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Because We’re Still Americans

So, our self proclaimed elites (Despite their ivy league degrees, I’ve yet to see one of them who could make it into/through the lowest ranked community college without connections/special considerations/money/help.  And I doubt their ability to get through the day without minders.) have decided what they need is a more compliant populace and like the infernal racists they are, they think they can get that by importing people with a darker skin shade.

It worries me and others – and it should – not because of the skin shade of those being imported (bites back very strongly on pungent remark about other elites who thought it was okay to import dark skinned people to do what the elites wanted them to.  History repeats first as tragedy and then as farce.  We’re in the farce portion) but because of the reasons they’re being imported.  It’s bad enough when your government is importing people to do “what Americans aren’t willing to do” at a time when Americans are willing to take any job at all, if only the government will let them contract for work without interposing itself with regulations and demands for paperwork. It’s much worse when your government is advertising abroad all the benefits you can get at the expense of the US taxpayer, if you will just move here and refuse to or can’t work.

It worries us because quite bluntly, our society is having enough trouble looking after those who have fallen through the net.  The fact that the economic wounds are largely self-inflected doesn’t make them any less painful.  I don’t believe there are people who don’t have anything to offer society in the way of meaningful labor, but there are quite a few who can’t measure up when you weigh against their labor having to pay minimum wage.  Most people with some experience are worth minimum wage, but most kids – even smart kids – aren’t.  Sorry, it’s a fact of life.  They have to learn things like punctuality and that their wants that day count less than the job.  Until then, very few of them are worth minimum wage.  And frankly, none of them is when you count in stuff like the paperwork required to have an employee, the regulations that must be satisfied, and the matching Social Security contributions. (If you don’t have an employee you have no idea.  It’s almost a full time job complying with everything.  Frankly, even for a part time employee.  I could afford to pay someone, half time, to help with secretarial and management.  But then I’d have to hire them full time to do their own paperwork, and that I can’t afford.)

I favor, as I’ve said before, instead of minimum wage some type of assistance program where people working full time are given enough to make up what they’d get if they were working minimum wage.  (Favor in a manner of speaking.  I’m a libertarian who thinks all taxation is theft.  But of the things I CAN get, I think that would distort the market least.)

The other thing that worries us  – or at least worries me – is that culture isn’t plastic.  No, it is not hereditary.  No, you’re not stuck living with the culture of your ancestors because you wee born that way.  If I adopted a little girl from China tomorrow, she would be more Hoyt than anything else, by the time she got to be 18.  (And if I won the lottery tomorrow I would.  And… poor kid.  Maybe that’s why I never win the lottery/become a bestseller.)

Culture is acquired from your parents and your environment.  Most of it is acquired at pre verbal times.  (Yes, it might link in with certain hereditary characteristics, but the BS in biology down the hall tells me the human genome is too complex for us to determine that.  Are the kids slightly more unorganized than they should be because their mom is Portuguese-born, or because they were raised by a writer mom who is likely to forget stuff like meals while she’s working?  — I’ll note in passing that for Portuguese culture I’m almost unreal in my clock-work like organization, and that I was often accused of being German.  I’ll also note from what I see I’m about medium for the US, except that I’m trying to do six jobs at once.)  You can change how you react and how you interact with people VOLATIONALLY.  This is called acculturating.  I did it more or less on purpose, but it is more complex than it sounds, and it required things such as stopping reading in Portuguese (though part of that might have been needed only because I wanted to write in English, and sound American.  There is a different tempo to the Portuguese narration.  Never mind.)  Most people who come here, even the ones who want to become American, can’t or aren’t willing to do that.  They seek the comfort of their hometown newspaper, back home.  Or, now that there’s the internet, they stay linked to family via email on a daily basis.

I don’t know how that last will affect it, but I know that most people used to take three generations to integrate.  How that works now, particularly with the enshrining of victimhood, and particularly if you’re a darker shade of skin (even if it’s a very light brown like the boys) I can’t tell you, but I suspect it’s harder.

It is a human thing to use what excuse you have ready to hand to explain away your failures, even when the person you’re explaining them to is yourself.  It also gives you a bad incentive not to try as hard.

I suspect a lot of people will glump through life, demanding all the special perks because they’re “victims” and refusing to accept that they might not be working as hard as others, because after all “systemic racism” and “white male privilege.”  (These same people, in a more traditional system, like, say, Islam, would accuse genii of cursing them.  Do genii exist?  Probably not, but in that society people believe them, and it provides an excuse.  The same with “Systemic racism” and “white male privilege.”)

This makes the importation of a large contingent into our society at best problematic and at worst dangerous.  The Tsarnaev brothers were after all just such immigrants, nurtured by us on social security and resentment.  (And they are, btw, whiter than I.  Religion is culture but culture is not race.)

I don’t know why the elites want this.  Oh, some of them, definitely want a new electorate and have illusions of bringing in a contingent used to quasi-feudal rule because  they fancy themselves as the new rulers of the new peons.  Others of course feel guilty.  They know that if they’d been thrown into an inner city high school with no connections, no help, not only would they not have survived, but they would never have managed to learn enough to graduate.  They also know that by the standards of thirty years ago, they have a ninth grade education if that.  In other words, like everyone whose success wasn’t earned, they want to atone.  Frankly, I wish like medieval rulers they just build Cathedrals.  It would be both more aesthetically pleasing and, ultimately, better for society.  (All societies.  Mexico thinks it’s unloading its lowest levels of society on us, and getting money back to boot, but they’ll find in time that when you export your “lower class” you also export those more likely to innovate.  Or maybe for them that’s a plus. They’ve been stagnant how long?)

However the China-lust of our ruling class (“We should be more like China.  They know how to get things done”) leads me to believe the main idea is that them little brown peoples are more subservient, and if we had more of them we could do things more like China, by main force and command.  (I did say that our elites are racist, right?)

…  And they’re going to fail.

I want you to step back from that ledge, I want you to take a deep breath, and I want you to know, to the bottom of your heart, to the tip of their toes that the “New Electorate Project” is going to flop.

I’ve given you some of the reasons, two days ago.  First, the self-deportation process is well under way.  You can see it in what’s stocked in your area.  You can see it just walking around the street.  (It might not be as complete in some areas, and some areas were more taken over when it started and it will take longer to SEE the difference.  Also, of course, in rural areas it will linger longer, because I know for a fact most farms simply cannot survive without illegal labor (see minimum wage/regulations/paperwork.  The margin the farms operate on is not that wide.)  However, most people have noticed a difference, even if it’s unreported.

Yes, the “legalization” will be huge on paper, but I doubt most of those people intend to live here – they just want to file for social security/disability.

This of course means those systems crash fast.  (They’re already on the verge of crashing.)  Part of the “importing a new electorate” project assumes that the blue model goes on forever, and that payments are secure and unlimited.  It ain’t so.  My generation came of age knowing we’d never see a cent from social security.  It’s gotten worse.  It’s gotten bad enough that those getting money from social security might not be able to much longer.  I think that at some point we do triage and give minimum only to those who need it absolutely to survive.  No, I don’t WANT this – it’s just inevitable, with a falling birth rate.  And no, importing illiterate workers doesn’t help.  This is not the twenties.  There are no great factories waiting for them to walk in and work on.

And that’s a good thing, of course.  By and large this country has dispensed with dangerous, labor-intensive work – except in farms, though even then it’s been lessened.

But it’s also a hint of things to come.  When I was born, mid-twentieth century we had some innovations and things had gotten cheaper, but the world would have made perfect sense to someone born a century earlier.  (Particularly where I lived.)  You could take someone from the nineteenth century and plunk them down in the middle of the twentieth, and after some adjustment, they’d go “oh, right, motors are different, carriages have motors, blah blah” but the structure of life would make perfect sense.  There would be homes, families, hospitals, schools, factories, office buildings.  Once they adapted to the minor tech innovation (and humans are very adaptable.) they’d “get” what was going on well enough.

Now… not so sure.  We’re only at the beginning, so they’d still identify a lot of things, of course, and they’d fail to see the significance of the fact that you can communicate instantly, in real time around the world.  They’d think it was just a “neat” thing.  A lot of people today think that too.

Part of that is because we’re just at the beginning of the revolution.  It’s hitting my business first, so I can tell you it’s dispensing with factories, with warehouses, with centralized distribution.  It’s a HUGE change.

The change is coming to other fields.  Schools are dead, but still walking.  Most factories, too, once three-d printing gets going.

Am I saying technology will save us?

Oh, my Lord NO!

Rapid change brings on upheaval.  The last change almost (but not) this fast gave us… the French Revolution and its sisters around the world.

It’s going to get rough.  It’s going to get really rough.  At the end of this where you live will mean far less than where you work, and the two might be half a world apart.

Does this mean territorial location and territorial nations will mean nothing?  Well, no.  It means stuff we can’t even imagine yet, but not that.  After all, my friends are around the world, my publisher is in North Carolina, but I am still affected by a disaster in my area, and how my neighbors live still matters.

What it means, though, is that people will be increasingly more free.  The territorial government will mean something, but not as much as it used to: labor regulations/welfare/laws about what you can’t and can’t do for a living – all of this means much less when you can live one place and work the other.  The same for what you can do for play.  The same for the interest rate that controls what home you can buy.  Regional jurisdictions, like NYC who rely on a highly paid work force are going to be upended, because people can work there and live elsewhere.  The same, writ large goes for national governments.

I have no idea, none, what the world will look like at the end of this.  And neither do you.  And neither does anyone else.  So called “futurists” are usually missing ten or twenty little points that could be all that determines the future.

But I do know one thing: where you live will still matter, as a locus of culture, law enforcement and neighborliness.

And I know another thing: we’re likely to come out on top.  We’re likely to come out on top for the same reason that our elites want a new electorate – because we’re not a normal nation.

We’re the descendants of those who left everything, who acculturated to become something new united not by blood, not by tribe, but by the words of the constitution.

The constitution is more flexible than tribe or blood. The constitution was forged to meet circumstances no one could have foreseen, a new world, new ways of doing things.  It was a document supposed to underlie a nation as tough as granite, as flexible as steel. A creature the world had never seen.

There is a reason that for the last hundred years, the future has come from America.  Even when inventions are made elsewhere, they are applied and popularized here.

We Americans are more flexible than those who chose to stay behind.

The cowards never left, the weak died on the way and the pusillanimous went back, tail between their legs.  (As will many of the new ones, when the teat goes dry.)

Those who became American are crazy people, ready for any challenge.

We are a people of the future.  The future can’t scare us because it’s where we come from.  We are impatient for it to arrive, curious about what it will bring, excited about our opportunities in it.

Let the elites rule and mandate.  You concentrate on what you can do that they never thought of.  You create a future they can’t comprehend, much less affect.

Step back from that ledge.  You’re an American and you belong to the future.

 

NOTE: If you’re interested in the future of SF, you should also read Amanda Green’s post at Mad Genius Club: Why?

*Yes, I do realize this post is relatively lightweight, and that a lot of the points can be debated.  I woke up late, nauseated and dizzy.  I’m hoping I’m not coming down with “what’s going around” because we have to fly out soon.*

At Least It’s Not The Seventies

Those of you too young to remember the seventies – looks towards the kiddy table – might not realize why this is a good thing.  Yes, I do agree with the Professor that at this point Carter is an (unattainable) best case scenario.  However, that’s politics, and politics is always several decades behind life.

Yes, I know tons of scientific advances and amazing stuff were being one in the seventies, but – either because the mass media controlled the dissemination of what it wanted to show – or (and having lived through that time I incline to the second) people really believed this bizarre stuff, a lot of odd ideas got credence in the seventies that right now only apply in highly specialized areas… like in colleges, or among the very young and the very stoned.

–          This is the dawning of the age of aquarius was semi-respectable.  No, the religious and the older people didn’t really buy into this, but “what’s your sign?” WAS a normal gambit for opening conversations.

I’m not going to discuss the relative merits of astrology, but I’m going to say when an entire civilization formed on the enlightenment principles chases after it, things have gone seriously wrong.

–          Psi power is the future.

It might be – but if it is it needs to be tamed and brought within the realm of the “studyable” (totally a word, shut up.)  It wouldn’t be the first odd knowledge to become mainstream and studied, HOWEVER – and this has been discussed ad nauseum on these pages before, both by me and the commenters when they were intent (for reasons known only to their psychiatrists) on creating a brand new magical world – the way we’ve gone about it is clearly wrong, and event he “best scientific efforts” of places like the USSR have failed to do anything.  “But Sarah,” you say.  “All the scientific advances from the USSR proved to be the ones they’d stolen, pretty much.  So their process was wrong.”  Oh, sure, as Solyndra proves top-down scientific research doesn’t work.  Also, note I’m not saying there are no psi-phenomena.  I couldn’t.  And any writer who can uses a different process.  BUT as discussed here, right now it seems to be powered by something that’s notoriously observation-shy.  This causes it to be a hot bed of trickster activity (some of it psi – read The Trickster and The Paranormal.)  But in the seventies, any number of otherwise educated people (Heinlein!) believed that a lot of our science could be profitably replaced with psi-stuff.  Even scientists believed that.  Again, maybe this is possible in the far distant future, when we tame the unobtanium that powers psi, but they thought they were in the process of doing that, and it was just around the corner.  Again, when a lot of people believe that, at our current level of knowledge of it, something has gone seriously wrong.

–          Communism is the future.

Yes, even a lot of people on the right believed this.  No, seriously, they really did.  You see, there were all those figures coming out of the USSR (like the ones coming out of China now – snort!) that said how much more efficient a controlled economy was, so of course, in the end they won.  A lot of the race on the right was to create a parallel, equally controlled but more humane system, so that in the end our system would win.  This was essentially social democracy (and sometimes Christian democracy.)  A lot of the GOP cut their teeth in this era (those older than me by a few years.)  This is why they act the way they do.  (Juan McCain, say.)  This is why their whole attitude is “the same, only slower.”

The fact they were wrong wrong wrong takes a while to percolate and might necessitate their death.  Whether we collapse before that, who knows, but at least we’re no longer there and the new generation doesn’t assume controlled is better.  Which is good because:

–          All tech is mass tech.

Even though things like Future Shock talked of micro manufacturing, no one believed it.  Now it looks likely to be the thing of the future.  Also things they didn’t know were in the future include blogs, information transfer, the ability for the individual to do more and have more power than ever before.

This makes the future horrifying, upside-down, and very much OURS.  “Ours?”  Yep, the odds, because dahlings, when the going gets weird, the weird get pro.

–          All Children Must Go Through State Indoctrination School

Yes, I know the homeschooling movement began in the seventies.  It was also mostly “unschooling” which only works if your kid is self-motivated and driven.  (I suppose in the end what I did with younger son came close to that.  He would spend the morning sprawled on my bed – it’s largest and my office is across from it – reading golden age SF, then write me essays about how the science and tech have changed, and that was a school day.  Or he lectured me on Greek Myth while we gardened, and that was a “test”.)  But now it is respectable, it’s becoming the default in some places, and there are so many resources.

-If You Don’t Want To Have Sex With Everyone, You’re Repressed &

In The Future There Is No Marriage.

Turned out those were only true in France.  Okay, only the second one.  Despite the statistics, etc, and despite the spectacular damage that the economy and the crazy fems have done on our kids’ chances of marriage, I believe we might have turned the corner.  At least there are fewer movies pushing general, forced promiscuity as the only way to be sane.

Mind you, now the feminists believe having sex with a man at all is a betrayal of the cause, but that’s something else, isn’t it?  When the most idiotic thing around is political neo- Victorianism it’s not good, but it’s considerably better than the Brave New World Assumption that you must have sex with everyone, all the time.  When THE gay cause is the securing of the benefits of marriage to same sex couples… We’ve won.  No, I know some of you don’t feel that way, but compare it to the “marriage is just a piece of paper” cause.  We’ve won.  In the future, we’re all married.  (But not to each other, en masse, because that would be icky.  Some of you don’t wear pants.)

–           UFOS

I leave it as a class exercise whether there are UFOs.  I mean, some of Puppet Masters’ is right on it, there could be real ones, in the mass of insanity.  But by the late seventies, we were getting the “UFOs are a spiritual phenomenon and these aliens tell us how to save the Earth” BS and no, really, no. Even Marxism is more rational or at least “integrated” as a religion.

–          Things Just Get Worse

I know that this is hard to believe, but it was expected then that double digit employment rates would last forever, that the economy would just get worse.  We had too many people, see, and the future was grey, starving and awful.  Again, they’re trying to resurrect that.  Don’t buy it.  It’s a lie.  (Though in most of Europe, which never had a Reagan, the 70s now look like a high point for stuff like savings and employment – not in the PIIGS though, they got tons of money from EU and…  Okay, those indicators still suck, but they do have more consumer goods.)

–          Bell bottoms, that particularly horrible brown that was everywhere.  That particularly

horrible orange that was everywhere, too.  Afro perms, even for guys.  Psychedelic wall paper. Yoko Ono.  No, this is not a “tastes cannot be disputed.”  It’s a “EWWWWW”

–          We’ve Learned

We’ve learned.  At least those of us not in the political class.  Most of these ideas bring out a half-laugh, sometimes embarrassed because we bought into them when we were very young.  Reading some of middle Heinlein does the same.  “Oh, sensitives, RAH, really?”  It’s hard to remember this was “respectable” at the time.  And though our kids are indoctrinated into Marxism, now they’re told it didn’t go right before, not that it’s the way of the bright and shiny future.  And the kids have a reckoning coming (poor things.  Unfortunately those of our kids who have been brought to reality have to go through it with them) and they will learn.  Some already are.

The most important thing we’ve learned is that communism is not our inevitable future.  And that’s enough.

Don’t jump off the ledge.  It’s not the seventies.  We’ve learned some, and the years between have proved us right and opened new tech options that are on our side.

In the end, we win, they lose.  Whoever tells you otherwise, just wants you to stop fighting.

How to learn to stop worrying and shrug off Amnesty.

Or Part I of This Is No Time To Go Wobbly

I’m baffled about the reactions to the amnesty bill around the web.  One side thinks it will be a good thing and that it will erase, at the stroke of a legislative pen, thousands of years of history and learned culture and make the people living in our midst and not integrating as American as Apple Pie.  They’re wrong, of course – and I’ll explain.

The other side thinks it’s the end of the US as we know it.  They are also wrong (though the end of the US as we know it right now is sort of in the cards, anyway, but that’s not the end of the US as constituted) though for reasons that are not as immediately obvious and that will take a little while to explain because the misconceptions in this case are shared by both sides (and a little funny for someone who has been alive and aware the last few years, but I guess those centuries of culture and ingrained history are hard to shrug off too, even when they’re not working as expected.)

I will concede that the amnesty bill passing, (and our betters DO seem to be determined to shove it down our throats) will hasten a collapse but it says nothing on what will come after.  And the collapse I’ve known is coming for at least two years, the only question being now or later, hard or soft landing.  Passing the amnesty will prejudice it towards near term and hard landing.  Is that worse than long term and soft?  I don’t know.  My friend Bill Reader thinks it would be best short term and hard – that the disruption will be shorter and what’s coming better – but I’m a wussy.  On the other hand, his arguments have long sounded convincing to me.  I just prefer long and soft because I’ve experienced it before and know coping strategies.

I’ll add that long term and soft might be impossible in any case, because the whole world is crashing and it all feeds on each other (and part of the reason is that the US has been propping up the tent a long time.  Our president misunderstood the resentment abroad.  He thought the prosperity of the US was holding other people down.  This is Marxism, which is a mystical religion with zero contact points with the real world.  In fact, the rest of the world resented us because we were enabling them to be semi-prosperous and not giving them the kick in the fundament they so sorely needed, and also because they knew they depended on us.  They were in fact like forty year olds (still) living in their father’s basement, and resenting the father with every fiber of their being.  Worse, I think the US is more of a mother, since we tend to be all soft and cooing and supporting.  Part of the resentment he encountered in Europe on this tour is that people are starting to realize he’s removed the pole from the tent of world economy.  They’re still not admitting to it, consciously, but subconsciously they know it.)  The hard landing might hit us anyway.

Again, erase ideas of running around cooking neighbors au gratin.  Even a hard landing is not that bad.  And even during a hard landing, some people do very well indeed, both those with the hard skills to do things that need done (maintain infrastructure, build needed stuff, even cook and clean – skills we’ve almost forgotten in our hyper-prosperous times) and people who can provide escapism: musicians, story tellers, writers, even artists, if they can pull you away from the dreary circumstances for a moment.  (I’ve mentioned before that at the hardest point of our economic life, a kid, an income that fell short a few hundred a month, no friends in town – Columbia SC – and 20k in debt, we spent what amounted to a week’s worth of grocery money to buy an illustrated book of DaVinci’s art.  The reason we did that was that leafing through it didn’t quite give me hope, but it lifted me out of the awful circumstances we were living in and improved my mood for hours.)

A collapse is bad, but it’s not Mad Max.  Envision a somewhat worse Great Depression where the government isn’t able to give you make work (which might be better in the long run.)  We’ll still have the net.  We’ll still have what infrastructure we have.  Many regions will be perfectly functional, but some will go under spectacularly.  Mostly the regions you expect:  I wouldn’t give a groat for the chances of either Detroit or New Orleans and Chicago will get “interesting.”  There you might get a sort of poor man’s Mad Max.

Yes, some people will starve.  Unfortunately a lot of those will be those who have trouble treading water in the world as is right now.  And I don’t mean just the homeless.  You live in fandom, many of you.  Look to your friends and less plugged-in-to-reality acquaintances.  Help where you can.  The water will get very choppy.  Note I’m not saying we should let them starve – those of us who can afford to help, should.  We’re trying to ensure we can survive AND help others – I think that’s everyone’s duty.

Because the crash is coming whether amnesty comes or not.  To that it’s irrelevant, save for maybe hurrying it.

Now, amnesty proper – what those (yes, even Libertarians) pushing the bill forget is double edged: first, culture is persistent.  You cannot decide to change the culture on a whim.  (That’s a progressive experiment and look how their experiments always end, because the human isn’t that plastic.)  Unlike a lot of people both on the left and right I vehemently oppose the idea that culture is genetic, but I KNOW how they got the idea. Culture is persistent.  You absorbed it from your parents, and you pass some of it on to your kids whether you mean to or not.  Culture is also community.  This means that Second, to acculturate is to die a little.  I’ve mentioned before my regrets, my soul-ache at the idea that I had to leave behind my family in Portugal and everything I shared with them.  You might not understand that this means more than just “I can’t spend much time with them.”  In a way I had to die a little.  I had to disconnect myself from the person I was, back there.  It’s now visible to me only through a veil.  I can sort of remember why I did things, but I can’t always understand them.  When I go back, the body language, the interactions, everything is strange to me, and it hurts with the duality of knowing I was once of them – I once belonged there.

When you renounce all allegiances foreign and domestic and really undertake to become American, it’s more than a legal thing.  You’re renouncing part of yourself.

I’m not lamenting.  I wanted it that badly, and always felt a little foreign in Portugal.

But there are two requirements – you have to want it badly.  You have to want to be American, and be willing to lop off parts of you that don’t fit.  This is my some number of immigrants either go back, or they come to resent the host country.  They want to do this and can’t, and blame the host country for “requiring” it.  This is a fallacy.  America doesn’t require it.  It requires it less than any other country.

And that’s problem one of the idea that legalizing illegal aliens will make them American.

Let’s start with who they are and why they’re here.  Most them are here through dire economic need (which is why I don’t hold breaking the law against them.)  And most of them came here by land, and can go home in less than a day.  Most of them have been living at the edges, viewing the US as an alien body on which they feed.

They bring their culture with them.  They come here in big groups, speak their language, behave in the ways that were appropriate back in the home country.  Have to.  Attempts at integrating and “acting American” will be punished by their community (trust me on this, this was true even among exchange students.)

“Oh, you are just saying that.  You realize that Italians, Irish, Germans, Jews, all of those also came here in big groups; many came in illegally; they lived at the margins and held the old line, but they all have integrated.”

Yes, of course.  I also realize high crime in those communities remained high for a generation or two, as the integration was taking place.  Because those people had come here not for a great love of our laws but to find streets paved with gold, it took two to three generations to integrate.

The difference is this: back then we expected immigrants to integrate.  There was no “Push one for Spanish, push two for Serb-Croat, push fifty for Cantonese.”  Because it was assumed culture was not genetic (look, it isn’t.  Truly.  If it were, you’d all be living like people in the fertile crescent.  Okay, even accounting for evolution and genetic drift, not very far off) it was not cruel to require people to learn English to transact official business.  Nor was it considered evil to say you should leave your public/political culture behind, or that frankly we don’t much care what race you think you are, you should become American now.

Also, most of those immigrants couldn’t live here and keep in complete contact with the people back home.  I have to tell you even with the best will to acculturate, I might not be able to do it now – it required a distance, an inability to keep in touch with the people at home for no cost every day.  The internet would have made that very difficult.  As I said, you have to die a little.

With people from north, central and south America, people on the same continent it’s harder.  What you get is what I saw when I was a kid in Portugal: people would go off and work in France, or Germany, or England, but they’d come “home” for every holiday, their kids would be baptized at “home”, they’d get married at “home” (and if you could at all arrange it to someone of Portuguese stock, if not someone in the mother country.)  And then the kids would either settle in Portugal or resume their back and forth ways.  Because these weren’t permanent migrants.  They worked until they could build a house back home.   Then if they found they ran into financial trouble, they went back.  In the host countries, they never integrated (though a lot became citizens, for the benefits.)  They just lived in their communities, and went back home when needed.

Getting French or German citizenship was an aim, not because they wanted to become part of those countries, whom they always viewed as alien, but because they wanted to collect pensions (being able to claim disability was a big coup) and retirement, which allowed them to live like kings at home, where life was cheaper.

Those who stayed and integrated did it because places like France have an unapologetic integrationist policy (or did.  If they still have it, it’s not working for the Muslims.)  You went to kindergarten at three, you were taught to be FRENCH.  No other languages allowed in the school (I know this because one of my little cousins grew up in France) and no nonsense about wherever you came from.  You got the history of glorious France, you were taught to sing the Marseillese, and you got told that you should WANT to be French.  Some of those kids still returned to Portugal, but about half, I’d judge, became French.

Now add to that the poisonous mix of our education– our universities and the culture-in-the-genes, race and grievance theorists in those.  Heck, even in our high schools.  Oh, forget that, even elementary, where they tried to shame me into “passing on your children’s culture” as though, you know, it were their culture when they’d spent a total of maybe a month in touch with it.  Also, of course, it was their “culture” even though his father’s family has been in the US since the first English immigrants arrived in New England.  Because foreign cultures are magic, and one drop and all that.

The second generation of these legalized illegals will not be taught that they are to be AMERICAN.  Instead, they’ll be given every incentive to identify with a mother country they don’t even know that well, to romanticize it, and, in the west, to think they have a “racial” right to these lands.

This will not end well.  There is no pot of gold at the end of that rainbow.  The only way those people assimilate is if they get put through the grinder and go through h*ll with the rest of us and have to pick sides.

Fortunately the gods of the copybook headings look about ready to administer that correction, amnesty or not.

The people who support the amnesty are either starry eyed idealists or – the majority – crooks who think they can import a new electorate.

This might have worked fine twenty years ago.  Now it won’t.  The problem is that they’re drinking their own ink.  And so is the right, for different reasons.

First – 46 million? … does anyone believe that number?  I don’t.  It might very well have been that, at the beginning of this mess, but look here, La Gran Salida is REAL.  You might not see it in your area, but I see it in mine.  Look, our local neighborhood grocery store, so small I have trouble finding anything not routine, was starting to stock magazines in Spanish in 2007.  In fact, the majority of magazines were in Spanish.  And the Walmart in the not so good part of town (yes, I shop there, deal) might as well be in Mexico.  Products, signs, magazines, people shopping.  It was easier to find stuff for quincenera parties than for prom.

Now?  Well, first the Spanish magazines receded from the local grocery, then from the larger grocery, and now Walmart is… not Spanish.  I mean, the big signs are bilingual, I think that’s company policy, but not the products or the stuff that’s pushed, and certainly not the magazines, the music or the movies.  As for the people shopping, you see the occasional Hispanic family, but more often than not the kids and I are the only ones who look it.  (The kids more than I, frankly.)

More importantly, even in the craiglist for Denver you rarely see an ad in Spanish anymore.

Yes, there was a massive tide into the US, but the tide has receded.  Look, these people come here for opportunities they don’t have in their own lands.  If the opportunities aren’t there, they go away.

The same applies to our government’s insane idea (and yes, they’re doing this.  No, I can no longer find the link) of courting people in Mexico to come here for the benefits.  Yes, this is treasonous.  Yes, this is crazy.  No, this doesn’t mean they’re winning.  When they’re courting immigrants because “we’ll give you cash and you won’t have to work” they’re admitting we’re no longer attracting immigrants for the usual reasons.

The amnesty bill and its idea they can just get a new electorate hinges on the idea the US is infinitely attractive.  Marxists believe this, because they believe that the wealth inheres on the locale and “natural resources” which is why they ruin places like Venezuela because they THINK it can’t be ruined.  And they think the US will remain “rich” no matter how they redistribute.  So they think it will always be attractive.  The rest of us think of the US as infinitely attractive because we’re mad in love with the IDEA of the US.  But it’s time to wake up.  A poor place is NOT going to attract immigrants in droves, particularly immigrants from a warmer climate, where the living is easier in pure food/residence terms.

So, the pushers of amnesty can’t get what they want, and those on the right shouldn’t think all is lost.  The wave that comes in won’t be very big.  Now, the financial drain WILL be massive.  Why?  Everyone who can afford to will come back, claim citizenship (on paper it will be a horde) then take benefits back to Mexico.

This will speed the financial crash, but it was coming anyway. I think Obamacare will do to the economy what pouring cement into an engine will do.  It could stop a healthy economy and no matter how much they lie, this one isn’t even half healthy.  To be blunt, it’s already on life support.

That means at some point there will be no mo’ benefits, not for half-baked citizens and not for others either.  As I said, prepare your landing pad, and prepare to help others whom you care for.

The other assumptions baked into this amnesty bill are that:

 

Things will go on as they are, more or less forever, boom or bust, the US will come through and remain the house that FDR built, giving benefits to everyone who comes in.  Built into this amnesty is the expectation of another and another and another – none of them creating citizens, but bringing in a people who are used to having an “overclass” over them.  These people who want this fancy themselves that “overclass.”

 

Third world immigration is infinite because their population is exploding.  Again, I can’t prove this, but I’ve been in some of these countries (I grew up in one at the edge of it) and more, I have friends who have worked in others.  Yes, on paper third world population is exploding.  In reality this doesn’t seem to be true.  Most third world countries have built in assumptions of both racial virility “look how many children we produce” and of getting money per-capita from international charities and other civic bodies.  Yes, we see a lot of immigration from Arab countries, but it’s not that their population is exploding, so much, as that they’re so extremely bad at providing for the population they have.  Look, Russians are immigrating to Portugal, and no one can claim Russians have an exploding population.  Usually buried in all of this is the statistical fact that immigrant populations behave like the native population in terms of births from the second generation on.  (Latins?  The US?  Well, Mexicans DO come over the border to give birth.  Why not?  Double the benefits.  And our law keeps accreting people to the category – takes a bow – yours truly, for instance.  And there’s benefit in claiming the exotic side of your ancestry, so children of mixed marriage are “Hispanic.”  I’m not surprised the majority of births in the US are Hispanic.  I’m surprised, given incentives to the contrary, anyone is still officially “white.”)

 

One third to one half of the world population is now forever unemployable and will have to be cared for by a governmental apparatus that must make sure they survive, as a sort of forever-underclass.

This is nonsense.  They came up with the same under Carter.  It’s bokum.  Until 07 our unemployment rate was miniscule.  Europe’s was massive.  Are Europeans that much dumber?  No.  Just regulated out the hair roots.  You pay for security in lack of opportunity.

But:

 

They also assume tech will remain about the same.  Or at least that it won’t affect things much.  They’re insane.  They’re still in denial about what computers are doing.  It is possible there would be a big crash coming even without political shenanigans, which don’t help.  Why?  Because the changes in the way at least half (more like two thirds) of the people work that are already in the process of happening, would in the end have hit national economies hard.  I’ll explain this in other parts, but honestly, our government apparatus belongs to the early twentieth century and it works well enough for big industry, big media, big cities.  It can’t survive in a time of individual operators.  It can make everything crash.  But then the rebuilding will come.  Perhaps it’s ironical that the stripped-down principles of government laid down at our founding would work best as far as I can see.  They might force ourselves on the new world – which would prove our founders were truly ahead of their time.

What you have to think about is that in a world where you can work remote practically anywhere, the place you live in matters less; there will be movement from expensive to cheap places; we’ll also lose a lot of commercial real estate value (it’s already happening.)  You can change some of those to residential, but note that that is also not blooming.  The 2008 crash is nothing to it.  Then think of food, transportation, schooling.  All of that will change radically in ten years.

Will there be a crash?  Of course there will.  Though whether it looks like a crash or frantic rebuilding, it’s up to you to guess.

In the middle of all this trying to get a lot of third world peasants to come live in a country that is often inhospitable climate wise, for the sake of benefits soon to go away is forlorn.  You can for a while import a virtual army of citizens, who don’t really live here, pay no taxes, but collect benefits and vote the way you want them to.  It might see you through one or two election cycles.

But then things crash, as they become more and more divorced from reality and the gods of the copy book headings descend.

ALL amnesty can do is speed the crash.  Well… it’s not my favorite way to deal with the inevitable, and I’d like more time to prepare.  But we’ll have to prepare faster.

Don’t jump off the ledge, guys.  There’s work to be done.

 

 

I come neither to praise boomers nor to bury them.  My intent is to both explain what I love and what I hate about the generation’s effect on American society, and also the one thing I DO hate about almost all boomers (it’s a tic, I swear) and which, IM(NS)HO is what causes most of the boomer hatred from the reasonable members of my generation – the unreasonable ones are like everyone else – and the generations after.

I’ll start with a clarification – I’m not sure when in heck the media started defining boomers as going from 46 to 64, but they can stop it already.  I was born in 62 and until the nineties no one ever referred to me as a boomer.  This was when boomer was a proud designation, all the good people in movies and sitcoms were boomers.  We were… something else.  We never joined communes, the ones of our generation who smoked A LOT of pot were usually troubled (not just part of what everyone was doing.)  We – as PJ O’Rourke says at one point and I wish I could remember where – were dragged to the sit ins and didn’t sit down.  We were lectured about the age of aquarium and kind of nodded.  Then we cut our hair, put on our suits (in girls’ case skirt suits.  Remember the shoulder pads?  Yeah, I never needed them.  I have shoulders like a line backer, which was pretty funny when I was young and dainty.  Thank G-d the fashion hid it) and went to work.

To be honest, my brother, born in fifty four, was in the very last, straggling end of the boomers.  Technically two years before it should be called so.  Think about it.  The boomers are defined as being the post war generation, conceived in the great effervescence of relief after the end of the European long war.  (The latest European long war, I should say.  Europe is good at those.)  The generation was marked by one of the greatest waves of prosperity to hit worldwide and trickle down to the common people.  (Because their parents had benefitted from the GI bill?) They were the most educated generation – en masse – the world had ever seen.  (There are things that went wrong just because of that.  Anytime an industry is booming, you get con artists, and in the boomers’ case the con artists often went into education.)  They came of age in the sixties, in a great mass, straining the seams of every institution and focusing the attention of every marketer.  Everything was directed at them.  When they were very young, all the focus was on baby stuff, then toys, then…  You get the point, right.

More, except in families like mine, they normally came from very different family structures.  Most boomers I know have more than one sibling.  In my generation more than one is rare, and if you go over more than two, that’s really rare.

(In my family we had two only – mom didn’t want kids.  For reason.)

My generation – those born, say 57 on to 67 – had no name.  We still don’t.  The ones the media has tried to put on us, when not claiming we’re boomers, are repulsive.  “Jones generation” because they said we had a “jones” for what the boomers had is just silly.

I don’t remember envying the boomers.  Oh, yeah, okay, when I was young I tried to ape them – till about 17 or so – but that’s just what kids do, and besides my brother was my hero, as much older brothers are to little girls.  But envy?  No.  They were just diferent.

They came of age in the sixties prosperity and got stuff thrown at them.  We came of age with disco and the idea that we were running out of oil.  By my birth year, in my area – I don’t know here – they were starting to close schools and consolidate, aware, as it were, that the boom wouldn’t last forever.  There is a different perspective there.

If you go back and read Heinlein’s juveniles, you’ll catch the certainty that each generation will be bigger than the last and that each one of them will therefore have more power in societal activities.  My generation was safely ignored.  The marketers were marketing to boomers.  We were left to do our thing.  And that was difficult, let me tell you, because the boomers had this idea of themselves as being a different generation (we’ll go on about this, later) and therefore they had ‘generation consciousness’ (there is a story relating to science fiction, which I’ll tell later) and believed that people before – and by the time I came along – after were somehow different and inferior.  If I had a dime for every interview where I was asked about my “social consciousness” or various other boomer-generation markers, (as defined by the media) I wouldn’t have needed a job.

There was a series of comic books – Mafalda – from an Argentine, which talked about my generation.  The title of one of them was “We came afterward.”  I think if we had a title it should be “the Worriers.”  We came of age being told there just wasn’t enough for us.  We came of age to worries about overpopulation and the horrors it would bring, we came of age afterwards, forgotten, as an afterthought.

Which is why most of us resent NOW being lumped in to the boomers.  My standard answer is “Sure I remember sixty eight.  I entered elementary then.”

Many in my generation developed a knee jerk reaction “If the boomers do it/believe it, I’m for the opposite.”  This is the reaction to being lectured to from a very early age, and from having every societal signal blare at you that the people ten years older than you are all that, and you just rained on the parade.  Frankly, I’m surprised we’re not more p*ssy than that.

Trying to swallow us up just p*ssed us off more.  Go and look at the magazines of the seventies.  We weren’t considered fellow boomers.  No, the marketing industry just kept creeping that forward, partly, I think to cater to this idea they’d created of the boomers as “forever young.”

Of course the generation that came of age in the late sixties is not uniform.  It is not so anymore than any other generation is.  And it is a mistake to think of it as defined by age. The president, mind you, is one year older than I, but he is an echo -boom baby, born of a (very young) boomer mother.  His generation markers are closer to those of my older son’s (born in the last year of the echo boom): Robert’s classmates tend to be “more boomers than boomers” and talk about their parents with near worship.

However, the boomers were hit by some of the same influences, the same marking experiences: First it had to do with being the first generation born after the long war.  I’m sure at some point, even the more detached, had at the back of their heads the certainty they were the next batch of cannon fodder being reared and the war would continue.  Can you blame them for their (public, media fueled.  I’m aware a lot of boomers served with valor) reaction to Vietnam?

Second, they were a prosperous generation.  Larger numbers than ever were educated. This created a disconnect between a lot of them and their parents, particularly since (I told you I’d pick it up later) a lot of the colleges hired teachers/professors in a hurry to meet the boom, and a lot of crazy theories and marginal academics of the past generation got given credence and became mainstream.

Third, they were “homogenized” and propagandized by the media like no other generation before.  Part of this was that the USSR (don’t bitch, we have papers) spent untold amounts of money to do so, to create a sixth column in our midst (they succeeded, but not with the ones they’d expect) and part of it was simply the ENORMOUS marketing wedge to be gained from catering to these young, relatively wealthy and NUMEROUS people who all were hitting the same stages at roughly the same time.  (Bitter joke from someone my age around the eighties “Have you noticed how it’s never been cool to have babies, till the boomers are doing it?  I wonder if fifty years from now, it will be cool to die?”)

It’s impossible to be on the receiving end of that sort of thing and not buy some of the ethos.  A lot of the people from that time still think there was something… unifying about the generation, aside from the sort of influences I named.  I think that’s where the odd defensiveness “Hey, you can’t trash talk about my generation” – even when someone isn’t! – comes from.  It, of course, reinforces the stereotypes.

Fourth: a generation that large can’t HELP being a lobbying group.  As I said, boomers focused the attention of marketeers.  Now, I don’t know if they still do (I rarely watch commercial tv) but they do focus the attention of politicians.  Stuff like Obamacare was with the idea of attracting them “Hey, get someone else to pay your last-years’ health bills.  Because you can.”  Of course it’s going to hurt them most of all, but that’s only reality, not what was marketed.

Now these influences hit people differently.  I’m going to admit right here I have and have always had a massive weakness for brainy boomer guys.  The sort who are so smart they’ve never made it at anything.  The sort that took everything thrown at them and retained only one thing: new stuff is opening up, do/learn/try new stuff.  Yeah, they often went to peace demonstrations (though they probably did it for the hippie chicks) and they probably did drugs.  A surprising number of them kept the hair and the ‘tude but turned right when they aged.  O’Rourke is sort of kind of one of those, Johnny Fever from WKRP in Cincinnati is the same type halfway through maturing.

I liked guys like that so much, when I was young, that I was shocked I married someone not at all like them.  I still like them and have several friends who are like that – though they’re usually from the younger trail of the boom, born 53 to 57.  There is something incredibly charming about the way they face the world: the willingness to try stuff and the refusal to condemn those who take different paths (but aren’t doing anything wrong.)

I even like the variety of them who were too “square” to do drugs or be promiscuous but who display towards the intellectual life that same curiosity.  I’ve come across guys and girls (eh, they’re only ten years older than I) who have not only read more than I have, but more than I could read, and who have thought deeply about things I couldn’t begin to even be interested in.  Those of them that went in academia are a blessing and usually a “burdensome stone” in the midst of their unthinking colleagues (and a lot of them turned away from Academia because they hated the group think.)

Their influence in general has been good for society.  It’s hard for people to remember this – the schools (argh) have worked hard at fostering the idea that the thirties-through-fifties were normal “before the boom” times, but they weren’t.  Increased industrial production and marketing made society a lot more uniform than it had ever been.  Let’s put it this way, in the fifties, 1984 was credible.  By the seventies, not so much.  (I don’t mean the future had changed.  1984 is an exaggerated fable and was never possible.  People are not that uniform.  BUT in the fifties it was possible to imagine them becoming so.)

But other people were hit very seriously: they took the idea that they were supposed to transform the world to heart.  They took the very bad economics and redistributionist bull hockey to heart.  They took the idea that all capitalism was corrupt to heart (remember, millions spent by the USSR.)  They thought Castro was doing a good thing.  They had Che posters.

Weirdly, these are the ones who early eighties cut their hair and went into corporations.  They were by and large “daddy’s sons and mommy’s daughters,” i.e. fairly affluent and had connections.  What they’ve done to our economic life doesn’t bear examining.  Part of this was that they believed what they were taught.  (If you think of our president as an exaggerated, cartoonish version of this, you’ll see what I mean.)  The USSR was the way of the future.  Oh, without the prison camps and icky stuff, but you just couldn’t deny communism was more efficient and besides they had no unemployment and no hunger.  (Ah!)  They were bringing these wonders to America, under the third-way.

What they’ve actually done is create an unprecedented level of crony capitalism.  (which, yes, always existed.  It’s part of how humans function.) They also – or at least a substantial number of them – took cold when the USSR fell, and since then have been intent on one thing only: feathering their nest.

Then there’s what I call the Rancid Hippies.  They annoy me because at first glance you might confuse them for my favorite type of boomers.  They’re not.  They might have been hippies when they were young, they might have believed in trying new things and letting others try their own path.  But somewhere along the line they hardened into twin convictions: other people are too stupid to do what they think is RIGHT, and they KNOW what is right.

Rancid Hippies mostly inhabit the education establishment, but also the media, the arts, and oh, yeah, publishing.  This explains how well all these institutions are doing.  These people are best exemplified by “Question Authority – except mine!  You WILL obey me.”

Then come the vast number of boomers: they kind of heard the propaganda, and often have an untoward pride in “my generation” but they bought neither the snake oil of the USSR nor the “do your own thing” openness of the early hippies.  They might have a bit of both, but they were just people, trying to do the best they could.

Of course, they aped the “ooh, having babies is cool” and all that, because it was shoved down their throats by the media.

But they don’t usually go around saying “Yeah, I’m a boomer” even if they come out and defend boomers when they suspect they’re under attack – even if they’re not.  I suspect a lot of this is because anger has been directed at them because of their birth year, and they don’t realize to people my age and younger what they’re “defending”, what we identify on sight as “boomer” is the media image of boomers, not the people who were born those years.

Some of it stuck, of course, stuff like “build community” and “give back to the community” and “make a difference” were slogans thrown at them so uniformly that it would be amazing if most of them had ever examined them.  Only the smarter and more conflicted have.  The others just seem to think this is like some sort of memorized response.  It drives people like me nuts, but my generation does it too, and my older kid’s even more so.  (Your older kids? You say.  But your kids are not that far apart.  Uh, no.  But there you can see the generational waves by year.  Yes, there’s people like us, who had kids too late or too early – I always thought it was late – but Robert’s year most of the parents were ten to fifteen years older than us.  Four years later, Marshall’s classmates all had parents ten years younger than us, and we were the “old” parents.  Consider one was born when I was 28 and the other when I was 32.  It makes no sense, unless you take in account Robert about hit the last year of boomer fertility without extraordinary aid, like Hollywood stars get.)

Things that affect almost all boomers and which I find completely understandable: their refusal to have kids in the number their parents did.  If you grew up thinking you were the next wave of cannon fodder, wouldn’t you?  Also, you were being told so much was expected of you.  You were going to change the world.  Left d*mn little time for kids;  the mass demonstrations against the war (yes, I know most of you never did, but the ones who did were still a higher percentage than at any other time) – well, between the propaganda over the air waves and the suspicion the battlefields of Europe were waiting for you your whole life… what do you expect?); their unwillingness to grow up till late in life – when you’re told you’ll be forever young, why bother?  The way they treated older and newer generations, too, had to do with gaps in education and with mass propaganda.  (Let’s be glad the days of mass anything are passing.  No generation should have done to them what was done to boomers.)

That part, though, is also part of the resentment, particularly for those of us in the media, in the arts, in education.  My generation was DELIBERATELY kept away because we weren’t “idealist’ enough (i.e. didn’t agree with leftist boomers) and then we were told we were too old, and the way was opened for the echo boomers.

Don’t tell me I’m imagining things.  I would bet you if you do a head count, my generation accounts for most of the midlisters and the shattered writers.  It hit me in the face as more than a suspicion when I read an interview in Locus with one of the major magazine editors – one I admired – who said that no one under 45 had enough life experience to write.  This was around 98, I think.  I was in my mid-thirties.  Ten years later, it was breathtaking to hear the same editor talk about how there was no market for writers in their forties, because the future and the interest was in the twenty somethings, whom they were buying in droves.  Because those were their sons and daughters and aping their opinions.

I realize that’s mostly in art and writing, but I’ve heard similar stories from corporate life.  People being treated as the “bratty kid” well into their thirties and then within a few years being agglutinated to the boomers, who were ten years older, and being told there was no future for them, and they would never make it far.

Why this is important – it’s important for those born in the boomer years to realize they were sold a bill of goods and that institutions they trust are still selling them a bill of goods.  That is the only way they’re going to realize the health-care-law backed by AARP will not in fact pay for all their needs in their late years.  No, they mortgaged MY kids, and instead they’re going to get killed.  Most of them don’t know the number of slots in medschools were cut by Obamacare, even as supposed universal access was granted (and don’t get me started on how we’ll all pay the penalty and  no one can have insurance, because we can’t afford it, and how the penalty will go into the general fund, of course) and therefore what they’re going to get is “death panels.”

It’s important for them to realize they have less in common with the conmen of their generation and with the rancid hippies than with people like me who are trying to save the nation.

Those people are not your friends; the image they sold you was beautiful, but it was a fairy glamor.  It never existed.  Behind that image are the con men who take advantage of the image and the rancid hippies that are destroying art and entertainment and making education an authoritarian nightmare (yes, I know, on the framework that was there, but the command to “Question authority” bellowed from above is a special refinement.)  The free spirits never subscribed to the image – or much of anything else – and the normal people shouldn’t be defending it.  Nor should they buy the sappy adds and propaganda aimed at them.

I know it’s hard to change your mind after forty five, but I’ve seen some of you do it.  Do try. The “third way” was a lie, your generation was not particularly blessed, just large (everything else came by accretion) and you don’t have to defend the crazed rancid hippy beardo the weirdos in education.  You also don’t have to die for the Hillary Clintons of the world, corrupting the polity from within.  You can trust people under fifty five.  (Over fifty five, it’s mostly you guys and some of mine, now.)

The circumstances of your birth are not your fault, the time at which it was, and the fact the USSR propagandized you is not your fault.  My circumstances are not my fault either, and truly we’re trying very hard to forgive what the boomer gatekeepers did to us, and to remember they’re not representative of all boomers.  Most of us try to do more good than harm.  None of us are cartoon characters.  It’s time to reexamine assumptions, and it’s time to help those who came after slog our way out of a mess that started years before any of us were born, in the trenches of WWI.

We didn’t start the fire.  But we have firehoses.

The other reason it’s important is that the more you push that image at us, the more you create people who will throw the baby out with the bath water.  The more you insist on the authoritarian-non authoritarian model, the more you tell us “Resist authority except ours” and the more you talk about fighting against the man when you ARE the man, the more people younger than I will go “Everything the boomers ever thought was a lie. I’ll do the opposite.”  And the pendulum swings towards 1984.

 

*Sorry to be late and for the somewhat short chapter.  It’s been an odd day.*

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 (And at this point I’m hoping that will happen by the beginning of July at the latest).  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. *

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

Jonas Was Not An Instruction Manual

Lady Helen Blythe, sister of the Earl of Savage:

 

He said we were inside something – inside a living creature.  I didn’t shriek.  I pride myself on not shrieking.  Betsy didn’t shriek, either, but I think that’s because she hadn’t quite understood what he said.  Instead, she clung to my arm and looked all around with big, worried eyes.

Part of my mind was misgiving me, because I should never have brought the poor child into this adventure, and the other part of me wondered at my misgiving.  The servants had just always been there, and it was their job to do what I wished, was it not?

I looked at the big rough man in the dark suit, with his bad haircut and his blunt features.  I had a sudden feeling he would in no way agree with my assessment, since, in a way, he could be considered a servant, could he not?

Laughter bubbled up my throat, and I coughed to disguise it, and when Mr. Wolfe looked at me, I said, very seriously, “It truly is an awful smell, is it not?”

His eyes were grave, and narrowed, as he nodded.  “I suspect,” he said.  “That we’ve been… swallowed.”

I tried to imagine something large enough to have swallowed us whole, and to contain this immense chamber as well as… surely more?  I looked upward, towards the place he’d pointed, the place from which light came.  I remembered nanny reading to us about Jonas.  That was something I’d never thought would happen to me.  Sure, piracy and running away to sea…  All right, perhaps my understanding of such things hadn’t been – still wasn’t – perfect, but was it not probable that I could have managed to learn it?  Surely, even the pirate world couldn’t be more complex and baffling than the world of the ton.

But this…

Mr. Wolfe was walking, decidedly.  I said, “Where are you going?”  He turned around and looked at me blankly for a moment, then said the one word, “out.”

I hate men like that, who will answer things as though they were obvious when they clearly can’t be.  “What do you mean out?” I asked.  “You can’t know which way is out.”

He frowned a little.  “I think we’re in the alimentary canal of some large creature,” he said.  “I think one way or the other we will go out, but we must perforce go one way.”

I thought of the “one way or the other” and shuddered and almost said “you can’t mean it, which was stupid, for it was plain as his square, undemonstrative face that he did mean it.

I bit my lower lip and refused to act like a gabby.  After all, if we needed that I’d explain to Betsy exactly where we were.  I looked at her glazed looking eyes and felt bad again I’d dragged her into this.  No.  I was not a monster of cruelty.

I couldn’t however just go meekly so I said, “Why don’t we use magic?”

He clamped his hand on my upper arm and said, “Listen … lady,” the pause led me to believe he’d almost said something quite different.  “Listen, look up.”

I looked, to where the pink ceiling that was all too obviously flesh moved.  And then I saw it, the almost too subtle sparkle.  “It’s a magical animal,” I said.

“I think so,” he said.  “Indeed, I do think so.  And you will realize with the magic going bad, it would be a very bad idea to use it inside a magical being.”

“I think—” I said, then stopped, because I couldn’t explain to him that I thought we were inside the thing that shook and rattled and tried to break through beneath the fish-men city.  But he looked quizzically at me.  He hadn’t let go of my arm, and I didn’t make him.  He wasn’t holding too tightly, and his human warmth was strangely comforting in this place.  “What do you think?” he asked.  “You said you were trying to get out before, trying to transport home.  Were you two always inside this, since you disappeared?”

“No,” Betsy wailed.  It was sudden and decisive.  “Noooo.  We were in the city of the mermen, and their king wanted to marry Miss.”  She paused a moment.  “At least I think it was Miss he wanted to marry, as he kissed her.”

Now Mr. Wolfe’s eyes were concerned indeed, as he turned on me.  He moved all the while, walking close to a moving, vertical pink wall, on a little ledge that was probably tissue, although I was choosing to think of it as a path.  To the right of us, as we followed this ledge, there was a foaming… I’d have thought it was an ocean, except it smelled sulfurous, and was a deep glowing green.  I was afraid if we fell in it, we’d dissolve, but I was none too sure that the path would continue.  What animal was this?  Even when I’d heard it – if that was what it was – beneath the city of the fishmen, I couldn’t tell what it was. An aquatic animal?  The idea of the whale flashed again, but I had an idea that whales swallowed a lot of sea water, and surely it would be cleaner inside a whale.

“Tell me,” Mr. Wolfe said.

And to avoid thinking of the foaming green liquid, to avoid thinking the path might run out, I told him everything since we’d got out of my room.  For a moment I thought he was amused, when I told him how it couldn’t be any harder to be a pirate than to be a debutant in the ton, particularly given the rumors about my family.  But then his face grew grave, and when I told him about the fish place, he said, “This world is not known.”

“Well, it’s not my fault,” I said.

Strange amusement danced in his eyes.  “You know, my lady,” he said.  “You are, in many ways very young.  You remind me of my son.”

“Your son!” I said.  And then because I’d rather think of anything than actually where we were, I said.  “How old is he?”

He shrugged.  “Jimmy,” he said.  “Is six.”

“Is he very smart?” I asked.  It’s been my experience that high born or low born every parent loves to speak of his child, and I needed Mr. Wolfe to like me and want to help me.  But he only gave me an odd look.  “He is… very odd,” he said, which made  me think that Mr. Wolfe himself was very odd, but I didn’t know what to say.

“The pearls,” he said.  “Do you still have them?”

I nodded and prepared to do battle if he told me I had to toss them into the acid bath, or whatever it was on our right.  But my tense muscles relaxed, when he said, “I think they might protect us.  I think–  There is a structure…  Can you wind them around your waist, though, under your clothes, so you don’t risk losing them or their being immediately visible?  We might met with malefactors.”

I stared at him, “Inside a whale?”

He looked above us.  “I don’t think this is a whale.”

“Inside whatever it is?”

“Well, we are here, are we not?  And it looks very large.”

I didn’t like the idea.  But I shut up, extracted the pearls from my soggy pocket and did as I was told, tying them firmly in a knot.  They wouldn’t have been very well concealed, except my clothes were now such a mess that a few bulges would never be noticed.

Mr. Wolfe stopped.  “Ah,” he said.

“Ah?” I said.

“Ah.  We can’t go any further. “ He showed me pink ledge enlarged into a sort of protuberance, and then ended.

“Oh,” I said.

“Fortunately,” he said.  “It looks like I was right about there being people in here.”  He pointed with a trembling finger.  On the… green liquid, there was a very odd looking ship, with sails that seemed inflated by an unfelt wind.  It looked somewhat like the Spanish ships at the time of the armada.

“They can’t be people,” I said, my mind rebelling.

Mr. Wolfe sighed.  “Let’s hope they are.”

“And let us hope they have food,” Betsy said, with a small sigh.

And thank you for the concern of all who’ve emailed.  It’s nothing serious, only my dishwasher died yesterday, and I’m downstairs with the repairman — also, this morning my computer was acting odd, and I had to reboot and run a full virus check.  Also — no, I don’t have a witlow — I’m having mild breathing difficulties, which made for a very bad night.

But the chapter is half written.  Just, depending on when the repairman finishes, I might need to cue my post for PJM lifestyle this Saturday first, so as not to drive my editor to distraction.

Thank you for your concern — and your patience.

Years ago, when I was stuck on the Magical British Empire books, two of my friends and beta-readers (YES, TWO OF YOU) made the worst possible interpretations of some paragraphs and one of them (not the one you’d expect) started sending me videos of animals having gay sex, for “inspiration.”  (This is why Kate calls those “the gay animals sex” books.)

When I protested, the one of the two who, like me, has been through the mill of a literature degree got mock-virtuous and said “you know books  are a collaborative art form.  Once you release literature into the world, the reader adds his or her own bit.  You don’t own it anymore.”  He said this exactly as many literature professors have said it, and he did it to get my goat, because we’d discussed literary interpretation before.  (I’ll get you for this some day, young man!  Age and guile beat youth, innocence and superior intelligence.)

The reason he knew it would get my goat, is that, both of us having graduate degrees in literature, we’d shared our annoyance before over the … for lack of a better term… Modern Arting of literature.

Modern Arting, you say?  Oh, yes, Sarah, enlighten us, you marvelous wordsmith.  Shut up, I say.  And do grow up.  Honestly, it’s like you never made up a word.  You’re just specialsnowflaking it again.

The modern art I mean almost always depends on interpretation and “a story” to make it art.  I’m talking of course of the type of “art” that gives my family extreme pleasure when we go to museums and get to wander about giving our egregious interpretations of it.  (Or critiquing the trash can as an installation.)  Yes, I know you can go to art classes for years to be taught that a twisted mess of kitchen implements is art.  But being taught that don’t make it so.  (Note this is not eschewing art that is done with different materials, or in different ways.  One of the best exhibits I’ve seen at the art museum were life-sized nude clay figures that seemed to move because of light/sound changes caused by people walking through the exhibit.  Classical?  No.  We have better tech now.  But interesting, oddly beautiful and… emotionally touching.  I’d say that is the measure of art – does it touch you in a way pure reason can’t?)

A lot of literature taught in classes depends on the story, on what the critics have said about it, for the professor (not necessarily the student, who might find more value or less, depending) to consider it “art.”  The interpretation is considered an integral part of the art piece.

When I was going through college, the fad was “significance.”  A piece had to be a social critique or have “significance” to count.  When this was applied backwards it resulted in some… uh… Odd interpretations.  I love Effie Briest, for instance.  It was the only part of German literature I really liked (For some reason memorizing Wagner’s librettos failed to do much for me).  But my professor de-emphasized the adultery as society disrupting sin that was part of the novel’s conception and instead viewed it, solely, as an anti-war novel.  (I don’t think that was even a major note in the novel, though I confess it’s been a long time since I read it.  But I doubt the author was writing to condemn the military.  According to my professor, the author also, apparently, was writing to prevent WWII.  Who knew?  Writers are clairvoyant.  And powerful.  “I’m writing to prevent Hitler.”  “Who?” “Exactly. It’s working.”)

Shakespeare – bless his heart – was a Marxist, according to my professors.  Yep.  It was that time travel from Black Adder…  It would have given the loyal bard of the Tudors heart attack, but never mind.

Jane Austen?  Totally a 20^th century feminist.

And always, the “the reader contributes his interpretation and every interpretation is equally valid.”

I never understood this.  AT ALL.  Or rather, I understood it.  It benefits a certain type of mind to be able to give legitimacy to half-baked theories, or to turn history on its head by claiming they have the right to interpret things ANY WAY THEY PLEASE and every view is equally valid.

Under the name of post modernism, this theory is destroying our universities.  It’s also doing no good at all to science fiction.  It means if someone is upset at being called a lady, her interpretation that the author is totally a misogynist is valid, and we should shut the man out.  Even if he never meant it.  And if several writers object to the fact that Heinlein’s women wanted to have babies?  Misogynist author.  The fact he never mentions skin color in his early works?  Racist author.  The fact that he has a book in which he disapproves of homosexuals (and a dozen books in which he doesn’t)?  Homophobic author.

In fact, if you read Heinlein’s letters or extra-textual material, he obsessed about not… How do I put this?  Not piling on on the weak.  It sometimes had an unpleasant feel of literary affirmative action, but it was just him taking it very seriously that minorities who had no defense (at the time) should not be piled on or reviled.  However, this reading of extra-textual materials and trying to figure out what the author meant has gone out of style.  Now every interpretation is just as valid.  And besides, the reader adds his own layer on the work.

Right.  Is this a totally invalid effect?  No.  I’ve talked here before about how sometimes your subconscious is up to stuff you don’t know, how the reader fills in “an otherwise thin” narrative to give the feel and texture of a full world and perceives things you didn’t know you’d put in.  It always stuns me when someone tells me something about one of my own characters and I realize it’s true.  Then I go and look in the books, and wow, it’s true.  But I didn’t realize I’d put it there.

It is this elasticity, this interpreting of penumbras that gives people the brilliant idea they can interpret things any way they please, because it must be there without the author’s knowledge.

Er… Two things: first, you’re entitled to your own opinions; you are not entitled to your own facts.

You might decide that Heinlein’s women wear aprons as a sign of degrading servitude.  You cannot however maintain it when someone points out that clothes were far more expensive in those days, (when he was writing.  Yes, he should have foreseen their becoming cheaper, but consider he also thought we’d be bursting at the seams with overpopulation) and so you ended up having to wear aprons when doing something that might stain the clothes.  (Clothes were nicer too.  I mean, I go through a bunch of jeans and ts a year because I don’t wear aprons (stupidity and forgetting to put them on, mostly) but I buy them at $5 at arc.  If I bought them at $20, instead, I’d remember the apron.)  And just screaming “But that’s how I see it” doesn’t make it so.

Yes, people see insane stuff in my work too.  I love it when people view Darkship Thieves as a Marxist masterpiece.  (And yes, I know which of you just snorted his morning coffee out his nose, because I shared three such reviews with you.  Yes, I remember that hurts.  I still owe you a keyboard, too.  Sorrrrry.)  I don’t for a moment believe the view is valid – I’m not INSANE and my subconscious is not that subconscious-y – but it amuses me.  I love it when people see Athena as oppressed.  I love it even more when they see her as a reflection of me.  (Gosh, I wish.)  However, I don’t go to people’s blogs and play whackamole with them for having these crazy notions.  I don’t even do it when people have genuinely insulting views – Athena as a Mary Sue, for instance.  (Gosh, I wish.)  Yeah, I could argue they’re nuts, but it’s their blog and it’s their opinion, and we get into the realm of “what do you think a Mary Sue is?” and “Now give me examples of how I did that?”  “Oh, I see, you think the fact she’s enhanced is Mary Sue?  That’s not my view, but I see where you might think that.”

Not worth it.

My rule in general is this: if you want to interpret something in a way that justifies your liking it, more power to you.  If you’re a devoted communist, and think that Athena is your comrade, sail on, you glorious nutbar.  In your journey you might rethink a point or three about state power, and who knows… your kids might read it and their minds might be sown with the seeds of individualism.

My next rule is: no matter how wrong you are, if you’re wrong in YOUR blog, and you don’t come and ask me to defend why I killed a million baby bunnies in Noah’s Boy, I’m not going to follow you to your lair and beat you over the head with “there were no bunnies in Noah’s Boy.”  I have books under contract, I have work to do.  I am however not responsible if the fans find you and argue with you.  But neither am I likely to join in, unless you get personal and even then I’m not likely to bother.  Nor, btw, will I direct fans to go annoy you.  (My husband might, but even then you have to be REALLY offensive and have hit him the wrong way for him to do so.)

However, if you come to my blog and accuse me of hypocrisy with a distorted and bizarre view of my work, yes, I’m going to get offended.  No, I’m not going to stop a pile-on if the fans get in one.  And no, I’m not even going to be in the slightest bit sorry. (This is not to be confused with the pile-on that happened due to misinterpreting someone WHILE I WAS ASLEEP.  In future, people from Europe or other time-shifted continents who are being piled on, should retreat till I wake and crack heads.)

Look, this blog is my living room.  If you come in my living room and accuse me of puppy blending, I’m going to defend myself.

And while prose is elastic, it has its limits.  You can’t tell me that in your view every non-gay male in AFGM is evil and claim this is valid, when I can off the top of my head cite Sam, the universal father; Simon, debonair and more than a little nuts, but certainly not evil; Jan, the silent tower of strength; Fuse, damaged but endearing; Mr. Long enduring discomfort and putting himself out for total strangers; the kid who lets Luce out of the broomer’s lair, because Luce saved him… and on and on.

You CAN come in and say “But Sarah, didn’t you use the evil father cliché in DST and AFGM?”  And then we can discuss what “father” is, and why these people are evil, in a way that has nothing to do with cliché (there’s reasons, both in the way they were raised and the life they’ve lead that makes them evil.  It’s not just “ooh, father, evil.”)  Because that’s a valid (if in my opinion wrong) opinion.

You can – duh, every reader can – say “I don’t like this” or “it makes me uncomfortable.”  I was aware when I wrote the book that having two gay main characters in AFGM might make people uncomfortable.  I don’t even assume you’re homophobic if it makes you uncomfortable.  Certain types of characters make me writhe that I’m okay with as friends.  I don’t live in my friends’ HEADS.

Saying “I didn’t like this book because the mushy stuff” – I assure those who haven’t yet read the book that the only mushy stuff is in letters, and we never get to read it because the letters were censured by the army.  Long story – “made me uncomfortable” is perfectly valid.  You don’t even need to give any reason for not liking it – even in my blog.  You can say “I hate the Shakespeare trilogy” or “I don’t like your romantic fantasy” and refuse to say anything else. Of course, one would wonder why you would come to my blog to tell me that, but that’s something else. (BTW, the “only the gay males are good” COULD apply – if you squint – to Soul of Fire.  It’s not true, but it can be argued and it’s harder to protest.)

You can’t, however, come in and say “you’re an hypocrite because my interpretation of your work goes against what you say you did.”  If you COULD do that, and if your interpretation – unbacked – were indeed as valid as the author’s intent, then why would authors write ANYTHING?

Sooner or later, someone would come along and say “I think Heinlein liked to strangle puppies, because there is a line that says kittens are always justified, but it says nothing about puppies.”  And suddenly, the poor man many years dead would be TRANSFORMED into a puppy-hater, despite all textual and extra textual evidence to the contrary.

This is what got me so upset, well beyond the personal angle (and the personal angle is bad enough.  I  mean, would you go into someone’s living room and call them liars, because YOU THINK you see something in their work?  And not retract it when people refute what you think you saw?)

IF everyone’s interpretation is equally valid, then the past, perforce, changes more than the future.

Which means in the great, glorious Soviet present, we’re always sure about the (sad) future of books.  It’s the past that keeps changing.

And that Gulag of the mind I oppose, not just on my behalf, but on the behalf of every ink stained wretch who ever put pen to paper or hands to keyboard, or even dictated a story and who, by gum, has the right to defend himself and the text put down in the story from outrageous charges leveled against him. (And if he’s dead has the right not to have stupid charges leveled against him and living writers should pound stupid charges down.)

Or, as Shakespeare said (supposedly alluding to Marlowe’s death – maybe.)  When a man’s verses cannot be understood nor a man’s good wit seconded with the forward child, understanding, it strikes a man more dead than a great reckoning in a little room.

Yesterday, when I was stuck for what to blog about, I asked Robert for suggestions.  Blocking on blogs happens.  To me, it happens way more often than blocking on fiction. Usually I have a week a month when this is really hard to do, but it’s not always the obvious one.  For instance you would think that I’d have blocked hard last week, but I didn’t.  I’d sit down, and the idea for what to write was RIGHT THERE.  I just sometimes didn’t have the strength to carry it with aplomb.

Anyway, this week I’m blocking practically every night (I’m trying to write them at night, as that leaves me in better shape to write during the day.)  There’s probably other issues at work, like I haven’t gone out for walks, because I have to be on hand for older son, so he doesn’t do stupid things like fall down the stairs, cane and all.  Not leaving the house makes me a … lot weird.

So, Robert was sitting here and I asked him what to blog about and he said “Stereotypes.  How you use stereotypes as short cuts and they’re part of a writer’s bag of tricks.”

I told him no, because I wanted a topic for ATH not MGC.  And ATH is a writer’s blog, and occasionally a writing blog, but not a craft (as such) blog.  That I leave for MGC.

So he asked what the heck ATH is.  The answer was “Smashed if I know.  I talk about what I feel like talking at the time, and most people seem to go along for the ride.”

But it is, if I may be permitted to wax pedantic, actually a blog about the intersection of storytelling, society, culture and of course the inevitable (argh) politics which arise from all of those.  In the end politics are sort of a super-form of storytelling.  No?  Then why in heck would people get all heated up to vote for someone they can’t possibly know that much about.  (Particularly if they’re the party that shall not be mentioned, where the letter is never after the name when the news reveal malfeasance.)

This is why people talk about “the narrative” and it fitting or contradicting “the narrative.”

Of course, a lot of the narrative is what the press chooses to say or not say, how the politicians justify their actions, and what the schools teach people really drives the events in the world.

But here’s the thing: none of it would do much without the additional narrative that is told in a hundred little stories, fictional and non.  The stories people tell each other at the grocery store contribute to this, but they too are framed and interpreted in the light of the stories we’ve been told since childhood.

I come from a lost world, and was raised on rather moralistic pseudo-fairytales.  As in, they were CALLED fairytales (by some atavistic naming convention) but they were usually not magical and involved no fairies.  They might or might not have talking animals instead of people but often they had people too.  The story was about like Aesop’s fables, with the moral really obvious, and the morals were usually things like “Do onto others as you’d have them do onto you” “Keep a clean kitchen” (I swear.  It was the cockroach’s story.  No, I mean, she was the housewife.  No, you don’t want to know.) “Saving means you’ll have stuff when you need it.”

These stories were conveyed in tiny books – about two by three, and maybe eight? Pages – cheaply printed and sold at the checkout in stores, like candy bars and at the time much cheaper.  I think they cost the equivalent of five cents.  Mom was not likely to spring for candy bars, being absolutely convinced that chocolate was bad for me, but she always sprang for these little booklets, because it meant she had blessed silence on the way home on the bus, while I read, re-read and re-re-read the story.  Usually we got home before I was sick of it.  And I was always willing to beg shamelessly for anything printed.

These books presumed you were slow of thought and had at the end, “The moral of the story is:….”

That sentence annoyed me before I was out of kindergarten but the thing is, the “moral” was usually salutary, and yeah, it was being pushed into little kids’ heads, all wrapped in story.  Also, some of those morals are now outright subversive “Save so you might have later” for instance, denies most of the things we are now told, about how we “deserve” this or that for free just for existing.

Anyway – those little books, as much as the teaching in school, the newspaper slant or anything else – molded how people think.  You might not think it’s affecting you, but it is.

It’s gradual, it’s continuous, and the fact that until recently fiction presented a united front made it more impactful.  Our brain is really not good at distinguishing between stuff we’ve lived through and stuff we’ve dreamed about vividly – which is what good fiction does – hence the problem with recovered/false memories.

What does this have to do with “first do no harm?”  Well, when we were discussing here yesterday whether the destruction of say the belief in the constitution was purposeful or just the side effect of wanting to be in with the “cool” crowd and of the world being saturated with Marxist claptrap, we failed to take something else into account.  Sometimes all it takes is a small push.

Were most of the fantasy authors in the eighties, writing about young spunky female protagonists with abusive fathers trying to make men pariahs and suspect?  Some, perhaps.  I mean, among my colleagues there are some people who are so walking wounded that they’re more wounded than walking.  And some had personal vendettas to work off.

But I’d wager the vast majority of women getting published then and therefore around their thirties, had simply grown up with a traditional family structure.  This meant the father was usually the enforcer (okay, not in my family.  We were weird.)  So when they needed their young female protagonist to overcome a bad childhood, the culprit was usually an overbearing or outright abusive father.

This was so prevalent in the eighties, that I used to roll my eyes when I hit it.  But that’s its own problem.

You see, storytellers do use clichés.  Robert was right there.  You can’t say “never use clichés or stereotypes.”  You can’t do that.  You just can’t.  A book is not reality.  If you’re going to write about an inn keeper and instead of fat, jolly and red cheeked you make him small, skinny and harassed-looking, you’re going to arouse the wrong type of curiosity.  People are going to want to KNOW why your innkeeper is skinny.  Is the food bad?  Does he hate his job?  Is he not an innkeeper at all?

This is great if you’re setting him up as a nobleman (or poisoner) in disguise, but a royal pain if his entire point in the story is to come out and tell the characters he’s prepared them a private parlor, and the boys will see to the horses.

What’s more, when you’re telling a certain type of story, if you go against the cliché people will doubt your story – at least after the cliché is well established.

So, once the “cruel fathers oppress young women in fantasy settings” bit was set, as it were, in stone, if you had a nice and somewhat ineffective father, people would wonder what he was hiding.

It was easier, particularly for young and not very experienced storytellers to come in and make the father the bad guy.

Is this related to the way courts always favor even unfit mothers over fit fathers for custody?  The way men are assumed not to be needed in a healthy family?  The way schools look askance at male teachers?  The way young women raised by the young women who read that fantasy think that every older man is out to “oppress” them?

I’d be surprised if it isn’t.  You see, the human brain is a machine designed to create meaning out of random events.  Even the least talented of us create story out of every day things.  My family prized this, because my mom is a naturally good story teller with great comedic deliver.  She’d come home from the fair and make us all laugh ourselves into stitches by describing some woman trying to get her two year old to behave… with the most stupid exhortations imaginable.

But even that story telling or the story of what happened at the market won’t be exact (ask any policeman about witness reports.)  There’s bias in the seeing, bias in the reporting, and bias in how people hear it.

And a lot of how we hear stories is based on the professional stories we heard, particularly when they all resort to the same cliché.

Say you’re a nurse in a pediatric ward, and a kid comes in with an obviously bruised shoulder, and tells you his dad grabbed him and threw him.  If your expectation is that fathers do what’s best for their offspring, you assume there is a reason and you dig further, and find out the kid was running out in the middle of the street (actually he got his arm dislocated) and wasn’t going to stop (he was only two, and oh, boy, he could run.) so all the father could do is grab what he could get at (his hand) and pull, throwing the kid onto the sidewalk and himself out of harm’s way in time.  (Younger son was Houdini.  He forced me to do what I’d always said I wouldn’t and put him on a leash.  It didn’t work.  So I put him on an harness.  It didn’t work.  At one time I almost lost him in the airport in Paris, and he was in harness AND leash.  I looked away for a minute and he was out of both and running h*ll for leather down hallway.  Until his heart issues – now gone – were found at three he was expected to become a marathoner.  He loved running.  It’s just when he was very young he didn’t have any sense about WHERE he ran.)

But if you were raised on book after book of abusive fathers, if you saw tv shows in which all men are secretly violent, if the news talk about child abuse rings …  You start doubting the story, even when the entire family tells you the same thing.  You start wondering what they’re covering up.  And you make their life very uncomfortable for an afternoon, even if in the end you can’t detain them longer.

Now part of the narrative conformity was enforced from on-high.  Publishers tried very hard to sell the same package in everything – and it absolutely was coordinated with the news and the teaching, either because they did so intentionally or because they all attended the same schools and “everyone knows.”

All you had to do was try to have a heroic man, an evil woman, or a hundred other anti-cliches, and the establishment would tell you either that it was outright wrong or they wouldn’t publish you.

And this is how we come to a world where every woman thinks every man is trying to “oppress her” or “put her down” – when reality is so much more complex than that.  Yeah, some men are insecure gits who try to put others down.  So are some women.  Some men are helpful and protective.  So are some women.

BUT these days every woman (except us gender traitors!) tends to assume that every man is out to get her – a state of insanity that doesn’t bear describing – and that is the result of the continuously dinned  in and reinforced narrative.

So – now that the gatekeepers are gone…

First, do no evil.

Yes, clichés are easier and sometimes they’re unavoidable.  But think before you use them.  Couldn’t your protagonist have an equally hard childhood if she was raised by her father and was at the mercy of idiot bureaucrats who suspect all men of abominable evil?  Does it need to be her father who is bad?

Sure, if you make every hostler ruddy and fat and jolly, the sour faced, bulimic hostellers are going to hate you.  But no one looking at a skinny hostler is going to think he’s actually fat in real life.

In the same way, can’t your rich guy have acquired his riches honestly (most did and do, you know.  Yes, recently there have been a few trying short cuts, but that’s part of their being convinced that’s how you get rich.  Stories again.) Can’t he be a philanthropist? (a lot of them are.)  Do all your poor need to be deserving?  Sure it’s a cliché since Dickens, more or less, and the cliché is so strong that even when it’s obvious most homeless are drug addicted or mentally ill or both, people call you heartless for saying “What we’re doing isn’t working.  We need a separate system for families in temporary homelessness, because they shouldn’t have to live with this.  And we need to figure out what to do about the permanent homeless.” They tell you that you’re just trying to remove inconvenience because, well, in stories all the victims are worthy, right?  (Except in Pratchett, bless him.)

In reality we know very well that just because you were treated badly doesn’t mean you’re a saint.  But we tend to forget that, after reading/watching a dozen or a hundred stories.

So I’m asking you… First do no evil.  First examine if you can get away with not using the cliché without distorting the story.  And then figure out if the cliché is harmful.  (Some aren’t.  I have too got a Latin temper, but if anything having the reputation serves people warning they’re dealing with a fully loaded Sarah and that she can go off at any moment.  Useful.)

If you must err, err on the side of breaking the clichés that condemn whole groups of people, particularly if these people are designated “oppressors” in Marx’s fake whirligig reality.

Of course you’ll have to have villains.  And sometimes your villains will have to be rich, or white, or male, or all, but give them some reason why they’re villains beyond “they’re privileged” (which most white males aren’t, btw.)  And if you can make the reason something more than “he was beaten when he was three.”  Freud notwithstanding, humans are more likely to commit villainy in pursuit of what they view as wealth, or status or power (or all of the above) or even “just” security than  out of the remembered trauma of childhood.  Most of us were traumatized enough that we created scar tissue.  It’s called being an adult and not overreacting to every event, as though this were the first time we met with it.

More often than not, you’ll meet this in revision, not on first writing, because you naturally fill in blanks on the sides of the story with clichés.  But in revision consider changing it.

And if you’re a reader, learn to be sensitive to the clichés and to remind yourself that just because the story says it, it ain’t necessarily so.  It will ruin some of your reads, but it might just start turning things around.

First, do no harm.

Different post up at Mad Genius Club.

You know that talk about what you write for?  Why you write?

When I came in to the profession, given realities that weren’t exactly too hard to suss out, I stood a better chance of having a 19^th century Eastern European prince get sucked up in a cross time vortex, fall in mad love with me at first sight and shower me in the crown jewels than of ever making a living doing this fiction writing thing.

When I started writing it wasn’t for Baen and that Baen has a limited number of slots in its publishing stable.  I knew the factors were things like “being able to attend tons of conventions and making up to editors and what can loosely be called opinion makers in the field” and that satisfying that requirement required other things like “don’t tell people when they’re being frigging idiots.  No, not even if they’re being frigging idiots right in front of you.  No, not even if they really, really deserve it.  No.  Just no.  For heaven’s sake, go to your room and scream it into the pillow if you have to, but make sickly sweet smiles when people explain to you they’re really victims because their father looked at them with patriarchal disdain when they were two.”

Somewhere there’s a bunch of pictures of me at conventions between oh, 1999 and 2008, and I am sure I look as though I’m wearing a corset, and also possibly as if I’m terminally constipated.  It was the effort of holding my opinions in.

In the face of all this, and knowing that the field rewarded exclusively loud and convincing parroting of talking points, I persisted in writing stuff and trying to make a living.  (Yeah, I even tried some talking points, but I was never good at it – possibly because subtexts kept creeping through.)  It is probably a testimony to my stubbornness that I actually remained published for over ten years, particularly given the times in which I was working.

But why, dear lady, you’ll ask yourself.  What possessed you?

When we were talking about it yesterday, some of you said you wrote because otherwise people would come and put you away in straight jackets.

This, of course, is completely ridiculous, as are all suggestions that writers suffer from a mild form of dissociative disease and that—

Yeah, basically.  You’re basically right.

Sort of.  Sideways.

Remember that thing in Stranger in a Strange Land when Heinlein has Mike realize that laughter is what you do when things hurt too much?

It is sort of like that.  For me at least.

I’ve said before that I wouldn’t write as I do if I weren’t being paid for it.  This is true to a great extent.  I mean, would I stop writing?

I once stopped writing.  It was glorious.  It lasted almost two weeks.  I cleaned the house, organized my books, took the boys to the park to play.  And then an idea ambushed me and poured out of my fingers with such intensity that I couldn’t stop myself writing it.  And after that, I had fallen off the wagon for good.

However, two and a half years ago, when Kris Rusch told me about indie, I was ready to walk away from it – at least walk away from it as a way of making a living.  As much as I enjoyed working for Baen I couldn’t work just for them and hope to survive, and besides if I only have one publisher I start worrying about things like whether the cover sends the right message, and I’ll drive anyone who works with me up the wall in no time flat.

So, if I had walked away would I have stopped writing?

Totally.  Er… not.

I might have stopped writing under my own name and as myself, but by now there would be fifty fan sites with a very odd writer, sometimes writing fan fiction for shows she’d never watched.  (I’d probably also have tried to write Shakespeare fan fiction, so it would be a dead giveaway.)

The thing, would it be as time consuming as it is now – no, of course not.  Would my writing take in account that people might need to read it?  Almost certainly not.  Given the erratic nature of my mind, these fan pieces in alternate reality are probably full of allusions and deep embedded significance that only I and maybe two people on the planet will get.  (And I don’t mean because they’re so smart and erudite – I mean because like me they have some truly weird mental associations.  Like the smell of chalk reminds them of pomegranates.  And don’t you wish you knew?)  Like there will be quotes from Asterix comic books unattributed in otherwise perfectly serious situations.

So would my writing be less stressful?  To an extent.  It would be mostly more erratic.  My muse trips on acid when left to its own devices.  Or behaves as though it did.

But I’d still write.  In heaven’s name why?

Because reality doesn’t make sense.  And the only way I can process things without writing fiction about them is by trying to make them make sense.  This means, btw, that the best way to upset and baffle me is to act completely irrational.  I can get someone being upset at me because my personal style annoys them.  I can get someone being upset at me because I once did something to them, even if it’s something I don’t get.

However, if someone comes at me and says “you know I hate your guts because penguins!”  I’ll spend the next three weeks obsessing over these words and trying to figure out what the person meant by “penguins” and any real or symbolic penguins that might be involved in my life at any given time.

The two things that completely confuse me are rudeness and making no sense.  This has probably been obvious by how long it takes me to deploy the troll hammer when a troll, cunningly, manages to combine both.  (Though I’m learning and I use some of you as canaries in the mine.  If these people make you sound like you want to stomp bunnies, the hammer descends.)

But my interpersonal failings notwithstanding, people who are irrational and refuse to fit any logical category are easy.  At fifty I’ve learned that most of these aren’t worth a second thought.  I either wall myself off from them completely, or I hold them in the container of “is okay, but periodically goes off meds.  Ignore the off meds stuff, but never trust.”  Sometimes, on rare occasions I go “Is okay but went through really painful, bad phase due to – illness, pregnancy, menopause – is safe to trust again, now.”

What drives me to writing like it drives other people to drinking is the big, societal, huge,  massive things that SHOULD make sense and don’t.

Like, say, a party that proclaims itself concerned with the rights of individuals running around making sure that people vote ONLY by mail, where vote fraud is huge and implicit.  (No?  How many people will resist voting for grandma, who is not quite there?  And that’s before the incentives for fraud at the top levels become clear.  “We’ll just find a box of ballots in the trunk.  We know people would vote for us if they voted their interests.”)  And yet managing to keep the appearances of being concerned with allowing people to vote – that’s all.  This even as it strikes down laws that would prevent non-citizens from voting (through verification of status.)  This even as it ignores certain groups intimidating other groups at the polling stations.  As in, New Black Panthers.  Brandishing clubs.

Like, say, a party who says that they want you to be free and express yourself and sex is beautiful endorsing codes of conduct and speech in campuses that would make Victorians go “whoa, that’s to far.”  Only of course, the codes are against men (asking for a date is sexual harassment!) which would baffle the Victorians even more.

Like, say, the IRS using its power to punish political enemies of the party in power and then a grown woman, an attorney at the highest levels, saying, with a completely straight face that no, she didn’t realize the Tea Parties didn’t apply to both groups on the left and write.  She thought “Tea party” was a generic term, like Kleenex.  (I wish I were joking.)

Like four men being abandoned to die in Benghazi, while those who should have sent rescuers to them refused to let rescue happen… And then spent a week blaming it on some Coptic Christian’s craptastic movie on Mohammed, to the point of making an apology-commercial to play in Pakistan.  (That filmmaker by the way is still in jail.  Yes, yes, parole violation.  Really?  This justifies being yanked from your home in the middle of the night?  Being put in jail and virtually having the key thrown away?  Not to mention publicizing your name so members of the religion of peace and Theo Van Gogh you?)

Like guns run into Mexico.  No, they weren’t tracked as they’d been in the previous (ill advised) Wide Receiver.  They were just sold to Mexican nationals of dubious associations and not tracked at all.  You see, wide placed people in the administration had kept insisting we needed gun controls in the US because, well, the guns were going to Mexico’s drug war.  But it turned out research revealed they weren’t.  Most guns there were foreign.  So…  So, if you are a person who thinks reality should conform to your idea of it, you send guns to Mexico, so they’ll be found there, and you have a reason for gun control, because it is the right thing to do, of course.  (Because it has worked so well in Europe.  At least in these people’s minds.  – and yes, I hate the above explanation, but if you find another explanation for Fast and Furious I’d like to hear it.)

Like the NSA scandal – spying on everyone, all the time, so the NSA is reading this post last night, hours before you get to see it.

Like, using the EPA to attack political opponents.  Like, blackmailing organizations into supporting Obamacare.

None of these is unexplainable, you say?  There are reasons, rooted in the fantastical, fanatical and frankly a little scary religion known as Marxism?

Sure there are.  But none of that explains how all these things are revealed, one by one, and yet life goes on, and the person on the street has no idea, and cares even less.

Ask them what Fast and Furious is, and they’ll say the movie.  Ask them what Benghazi is, and they don’t know.  Show them clips of people at a political convention saying we belong to the government, and they don’t howl with outrage.

And we’re not talking about completely disconnected people: writers, scientists, college students, all of them will look at you blankly and say “oh, that’s just a way of speaking” or “Oh, that’s just some weird political scandal.”

You see, even as trust in the media plummets, people trust it for one thing: if it were important, it would be reported.  It might be badly reported, but it would be reported.

Only it isn’t.

And how do you explain that?

I don’t know.  The press, like most of our intellectual class is blinded by Marxism.  It’s such a pretty little system.  Like a rube Goldberg machine it does nothing useful, but it’s so complex, so interesting…  So they want to believe in it.  And wanting to believe in it blinds them to reality – with which Marxism has not even the narrowest of contact points.

So they think oppression and totalitarianism wears jackboots, goosesteps and has racial obsessions of the “if you’re not blond you die” type.

Anything that doesn’t fit this stereotypes, and anything that comes under the shiny coat of Marxism can’t be bad.  Because fighting for the downtrodden is never bad (and anyone who is not blond, male and gooseteppish can be interpreted to be downtrodden.  I mean, surely you were yelled at once in your life.)  Because wanting to take care of others is always good.  Because no one should have anything more than others: material, physical, mental.  We should all be equal, and then there would be paradise.  (Because Marx said so.  In fact, having seen what envy can feed on–  Never mind.  Marxists remind me of Muslims who want every woman swathed in sofa-covers to save them from the sin of lust.  We’re all supposed to be poor to spare the poor Marxists the sin of envy.)

And so obvious abuses and obvious infringements can’t be a sign of encroaching tyranny.  They can’t be.  Because if they were the journalists would react.  And they’re not reacting, because it’s with good intentions, and it’s the good people, and it’s—  Well, do you see anyone goose-stepping?  No.  Then go home, and go back to sleep.

It is this irrationality that makes me write fiction.  There is no way to fully express the anger, the baffled, frustrated anger that stops me up, that makes my hands shake, that makes me … clean the basement really well.

Only sometimes, after a while, my subconscious comes up with something and pours it forth.  And through it, I “get” it.  This was why I wrote A Few Good Men.  (And for that matter Sword and Blood.)  And it is why I’m working on Through Fire.

Because sometimes you need to go deep into a lie, to find the sort of sense you can’t find in the truth and to come to terms with the world as it is: irrational and often prejudicial.  More than that, it’s the only way to figure out the way out – to find out how to escape the nonsensical reality, how to shake the globe just right to make things make sense again.

In City Clifford Simak has people use kaleidoscopes to rewire the human mind to understand what it’s like to live in the other worlds of the solar system: and to want to go there.  As with Heinlein’s psycho-linguistic program it’s something that makes me squirm.  People should decide of their own free will and logic, and not because they were manipulated.

But sometimes you have to go deeper than logic, and sideways to reason to make sense of things.  That’s the place where fiction operates.

Hopefully – and if it works out – that’s where fiction operates for both the writer and the reader.

Afflict the comfortable?  Don’t make me laugh.  These things are mostly a good story, unstoppable.  And if afterwards you stop and go “Wait, but if that’s true then–” that just happens because of the what the story is, what it has to be.

It is not preaching.  It’s a kaleidoscope, through which the world makes a form of sense anew.  It’s the oldest of all human art forms.  It is language and thought and emotion.  It is what makes us human.

And when it works, it is what makes the world less insane.

 

So what is the purpose of this strange thing?  What do we do when we tell stories?

This is prompted by Amanda’s post on Saturday about the Harlan Ellison interview, where Ellison proudly proclaims . . . that’s what writers are supposed to do, afflict the contented.

My first reaction to this was that it was “leftist boomer twaddle.”  Some people took offense with it as being boomer bashing.  We’ll go into that in a later post – what and who is a boomer, why there is a tendency to bash them and how defensive people get when “boomer” is used.  But I actually meant something very specific.  Note the modifiers leftist modifies boomer, which yeah, okay, modifies twaddle.

What I mean is, to me at least, the sixties were the era when people – particularly leftists, particularly young, so by definition boomers who turned 20 around sixty five – came up with this odd utilitarian version of society.

Oh, it wasn’t just them, of course, and it wasn’t even originally them.  I’ve said before that I think Western civilization is dying of World War I.  The generation after the war tended to look for “greater meaning” and reject what had brought about the war (at least in their mind) including all the old values of the society they’d been brought up in.

But the thing is, this was mostly an affliction of the wealthy enough to angst about whether what they were doing was “useful.”  Artists, sure.  Some writers.  (Okay, a lot of writers.)  The wealthy sons and daughters of wealthy families.  They worried about whether they were doing was “important.”  Most people were just trying to survive, just trying to get by.

The boomer generation was the first time a significant number middle class people were both wealthy enough and educated enough to take on these ideas and to want to “make a difference.”

It didn’t help that this was the height of the cold war, and that the Soviets had rather active agit prop branches.  Communism – Marxism – is a philosophy that appeals to most young people, because it’s so “neat” and “internally consistent.”  It usually takes a while to dawn that the way to achieve this is to have absolutely nothing to do with reality.  For certain people it never dawns.

And the sixties (and subsequent decades) was the first time that it became feasible for large numbers of young people to hold onto these ideas long past the point they should have grown out of them: particularly people in the arts, in education, in the sort of “business” that has little contact with reality.

These people are “leftist boomers” or if you prefer “beardo the weirdo” – particularly the women!  — They probably started to the left of most of their generation, and they’ve taken refuge in echo chambers where it got worse, and where their pronouncements spun more and more out of contact with reality.

At least that’s the only way I can justify this bizarre, otherworldly idea that the primary purpose of writing – which in this sense means of course storytelling – is to afflict the comfortable?

It’s a common enough view.  I got it from various types of college professors, who – if they demeaned themselves with science fiction – would have loved Ellison.  I also heard it as a statement from one of the major editors in the field.  A lot of English teachers and professors will also tell you “Our job is to do a critique of society.”

And yes, if you dig around, you can read pretty much everything, from Shakespeare to Jane Austen as “critiques of society” – but frankly, I can ape it, but I never bought it.  Oh, sure, Shakespeare says pretty acerbic things about his time, but they’re almost incidental to telling his tales, and in the end he was the Tudors tame playwright.  And Jane Austen makes needle-witted observations on the condition of women but only of the sort that frankly any women of her time might have made, in safe company.

Mostly their stories are something else: they’re about people, about relationships, about eternal things.

You go back far enough in time, and why did people tell stories, whether imaginary or supposedly historic?

You can tell stories to inspire. I imagine when someone got up after a dinner, in pre-history and launched into one of those long sagas of which the Illiad is an echo, people got tears in their eyes at the feats of heroes and a warm feeling at the idea of this great, shared history.

You can tell stories to dream – truly, the stories were told of monsters and gods, and beautiful nymphs and lands where men had no heads, and the vegetable lamb.  Humans like stories of the wondrous and the miraculous, and stories can introduce the idea of possibilities, of things to explore into people’s humdrum lives.  It satisfies the “exploring” need when you can’t.

You can tell stories to educate and enlighten.  I will tell you right now these are my least favorite type of stories.  I never enjoyed the lives of saints.  But there is a certain type of people who likes these and even finds them edifying.  And of course the writer’s idea of right and wrong always shows in a story, and that’s okay.

You can tell stories that allow people to escape.  I’m telling you that through some of the worst times in my life – through fear, instability, grief, illness – stories saved my life.  They allowed me to forget my pain long enough, to go elsewhere long enough that I could face my problems with new perspective afterwards.

But none of these were enough for the leftist boomers when they came of age.  An affluent enough society, with a wealth of young people (and it’s a wealth we desperately need now) viewed it as the most important thing that storytelling be for some great collective purpose.  “To critique society” – i.e. to bring communal living to that semblance of paradise that is not achievable to mere humans.

This is rather akin to pulling down walls because you can’t build houses.

If your purpose is to make people writhe, to yell at those who disagree with you and those you think stand in the way of making society “perfect” you’ll always find victims.  They’ll never be the right victims, either.  I mean, if you truly attack the powerful in society, they won’t buy you and they won’t promote you, and they will even actively work against you.  Make the feminists writhe and… well… look up “storm in a B cup,” aka the late SFWA kerfuffle for how much that will enhance your career.

But even if you yell at the least powerful, and enforce the rules of those in power, in the end, all your work will be is a long screaming tantrum of dissatisfaction at a world that seems to forever fall short of your demands.

Pardon me – my kids could do that at a day old.  It hardly requires learning to write.

So why write?  Why tell stories?

Like Robert A. Heinlein, I like to answer “first, I write to feed my family.”  But that is a bit of a cop out.  If I were looking at strict bang for the buck work output for money input, I should have stuck with translation, which pays much higher fees per word.

But I don’t enjoy translation, and I enjoy writing.

In the end and to a great extent, I enjoy writing for much the same reasons I enjoy reading.  I enjoy the day dreaming and the escape.  In fiction situations can be bigger than life, heroes more inspiring, villains more villainous.  You can build an elaborate dream and share it.  And when people buy it – when people forego a chicken or a six pack of beer to buy your paperback, and when they love it so much they write you a note about it… It’s the best feeling in the world.

But what about afflicting the comfortable?

First I’m not a sadist.  I don’t particularly like afflicting anyone.  (Okay, limited discomfort because I just killed your favorite character excepted.  Deal. You have to experience that to be really happy at the ending.)  Second, who is the “comfortable” – do we mean the rich?  Do we mean the powerful?  Or do we mean those who have never thought over their unexamined assumptions?

I’ll confess that if I can I’d like to make people think – not agree with me; not hiss the same villains and cheer the same heroes, or not necessarily – just make them pause and bring out things they always assumed were right and give them a good look-see; make sure they really do apply.

However, that’s a distant ambition.  If I can amuse the reader; if I can take them away on a wild ride, make them forget that their job is in jeopardy and the baby has a cold (again) and the cat really needs more food–  If I can do that, and make someone’s life better or more interesting for two hours or so, I’ve done my job.

If I can make a living at it (and I’ve sort of managed the last few years) that’s even better.

Making them think?  Good, but not got to have.

Using words as whip to chastise those who upset me?  Bah.  That’s secondary.  And a mean aim for fiction.

Inspire, dream, build – that’s what I want to do.  Why would I settle for less?

 

SOME QUICK NOTES: for those who missed this before, Sabrina Chase has arranged for an opportunity at promotion and wishes to share.  We’re thinking a human wave garage sale and/or humble bundle.  Sound of in the comments if you’re interested and/or go and find Sabrina’s email address in Satruday’s comments and email her.  Copy me if you have my addy handy.  We’re thinking early August.

Also, lending credence to the fact that Dave Freer and I are pretty much the same person, he hit a similar theme to mine in his post today at Mad Genius Club.

And finally, I’ve updated the subscriber’s space, and those fortunate enough to subscribe (!) get to see some of what I’ve written this week.  On condition, of course, they talk it up.  (Yay.)  And now I’m going to prepare the suburban fantasy stories for publishing.