that had genocide imposed against it.)
BUT if you’re going to be caught in one of those movements of history and killed, there’s no point worrying about it. There’s nothing much you can do. It’s kind of like being afraid of the super volcano. What are you going to do about it?
If you’re not, what you have to prepare for is disruptions and inconveniences.
This is something that seems to be true everywhere that experiences a collapse. Take Lebanon (please, I don’t want it. I already ate a Paraguay {comment reference joke!} I’m full.) To us during Lebanon’s civil war, as shown in our TVs, the whole place was falling apart, and back to the stone age. But people grew up there, during that, decent middle class lives – with some interesting twists.
Portugal had only a mini slow mo collapse, but I suspect it’s much the same, amped up, to what we’d experience here.
Look, to impose country-wide poverty it takes a CONTROLLING regime. While the twits at the top are TRYING to impose that on us, I don’t think they have a chance in h*ll. We’re Americans. We don’t go down easy and we’re not easily governable. Also we’re massive both in terms of landmass and population. (The USSR had massive landmass, but not the same population.) I think we’re about to go pear shaped at them.
Which brings us to a collapse, not imposition of poverty from above. Which brings us to: we’re not going back to the nineteenth century. Heck, chances are we’re not going back to the fifties.
Heck, even the communists haven’t managed to take Cuba back to the middle ages – though they’ve tried. Instead they sort of froze it in time into a poor version of the fifties.
We are not going back to the middle ages, either – it’s not how collapses work.
Look, guys, the network doesn’t vanish overnight. Power plants don’t disappear. Factories don’t stop. Cars don’t just quit working all at once. There are things that can cause that, and some regions might experience that, but not ALL, not even most. It’s not a high probability. If that happens at all, it will be a city or so. Walk to the next one. It won’t kill you. Or maybe it will, if people in the city defend. Which is why you need to prepare.
But that’s still a low probability and the preparations should amount to “A friend in another city who will come and pick me up at some mutually arranged place.”
Someone here said we prepare for the disaster we can prepare for. I.e. if we have a hammer. It’s kind of like that, of course, (by my profession, by my way of living, I can’t prepare totally for utter collapse. I have made preparations to survive a month in place, but it won’t be pretty and it can’t be a way of life. Yes, I’m Heinleinian enough I’d like a log cabin somewhere, but I can’t afford it) but I’m also bolstered by history. Collapse or no collapse, civilization level doesn’t go back.
What you get instead is an inability to trust the civilization you’ve come to know. Your “conveniences” will fail, and “conveniences in this case include not just cable TV (actually that might well keep going through it all) but electricity, water, roads.
I’m not saying that electricity will go out and stay out. That’s highly unlikely. In modern collapses that only happened in zones where active fighting was going on, and sometimes not there.
I’m saying that hours at the power plant might become… erratic. And if you’re at the mercy of a power plant that runs on coal (raises hand) doubly so, with sugar on top, depending on coal supply.
That is what will hurt you the most. No? Keep in mind civilization goes on at about this level. How many of you use computers for your paid-work? (Raises hand.)
I’m also saying that water can become contaminated. As someone said here “keep bleach handy.” That is only an issue if you don’t. But you have to learn not to trust stuff like that.
Roads might become potholed to the point of unusability. In Portugal, the roads would kill a car in three years, at the height of the “slow mo collapse.” People passed info about the biggest potholes.
This is edging towards the bigger preparation you need to do.
There will be other inconveniences, but none of them as bad as the lack of electricity for long periods of time, erratically. Like, for instance, there is a strong to medium chance that gas and other supplies will become erratic. Where we live two thirds of the year a bicycle is feasible (not for me. I’ll need a tricycle. I never learned to ride a bike. Because we couldn’t afford one, when I should have been learning. Also because I’m a klutz. Shut up, wretches.)
Electricity is a problem because it can cut you from the network. And for many of us, the network is social life and work and everything in between (I shop a lot on Amazon.) But also – our neighborhood has these erratic power failures, twice a year and GAH, not being able to work! It makes you fret twice as hard.
So, here’s my suggestions for the type of collapse I think most likely and beyond the ammo and whatever needed for active fighting which if we follow the French model will happen in at least some areas of the country:
Go to ebay. Find three extra batteries for your computer. Make sure you keep them charged. (Why ebay? You can usually get them for $25 or so. In my case for the travel computer, because the new one is way more expensive.)
Make sure you have a device that allows you to connect to the net without depending on local power/ your own hub. Ipad or smart phone or kindle tablet with 4G. It’s prep expense. If you can, get it. That way if you get caught in one of the (bowel) movements of history or the flailing about of a dying government, you can tell your friends to come get you.
Have stuff in place to survive a week of erratic grocery. Have other ways to get where you absolutely must go.
If in a hot climate, have at least one room you can cool somehow without electricity. Because heat can kill you. Same with heating in cold climates.
Oh, if you’re a writer, and electricity becomes THAT erratic – you know the jags we go on – buy a used typewriter. Manual. You might have to repair it yourself, but there’s probably instructions on line. But look, if you write on a typewriter, when electricity comes back you can scan the damn things in, while even I myself can’t interpret my handwriting. If yours is better, may the (by hand writing) force be with you, but mine is what it is – and I’m looking for a little manual typewriter, just in case. The last thing husband and kids want, when stuck in the house without power, is to have me climbing walls because I can’t write the next chapter. Your mileage may vary.
Mid-range skills now hobbies MIGHT come in handy. As we all become poorer, being able to do clothing alterations MIGHT be prized (but remember the transition might be short, so unless you enjoy it, don’t bother learning it.) Same with playing an instrument. When everyone is stir crazy from lack of electricity, someone who can play music can provide relief. But don’t learn to build steam engines or anything like that. Cooking from scratch might not hurt. It gives you flexibility with bad supply chains.
But more importantly, and above all that, build under. Heinlein despised “rugged individualists” who thought they never needed the collective, ever. That he trusted government for most of the needs, like roads or electricity, just means he lived in different times. We can’t do much about that – for now – but we might have to rely on our friends for aid and succor and support.
We will also need our friends – possibly – for ensuring commerce and other things that government used to guarantee. How?
Well, say I’m stuck and can’t upload books but I can send TXRed a CD with three novels via whatever parcel post still runs, and give her my publishing password on the tablet. She can upload them for me, and I’ll still get paid.
I can’t think of all the situations in which the network can come in handy, but I guarantee it can be.
We keep thinking of a sort of Galt’s Gulch with everyone gathered in one place, lending aid, comfort and protecting each other.
This is unlikely.
It’s unlikely because this is the 21st century. Civilization and tech create distributed networks, both in reality and in physical space. But is there a reason not to have a Galt’s Network? One that allows us to survive the collapse and keep on going, and perhaps – perhaps – ensure that this time the bad guys don’t win?
I don’t see why we shouldn’t. Embryonic internet, on 9/11, but people stuck across the country as the planes stopped were able to make it home in relays of friends they’d met on line, who each drove them the next ninety miles. Is there some reason we can’t save our own caught in one of the places that goes grimdark? Or send our own clothes, if they’re caught in a place where there are none in the stores. Or flour. Or…
And this is important – this sort of network – for another reason. People here keep saying “Beware revolution. The next regime was only better in one instance.”
I’m not proposing revolution, but collapse MIGHT force one on us, if only because some people find collapses ideal opportunity to impose totalitarianism. (Okay, most people.)
And why Galt? Because it allows us to separate from a society that is not only taking far more than it gives, but that is slowly circling the drain. It allows us to mini-galt and small-strike of sorts.
So, let’s look at the one revolution that was different – The USA – why was it different?
Because they had already built their own institutions, their own polity. They weren’t inventing it from scratch, mid air. The distance between countries meant they were already independent, in most ways.
And that’s what we need to do and what we need to be. That way if a totalitarian horror (yes, there’s worse than our current mess) we’ll be organized to fight. And we’ll be organized to survive. And we’ll be organized to govern* afterwards.
Despair is a sin. Don’t give up. Don’t lie flat. Build under. When it collapses, we’ll be there, keeping civilization going. Maybe we won’t even notice the collapse.
Be not afraid and stop learning to chip flint. Learn to network, instead. The future is ours, because we embrace it. Let the Luddites wail and gnash their teeth. We have places to be.
* (I know all of you made a face. I am not going to govern anyone. I just want to be left in peace. Since most of you are the same, let’s stipulate a very small and localized government. Enough to keep the lights on and commerce flowing.)
UPDATE: Different post, Freedom! (weirdly not political) over at Mad Genius Club.
