I really wanted to title this “How to pack for Armageddon” but that is not right, and not something I can do anyway.  There are tons of sites on that.  What to pack in the scaredy bag, what to have for “shelter in place.”

I’m not saying those won’t be needed.  As I said before, I don’t think anyone has taken into account – well, maybe someone has, but that’s not a comforting thought – that while this crew in power is playing at being “more sensitive than you” they’re giving signals to a lot of very bad actors.  The crew in power might be ill-intentioned (mostly I think they’re power-greedy and trying to cover it up by doing the things they’ve been told are “good”) but I suspect they honestly believe that if we unilaterally disarm we’ll be safe.  Don’t laugh.  A lot of my colleagues believed that all through the eighties.  It has nothing to do with intelligence, but with having lived quiet, sheltered prosperous lives where the wildest environment they knew was their kindergarten class.

Unfortunately, I’ve seen other sides of life, and I’ve studied history.

If we can do things like let all the sequester cuts fall on defense, and eventually start reducing our nuclear arsenal (more flexibility, remember?) and NOT get hit, we should just assume the USA is the Almighty’s favorite child and my made up USAians were right.  If we don’t lose a city or more to enemy attack in the next five/six years, I’ll assume this country is G-d’s personal project and that He’s zealously guarding us.

But alas, I think we’re human like other humans and our project of liberty and individual freedom is ours.

So, some regions of the country almost for sure will have to deal with Armageddon conditions to an extent or another.  Which depends who hits us and whether it’s a missile or a backpack nuke.

Yes, I feel crazy just typing that – it’s like ebooks, you know.  We expected ebooks to hit any minute now, and they didn’t, for almost twenty years.  I attended conferences in ninety four where they were talking about how ebooks were the coming thing.  But most people don’t like reading on the computer, and therefore it didn’t happen.  And then suddenly there was the second model of kindle (the first was too green and computer-like) and by that time anyone who’d been immersed in the business was SO convinced ebooks would amount to nothing, that they never, really, got their heads around the reverse.  They still haven’t.

To an extent we have the same relationship with nuclear attacks.  We expected them all through the cold war, which means most of our lives.  It never happened.  Now we tend to roll our eyes as we think of them.

But they are a heavy possibility.  There is a huge difference between attacking the US when you’re the USSR and you know you’ll get hit back, and attacking the US when you know it’s weakened and infighting, and you’re a small back water country and know if the US retaliates the world community will complain they’re picking on you.  (My brother after the Axis of Evil speech “Why is Bush picking on tiny, mad North Korea?” is what I expect to see.)

So, if you live in or near one of our major cities (unless it goes completely astray, which is possible since this is mostly “Russian Technology”, I expect it will be in one of the cities that everyone hears about on TV and shows: DC, NYC, Chicago, LA, San Francisco – with an outside chance of cities that have had TV shows set in them – Cincinnati, Dallas.  While it’s possible there will be one in Denver, for instance, that is an extremely outside chance unless there’s a sudden upswell of  documentaries about “Denver, the power of the west” that makes it abroad.) have a get away bag, just in case, and DO for the love of G-d know some funky, back-road route out of the city.  Make it a weekend project to scout those.  If you live in NYC and don’t have a car – Yes, you DO know who you are – make sure a friend-with-car includes you in his evacuation plans.

For what to put in the bag, and what to put in your basement/crawl space/armoire if you have to sit tight, there are survival blogs all over the net, and if you don’t know any, someone in this blog will link it on request.

My post – taking this long to get to the point is the hallmark of the fact I have had only one cup of tea – is about not the apocalypse, but the gentle slide into chaos and a (much) lower but still civilized lifestyle.

I’ve never been convinced by the “apocalypse” stories simply because American authors, never having experienced it, seem to think of something like a nuclear hit, or even several, crippling all our major cities and making our daily life a negotiated mess (and I want to stress that last one is – I think – highly unlikely in the situation right now.  We’re more likely to get the equivalent to “terrorism with nukes” than to get a planned, carefully carried out attack.  OTOH the attack might well unleash our own tensions and release Civil Unrest with a capital Mess – in which case, it won’t be much different from most cities taken out.)  will immediately send us back to some past age, ranging from the stone age to the nineteenth century.

Of course, most of those stories were written to convince us to unilaterally disarm, which, of course, meant exaggerating the awfulness.

Here is what is not going to happen:

Most people are not going to become looters overnight.  Yes, it will happen in some places, but let me remind you of when the lights went out in NYC for most of a day, and people just quietly walked home.  Whether you’ll have to shoot looters and keep vandals away depends on what region of the country you live in and how dangerous it is now.

You’re not going to need to grow your own wheat and mill your own flour overnight.  Yes, I know “on demand” supply, etc.  So, the local groceries will run out of ice-cream, Hersheys and the other stuff like that.  They might also – always depending on where you live.  We’re in the Khaki for vegetables out here, unless it’s summer, and even then – run out of steaks, or onions, or even (but unlikely.  I think the stuff spontaneously generates) cabbage.  BUT it’s unlikely to run completely out of flour or beans or rice.  (Of course, if you’re low carb you should be making your own preparations.)  Nor will it prevent local farmers from putting stalls by the side of the highway selling local produce ¾ of the year.

You’re not going to have to make your own clothes.  Look, I’m a writer, which means our income fluctuates, which is a polite term for “sometimes it’s non-existent.”  It always hits rock bottom at the most inconvenient times, too, like, when my husband is unemployed, (knock on wood, only happened twice in our entire married life.)  We’ve had to cut back on food, by going to the essentials and having me cook from scratch (but I do that, anyway, by preference) BUT we’ve never really had to cut back on clothes.  In fact, I think I have more than fit in my closet, and one of these days the hanging apparatus will crash.  (Partly because I treat them as disposable, since I hate aprons and all confining clothing, and so I tend to stain clothes while cleaning or cooking.)  — first, the clothes in your closet will not evaporate into the ether.  Second, and VERY important, society as a whole probably has a larger supply of clothes than we could consume (without throwing away) in a century.  I know this because we shop for our clothes at an ARC thrift store nearby.  A LOT of the clothes are brand new still with tags, usually because a store donated surplus.  And I have a rule never to pay more than $5 for a piece of clothing unless it’s designer. Then I’ll go up to $7.  If I go to $10 I get the frown of doom from my husband…

You’re not going to have to make your own furniture – see above.  We’ve gotten used to changing furniture at the drop of a hat because we stopped liking something, but if things get rough we stop throwing it away, and I bet you that what we have will last generations.  (Here I do have advice on what to choose. And what to have.)

This is not saying that things will be either comfortable or wonderful.

So – what do you watch for, and how do you prepare?

This post comes from the fact I was talking to my husband and said “the first thing is usually the post office going unreliable.”

Right now you’re looking at me like I’m a lunatic.  “But our post awful was always—”

No. There are differences.  Yes, in most countries the post office jobs are a sinecure for a politically favored majority (Or minority.  I might be wrong in this, but I have a vague idea most postal carriers in South Africa were Afrikaans speaking.)  and that they are a union shop in most countries, and that jokes about mis-delivered mail exist everywhere. That’s not what I mean.

Part of this is tricky when it comes to the post office, btw – because ours is suffering from catastrophic technological change, as well as everything else.  HOWEVER:

The slide goes like this – it begins with mail distribution twice a day six days a week, and the mail fairly reliable in the sense that yes, you do get human error and things delayed a bit.  Then it goes to once daily.  (I don’t know if the US started with twice daily.  By the time I came here, it was once daily. Part of this was tech change.  Used to be that before the telephone letters in-town were used to say “I’ll drop by tomorrow afternoon.”  Read a mystery of the early twentieth century for that.)

Then slowly the mail becomes more unreliable.  Then one day is cut out.  Then delivery is every other day.

BUT the most important thing is how unreliable it gets.  We’re already pretty unreliable, the reason they’re mostly used for spam.  (Though their tendency to misplace stuff doesn’t help.)

But along that slide comes the time when the mail is COMPLETELY unreliable.  Anything you entrust to them has a fifty/fifty chance of arriving, and anything even vaguely useful/valuable WILL get stolen, unless you’re very, very crafty.

This is a sign post on the way down.  When you start seeing outright unabashed theft by postal employees, and no attempt to track down your registered package, it’s time to have your preparations for the rest of the slide made.

Because that type of theft is a “societal strictures have broken down.”  It’s not “the neighbors will rape and pillage” but it is the “people will pilfer from strangers as a matter of course.”  A package, entrusted to strangers to carry across the country is, of course, at high risk.

This is highly unlikely and there are already signs we’re headed in that direction.  Whether and how much it will affect the private carrier companies, I don’t know.  Whether there will be Amazon Delivery vans that are more reliable, I don’t know.  I do know that the break down in trust needed to efficiently run mail in a continental-sized country is already well underway and getting markedly worse by the day.

The way to deal with the post office is to disguise the contents of whatever you’re sending.  Put an old coat over the new dress you’re sending aunt Emily.  Learn to make false bottoms on boxes.  Encase you check in several pages of blather.

Or, more likely, in this country, in the 21^st century, find ways to send ecash, email and different carriers (thank heavens.)

But even if we have more options – that break down in trust is a telling sign.

The other slide is what used to be called in Portugal “a zeal strike” which I understand is the opposite of what the words mean in OZ where they mean “be over-picky over everything and delay everything.”  In Portugal it means “show up for work, but do whatever.”

This, not as a strike but as a way of life ensues.

What I mean is, you don’t realize how much we, Americans, are used to getting what we want, when we want it.

This is likely to go by the way side.  People won’t be breaking their backs to get stuff done and also, sorry, but all businesses are likely to be understaffed for the foreseeable future, because it’s right now almost impossible to keep your margins up in this country unless you’re GE and the government is feeding you dough by the bucketful.

So, things to have:

Any staple you can’t do without, even if it’s not a “survival essential” thing.  Say you’re mighty fond of a brand of coffee, have three or four bags put by in your freezer.  Before you run through them, it will be on the shelves.  Restock when it’s on the shelves and you can afford it.  That way interruptions in supply don’t affect you.

In the same vein, this coming spring, can, pickle and dehydrate veggies.  I don’t think they’ll vanish forever, but supply can/might/almost certainly will (depending on where you live) get mighty irregular.

Any parts you need to keep your car and house running, and which you know are likely to breakdown or need replacing – have by.  And either know how to replace it yourself, or establish a relationship with someone who does.  Knowing how to rewire something in the house and/or how to deal with plumbing is important.  (My husband is okay with it.  But getting one of those comprehensive books from the hardware stores, you know “how to fix anything in the house” is NOT a bad idea.)

Also not a bad idea: if you have to buy furniture and CAN afford it, buy real wood and the best construction you can.  “Furniture you can will to your grandchildren” should be your goal.  Mostly because you might have to.

Also, if you have a young family, buy the biggest house you can afford.  Look, I’ll be blunt, the one slide I saw up close and personal ended up with three and four nuclear families per house.  I.e. kids married and had grandkids, but they were still living with the parents/grandparents.  This did not change till the economy got better.  (And yes, it SORTA is cultural in Portugal, but it was not the norm since the forties, and in fact, as soon as people could afford it, they went their own way, even if children normally live NEAR parents.)

For those people with three kids in a one bedroom apartment it could get tough.

If you’re renting, try to get in a place where the rent won’t go crazy and where you can hunker down if you need to.  Establish a good relationship with your landlord.

Have a deep freezer, so you can buy meat when it’s available/relatively cheap.  (This is a good idea at any time, but it might be vital in a slide down.)

Acquire some knowledge of folk medicine and lay some supplies by.  I’ve recently found that Manuka wound honey (available from Amazon) is the awesome, and will definitely stock it.)  This is obviously part of the slide down at least for this country.  Finding a doctor might become an issue.  DO try to make friends with a doctor or a trained nurse.  It might save your life.

Other things that are probably sort of kind of less vital but that you REALLY don’t want to do without.  One thing I’ve never seen in a slide down is a country sliding into the gutter without significant, pervasive disruptions in the electrical supply.  I don’t mean electricity goes bye bye and never comes back. I don’t even mean LONG black outs.  For those you should have a generator/whole house battery (we can’t afford either) but I expect most of the time you won’t get that.  I mean brown outs and black outs become a fact of life to the point they affect your daily life/ability to work. Not enough to get you to crisis point, not even enough to spoil food in freezer, if you keep it closed.  But enough to annoy you and make things a daily slog.

First – have something you can use for light.  I used to love candles when I was a kid, but of course there are better options.  If you are using flashlights, keep your battery supply up.  I’ve also laid by some of those solar garden lights.  The light is not wonderful, but it is enough to read by.

Speaking of which, since it’s almost impossible to have extra batteries for the kindle (I don’t know about other e-readers) have a car charger, so that if your electrical crashes, you can charge the kindle enough to finish reading that novel.  Also, keep the vital stuff like “how to” manuals in paper.

In the same vein, if you get your living by using the computer, have extra batteries for your laptop.  Keep three of them or so by.

And have an alternate means of cooking, if you rely on electrical.  A grill will do, though I have an entirely coal fired hibachi as well, but that’s because I’m a nut.

Have an alternate means of heating (IF we’re going to stay in this house, I want a soapstone stove.  Sigh.  Maybe Witchfinder will buy me one.)

These things will seem frivolous.  They’re not “how to survive apocalypse” – but having lived through the slide-down, trust me, it makes your life immeasurably better to know that you can still finish that chapter, or write that report, or whatever, even if electricity just went down, and/or you can cook that dish even if the store is out of peppers.

One disruption or interruption is piddly stuff.  An unpredictable succession of them saps the soul and kills the spirit.

Now, the thing is, in the low slide down and counterintuitively, things can do very well you’d never think about.

Look, let me put it bluntly: babies are still born, birthdays still happen, girls still want to buy something pretty for a pick me up.

The people who did well in my brother’s generation (the most affected in Portugal by the slide-down) learned to do something crafty to sell.  Usually bead jewelry, which they sold (literally) on street corners, but also stuffed animals which you could sell to friends of friends of friends.  Paintings, if you were good.  That sort of thing.

Yes, we have walmart and jewelry for a song.  How long it will be cheap is something else, with the dollar plummeting, BUT

But people will pay the same/a little more for something that’s unique/looks better.  And people will still buy toys, baby clothes, (giving stuff to babies is a deeply-rooted tradition.) pretty things that make them smile, unique bits of apparel/accessories that make a tired outfit look new.

Cultivate some crafty skill – first it will keep you from going nuts while you’re worrying about jobs or what not.  Second, it might bring in enough money to survive between jobs/if permanently sidelined by this atrocious economy

Crafts to pick, if you don’t have a favorite should be things that are useful/don’t need proprietary materials.  Scrapbooking would be right out on the first count, and stamped cross-stitch on the second.

But say learning to make clothes out of scraps of material might be in, ditto with braiding rugs.  (Clue zero, but I know people in the village did it.  They bought/got rags off other people and made these gorgeous rugs.)  In a cold climate quilting is a good one.  Altering clothes is too.  Even with the surplus we have, people will grow up, grow wider, or lose weight.  If you know how to alter clothes to make them look GOOD you have something you can trade on/get money for.

I’m decent at refinishing furniture, and I’ve picked up on fillet crochet again.  I used to do this obsessively, then I hit my head and lost the ability to keep track of where I was on the pattern (wonder if that affected writing too?) which is slowly coming back.  Right now – by way of warm up – I’m working on a massive (bedspread size) curtain for our outsized front window.  But I’ve recently come across normal sized patterns for pillows and hangings (and maybe clothes inserts) from the turn of the century, which I think fall under “beautiful and unique” and would probably sell well at SF cons.  And the little ones I can do in an evening, the bigger ones in a week of evenings.

Though I expect ebooks will continue to sell and I even expect Baen to survive.  (The other houses… They’re houses of the living dead right now.  They look alive, but…)  It’s just that you might have to time your publishing/buying for the times the net is up.  And yep, I expect those will actually sell better, because if the net is down there’s less gaming, etc. available.

In that vein, don’t get rid of ALL your obsolete stuff.  Keep DVDs by, even if you have Amazon streaming.  Keep CDs by, even if you buy a lot of music electronic.  I’m clueless about game systems because I don’t use them, but if there’s a way to keep games by, and have power for the systems, do so.

CDs, DVDs and other forms of entertainment not depending on connectivity (if the electricity goes down in your area, so will the net service, most of the time) might make good trade-goods, as well.  So if you see them at the thrift store, buy and store, just in case.  Don’t spend an enormous amount and don’t fill your house with them, but having a few around to trade for others you want is not a bad idea.  Burn you MP3 to CD as backup and keep one of the old stereos around.

Also, because in the long slide down things like the over-restrictive “must cook this in a sterilized kitchen with no one else in the house” health laws tend to slide, even baking and cooking might not be a bad thing, particularly because I suspect a lot of people can’t cook beyond pre-prepared and will be looking for alternatives.  Having the house where the working couple can pick up the pot of pot roast and give you something in return because they’re that kind, might not be a bad idea if the stores are having trouble stocking tv dinners.  (In Portugal it was bread.  Very few people knew how to make bread, but the bakers’ union got bumptious and started not delivering when expected.  Suddenly the people who could bake bread were very popular.)

These are not survival skills, but they’re “keep the world spinning” skills and “make people feel they’re not living in the end times” skills.  They will stand you in good stead.

Most of them are a matter of degree from the Armagedon skills.  So if you believe Armageddon is more likely, by all means, learn to make soap.  BUT learn to make scented, interestingly shaped soap, and you have a skill in case it’s a slide-down.  Learn to make beer, but if you make it micro-brewery specialty beer you can also do well in the slide-down.  Learn to make clothes – but also learn to fix/alter clothes.  That way you’re okay either way.

The only difference is stuff like laptop batteries which are vital in a slide-down and useless in the end of the world.  BUT having them won’t cost you too much.

And it might save your sanity… and allow you to make money off ebooks or whatever it is you do.  If it’s just a slide down.

We’re already in a slide-down, even if not critical yet.  There’s a good chance of a crash, but there’s a chance, also, the slide-down will continue.

In your packing for the crash, don’t neglect preparation for the tumble down the stairs.  It’s usually just a little more effort/expense.  But it can make all the difference.

UPDATE: Welcome instapundit readers and thank you to Glenn for the link!  I was ironing, a masochistic ritual I engage in for a few hours once a month (because it makes a difference on how husband and sons look!) and came back to a ‘lanche.  Very nice. Those thinking I’m overly pessimistic might want to read today’s post!

I’ve talked before about being in the political closet.  The thing is, though that’s the easiest shorthand, it’s not the right shorthand, which made it worse.

The political closet would be right if one identified strongly with one party’s entire perceived agenda and were pretending to be the other. (The perceived is important and will come in later.)

My problem of course was that for most of that time, the party I identified most closely with was the Libertarians.  But even with them I have issues – I won’t go into it too deeply, lest we get Josh going – but to be blunt, there was an assumption that pacifism could work and that if we don’t attack other people they won’t attack us, which didn’t fit in with my life experience or my reading of history.

Before 9/11 I sorta kinda convinced myself maybe this time it would work that way, but after 9/11, particularly as half the Libertarians in my region went bananas and started frothing at the mouth about how we’d brought it on ourselves by being mean to the poor brown people.  (This is still one of my triggers, this ridiculous, disguised racism wherein Arabs – who, btw, would consider themselves white and nothing else – are considered sort of immature children and we have to take their sins onto ourselves.  Kind of like if you pick on a two year old and he breaks the cup, it’s your fault not his.  I say foreigners, whether they tan or not, are people too and capable of evil as well as good.  I should know.  I was born foreign.)

The other half went… Well… Look guys, let’s level up: I think drugs should be legalized because I think it would be easier to convince people not to take them (or to minimize the number of people who take them.  Some always will, and I’m not their collective mother) if they’re out in the open.  But there is a large cohort of Libertarians who make the legalization of drugs the be all-end all of their existence, not just because the war on drugs is ineffective, a statist power grab and distorting our polity – but because (perhaps because they’re enraged at these ills and kneejerk into the rest of it) illegal drugs are supposed to be good for everything including hair loss and ingrown toe nails.

Look – I know too much about the biological side of it to think most drugs – yes, including pot – are a net good.  I’ve also seen too many of the results.  Yes, all of them – including pot – have SOME beneficial effects.  But, as with all medicine, including the legal, there are the other effects and counterindications.

Anyway, in our area, that’s all the people that remained capital L, active and registered Libertarians.  Since all my email seemed to be peace demonstrations or pot taste-ins, I quietly dropped out of the active Libertarian thing – though not out of the registration until last year.

But I can’t say I fit the Republicans any better.  For one, most Republicans don’t fit the perceived Republican party any better.  I mean, of all the people I know who generally vote Republican, I think only two are fundamentalist Christians and even those have no issue with my gay characters or my other unorthodox positions.

Oh, and I don’t think (though some of them I know only on line, and who cares) any of them live in a trailer park, and only one (rather obvious and well known) is a billionaire, and our correspondence is at best irregular due to his being a very busy man.  (I wish he were one of you lot who read here.  Then he might, in an unconsidered moment, hit the kitty for a hundred thousand or so, which at the moment would relieve me of worry over husband’s job enough to write without issue.  But he’s not.  And I think even for billionaires, you don’t just throw that kind of money around – which is just too bad.)

I’ve met some caricature republicans while working on the campaigns – one of them almost made me leave the office – but they were so stereotypical, and so unlike any real Republicans I know, that now I wonder if they were moles.  (Like the crazy guy who thought he could camouflage as republican by having a chic-fillet bag with him.)

But if you turn to the “real republicans who govern”, I still don’t fit in with them very well (they by and large don’t fit in with base too well) because ultimately they are power brokers and power dealers, and their idea of government is to continue expanding the Federal power only not in the same directions as the Democrats.

As a friend of mine put it on FB, one side wants to give other countries vast subsidies so they’ll like us, and the other side sends over our young men and women to protect other countries, so they have the money to run their social programs and ignore their defense.

Yes, I do understand the necessity of keeping the lanes of commerce open – I’m not a total lack wit – but part of me thinks if we’re going to protect them, they should pay, not the other way around.  Then maybe they would perceive the benefit of what we’re doing, instead of resenting us like teens still living in mommy and dad’s house.  (On the other hand – I told you I wasn’t a lack wit – I am aware that from “we pay for the armies” to Empire and Tribute (which is a great name for a book) is a series of not very painful steps over a century or so.  Humans aren’t perfect and life is full of these little tradeoffs and things being what they are, a hundred years of our continued existence sound like to dream the impossible dream.)

So…  So I settle for voting for those people who will grow the deficit SLOWER and who stick their noses in what I eat, what I wear and how many kids I wish to have LESS.  The fact that they’re despised by the plutocrats in the press is a plus, because it means when they’re in power the press actually DO hound them and bark at their heels, as opposed to rolling over and asking to tummy rubs after Benghazi, fast and furious, and the executive orders that are slowly bringing SOPA and PIPA into effect (at the command of the vast entertainment corporations.)  Yes, I know that’s – sort of – the gateway to hell and that it’s how we got when we are, but societies and states are slow and cumbersome to turn around and the tech is going our way, taking away the power of schools and vast media operations, and putting it in individual hands.  We need another generation or two and then we’ll be a sufficient majority.  (We’ll never be an overwhelming majority.  A lot of people ALWAYS prefer security over liberty, though I grant you fewer of them in America than anywhere else.)

What I have been trying to avoid is the headlong RUSH into the abyss that might stop the tech advance BEFORE we can raise another generation, with different values.  Ah well.  To dream the impossible dream.

So, you see how complex my political positions are.  What is more, they change, in response to events, in response to new knowledge from history, in response to a whole bunch of things.

You’d think this was exactly the type of mind you’d want in someone who writes science fiction (or even fantasy) and who is therefore – by professional requirement – likely to build challenging societies, with loopholes, contradictions and points of conflict.  Right?

Wrong.

What the publishing establishment I entered in 1999 (remember I didn’t get into Baen until 2004) wanted only one thing: really articulate, literate parrots who would expound the status quo of the “intelligentsia” (and that btw, as caricatured as their idea of “Republicans.”) and join their voices to the chorus of all these things everybody knows (which just ain’t so) like “If there were no men, there would be no war.”   “To be truly liberated a woman must be a lesbian.” “Human extinction is the only way to change the Earth.” And my ever-favorite “We must not go to space, because we haven’t yet learned to take care of the Earth.” (As though humanity were MEANT to be some sort of gardeners or Earth were sentient.)  There are others, of course, including the ever fertile chestnut that if someone is rich he/she stole it from someone or his/her ancestors did.

I couldn’t hack it.  Tried.  You see, I had this idea that if only we got one or two more generations, we’d need people capable of explaining liberty to those generations, so there COULD be a rebirth, eventually.  Heinlein did a capital job, but he’s not around now, and science fiction AGES.  (My kids still loved Heinlein, but let’s admit it, right now it’s parallel history and it’s lost that veneer of “this is the future.”  Of course, it’s possible that veneer was part of mid twenty century culture and can’t be brought back.)

So my idea was to stealth it, till I got really big, and then from there to slowly uncloak and start talking about the important stuff.

Ah… well…  Let’s say that I miscalculated on several counts.  First, I might lack the necessary talent/proficiency.  (I keep reading in books and hearing my colleagues say that at heart we each know exactly how good we are, but if that’s true I’m even more of an oddity than I thought.  I have no clue how good I am.  I like some of my books, it’s all I can tell you – even though it might be bad manners.) Second, by the time I entered publishing, you had to be especially favored to even survive with the same name past three books – and you had to have impeccable political pedigree (usually supported by who you know, what schools you attended, etc) and usually other stuff like personal beauty or charisma (I’m not bad, but I’m female and I broke in after 30) to be pushed to bestseller.  And the “push” was in the house’s control.  (Again, I’m not talking about Baen, who has to grow bestsellers the old fashioned way.  And does, one of the reasons the other houses hate it.)  And THIRD – I couldn’t do it.  I didn’t realize how bad I was at it.  No, seriously, I didn’t.  I used to be good at it, or else, I wouldn’t have a degree in Languages and Literature from an European university.  But I’ve gone back and read some of my books that didn’t sell, and uh… there is this certain lack of confidence in authority and established credentials that keeps leaking through…  I guess having got out of school and spent a few years alone with my own thoughts, I was too iconoclastic to hide ALL of it.

I know people who are stealthing it, some much better than others, all better than I do.  (And I take my hat off to them.)

And I know people who are stealthing it in other fields, at least two of whom read this blog and comment under pen names, and one of whom I told I don’t want to know his/her real name.  I don’t want to risk letting it slip.

I admire their ability to do this, and I get very upset when – often – some blog or some commenter on a blog starts saying that they’re cowards for not confronting their family/colleagues/boss with their real political opinions.

Me?  I think more is won by planting seeds.  If Heinlein hadn’t got to me with fiction, I might very well have ended up in the politically correct chorus.  And he got to me because no one in Portugal had thought of isolating minds from him by accusing him of being homophobic, or xenophobic, or misogynist or whatever.  Yes, at the age of eleven or so, if I’d been primed, I’d have seen that in the books and not read them.  I’m sure I – at least in my public identity – have managed to land myself on several “do not read” lists.

On the other hand… on the other hand…

On the other hand, I think – or at least, after dealing with the failure of my stealthing attempt I tell myself that – I too might have a place in the ranks, and my position too can be useful.

First of all, because I’ve been on both sides of this and therefore can tell you the problem with the stealth position.  I’m one of very few people who has done this – most others are actual converts.  The problem with the stealth position is the problem of double agents.  You start out by pretending to be something you’re not, but if you’re good enough at it, it starts leaking into your thought and your identity.  (This is part of being human and a social creature.) I don’t mean you start thinking like them, but parts of the shibboleths of the dominant culture will start affecting your thinking.  Mostly the prejudices.  You’ll start feeling, for instance, anyone who defends the free market must be greedy, and flinching a little at unabashed defense of personal liberty.  This never happened to me personally.  I have seen it happen, until the person is completely captured by the other side and doesn’t even know it.  You’ll find them saying things like “Well, I’m a republican, but republicans are soooo anti-woman.  They don’t see only women can bring peace to the world.”

At that point if you’re another of the stealthers, and if this person was a friend (discovering other stealthers used to be a thing.  Sometimes I thought we should have a hanky code.) you salute a fallen comrade, route around the leak and move on.

I – and others – of the stealthers went the other way, though.  And it’s just as bad.  I got to the point where all these people that I knew, objectively were actually decent, good people – or at least not bad – but just didn’t think or challenge the dominant culture (either from cowardice or desire to fit in) were Evil with a capital E.

I had “friends” in the field, but none of them could be real friends, because none of them could see the real me, and I didn’t like the “them” they presented.  I started hating people for their opinions, even when I knew those opinions were  just the result of their growing up in a place and time and wanting to fit in.

And that is poison to the soul, particularly when you consider that I am, at heart, very gregarious and spent my formative years in a “live in your extended family’s pockets” culture (the fact I ever left probably means I am at heart rather insane, anyway.)

In the first route, you become a prisoner of the status quo.  In the second, though, it slowly makes you bitter and encased in a loneliness nothing can break.

I dedicated A Few Good men To Glenn (of Instapundit) because without the blogs, without knowing there were other people out there like me – with whom I might not agree on EVERYTHING, but with whom I agreed that political direction and beliefs were something to be examined and discussed in the light of history – were all that kept me – marginally – sane in the ten years of deep-cover.

It is still hard, sometimes, for me to remember that say, people who believe we should have the minimum wage are not CONSCIOUS Marxists.  Yes, they do implicitly assume that if a benevolent (where they find that, is beyond me, it being like everything else, a human construction and therefore at best mixed) government doesn’t watch over businessmen, businessmen will – of course – exploit their fellow human (who is always defenseless, poor muggings, like 19^th century peasants) beyond all reason.  BUT they don’t realize their thoughts have been infiltrated.  Depending on how annoyed I am that day, I’m likely to unload with both barrels before I pull back and think that “oh, yeah.  Someone who has never even thought about this and for whom it is an “of course.””  These people are different from the hard-core vile progs and might or might not be winnable back to sanity.  Those we can win back must be won, because if we can survive this, we’ll need all hands on deck.  But right now I’m more likely to blast them with the burner.  My ability to distinguish between red and deep pink is gone.

It can’t be helped, at least for now.  It’s a war wound, and touching it brings a reflex response.  It might get better – supposing we survive (To Dream The Impossible Dream) over the decades.  It might not.  You pick your course, you place your bet, you take your lumps. None of us is perfect or unscarred.

Worse, though, it was affecting my writing.  I’d got in the habit of never writing about anything I REALLY cared about and was well on my way to learning to write about nothing, which is –of course – the road to grey goo.  (It’s paved with awards I hear, not that I ever saw one of those awards.)

I came out of the political closet because I dimly perceived that to stay in it, I’d lose myself.  If my occasional flailing around with how we got here and what it all means helps some of my still-stealthed comrades, in writing or other professions almost entirely taken over by vile-progs then it’s all worth it.

I will continue to run ultra-secret indie-only pen names who stealth.  Who knows?  Those might get through some of the “never thought” people.

Meanwhile I’m glad to be out of the political closet, sorry I couldn’t stick the stealthing, wondering if anyone can without in one way or another losing their inner selves – and profoundly grieved we live in a time where such conformity of thought is demanded by the establishment, even of people who are supposed to be creative.  I’m grieved that you’re not just required to generally believe in their principles (no, I don’t believe that only government is impartial and benign and they can’t make me. But I could allow that sometimes – rarely – government isn’t all wrong) or agree with them on some things (I am, for instance, for the legalization of drugs, among other things – even if my reasons are different from most of those the vile progs tout) BUT you’re required to loudly promote and proclaim the party line, even when it changes.

Life is what it is.  You live in the times you live in.  You do the best you can with it.

To my stealthed colleagues, I salute you.  To those who have fallen, I thank you for your service and I’m sorry we lost you.  To those who never thought of being stealthed, I assume you knew yourselves best, and are doing the best you can.

Courage.  It might seem like we’re dreaming the impossible dream, but it’s always darkest before dawn, and a friend once told me that the other side always crows victory the loudest when they know they’re losing.  There are signs, hard to read because so many of us are stealthing, that it might not yet be to late to turn this thing around.

Courage – return to your positions and do your best.  And I’ll do mine.  I’ll stand here and do my poor best.  And hope it serves something.

It’s now been two years since I was on the Tor “seminar” for the launching of Learning Curve, the first installment of Heinlein’s bio – and I’ve almost (but not quite) stopped steaming.

What affronted me at the time was my colleagues who would come in and say “Was Heinlein sexist or homophobic?  Absolutely” – and did this freely admitting they’d never read Heinlein, they just knew he had no queer characters (Brother, the scene between Galahad and Isthar would shock them) and no strong women who weren’t “men with breasts” (this is the no true Scotsman fallacy.  What is a man with breasts?  Any woman who is capable and self sufficient?  I think the people complaining should ask themselves if their characters aren’t female dogs with no brain.)  Alternately, or often at the same time, Heinlein gets accused of writing only submissive women, because in the intervals between shooting the bad guys, working astrogation problems and solving/causing world crisis, his characters want to have babies and – shocker, I know – fall in love with men.  As proof of their submission the fact that they wear high heels and – horrors – aprons is brought up.  (It’s a good idea to wear aprons while shooting bad guys.  Blood is a pain to get off good clothes.)

The truth is that Heinlein gets crucified for two reasons only:

1. He propagated the idea that There Ain’t No Such Thing As A Free Lunch and the philosophy is embedded in his books.
2. None of the people who rage and rag on him and call him names have a tenth of the talent he had in his little toe.  And none of them has now, nor will ever have the same influence on the culture.

The first one is of course the most important point.  No, wait.  It’s not the most important point, no.  But it is the point that serves to hang up all their discontents.  They read Heinlein’s characters who do-for-themselves (male, female and juvenile) and they get upset.  I belong to the same vague socio economic group as these people, and let’s face it, we all grew up with nonsense like “follow your dreams” and “to dine own self be true.”  And we’ve interpreted it – having largely lived soft and sheltered lives – to mean that we should in fact do this, regardless of the economic consequences of it.

I’m a little different because I was fortunate, very early on (“Never ruin your children by making their lives too soft” RAH) because I experienced true poverty – due to political-social circumstances – I not only know what it’s like to go to bed without having “eaten all you want to?” – which is the question used to establish “hunger in America” – but I often went to bed without having eaten much substantial.  (It’s okay.  I had a lovely figure.)  Because come evening, the cupboard was bare.

I attended a magnet school in the rich area of town and had to go between the ages of 12 to 14 without a single new piece of clothing, except what we got from red cross.

Now, am I claiming I suffered horribly?  H*ll, no.  I’m not even claiming I suffered.  My mom and dad grew up eating a lot of vegetable soup when all else was absent, and mom went barefoot summer and winter, and gleaned for coal by the side of the railroad for cooking.  She grew up with four siblings and a cousin all in a three bedroom house where the kitchen had a dirt floor and the only bathroom was an outhouse at the end of the garden.

Compared to her, I was a pampered princess who whined when we couldn’t afford hot water in winter.

However it brought me up close to the idea that when there isn’t enough, you can’t have it.  You can say all you want to that you have these rights and these needs, but when something isn’t there, you can’t have it.  (It also brought me up to the idea that a government powerful enough to give you what you want can also take it away from you, but that’s something else.  And it gave me a profound distrust of authority and the certainty I don’t want anyone to have TOO much over me and mine.)

And that’s what sets my colleagues off.  Look, to establish a writing career these days, you’re going to be unproductive for a good long time.

Or at least, you’re going to make very little money.

Those of us who are disposed to feel we have to pay our way through life (and many of us are) are at the very least going to feel guilty.  Some, like me – and a lot of my friends – will justify our compulsion by doing things like running the house on one person’s salary, at the same level as friends making double the money (which I did for years.  It’s called cooking from scratch, mending, refinishing AND doing without – we drove an $1100 suburban with a missing front bumper for ten years.)

My husband convinced me that it was worth it doing this, that it was a risky investment but an investment which would eventually pay off by supporting us in our old age.  I thought he was nuts.  Now indie is a possibility, I wish I would have listened to him more. I’d have a lot more things ready to go up.

But a lot of people have to rely on parents, siblings, even friends in those early years.  For a lot of them it paid off.  (And a lot end up just doing this the rest of their lives.)  The guilt they felt about this makes them very upset at hearing TANSTAAFL.  They feel it as an accusation and therefore they lash out at the man they think is accusing them.

Am I holding Heinlein up as a paragon?  Kids, no one in early SF was a paragon.  Oh, okay, maybe one or two, but I’ve heard stories of con parties.  I also get told – regularly – how boring and stodgy we are now, with our spouses and our kids and our middle-class lives.

That’s fine.  Heinlein was married three times and he was a man of his generation.  He had ideas of his generation.

However, considering most of those ideas are now being implemented in our schools, our mass media and our “public counseling” that can’t be why they turn against him.  (And let me tell you, compared to what is being written today in contemporary romance, Heinlein wrote books suitable for nuns.  WELL BEHAVED nuns.)  And the way he wrote sex working in the future was possibly – maybe – something that MIGHT make sense for a society where you live practically forever and where sex and reproduction are almost entirely divorced.

If writers of science fiction are meant to be saints, I must give it up now.  To quote from Pride and Prejudice “my temper I can’t vouch for.”  (Though my good opinion once gone isn’t gone forever.  In fact, I like many people whose politics I abhor.  I’m just likely to tell them to their faces that they’re Marxist [or statist] poopy heads, and when they take offense at that it loses me friends or allies.  It’s a character defect and one I’d like to overcome.  But I’m not willing to go back to hiding my deepest feelings, either.)

But of course, the people – mostly writers – accusing Robert A. Heinlein (who was known for his epic rows with everyone from Communists to Libertarians, so I might get that from him, if one assumes – like Pratchett does – that there are genetics that have nothing to do with the physical) are also not people who live immaculate lives, they’re not people of even and sweet tempers, and the work they do is not in fact perfectly balanced and giving every side and point of view (partly because a book that did that would be soup.)

No, what irks them most about Heinlein is that he had influence they couldn’t have – that he molded minds of people who started out in a culture so different his characters opposition to taxation or their insistence on owning guns made them as alien as another species.  But little by little, his stories showed me the logic of his arguments.  (No other writer has done that to me.)

People crucifying Heinlein are not even those standing on the shoulders of giants.  They’re non-house-broken puppies, peeing on the shoulders of giants.

In a related note, I confess I never read Ayn Rand.  (I watched the Atlas Shrugged movies and, yes, I was the one person in the world who loved the first.  No.  One of two people.  My younger son did too.)  I have this thing with the way words are put together.  Perhaps because I see the non-colloquial way the words fall.  I also can’t read Nabokov.

I do realize a lot of her ideas are “extreme” in the sense that “people don’t work that way.”  But I have several friends who worship her because of what she said about the trends of society, and for being the one voice in fiction (until Heinlein, I guess) pointing out that no, you don’t have the right to anyone else’s sweat.  To live off the work of others is NOT a moral stand.  It might be a need.  I lived off my husband’s salary for a long time, but I tried to give something back.  I have friends who are unemployed and who are trying like h_ll to give back.  But that is different from assuming you are entitled.  (No one does that?  Then why was one of the excuses to pay the health care bill, that it would free you to pursue your artistic ambitions, instead of having to get a nine to five job?)

My friends seem to discount the more extreme bits of the philosophy the same way I discounted the free love poliamoury in Heinlein.  (One of the saddest things at a con was the woman in the audience who said “I read Heinlein when I was a virgin and I tried to follow his ideas, and it messed up my life.”  I wanted to say “oh, you sad little puppy.  If you’d read Harry Potter, would you have jumped out the window on a broom?”  I too read Heinlein when I was a virgin, but being a virgin – that I know – is not supposed to make you lack all common sense and ability to observe your surroundings.  Maybe I was an unusual virgin.  And no, I didn’t say it.  If I’d told her that, she MIGHT have jumped out the window on a broom.)

Anyway, my friend Amanda Green takes up the issue of “why hate Rand?”:

Let me ask you this: if Rand’s world is so unrealistic and its heros so “evil” (read politically incorrect) what about Herbert’s Dune? Oh, I hear the complaints now. That wasn’t a book that pushed philosphy. Bull shit. It just pushed a different sort of ideology. Go back and read it without your poltically correct glasses on. There are any number of other books out there that hit the readers over the head with the author’s philosphy. But those books are all right because they push the “right sort of thinking”.

Read the Whole Thing.

As a writer who is neither a saint nor a model of much of anything, and who wrote, in A Few Good Men a book that will probably get her crucified not just by both sides of politics, but possibly by sides that will come into existence for the purpose of hating me, I can only say that I hope twenty years after my death there will be panels at cons where the subtext is “Hoyt, immoral pervert or political menace?”

I’ll be in good company.

No, I’m not talking about my issues.  I do in fact, have a “complex” of autoimmune issues that seem to run together – eczema (severe) rheumatic arthritis (not troubling since I’ve been in Colorado and weirdly worst in my teens) and asthma (also not a problem pretty much since my teens, though living in South Carolina brought it back briefly – and is one of the reasons I’m glad we moved.)

So… I have some experience with there being nothing wrong with you except your stupid immune system attacking your own body under the misguided impression that it’s an invader.

This came to mind because the other day Older Son was babbling about auto-immune disorders (younger son is likely to go on about physics.  It’s… interesting at the dinner table.  I just achieve this zen state where I’m listening to the parts I understand, while plotting at the back of my mind.  But you know, considering all the years I babbled plot and character at them, and considering that my beloved is likely to get a notebook in the middle of dinner so he can sketch out some equations that he thinks will solve this problem he’s been having at work – I don’t think we can throw stones.)

As he was describing the basic workings of an autoimmune disease, I thought “that’s what our country has.”

From living with eczema, which is a chronic auto-immune disorder, I can tell you that it much resembles the way we stumbled through from the forties (perhaps earlier.  But in the forties, Heinlein described the communists taking over the Democratic party.  And considering it took him till the eighties to vote Republican for the first time, I don’t think he can be considered a biased source.) through to 2001 like I live – most of the time – with my eczema: it flares up in a specific part of my body, and it itches like heck, which of course means that I don’t give my full attention to anything much, but because I’ve lived like this since I was one, it doesn’t really bother me or I should say – I don’t know what it’s like when it’s not bothering me.

It can rise to the level of “argh” when it settles in a body part that’s hard to keep clean/dry and free of irritating agents.  Since it decided it wanted to live in my hands, last couple of years, I’ve had trouble keeping from having infected wounds – I use my hands for everything and kitchen work is hard when you have open sores.  (I’ve been using surgical gloves, but that makes my hands sweat, which aggravates the condition.)

The problem is twofold – first, any “aggravating factor” can cause a monumental flare up, where the condition becomes near-impossible to live with.  (Since one of the aggravating factors for eczema is stress and since the airlines live to make my life interesting, those of you who have seen me at Liberty, with eczema all over my body know what I’m talking about.  It gets so I can’t sleep and I can’t think, and it impairs my functioning all across the spectrum.)  The second issue is that, sleep deprivation and the very fact that my body is – with gonzo-like enthusiasm – attacking itself, means it’s not paying much attention to external enemies – virus and bacteria – which walk right in and settle down, leading to a never ending stream of infections.

And because there is nothing fundamentally wrong with my body, I’m treated to an never-ending stream of people – starting with acquaintances and ending with some doctors, about whom the least said the better – who tell me things like “you just need to stop scratching.”  (Trust me on this, while scratching aggravates it, and this is why – to the despair of both my mother and my mother in law – I keep my nails cut almost to the quick, the skin will still flare up – sometimes overnight – with no scratching whatsoever.)

For those who’ve been following our politics in puzzled wonder, it might help if you think of our issues as an autoimmune disorder.  Let’s for the moment forget where it came from.  Most autoimmune disorders are a bit of a mystery.  Yes, part of it was the same bad philosophy that affected Europe at the time, and some of it might have been Soviet agit prop leaking over the ocean (as someone who grew up in Europe and in a fractured country, I know most Americans ignore the chances of that.)  Part of it was a predisposition to it.  The US and the ancient Israelites are the only people I know of formed on a set of principles and engagins in detailed criticism of themselves over their principles.  (Most other nations engaged in a criticism of OTHER countries over their own principles and blame OTHER countries for their own failures.  For further study, I recommend Europe.)

Anyway, mostly we’ve been living with it and ignoring it, like I do with eczema.  The areas where it was chronic: college campuses, “intellectual” areas were relatively minor.  Even when it affected Hollywood, as long as it wasn’t flaring up too badly, most people rolled their eyes and ignored it.

When I came to the States, the situation puzzled me, sort of like it puzzles people who see me going around cheerfully with, say, the inside of my elbows looking like a third degree burn.  They flinch and go “What happened?” and I look down and go “Oh, that?  Eczema.  Never mind.”

You have to understand, I came over expecting this one of the world’s superpowers to be, if not as repressive (I’m not stupid) as the USSR, at least as defensive.  I expected it to be considered bad form to trash talk the US or talk up the USSR in public.  Because, well… that’s only sane.  Imagine my shock when – in the eighties – not just TV personalities, but people who were considered/considered themselves “high class” talking about the “good ideas” of the USSR and talking down the US and particularly “ignorant rednecks.”

It puzzled me, but I could see also that the country was sort of ignoring it.  I mean, we discounted the biases on TV and the twitches of the upper class like I discount the (normally) minor itch and skin bubbling up of the eczema. In real life, where things functioned normally, the crazy people were largely ignored.

The problem is this – the flare up continued growing.  All through the sixties and the seventies, and the eighties, and yes, of course, the nineties, the flare up of self-hatred grew.  And just like the eczema in my hands, it started affecting areas we can’t live without: K-12 schools, business, news.

And it’s not just a little.  The news have been biased left for a long time (yes, I know the left thinks they’re biased right, but that’s because the left is to the left of Stalin, while the media are basically propping up a state-capitalism system much like China’s.)  If you consider Fascism right, then you’re darn tooting the media is biased right.  Since I consider it a misnomer, well…

But more importantly, unlike the manifestations of totalitarian impulse in other countries – Russia, Cuba, China – the autoimmune problems are NOT affecting just out governance or our industry.  It’s not a matter of destroying our industry so we’ll all be poor.  That would be bad enough.  The problem is far worse, though: the problem is that the statist ideology now in control of our government, our media, our education and what passes for “high culture” doesn’t just hate this or that part of us.  No, they’ve been told/convinced/brainwashed that what’s wrong with the world is US – that the country and its existence ARE the enemy.

It might be the first time in history where in a non-occupied country flying the flag is an act of daring that in certain neighborhoods can get you shunned by all your neighbors.  It might be the first time in history where teaching the good parts of your history in school is considered an act of defiance, and where the higher-class and all the bien-pensants push distorted histories and documentaries that run down the country that hosts them.

Autoimmune.  Systemic.

The shock of 9/11 beat back the illness for a while.  The forces of sanity rallied.  But in any autoimmune illness, the more you rally, the stronger the backlash.  And it’s come.  And it’s worse than ever, to the point kids get sent home from school for patriotic clothing.

So… what to do?

I don’t know.  The analogy accurately describes the problem, and to the extent that it applies to the recovery, I can tell you we’ll never get rid of the auto-immune reaction – not fully.  But you knew that.  The same qualities that allow us to try to improve our governance according to our principles provide an opening to the flare ups.  Like a person with a strong immune system is more likely to get an auto-immune flare-up.

But we can’t live with it infecting all of our body politic.

The only thing I can suggest – and it is not going to make me any friends – is that you beat it back wherever you find it.  We, like me with eczema, have got so used to the minor flare ups that we ignore them.  People at a party saying the US is uniquely back, say, because it was founded in genocide…  Beat it back.  Explain about germs, and about the fact that at any rate the colonization was all over the Americas and our part of the Americas saw the least abuse.  (Mostly what happened to the original inhabitants is that they died of unfamiliar illnesses and THEN were genetically swamped.  They’re mostly still here – a bit in everyone.)

Learn our history.  Learn economics.  Learn the history of ideas.  Learn about other nations.  Not the prettied up “multicultural” histories they teach our kids in school, but the real histories (the fact this feels like hitting the weak tells you how badly off we are.  We are the only ones it’s fair to hit on.)  When people start running ourselves down, do a little comparative teaches.

Apply medicine to the flare ups, big and small and try to beat the condition to manageable level.  To survive all of us need to do it (however subtly.)

The alternative is a body – or a nation – that can’t function, much less defend itself.

UPDATE: Post on Herding Ducks (and health) over at Mad Genius Club.

By which I don’t mean it was even remotely fun.  I don’t know if other people have these, but I do periodically, where there is no comfortable position, all the blankets feel too… rough or folded or something, and on top of all I’m now too hot now too cold.

I don’t think it’s an illness, though it is possible — it’s just out of sorts and a bad night.  I need to package books to send to several of you and I’m considering walking to the post office to see if it will clear my head.  I hope it will because I really need to write a bunch of guest blog posts and do something I promised PJM, and right now I’m not even up to writing a post for this blog.  If my head doesn’t clear, I might go back to bed.

I also need to edit a novella in the DST universe and finish editing a couple of short stories because I haven’t put anything up in very long.  And of course, I’m halfway through editing Shadow Gods and then will start on Witchfinder.  (I’ve figured the next book is Rogue Magic, because that’s the problem in the story.  I need to outline it before Friday.)

And of course, there’s the rewrite to do for Noah’s Boy.

Today was not a good day for a bad night…  But as we were discussing (bickering, infighting, throwing fish) yesterday, humans aren’t just creatures of the spirit, nor even (as I must remind myself) creatures of will power.  Sometimes the body gets a say.

So, I shall leave you unfed today.  Free ice cream tomorrow.  Today I’m going to drink three gallons of tea (might be more) and then go to the post office.  G-d willing by the time I come back I’ll be human.

UPDATE: And meanwhile, for those who need something to chew on, Amanda is talking about the state of the business over at Mad Genius Club.  I confess I haven’t, lately, because in this as in politics, it’s gotten to the point all I can do is shake my head.  But Amanda’s head shaking is fun.

The inmates have managed to get out of their cells and are running around loose. Now, most days, it is pretty entertaining to watch. After all, they usually are either pointing at the sky and screaming about how the aliens are coming and taking over the world, or they are burying their heads in the sand and doing their best to ignore the changes needed to be made in order to survive. But today, well, all I can do is shake my head and wonder how long this current farce will run before the final curtain falls on it.

Read the whole thing.

So, what are we humans, as creatures?

I ask, because it bears a great weight on how we answer “how should we be governed”?

A lot of people since the enlightenment (but not the Founding Fathers) have assumed that humans are creatures of reason and that once you get them to a certain state of government that answers certain needs, they’ll stay there.

They’ve assumed this for good and ill.  As I’ve been known to say before 1984 and Brave New World would last about ten seconds under the impact of a Heinlein character.  But so would any of the utopias we can think of.

So, the question is this – are we humans (or can we be) – creatures of pure reason?  Is that even desirable?

Heinlein notably – sometimes being a man of his time, and his education and of course a writer, worked at cross purposes with his horse sense – thought by now we’d have a science of the human mind and a science of crowd behavior.  Of course, at the same time he expounded this, his societies gave it the lie, so maybe he was being tricky and that’s what he meant.

We’re hearing a lot of this too, right now from the progr–  vile progs.  About how they had everyone pegged with consumer info and knew where to concentrate their efforts for getting out the vote.  Brother.  They managed to be more unorganized than the other campaign and I had to forget I was a lady several times over the phone to them before they stopped bothering us.  (And now they’ve resumed.)

Communism, of course, assumes this.  It assumes the only reason man isn’t perfectly rational is the chains of medievalism, the dank influence of capitalism, and that good old villain “greed” which is an excuse for communists envy.

(Sorry, I have in mind an old Reader’s Digest joke.  My father had piles of old Reader’s Digest from his dad lying around, and it comprised a lot of my reading as a kid.  One of the jokes went “I went to my politics test, and they asked for ten ways to combat communism.  The only thing I could think of was the Ten Commandments.  I had an A.”  To an extent, quite right, of course.  Where would communism be with “Though shalt not covet” foremost in people’s minds?)

Then there’s Ayn Rand who also assumed humans could be rational if they got rid of “slave mentality.”

Are humans rational?  Well, most of the time and within limitations.  But thinking reason is the only thing that guides us is as blinkered as thinking emotions or culture or history are the only things that guide us.

If humans were perfectly rational… we’d live in hell on Earth. From the purely “reason” point of view there is no logical motive that the very rich shouldn’t be like the vampires in the vampire-parallel-world of buffy “we rode people like ponies.”

But if you’re going to say that type of behavior is a thing of instinct and emotion, perhaps – but using people for dog food or fertilizer, isn’t.  It’s not our reason that recoils from this.  It’s other parts of us.

Even at its mildest, a human society run MOSTLY by reason would be a crazy society given to all kinds of lurches.  Look at me and my colleagues, and the things we play with in our minds… yeah.

The new and hip thing – and I’ve read a lot of books on this recently – is that we’re purely creatures of instincts, that we react according to instinct and then make up stories to cover it up.  (Groans.)  As someone who took psychology, let me tell you this is a load of pure hokum.  First because – WHY would we make stories to rationalize it, if all we had were instincts and everyone was jumping around when someone said frog?  In fact, if this were the case, we’d never have got off square one of civilization.

But the main reason I KNOW it’s hokum – and you guys might not be as sensitive to it, as I doubt most of you have humanities degrees and/or moved extensively in New Age circles at one time (one of our friends worked in a New Age bookstore for years.  He started a science fiction section.) – is that it’s a non-falsifiable theory.

No?  Well, if I tell you “Of course people aren’t just creatures of instincts.  My instinct was to do x not y and I overcame it with my reason.”  You can always tell me, “No, your instinct was always y, you just made up a story afterwards to rationalize it.  How do I answer that?  How do I prove you’re wrong?  Absent recording my thought process, I can’t.

This theory is close kin to another, also in vogue right now, that “there are no coincidences” and “no one does anything unless at some level they meant it.”  Say I’m late for an appointment and don’t get in.  I meant to do that because I didn’t want to go to the dentist, or whatever.  Even if what made me late was the car breaking down.  You get “subconsciously, you knew there was something wrong with the car.”  Poppycock.  A new incarnation of the “fate” doctrine, only it’s all on you and your subconscious.

And a close descendant of the New Age doctrine that I heard twenty years ago, which insisted if you caught a cold you meant to.  So, you know, you could get mad at your friends for getting sick.

The thing is – watch that ball move – while these theories seem completely different, they’re like the two sides of global cooling/warming, the idea is always the same.  If you can contumaciously get sick when you wish to, it’s a failure of the will, and you need a guru to guide you.  And if you can’t control yourself and are just acting by instincts, you need to quote the song “Someone to watch over” you.  All of you.  At all times.

The vile progs love both of these theories – in their new incarnation.  While they contradict the idea that man is perfectly rational and is born tabula rasa, they have the same solution: if properly trained by the people in power, you’ll be all right.  If not, you’re a quivering mass of contradictory instincts.  And they never let a little contradiction bother them.

Are you a quivering mass of contradictory instincts?  Well, of course you are.  You’re also a rational human being.  But wait, that’s not all!

To all this I’d add that you’re a product of your culture.  The people who think that you have, inborn in you, all the characteristics of your culture at birth have taken over the schools.  This is why you hear people who say things like “you should speak English in America” accused of racism.  Because language is culture and culture is innate, don’t you know?

Forget the fact that we’re not speaking whatever they spoke before recorded language in the fertile crescent, and that we’re not living like them – proof enough that culture changes and is not in the genes.  But before someone says “but genes change, too, gradually.”  Yes, okay.  But what mutation was involved in Italians crossing the ocean and settling in America?  Because my second generation Italian host parents in Ohio were middle America and my mom spoke no Italian.  (My host dad spoke Italian to his mother only.)

Do traces of the culture linger?  Well, of course.  There’s the way things are done in any given family which even in melted pot America are not the same as any other family.  And some of them are very old indeed.  I’ve mentioned before that in my region “pila” was the slang term for a part of the human male – probably the result of a slew of bad jokes by legionaires.

And the ways of life in Portugal, to an extent, including the patronage system to advance, are clearly descended from Rome.  The part the vile progs are right about is that I’m likely to feel transported to childhood (not always in a good way) when confronted with many parts of Hispanic/Latin culture.  My host-parents best friends were immigrants from Cuba.  I loved going to their home, because at a basic “how things are done” level they were a lot like my own family, so when I was homesick, it helped.  It even smelled right.  OTOH …

OTOH when I’m at the Embassy Suites in Denver that is now mostly staffed with Latin immigrants, and they start closing the breakfast buffet half an hour early so they’re done on the dot at nine thirty – as opposed to starting to close at nine thirty, so customers can find breakfast till that time – I’m reminded why that is a bad thing, and why I left.

And that’s ultimately the thing – immigrants CAN leave, and they can make the decision to acculturate and to port the best parts of another culture.

None of which would be possible if humans were merely reactive, or purely reason.  If they were purely reason, culture would not exist or have no influence.  If they were merely reactive, then they would be caught in something like animal behavior – and human civilization wouldn’t really exist, nor could people move between cultures.  (This last is what the vile progs currently believe, so assimilation is a bad word.)

HOWEVER when you are raised in a culture, never go out of it, and/or have to live in it, culture is a heavy determinant of how you’ll react to things, often with no rational thought.

So, humans are creatures of reason, and physical body (which implies instincts, but also other things.  Trust me, it’s possible for me to be hormonally insane and not know it) AND culture.  (To these, because I’m a believer, I’d add a fourth, what Giovanni Guareschi (Great theological philosopher.  What?  You thought theology had to be boring?  Seriously, if you haven’t read his Don Camilo short stories and the other stories about the village in the valley of Po, you’re missing a treat)  called “The something else” which grabs the priest of mind and the priest of body and throws it into the ring to help the communist mayor win a bout against an “outsider, who kept hitting low.”  To this the Christ (the Christ over the altar talks to Don Camilo.  Deal.  Their relationship makes me wonder if Guareschi read Nero Wolfe stories) says “I suppose you mean the priest of spirit?”  And Don Camilo says “I didn’t say that, Lord, I wouldn’t presume to lecture you.”)

The result…

My older son who is about to finish a bachelors in biology says the weird thing is not “how well man is constructed” but that we don’t al fall dead after a few minutes because of how BADLY systems interact together, and everything that can go wrong.

This is because we have in us the remnants of our evolution, like that “pila” embedded in Portuguese slang.  (The first man to make a joke on this gets a carp upside the head.)

Psychologically we’re about the same.  Reason and sentience might have given us an edge over the other animals, but they haven’t exactly taken over completely.  In the end, we might be “in reasoning so like the angels” but what this angelic creature reasons with is an ape’s skull and ape’s instincts, including the desire to belong and to make the band as uniform as possible (because this worked, for the apes.)

All of which means – so how do humans tick?  And how should we govern them and by what principles?

Well – fortunately I don’t have to answer that question all at once and all on my own.  I’d say the normal, default governance of mankind is the strong man system.  This is what governed us in the pre-human bands.

It can be an okay form of governance, too – sort of – if you have an okay strong man.

Take Salazar, in Portugal.  I’ve said before that there were serious troubles with his governance (ruling, really.)  Partly because of where he came from and what he concentrated on.  He was an accountant, and he’d been – I think – a charity inmate at a Jesuit orphanage.

Even his worst enemies never accused him of being lavish in his private arrangements.  He was, in fact, said to live “like a monk.”  And he was probably a decent enough human being, to begin with.

It is a very bad thing to put a decent enough human being in charge of a large group of people and a vast territory (even when these are Portuguese scale.)  There are compromises that have to be made with reality.  You assume other people work the way you do.  Your understanding of economics propagates itself to the economy, and you end up in a mercantilist backwater.  People talk back and give you guff, and you end up with a secret police and an apparatus of repression – for people’s good, of course.  And the bureaucracy festers under you, because no matter how much of a type A personality you are, you can’t do everything.

Was the Portugal I grew up in hell on Earth?  Well… no.  In some minor ways it was much better than it is now: there was virtually no violent crime – there was a lot of theft, mostly of clothes from the lines, and that’s telling – and the police was far less bribable.  (Look, it’s a Latin country, they were still bribable.  But people were NOT afraid to call the (civil) police to the site of accidents.)

But the reason clothes were stolen from the lines because we were all desperately poor.  Because his understanding of economics was the opposite of free trade.  And even though he stabilized it after the disastrous “republic” – life didn’t get much better. That said, we were far less poor than the communist portions of Europe, so if you’re going to have a strong man government, take it without serious ideological sauce. (Salazar had the beliefs of his time including in National superiority or unity or whatever, but he governed mostly with an eye to the purse.  And because he’d come from a very poor background his idea of a road to prosperity was to save.)

And before the Straw Kung Foo Fighters come in – no, this doesn’t mean I approved of Salazar’s government.  I also didn’t approve of the mostly crypto-communists who followed after the revolution and as much of a bumble broth as the current mess is, it’s better than either of those… unless you have to live there with the crime rate and the corrupt institutions. But I do think there are better ways to solve that than strong-man government.

The strong-man form is so prevalent that it’s what communism, fascism and all the other hip “isms” of the twentieth century devolve into.  And, again, it can be okay — depending on the strong man – or hell on Earth.  Names like Castro and Stalin come to mind.  Also, let’s not forget that sociopaths MIGHT be particularly well adapted to get to the top in this form of government.

But it might – given the right kind of education/training – provide countries with stable governments where the least people get hurt and things are “okay”.

What it rarely provides is innovation, a decent life standard for the individual or… well squid farms on Mars – that is, the things we don’t even know never came into being because the system wouldn’t allow them.

The systems under which more innovation happens and the standard of life increases are those that put the most emphasis on the individual.

Universal suffrage is an insane idea, of course, based on the premise that more voices are saner than one voice.  But sometimes insane ideas work.  If nothing else, universal suffrage makes the government not quite so cavalier about what they’re doing “to the least of these little ones.”

But a collection of fallible human beings are still fallible, which is why the founding fathers (and don’t tell me by our lights they didn’t have universal suffrage.  We don’t either, we have machine politics, in which cats, dogs, made up people, cartoon characters and – mostly – organizations control our vote.) had a system of checks and balances, with different people voting on different things and…

The way to promote human prosperity and innovation is to have as close to universal suffrage as possible (actually restricting it to property owners is the most common and least troublesome – in playing out – arrangement) and as small a government as possible.  This is likely to become corrupted as people find they can vote themselves bread and circus, but it will become corrupted faster if the system is subtly changed to direct democracy and if the checks and balances are destroyed, so leviathan can rise.

(We could discuss ways of suffrage.  I used to think Australia was barmy to have voting be mandatory.  One of the saving graces of the American system when it worked was its low rate of participation.  It kept voting to a small, very interested minority, a majority of which would either take the trouble to inform themselves, or vote with the RIGHT instincts – right instincts? – well, yes, a tendency not to go overboard on new new things was one of those.  However, Australia by keeping track as it does keeps the vote of pets, imaginary people and cartoon characters to a minimum and it would be really obvious if thousands of votes were found in the trunk of a car and put the voting at well above the population.  It has merits.)

It actually doesn’t matter much how universal the suffrage is, provided representatives are hampered in their attempts to exert their power and kept in fear of the population.

No system of government lasts forever.  So… how do we judge what we should do?

A wise man said: by their fruits ye shall know them.

Strong man government (and the ancillary feudalism and fiefdoms in any society over 20) is the default system that everything falls to, when out of control and when humans are left to their instincts.  It’s not hell on Earth, unless the strong man is hell on Earth.  But at its best it’s stagnant and it imbues the personality of the person in charge.

Communism STARTS as hell on Earth, because it tries to make humans into gadgets, which can’t be done. And then it becomes strong man government.

A democratic republic seems to work for a time at least – maybe we should give it a try again – but it too decays into direct democracy, which decays into strong man government.

The good of a system that protects life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness might not be self evident, but it is nonetheless real over time and squinted at.

It will never be perfect – humans aren’t perfect.  We’re a barely cobbled together mess held with spit and glue.  It just happens to be the best we can do – even when it’s honored more in the breach.

Humans are cobbled together creatures.  Because we’re social apes, some form of government is inherently “desired” or we default to strong man.  Keeping the government small might be the best we can do — and allowing more importance to individuals, to minimize the chances of mass-killings.

Can we get there from here?  Who knows?  Possibly not without centuries passing.  Probably not without wading through rivers of blood.  Certainly not without an education that’s not mass indoctrination.  (It is worth considering that while state schools serve the interests of a strong man — there are nauseating panegyrics to the great leader, and some of them stick — they serve very badly a system that’s supposed to de-emphasize government.)

It is the only cause worth fighting for.  Even if the brief periods of freedom and innovation and individual prosperity and dignity don’t last – their memory warms the centuries ahead, and passes on the torch, so that the light might be kindled again.

It’s worth a try.

 

I have a confession to make.  I was one of those insane mothers who try to make sure their kids never come in contact with a particle of dirt.  This meant about half of everyday, usually while the babies were asleep, was spent scrubbing floors and moving furniture to vacuum behind.  On a rough estimate, that probably cost me a good 10 or so books by the age of 35.  It was probably — oh, heck, surely — excessive.

Kids who came to play with my kids, even well into elementary, used to say things like “Your house is so clean.”

Then we moved to this house.  I’ve talked about before how this house seems to have a cloud of dolce far niente over it.  Which could be very nice, if we had maids and stuff (or staff.)

However, in retrospect I’m not even sure that’s true.  I mean, that there is a cloud of dolce far niente over the house.

What happened is that we moved here in 03, when I’d been informed my first series hadn’t done “as well as expected” (which, speaking of pure evil and Random Penguins is funny considering within two years I’d outearned the advance for both number one and number two.  Since the advance back then were an estimation of what the book would make the author, saying books that earned royalties over the advance didn’t do as well as expected is duck speak.  The translation is actually this “You earned more than we expected you to, given the crappy non-support and publicity we gave you – but you didn’t become a miraculous bestseller, so we’re dropping you.”)

Anyway, because burning the publishing district was not an option even if it would have made me feel much better, and because I’m a human wave AUTHOR – meaning I behave like a human wave character – I said “like h*ll you’ll fire me.* and spent the next couple of years furiously running just to stay in print.  The running included writing a lot of proposals, halves of some novels (that will now get finished) and apparently an entire medieval romance I have no memory of writing and I’m afraid of reading.  There was also a couple of stints in work for hire and ghosting.  I will not lie – I would have quit writing – probably – sometime in the next two years when things weren’t BREAKING except that we were paying double mortgage, as we were still getting the other house ready to sell, then selling it.  So, I needed money for the double mortgage, which included a year where I made 5k from short stories.  (Do the math at around $300 each story.)

Because all my free time, I was working on the house in Manitou, to get it ready for sale, I wasn’t unpacking/cleaning.  I did the minimal unpacking to get the house functional but that was all.

Then we had the year of crisis with middle school and Number Two Son.

At the end of that, a certain pattern of living in this house had set in.  And unfortunately it wasn’t a very GOOD pattern.

I cleaned every week because I’m allergic to household dust, but furniture didn’t get moved, you didn’t look in drawers (except I organize my closet twice a year, otherwise I can’t find clothes) stuff just got piled in closets and the attic remained a disaster area.

And then I started getting ill – a lot – which meant fewer books got written and the cleaning was even more neglected.

Well… there is a possibility we will have to move in the next year or so – and it would be sane to downsize if/when the boys leave.  (Though the advantage of this house for the times we live in is that it can easily fit two families.  – three would be a bit cramped.)

So I started, desultorily, going through stuff, since the first order of business is “cull crap” – mostly paper books, since we now have a lot of them in electronic format, which thank G-d can’t collect dust.

And I’ve found that maybe the problem is not with the house, but with ourselves.  I.e., we took so long to get settled/get things started here, that by the time we did the clutter was well-night hopeless.  After five years the accumulation of dust in places I couldn’t reach without major reorganization started making me ill more often, and besides we were spending money to buy things we already had because we couldn’t find anything.  (Look, there might be a logical reason to have a collection of drill bits in my desk drawer of my writing desk.  Perhaps a character had told me she wanted to get drilled, who knows?  BUT when I needed those drill bits to fix the kitchen stool… well… I never thought to look there.  There were also two visa gift cards for the kids, given to us around the time we moved, which ended up at the back of my bedside table drawer, behind my weight in pens and about ten thousand hair clips.)

Now, I’m not going to tell you that I’m about to become the world’s best housekeeper.  I think my fans would rather I do three or four more books a year.  And G-d knows this is the last thing I wanted to be doing right now.  (And I have to do guest blogging today and tomorrow.  I just do.)  But those who have engaged in this type of work – possibly not as epic – will understand what I mean when I say that having lifted a corner of the mess, I now must continue until it’s done.

A lot of this, really, is “moving in” and making this house functional to live in, as it never was.  Depending on whether or not it looks like re: staying or having to move, there might be wall painting this summer.  But for now, it’s just getting rid of furniture we don’t need.  Getting rid of stuff we no longer use (though the hair clips are a kludge.  I used them when I had hair so long I could – and did, by accident – sit on it.  Now I have it somewhere above my shoulders, so I don’t have that much use for … fifty different ways to confine my hair.  I don’t intend to grow my hair that long again – but then I never did, I just forgot to have it cut.  That’s what the first four years in this house were like.  I don’t have anywhere to store them, and no clue what to do with them.)

Now, I think I’m about at the point that I can relegate this to weekends – I.e. do my usual lick and promise in the normal areas, but add one room that gets unpacked/organized/decluttered.  Which is good.  It means I can go back to doing the stuff all of us enjoy more.

The idea is that if I do this for a couple of months, then it will be easier to maintain the house and keep from getting sick, and finally fight off the lassitude of “I can’t find anything and why bother.  At least that’s the idea.

However – right now – remember it’s been ten years of my not doing this, it means both the kids and the cats seem to think I’ve been possessed by a cleaning demon which has now spread to Dan who spent yesterday organizing his office, as the kids looked in horror.

Bear with me through late postings and such.  This is health related, though not in the normal way.  (For one, since there was mildew in the humidifier, I need to clean any place stuff might grow in the rest of the house.)

And I’m just trying to make time for the writing.

 

So, we’ve named the type of fiction we like – stories in which the human wins, or at least goes on fighting, and in which humans in general and often (gasp) Western Culture Subgroup humans are the good guys.  Because we’re brats and pests, we named it Human WAVE to tweak the New Wave people as they drown in a morass of grey goo.

Too frank? Well, still true.  The New Wavers were the usual smug and artistic lot, and being boomers, they thought they’d be, ah, yeah “Forever Young.”  If we let them go on taking themselves way too seriously, they’ll do onto genre writing what the post-war lot have done to every other art, and then no one will read, not even us, because if we want unstructured and hopeless, h*ll, we’ll just look outside the window.

It also behooves our lot to not take ourselves too seriously, not that I think there is a terrible danger of that, given that at least the founding lot are my kind of people – i.e. more likely to pelt a boring speaker with dinner rolls than to stand at a podium and make a boring speech.  But still, you never know, we get old and stuff, and well…  you know…  we might start chewing on our gums and saying things like “I started that Human Wave Stuff and look, it’s the last word in Art with a capital aspired A.”  In which case you can point us at this blog post and remind us we’re pests and brats.

Anyway, there is an art to being brats – I’ve been doing it my whole life – and the despair of our elders – been doing that my whole life too.  My brother is ten years older.  But we don’t have much practice at being brats.  At least people my age and up to fifteen years younger (and a few of the boomers who had to put up with the A’tistic ones and who now have all sorts of eye problems, because spending sixty years rolling your eyes is bad for you) have had to be way too serious and get jobs, because the other people were being A’tistic and trying free love and tax-free pot dealing, and looking down their long noses at us for being so “materialistic”.

So, I’m here to guide you.  The first part of being a brat is to make your brattiness noticed.  Oh, sure, I’ve seen some mentions here and there.  But by and large, it’s spreading too slowly.  And we want this movement to catch on a) because it will make “a’tistic” types groan and think they’ve lived in vain, b) because we want more readable stuff, right?

Before people think Human Wave is cool and try to imitate it, we must make them know it exists.  Besides, a lot of them walked away from the fifth “and then everyone died” supposed space-opera and aren’t reading anymore.  We need to let them know we’re here.

Only right now, no one does.  We’re out in the hall and making bad jokes, but they can just ignore us.  We must get in, so we can throw rubbery rolls at the self-adoring speakers.

Yesterday I had a brain storm and I thought: Awards.  (I also made a typo, the rest of you — infants — have been having WAY too much fun with.)

Before you pelt me with rubber rolls – even two years ago, I’d have been the first to say “oh, not awards, they’re SOOOOOOO stuffy.”

But the thing is in indie publishing, and in all publishing as it moves to Amazon and other electronic venues, being able to put on the cover a little seal that says “winner of the blah blah award” (we’re not calling it a blah blah award.  No, you can’t talk me into it.) does give you a huge leg up.  Most of the readers who are rediscovering SF (or anything else) because they can finally find stuff they want to read, see the Hugo and it doesn’t say to them “Award given by small group of people who attend Worldcon.”  They see “Award” which means someone other than the author’s cat read this masterpiece and approved of – or at least finished—it.  That means they’re twice as likely to buy it.

So, what I’m proposing is Human Wave Awards.  The boy has drawn this stylized human figure that is also sort of a wave, all very art-noveau and respectable-looking, and suitable not only for engraving in cool-award-plaque, but also suitable to make into a round silvery medallion which winners can use on the cover of the book and/or their other books with Human Wave Award Winning Author till the end of times.  (And if we make a lot of money, eventually — twenty years from now? — we can give away SILVER medallions with the figure, so it will have pawnable value as well.)

This is why I propose to call it Human Wave Award and not something that would appeal to us more like The Bobby (for Robert A. Heinlein) or the Poul Anderson Memorial Viking Award.

The thing is HOW do we go about organizing, nominating, and making this look respectable – considering that between us we’re more likely to start giggling halfway through and then go out for a beer?

Well, I have a little list.  (Not THAT little list.  The entire internet doesn’t have enough room for that list.  You don’t want to run out of internet, do you?)

1-      Those of you legally minded (as opposed to the rest of us, who are misdemeanor inclined, at the best of times) could you tell me what would be the easiest way to organize?

I know becoming a tax-deductible organization is a mess of work, and might not be worth it, at least at the start when I expect there will be tops a hundred of us, and the money just about enough for the nifty looking plaque and to buy the boy an espresso for his art work.  (As for WHY we should organize, whomever we elect treasurer should not have to report the $500 [I’m wildly optimistic.  Sue me] we get as personal income.  Most of the time that wouldn’t make much difference, but if the treasurer is someone like me, with a lot of self-employed income, you’re just piling onto the self-employment taxes and penalties, and it can mean a loss in the end.  This means S corp or other pass-through income could be a pain, and besides we’ll likely have a varying – and hopefully expanding – roster.)

2-      Now, once we establish the Human Wave Committee of North America – leaving room for human wavers the world over to do their thing – I propose relatively painless yearly dues of $5 or $10, which will buy you the right to vote in the award.  Now, you know how these things go – world fantasy has (I think) a nominating committee, smaller than the general membership, which recommends books for the award, and then the members of World Fantasy Convention get to vote.  Hugo has a point system depending on how many people nominate you.  (I don’t think there’s a Hugo committee, but there might be.)  The membership of Worldcon votes. We’re doing this on a shoe string (Sonny, we’ll be lucky if we can afford shoe strings) those big cons might not be the thing for us, and hell, even the Prometheus isn’t presented with the other awards, but in a different ceremony at worldcon.  (Because if we could get ours presented on that stage it might be worth it.  Very rubber-rolly.) I propose we present the Human Wave Award at Liberty con, because if all else fails, I’ll be there to present it, or we can get my publisher to stand in, or all else failing one of the con organizers.  So, I propose to present the award at Liberty con, in July, in Chattanooga TN and for the first one to be presented in 14 (which will give us time to get our act as together as it will ever be.)

I propose that after the organization we elect officers, just so everyone knows what they’re doing:  so, a president to keep the others in line; a treasurer to make sure we have the money for our nifty plaque “suitable for hanging”; and an MC to either present the award or make sure someone is around to.

3-      And then, with some members (at least three of us!) we can vote on rules, like:

Who gets to nominate?  Who gets to vote? Who gets to throw rubber rolls?

I’d like to suggest that members of the organization get to nominate, that members of the organization plus fully paid up members of Liberty con get to vote (Though I’m okay with those two being reversed) and that everyone gets to throw rubber rolls.

I propose that for 2014 because it’s a new award, work going back five years be eligible. That work by serving officers of Human Wave Organization NOT be eligible for the term of service.  That five year thing is an option.  The other one is to do what the Prometheus does and for some years at least do a retro-award, for work published before the award was instituted.  It’s all the same to me.

Now discuss it among yourselves.  I have some (more) guest blogging to do because it would be nice to finish the guest blogging for DSR BEFORE AFGM comes out (the fifth.  If you haven’t pre-ordered, do so now!) and unfortunately health and other issues have made that highly iffy.

Who threw that rubber roll?  I see you, Mister.  Anyone have any butter?

— a guest post by Lieutenant Colonel (And fellow Baen Author) Tom Kratman

Colonel Kratman sent me a message with this post in answer to my challenge to discuss the pros cons and intricacies of a Starship Trooper Type Regime.  For those of you (lucky souls) not afflicted with our writing but and our oddness, this is how science fiction works — someone writes a book and someone else looks at it and goes “Oh, h*ll no* or perhaps *Yes, but–”  or even “How about like this instead.”  I make no mistake of the fact a lot of my stuff is that sort of dialogue with Heinlein — to wit the Earth revolution stuff is my answer to The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress (“How about without a supercomputer?” resulted in A Few Good Men and the other notes in the background of that will do for the rest of the series.)  Colonel Kratman says his Balboa Union books came as his taking of the basic principles of Starship troopers and adjusting them for a particular country on a particular planet, in another solar system. (More on Balboa and its narrative universe here.)

So, we’ve established that revolutions don’t do much except make things worse, unless revolutions are the blessing of an order already in place and already functioning, in which case, the overpower vanishes and there it is.

This works best, of course, in Colonial situations, though for the record, most of the anti-colonial revolutions ended disastrously.  Even when the colonial power was as unorganized, hapless and… well, devil-may-care as Portugal, the result… oh, just read the recent history of Mozambique and Angola, or, better, talk to someone who was there.  As for Zimbabwe, its fall from the breadbasket of Africa is… well…

Of course there are other factors for that, including but not limited to the fact that the colonial powers had infected – via their intellectuals – these poor people with Marxism, and also that the Soviet Union used them as cat’s paws to keep the US occupied, to keep its people in goods (it’s curious that while capitalism is accused of this, the communist powers are always the ones who work like ancient empires.  They have to keep invading and stealing, because they simply can’t produce, having long since killed or scared away their producers.) and to kill off a lot of the young males who might otherwise cause trouble.

Leaving all that aside and since space colonies don’t seem to be forthcoming in the next 20 years or so – though I wouldn’t count them out.  Like with ebooks which were talked about forever and finally dismissed as “never gonna happen” I suspect if it does happen it will be suddenly, over about five years, and probably involving some new technology or a will to use the old ones. – what do we do, those of us who don’t wish to live under the boot of a progressively (eh!) more authoritarian regime?

We dig under.

I’d like to point out the regime we are currently living out is the result of just that strategy.  They occupied all the positions of power that lead to government control over about three to four generations.  (It’s what “the long march” is all about.)  Those of us who grew up in unstable countries know what the nexus of power a new regime absolutely must conquer to maintain its grip on the population: radio, TV, Newspapers, as much of the bureaucracy as possible, from your local DMV to whatever passes for a deliberative body – and then you can take the president, and then you’re home free.

The genius of the current take over is that they knew they couldn’t do it South American style and come in with tanks and machine guns, take over all these places by force and get away with it.  That can’t be managed in the country with the best military in the world.

Instead, they went exactly for the same centers, but one by one, and with replacement strategies.  In this they were helped by two of their characteristics and the characteristics of those they view as domestic enemies (No?  Listen to them sometime.) and who are anyone who isn’t to the left of Lenin.  For our purposes we’ll call them “conservatives” though a lot of us aren’t EXACTLY that and though at this point in time “conservative” is a misnomer for people who want to change the current form of governance.

They took over by stealthing it – that is by pretending to be “establishment” until they were secure.  I actually tried to stealth it for years in publishing, and I have friends who are still trying to do it now (All the best boys and girls, you’re better than I.)  I couldn’t do it for reasons that lots of other conservatives can’t do it.  First, I couldn’t STEALTH well enough.  We, liberty lovers tend to prize truth and it bothered me greatly to fake it, so I was never vocal about supporting stuff I, in fact, abhorred.  Second, (vile) progs once in control which was well before I broke in, started demanding VOCAL adherence to their nonsense.  So if you weren’t screaming about the patriarchal, capitalist regime every other line, you simply wouldn’t get the push and the promo.  Or, as a friend of mine said “they watch what you laugh at, and they watch for how you respond in conversation”  and since even professional meetings turn into extended political rants with quite unimaginably offensive things said about everyone not extreme left, keeping an impassive face is difficult enough, let alone faking enthusiasm.

The reverse of this is that liberty lovers have this habit of fairness (which is why it’s so hard for me to wield the troll hammer) so even if we took over, the take over would never be absolute, and it would never, ever, ever be permanent.  We tend to go “Yes, he’s a communist, but that’s a stupid quirk.  He’s a good worker.  Look at what he did with this or that – give him the promotion.  It is by this process that most conservative institutions become far left.  The reverse doesn’t happen.  It’s not that the left is much better at stealthing (though they are) it’s that the right is much worse at excluding ideological opponents and/or viewing them as “the enemy.”  At least quase-ante, before the last few years, we tended to view them more as poor fools.

And this is how they took over all the media, all entertainment and most corporations and boards and anything that was a group of people, that needed “leadership” and that could be manipulated.  It also helps they’re the side who want power over others, while we mostly want to be left alone.

So to propose that we start our own crawl through the institutions is misguided – it’s not something we can do, something we’re good at or something even particularly productive in the current state of affairs.

However, the power-lovers, no matter what the regime have one fatal flaw.  They love to seize power.  They’re very good at wielding it – as in pounding down all opposition – what they suck at, because their temperament makes them not empathetic at all, is figuring out how people work.  And trying to rule (which is what they do) or worse, govern, without understanding people leads to disaster.  It is worse if they are communists, because communism is a religion at odds with reality.  They continue believing it, even as it fails, like those poor cult members whose end of the world is forever postponed one more month, and they continue doing more of what fails, which is why their utopias turn rapidly to hell on earth.

This leaves the rest of us stuck in a situation where EVEN if we could do the reverse of their strategy, even if we decided to crawl through the institutions for seventy years, we don’t have that kind of time.  The people who were so hot on getting into the cockpit, are flying the plane right into the ground because their little (red) religious book tells that that’s the way to gain altitude.

We don’t have seventy years before gravity asserts itself explosively.  We don’t have seventy months.  Sometimes I think we’ll be lucky if we have seventy weeks, and frankly I wouldn’t be surprised if we crashed in seventy days.  Sometimes I feel as if I’m locked in the painting “the scream” shrieking soundless and I can’t do anything.

Wait.  Before you head out to the bathroom to slit your wrists in a warm bath – listen.  I didn’t say there’s nothing we can do.

Like the left we have our own strengths and our own abilities.  And they are things they not only don’t have, but they can’t fully understand.

To wit, the reason we tend to be really bad at politics is that there are things that are more important to us.  A lot of people have complained that people aren’t focusing on the politics because they’re busy making a living, raising a family, figuring out how to survive.

But, listen, that’s a strength, too.

See, the reason that they’re self-devouring is that they see politics before merit.  It’s never “we’ll promote him even though he’s a political idiot because OMG, he can write.”  It’s always “She can write all right, but she’s not “one of the good people” so we’ll not only do nothing but thwart her if we can.”

Over time this allows them to take over ideologically.  And it makes them REALLY dumb about anything else.

Here we have to go back to the publishing industry.  Because ideology was more important than anything else (though they promoted some books with no overt ideological tinge, because the author – they were satisfied – was one of them.  They tolerated these books more anywhere else rather than sf, which is why sf crashed harder and faster, except obviously at Baen.  Because SF is the projection of the present into the future, no “incorrect” politics would be allowed.) they needed to control not just what got published, but what got distributed and what got push.  This meant not only taking over the bookstores, (ideologically, not the publishers) but setting up a system which was determined by pull, not push.  By the end of their reign and just before ebooks hit, they could “publish” a book and make sure it sold nothing (it was never on shelves.  EVEN if people asked for it) and thereby end the career of anyone whom they’d found out was ideologically different – or suspect.  At the same time, of course, someone on the “right” (left) side got push, even if the work was otherwise undistinguished.

This worked to an extent – the reading public simply assumed ALL authors were leftist, and read the least offensive ones.  However, as the houses lost feedback (because this was all push, no pull) they lost track of “what the market will bear.”  Printruns were shrinking every year (the excuse being “people don’t read anymore.”) and they were starting to feel the pinch.  The bookstores, in particular (their fault for buying into “to the net” and the publishers’ push model) were caught in the middle and imploding.

All it took was the emergence of a free market in electronic books to send the whole thing into a tail spin.  (Most of the houses are dead, just still – somehow – walking.)

The houses reaction to ebooks was classic too – they reacted just like cultists whose UFO/prophet failed to bring about the end of the world on the appointed date: cover up, ignore, and hope the whole thing goes away.

Well – this is basically what we’re seeing in government, in finance, and anywhere that the left has got its big foot in, including “big science.”

They have been promoting people on the basis of faith, not intelligence for years.  And that’s no way to run a civilization (the problem goes beyond the USA, though I suppose, as usual, it will be left for us to solve.)

So – you want your second American revolution and your second American republic?  Fine.  Start building a structure that works, behind, beside and beneath the official one.

In some cases this will be very very difficult.  For us writers, for instance, it’s almost impossible to work for anything but US dollars.  (Though, who knows, that might change.  Will for sure if the crash comes.  I will of course work for gold, if anyone wants to cover me in a pile of it!)

On the other hand, we’re going around the publishing establishment, more and more so, yay us.  I’d advise every liberty-minded writer, even the traditionally published ones, to look into indie.  At best you can use it to support and promote your published work (I have brought a lot of people to the Darkship Thieves universe through the short stories.)  At worst, if something happens to your publisher (No, I don’t expect anything to happen to Baen, but a lot of it rests on ONE WOMAN’s shoulders, and while she’s younger than I and I hope she outlives me, sh*t happens.  To everyone.) you have a fallback and something to build from.

At the same time, I urge artists to find other ways to market their art.  Both of these will take stepping outside your “validation” comfort zone, but a lot of us had to do that with politics anyway, and it’s not that different.

If you’re not there – I urge you, urge you – to use your skills to advance the building of a parallel structure.  If you’re a computer maven, build a game engine that will allow indie game writers to compete with the big houses.  If you’re a computer maven, again, think about animation tools and others that allow indie movies to do what the big guys do for one percent of the price.  If you’re a teacher or interested in teaching, study how to do it on line.

We have it worse than they did.  We can’t just take over a few strategic points and hope the whole thing keeps running but now under us.  They’re destroying everything because of their anti-reality beliefs.  We have to take over everything just to prevent a terminal collapse.

Fortunately, most of us are “people who do things.”  I urge you to do things.  I have a friend who is studying brewing and welding, in case that’s all he can contribute.  In fact, I’d urge all of us to do that if we can.  Even if you’re a writer an artist or a scientist, if you have a hobby that can be turned into a part time job – growing vegetables, refinishing furniture, cooking, cleaning, sewing, brewing, etc – and bring in some money, do so.

I knew a family in Portugal who were educated and well to do, but when everything went upside down, they arranged with a textile firm to get the scraps of material that would (otherwise) have been burned at the end of the day.  The wife and daughters then fired up the sewing machines and started making pot holders, placemats and aprons (fewer aprons, most pieces were tiny.)  They sold these at the fairs which are at best gray market (the stalls require a license, so you have to declare some income.  But most of the business is done in cash.  You do the math.)  By the time things stabilized, they were living better than ever.

I don’t think that in most places the system will collapse that completely.  I DO think that things like making a living on line – provided you’re either selling something useful or something people find entertaining – will work for most of us.  But if your area goes bad, that second skill will help.

And meanwhile – hat tip to Dave Freer – network.  Network with those in your area, and network with those out of it who can help you on line.  Build connections with like minded people.

Yes, this means we will ALL have to work our tails off for the next – if we’re lucky – seventy weeks.  But work is what we do.  Building is what we do.

You see the current society is like a beautiful building that has termites in the support beams.  We’re working very fast to put up new support beams along side them and to encase the current support beams in strong concrete.

The goal is that when they give out and turn to powder, there is a shhh sound and then, nothing, because our support structures step in place and keep things going.

And THEN we can argue whether the bit on the roof should be round or square and – hopefully – termite-proof the new structure.

But first, it has to be in place.  So go forth and build.