For The Times They Are A’Changing a blast from the past from August 2016
Blame this on the head cold I’m almost over (truly) and the mild fever that accompanied it. Blame it on the change of weather, that had me getting up in the middle of the night to close windows that had, sudden and inexplicably, become openings to the arctic.
Blame it on my dad giving me all the books of legends of the region that he could gather on short notice. Yes, I also got books on the history of the City of Porto and surroundings, but when it comes to Fantasy it is easiest to dip into the legends. And these legends are full of changing times and changing circumstances, of the tumultuous succession of Romans and Swabians, Moors and Christian crusaders, absolutist and parliamentary monarchists, republicans, French invaders and British liberators.
Most of the legends are just that, legends, though I suspect a lot of what the guys writing these books ignored is that that type of popular memory might be wrong in the particulars (So it wasn’t that particular Caliph, but something happened here, perhaps a hundred years before or since. I know from my own experience it’s very easy to confuse stories your grandmother told you for things that happened in her life time and that you find, once you look into it, had to have happened in the time of her grandmother’s grandmother, and which she told me as had been told to her. — Confusing how many grandmothers ago is particularly easy since her introduction was always “My grandmother told me that once upon a time, this street–“) but is often right in the details, particularly when various local legends chain on each other to form a coherent whole. (A Moorish defeat in one place, leading to a Moorish route passing through the next village, leading to–)
Anyway, legends seem to cluster around times of great change, times in which lots of things were happening, times of turmoil and movement. As did, I’ll admit, my grandmother’s stories. Humans seem to have an innate predilection for stories in which stuff happens. (I know. It’s astounding, right? It’s almost like there’s a difference between stories and sermons.)
My favorite — I’ve been crashing early, but having trouble sleeping, so chain-reading these little one to two page stories, until I physically can’t hold the book up — was the story of Wellington taking the city of Porto and eating the lunch originally cooked for Soult. While Soult wasn’t waiting around to eat it, and had prepared to leave the city in the morning, it is easy to believe the servants of the house he was occupying went around preparing lunch, as they would have done, anyway. And of course Wellington would have eaten it, and probably toasted his victory, as befits the gallant spirit of the age where being seen to do something with flare was even better than “just” doing it.
Then this morning, I woke up and caught up with Mad Genius Club, where Dave Freer has written a post about the changing state of our field. (Last Monday.) Changing Spots.
In it he notes many things I have myself realized, including that it’s d*mn hard to plan for the future in this time of turmoil we’re entering.
And it’s not just in publishing, of course. If it were just in publishing it would be easy. One could after all fall back on the rest of the “stable world.”
It’s not just in publishing.
It’s everywhere we look, and part of this is that we’re in the middle of one of those macro conceptual changes the human race goes through now and then. You know, nomadic to agriculture, agriculture to cottage industry trade/cottage industry-trade to industrial/ industrial to mass production/mass production to personal-individual-small scale.
All of those are accompanied by equivalent turmoil: political, scientific (as the conceptual change spreads), territorial.
All of them.
So, things to remember:
-It is only beginning. Someone on Facebook said we’re living through the period of history summarized under “causes leading to” before the map gets all arrowy and scary. And they’re not wrong. What I have a feeling though, is that we’re living through “Factors contributing to” the “causes leading to.” Things are still working themselves out, and the economic fall out of what seemed like the relatively simple innovation of instant communication around the world and portability of data hasn’t fully worked itself through yet. When will it work itself through? When you see land in “states with no jobs” pick up on sales. You’ll know we’re halfway through the transformation when pay scales start to balance between KS and NYC. (Not quite. Very large cities will always have a pull of their own. It’s the mid range cities that will balance and empty. But you know what I mean.) You’ll now we’re almost done when telecommuting is the ASSUMPTION for any job that can be done this way. I don’t expect it in my lifetime.
-The very beginning is enough for craziness and dislocation, war and rumors of war. Trust me. So, we’re living through that.
-The Future won’t look anything like those people who think history comes with an arrow think it will look. It also won’t look like the dreams of those who wish to hurtle back intot he beginning of the 20th century. (No, seriously. They’re the romantics of the present day, wearing their retro chic opinions like people who built “ruins” on their estates.) It’s an hysterical reaction of scared children in either case.
-It is entirely possible that the future won’t look like anything any of us CAN conceptualize. Start working through the consequences of a truly decentralized, not-space-attached workforce. Real estate? Dating? Family structure? Education? If you really think it through it will make your head spin, particularly as you get into the consequences of the consequences.
So, what to do? Try not to get too excited. Stay flexible. Be able and ready to jump. Don’t try to define the present based on the past: it’s likely not to work too well.
In practical terms: take care of yourself. Make connections. Teach your children well. Don’t let yourself be gaslighted. Learn. The more options you have the better. And stay awake. Falling asleep is to fall behind and lose touch with what’s happening.
Most of all don’t give up. There is a good chance the future will be better than the past (though some disgusting interludes do occur.) and if we don’t live to see it, other humans will.
It is important to judge people and events in their own time. First, because that’s the only way we really can judge them.
You can’t judge people on actions they didn’t know were wrong, or on things that were hidden from them, which only time has revealed. Or rather, you can, but it’s deranged. What you are holding people guilty of is not being psychic. Not being able to foretell the future. Well, none of us can. Not with any accuracy, and never about things we want to. (Yeah, sometimes I get something like glimpses, but seriously? Do you see me among the lottery winners? No? That’s because I can’t see the future in a significant way.) Go ahead and despise people for that failing, but be aware you’re being deranged.
Also, unlike the people on the left, most of us are aware we, ourselves, are not infallible, and our time is not the pinnacle of knowledge and morality. Things that seem right to us now — or at least not markedly wrong — can and will be reviled by future lovers of liberty.
Already, in my time, I have taken positions and done things that I’m sorry for. I mean, voting for McCain was — maybe — the least of the bad choices. Maybe. Do we know what he might have done in the presidency? We do know he wasn’t a good man. And would either he or Palin been able to withstand the treatment that Trump endured and endures? Because it would have been visited upon them. And I have my doubts. As for Romney… well, I thought he was the least evil choice. As things turned out, G-d might have been looking out for the United States of America when it let the Light Bringer (oh, Lucifer, son of the morning…. What? Tell me you didn’t think of that! Okay, maybe not. Not everyone thinks in allusions and poetry.) cheat his way into a second term.
George W. Bush? I am divided. I mean, coming out of the presidency and announcing he is practically Clinton’s brother clarified much. But then again, the alternative was Al Gore. Or, heaven forfend, Jean le Kerry. Shrug. There might have been no good choice there. But the truth is I didn’t vote for what I thought I was voting. Not even the second time. And the results of his subtle actions have us more in the thrall of the left than we’d otherwise have been.
I have to judge in that time.
Why this? I’ve come to doubt the Cold War was needed. I’ve come to doubt the Soviet Union was ever the threat we believed. It’s almost sure it would have been unable to retaliate, had it come to nukes. It’s almost sure it would have been destroyed and not able to fire back.
Which makes the entire corrupt business of letting the Soviet Union swallow more than half the world and infiltrate the rest to avoid a nuclear exchange even more corrupt and criminal than it sounds. Sure, I’m speaking very glibly of maybe nuking to dust all of the Soviet Union’s major cities — 3? — which would mean the death of a couple three million people or so.
On the other hand, think of the misery around the globe. South America and Africa alone bled people and wealth thanks to the Soviet Union. And the Soviet Union corrupted China, whose death count was much higher than…. well, anyone. And think of the horrors endured by Cuba and North Korea to this day. Think of what is happening in Venezuela. Think of the corruption and destruction caused by international Communism.
On the other hand–
The Soviet Union was good at one thing, and that was deception and lying. And whether driving long tubes around the country in trucks, or making up wholly fabricated numbers, it gave the impression to our, perhaps overly gullible, establishment that there was a credible threat of mutual annihilation.
This in turn means we let the Soviet Union get away with — literal — mass murder, destruction of wealth, imperialism, because we were convinced — partly because of Soviet propaganda and our corrupt science establishment — that any exchange would not only kill its targets, but cause nuclear winter and destroy the planet. (No, there is no reason to believe this. Seems to be another fable, of the kind Paul Ehrlich loves.)
Did anyone know? I’m sure there might have been a few people who knew. Probably a very few. And even they might not have been aware of the full scale of deception, of how much we were cowing to a non-existent threat.
Most people though, even when corrupt, even when lying about something, were corrupt in something minor that they thought insignificant, or even a white lie for good. Say, exaggerating the bad effects of a nuclear exchange. Some scientists might have known it was bullshit, but hey they were prevent bombs from flying and killing innocents. That’s to the good, right? I mean, can you blame them? (Yes, yes, I can. there is a reason Jordan Peterson says “Tell the truth, or at least don’t lie.” Your piece of the lie might seem inconsequential, but added to other lies, it could destroy the world.)
Good people; people with a decent brain, and unconventional thinkers at that, like Robert A. Heinlein, did not see the Soviet lies. (Not even when he realized how much smaller Soviet population was. Even holding our spycraft in utter contempt, as he did.) That means a large number of people earnestly believed the lies. And given the lies, they were acting in the most ethical manner possible.
In fact, given the effect of the lies in the world, onto our day, most people believed the lies and were, at least to an extent, justified in believing the lies. The “War on Terror” and “Winning Hearts And Minds” or as it’s known in the real world, fighting with both feet tied together and your right hand strapped behind your back might have been stupid — was stupid — and carried on in a way that mostly enriched the various special interests that feed off big government.
On the other hand, it was the result of “lessons learned” and never questioned from the Cold War. That those lessons were wrong, and the threat largely one we enabled wasn’t obvious TO ME — and I’m, as you know, a very unconventional thinker — until I saw Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, and started having reason to doubt they have any of their nuclear arsenal ready to fly. Most people here and elsewhere still view them as a credible nuclear threat (Pfui, I say onto you. Putin would have used a nuke by now, if he could. To stop dissent at home if nothing else.)
So, can you hold people during the Cold War responsible for not knowing? No.
You — to quote Mark Alger — go to war with the underwear you got on. Or if you prefer, you do what you can based on what you know then.
However, when that knowledge changes, when a complete outsider by accident and sideways becomes president and reveals that things like “War in the Middle East” are not inevitable, if we just don’t act according to things we now know are erroneous. If we act like everything we know is wrong (more or less) and consider it anew, it behooves us not to assume he’s crazy. It behooves us to consider the situation and change what we think. Because having been lied to is not a pact to continue acting like complete idiots forever.
In the same way, take the Covidiocy. No amnesty! Why no amnesty? Well, because with a very few exceptions, most of the people — particularly the doctors at the top — leading the charge to destroy your liberties knew very well what they were doing, and how exaggerated the threat was.
In fact, many of them, and politicians in the pay of China, might have been aware the “videos” leaking from China were fiction to rival anything that Pallywood dishes out.
But even assuming none of that was true, any of them — any of them at any time — could have looked at the Diamond Princess numbers and seen how the threat was not that big. Bad flu numbers, at most. Does this indict Donald Trump? I don’t know. As you guys know, I’ve been very angry at him since the two week lockdown. Should he have looked at the numbers? Sure. On the other hand, as a business man, he’s used to trusting engineers and other experts. I don’t think it occurred to him someone would perpetrate a lie of that magnitude. Time and again he showed that his big blind spot was his actual love of nation, and his inability to realize how many people are willing to sell this country out with nary a thought. In other words, it’s his Paladin qualities that betrayed him, not something I expected.
Should he still have checked? Aye. But note he’s not the one who locked you down indefinitely, and made you wear masks, and closed your churches. Hold the two weeks against him as much as you want to, but after that? Oh, hell no.
That was his refusal to trample regional rights. So, again, his Paladin qualities, curse them.
Note, still not happy with him, but he might have been the best we could get. He might still be, at that. I’ll hang loose and act as possible.
Now is it possible that some of the things we think we know now are wrong? Absolutely. In fact, I’d guarantee it.
Forgive yourself too, looking back. All you can do is all you can do. All you can know is all you can know.
Do your best with what you know at the time.
We are told that in the end of time, the truth of every heart will be laid bare. I’m not going to lie and say I’m looking forward to mine being laid bare. I know all of us have things we’d rather not admit. But– But at the same time, perhaps it needs to happen to set reality aright. And don’t we all wish we could know.
But the end of time is a long way off, or perhaps metaphorical. Until then, each of us knows what each of us knows. And we can’t be responsible for knowing more than we can find out.
Nor can we hold people who believed the lies of their times responsible for not being future-seers.
Most of the liars and the duped of the 20th century are dead.
What we can do is face what the lies were, and not compound them.
I hope you little maniacs are happy. I’ve changed the illustration now.
You’ll forgive me if I say this, but all of you who were born and raised in America are the children of the good times.
This is not a disparagement. As I have said before, there is a lot of nonsense — for that matter a lot of what appears to me to be a lot of imbibed third hand ROMAN nonsense — about the whole “good times make weak men.” (They don’t. Not if the children are properly raised. The defect is in the good times the parents pursuing things other than properly raising their children, not the good times themselves. And bad times have other pathologies that have nothing to with making people strong.) It’s an observation.
Most of us in most of the world, now and throughout history, were “born owing money.” Life was hard, and we knew our parents had made significant sacrifices for us. So we felt we had to justify our existence. The level of justifying varied. But justifying happened. Some of us, at the beginning of our sixth decade, will catch ourselves, late at night, cataloguing everything we did that day, to justify being alive.
Most of us, in most of the world, now and throughout history, knew that surviving childhood left you injured, often maimed. Because there was a never end of childhood diseases, and that scar that you have from when you tore your leg open. It was worse (still is in the third world) before the twentieth century, where even in your twenties, you might not have full mobility of balance, because of the foot the cow trod on, when you were minding the cow at four or five.
These are not badges of honor. They’re ways people arrived at adulthood maimed and broken, and knew they would never reach their full potential already, even when at the height of their strength and mental power.
Children of the good times are different. They were born because they were wanted. They might be neglected in childhood, which brings on its own issues, and more on that later, but they don’t know what it is to go hungry, or not to be sure where the next meal is going to come from.
They might be sick, now and then. Ear infections, maybe bad colds. But very few children of the good times were ever in doubt they’d survive, or had to submit to dubious medical treatment in hope of surviving.
Physically they are stronger, taller, clean-limbed, bright eyed.
The problem is psychological. And to an extent it’s not even a problem.
Growing up unaware that you are immensely fortunate because everyone around you is similarly fortunate is not a problem. Wanting the best for yourself and your children is not a problem. Reaching and working for the best is not the problem.
The problem is not being aware that there are limits. That the world is broken at a very fundamental level. That the very realm of physical existence imposes its own limits, its own deficiencies. That you might be the best you could be, but the human genetics, too, have limits. As does the span of our life. The wisdom of our heart. The reach of our minds.
Now, this might be complicated in our days because for three generations now, the children of previous good times (no, trust me, historically speaking, not knowing a famine or a war in our land is good times) plunged into the pursuit of the perfect life, and didn’t pay much attention to their children. Or at least not the attention children of the good times need to understand the limits of life.
I don’t know. I know that in our post-religious (yes, a lot of us are religious, but society at large isn’t) post civics-religion (no longer taught, even in America, that idea you owe a duty to the family and country that spawned you) world most people spend their lives crying for a perfection that can’t exist, and feeling cheated they don’t get it.
Yes, some of us know we need to “work on ourselves” and we do. But the reason for that is not that we expect to be perfect but that we owe a duty to those around us not to live our lives locked in a permanent scream of “But I don’t want it” or to fall into depressions we don’t even understand. Also, we are all too aware we can’t do our work while being crazy.
But we don’t have religion or philosophy to tell us neither us nor others will be perfect, nor that there is a limit to “fairness.”
Look, I was a child of good times enough that in my teen years, in a very traditional society, I rebelled against the idea that, as a woman, my aspiration should be to have children, and the females among them would aspire to have children. It seemed silly.
Throughout most of the human race’s tenure on Earth having children and bringing them safely to adulthood and their own children was aspirational. Something to dream of and strive for. But even I, to an extent, was a child of the good times. I wanted perfection, and emotional satisfaction.
Which is part of it. When you are a child of the good times, physically, you see your psychological injuries much larger. And you think yourself more unfortunate than most, when in fact you are a pampered princeling in relation to most of humanity living and ead.
Now, everyone who can sniff the air, and yes, myself, knows that there’s turmoil ahead.
I’m perhaps among the very few who thinks it will be brief, and the good times will continue
And with them, the children of the good times.
As such, I must tell you that part of the “raise your children well” is both paying attention to them, so you know how their minds tick and making them aware how very fortunate they are.
On top of this you must layer a sense of duty; a sense of living for something. I can’t tell you what. I’m not you. I don’t know your kids.
I know for my kids, I tried to imbue along with our religion, the idea they owed a duty to their country; that they, inheritors of liberty, should protect it for future generations. And I tried to pass along a duty to “labor truly in the position appointed to them.” (Or, us being American, the one they aspire to reaching. And labor for that too.)
Look, it’s not just for the children. Raise yourself, too, no matter what age you are. Raise yourself to understanding you’ll never be perfect. In fact you might be so broken that achieving a little thing every day is a feat.
But you must try. You must try to work on yourself so you’re not a burden to others around you; you must try to “labor truly” either at your job, or that other thing you do, so you’re a net positive on the world; and you must understand things will never be perfect.
Things were never perfect. They never will be.
Compared to most of the world and history, you already live in paradise. That doesn’t mean you can be “like onto gods.” But that you have it very, very good. And you should strive to enjoy it, work on it, and pass it on to others as good as you found it or better.
If you wish to send us books for next week’s promo,please email to bookpimping at outlook dot com. If you feel a need to re-promo the same book do so no more than once every six months(unless you’re me or my relative. Deal.) One book per author per week. Amazon links only. Oh, yeah, by clicking through and buying (anything, actually) through one of the links below, you will at no cost to you be giving a portion of your purchase to support ATH through our associates number. A COMMISSION IS EARNED FROM EACH PURCHASE.*Note that I haven’t read most of these books (my reading is eclectic and “craving led”,) and apply the usual cautions to buying. I reserve the right not to run any submission, if cover, blurb or anything else made me decide not to, at my sole discretion.– SAH
Chloe Brandt got more than she bargained for when she took on the groundskeeper and caretaker position at the old cemetery of Belleview. Chloe is still learning just what her job duties at the big cemetery are, and how far they will take her. Just what mysteries are her responsibility? When the ghoul asks for help, she’s willing to try…
Two novellas of magic and adventure. . . Caught between pirates who would force him to use wizardry in their aid, and a king who would force him to spy, Alik will need every scrap of wits and wizardry to forge his own path. A curse of ill luck leaves Perriel and Gareth trapped in an endless winter, with only the faintest hope of breaking free.
Life has been a nightmare for Mitya ever since he was arrested on trumped-up charges and exiled to Siberia. But this labor camp in the far north of Magadan Oblast hides a secret far more terrible than the merely human evils of the Great Terror. For the universe we know is not the only one, and there are places where it interpenetrates with universes where the laws of nature as we know them do not operate, where humanity has no place. Worlds inhabited by beings ancient and terrible, to whom humanity are slaves, playthings, food.
Voodoo Magic was not the only sinister guard over that blood-drenched Haitian inheritance. There was Uncle Eli’s bizarre will, the half a dozen other potential heirs, who inconveniently kept dropping dead, and the local police, who are all to suspicious of a pretty American lady, and her supposed “artist” of a fiancé. Then the locals began an uprising, with rumors that they were lead by a zombie!
This iktaPOP Media edition includes an introduction giving the novel genre and historical context.
Thirteen tales of Horror, perfect for a dark and stormy Friday the 13th…or a sunny Tuesday afternoon.
From science fiction to classic European horror, interwoven with layers of creep factor, gore, and mystery that will keep you turning the page…and looking over your shoulder.
So, light the candles, stir the cauldron, and check your ammo count, because things are about to get dark!
Mark Sheppard knew he was different, but they kept him in the dark about how different he was until he was old enough. Then he learned what he was. He is an Incubus. Now it is time to fulfill his duties as an Incubus. Those duties include building a harem of Succubi.
Unfortunately, the mythological stories omitted one crucial part. Succubus are several times stronger than humans, and they go into a bonding hunt at the first scent of an Incubus. They have only one thing on their minds, and sex is the key part of the bonding.
After the bonding, they become “almost normal,” assuming that normal means a sex-crazed nymphomaniac.
Succubi outnumber Incubuses by ten to one, and they must be bonded to an Incubuses to survive past age 25.
He finds out that Incubi and Succubi are not the only paranormals out there and that Incubuses also attract other female paranormals.
This story is quite humorous, and while it is 18+ (it is not fade to black), it concentrates on the story and character development and does not stretch out the sex descriptions to an excessive number of pages.
You will find Elf attributes extremely amusing, ;)…
Garia and the East Morlans have been on increasingly rocky terms for years, and when Téo and Zara ran away together, they touched off the powder keg of war between their kingdoms. Now they have to fight for their lives while learning to live in a foreign land.
In the Morlans, Hanri and Alia are facing their own sets of problems. He must control and divert the single-minded vengeance of his father King Reynard, and she must sort the gold of information from the dross of gossip in a palace swarming with rumors. It could mean the difference between life and death for all of them.
When Peggy Becker married Englishman Tommy Morehouse in San Antonio in the spring of 1938, her cousin and best friend Venetia “Vennie” Stoneman was her bridesmaid. After the wedding, Peg and Tommy traveled across the Pacific to Malaya, where Tommy managed his family’s rubber plantation. There they expected to raise a family and live a comfortable and rewarding life among the British expatriates in the tropics, while Vennie returned to Galveston to continue training as a nurse. The start of the Second World War changed those comfortable, settled lives: Tommy Morehouse became a prisoner of war, Peg barely escaped the fall of Singapore with her small son, and Vennie Stoneman was a nurse in the US Army Nurse Corps, tending to battlefield casualties in North Africa, Italy, and France. In Australia, Peg waits out the war, wondering if her husband will survive brutal captivity by the Japanese, and Vennie risks her own life as an air evacuation nurse. Throughout all, the two women write to each other, of their lives, loves, of Vennie’s patients and comrades, and Peg’s children and the woes of running a wartime household among rationing and shortages of shoes for her children.
Vignettes by Luke, Mary Catelli and ‘Nother Mike.
So what’s a vignette? You might know them as flash fiction, or even just sketches. We will provide a prompt each Sunday that you can use directly (including it in your work) or just as an inspiration. You, in turn, will write about 50 words (yes, we are going for short shorts! Not even a Drabble 100 words, just half that!). Then post it! For an additional challenge, you can aim to make it exactly 50 words, if you like.
We recommend that if you have an original vignette, you post that as a new reply. If you are commenting on someone’s vignette, then post that as a reply to the vignette. Comments — this is writing practice, so comments should be aimed at helping someone be a better writer, not at crushing them. And since these are likely to be drafts, don’t jump up and down too hard on typos and grammar.
There is this platonic ideal of our lives, inside our heads. Looking back, I know what I SHOULD have been doing at any given time. It’s rarely what I was actually even close to doing. And it’s not that I didn’t want to do it as such. It’s…. other things.
Yeah, I have this fantasy that if I could only send my mind/knowledge back in time, to say when I was 18, and known how things would hit, particularly Indie publishing, I’d be so much better positioned. Or blogs. Or…. you know?
But it’s not that way, is it?
I mean, if I could send my mind back in time, and I weren’t submitting stories, because I needed to sell, because baby needed shoes, what would have happened? I probably would have let the world and the daily necessities overwhelm me, and nothing would get written, and 2011 would come around, and nothing in the drawer ready to publish, plus a whole lot of not-learning-to-do-it. Unless I’d managed to send “craft” back with my mind, too.
The truth is I know perfectly well what I’m supposed to be doing right now, to fulfill my prime directive: write a lot of books, get more readers, get worlds out of head, make money for our retirement, money to help the boys, etc.
I should be writing. 9 to 5. Like a real job. And Saturday I’m supposed to do publishing/recovering, etc.
Unfortunately life happens and I’m not an automaton.
This year has been a lesson in “life happens” and the machinery of — mostly — grief. Though stress too. Look, it turns out grief can make you ill, and repeated hits can make you depressed…. and….
And even when nothing big and metaphysical is going on, there is other stuff, like–
Last night, we went to bed, and I realized my PILLOW was wet. No, really. It didn’t really smell, and was wet with clear liquid and… Yeah, Val cat is having kidney failure. She doesn’t concentrate her urine really well. BUT she knows if she pees on my stuff enough, then I will leave, and she’ll have Dan all to herself. Senility and kidney disease, basically.
Well, we had sheets and pillow cases, but the pee had gone all over (though most of it stayed IN the pillow, yay me) and we had to clean the mattress and dry it, and it was 3 am by the time we were in bed, upset and cranky and having trouble sleeping.
So today…. is as you expect.
I know what I’m supposed to be doing. Plus I need to clean the back porch so I can paint it in the last above-freezing days we have. What am I doing? Oh, yeah. Sitting here, trying to think.
I swear it’s been like this every day for three years. Only, other reasons. The sort of thing you look back and can’t even remember, either because so many of them, or so seemingly minor.
Perhaps this is the way G-d makes sure each of us doesn’t take over the world (And leaves it strictly alone.)
It’s more really, that we are not pure minds, interacting in a world of thought and archetypes. Plato’s cave is cold, it smells, and there’s something dripping down the back of my neck, and a spider just nested in my hair, so who is paying attention to those shadows on the wall? Much less trying to direct them?
Here’s the thing though: You get up, you get dressed (my goal is to do this before 1 pm, today) and you try. You TRY.
Maybe today you’re so sleepy/sick/depressed that all you manage is to put up one of those covers you rendered, that are waiting to go up. Or maybe all you do is typeset the redarn Christmas collection. Or maybe– 500 words, which might get ditched tomorrow. Come on, give me 500 words. In something.
YOU TRY. You do just this one little thing.
And the same way that a year — or ten — can go up the spout in a flurry of “today the cat peed on my bed; today I have a blinding headache; now I need to fix the vacuum; today I painted the blinds” the same way the little things you did “Hey, I wrote a short-short; hey, I did a new lettering on my cover; hey, I typeset this thing; hey, I researched fishing in the middle ages” eventually can lead to something huge that you never saw coming. Like starting a blog you barely kept up for publicity, eventually turning into a whole community. Like the book you wrote in a month, because no one was buying anything, and you had to do something for your own sanity, eventually 13 years later winning the Prometheus, like your dreams of being a writer actually coming true, despite you being ADHD AF and incapable of coordinated action to save your life, let alone to have a career.
Here’s the thing, looking back, all that flailing around and uncoordinated movement did get me somewhere. Maybe not optimally and heaven knows I never had a storied career, but for someone with no contacts to get published at all in trad was rare. To get published and have a 20 year career was almost impossible by the time I broke in. Particularly if you’re ESL and with no contacts and with weird politics.
BUT it happened. Because when I could, I did a little thing. And then another little thing.
The trick is not stop.
No matter how broken, how beset, how incredibly tired, how depressed: Do a little thing, when you can. When the rain lets up, go and do a tiny thing. Most of the day might be a waste. But do a tiny thing. And then another tiny thing. And then another tiny thing.
You’re doing great. Just keep putting a foot in front of the other. And don’t kick the cat. Even if she deserves it. Just. One foot. Then the other. Don’t stop. Aim for your objective, and keep walking.
You’ll get there. We’ll get there. It seems like we’re standing still, but we’re not.
The most pernicious doctrine of modernity, which informs Marxism via having been in the air — thanks, Rosseau — when Marx, the synthesizing plagiarist concocted his abortion of a theory, is the idea that all evil must have causes.
The causes can’t be “because this person is broken and enjoys tormenting others.” No, because, again, thanks Rosseau, all babies are born utterly pure and wonderful, and it is only their upbringing and what we’ll call “civilization” that corrupts them and makes them evil, when someone acts in a way that destroys others or everything, it must be the fault of something done to them.
Now, if we’re going to discuss nature or nurture, we’re going to be here all day. I suspect the answer is “yes.” Like most people of my generation, I used to think that it was all mostly nurture. There have been case studies of people brought by adoptive parents where, barring mental impairment, all children mirror the parents high-IQ. Beyond statistical chance. (From something I heard from a psychologist long ago, though I think those cases are highly publicized and…. rare. So it might be luck of the draw. But never mind. We never hear of the rest.) And after all, we all know families that have certain characteristics, that would not seem to be — possibly — genetic.
Then I became a mother. Younger son is, barring small bits, like having my husband’s much more acceptable nose, my father come again. Seriously, it is to the point that if Dad weren’t still alive, or hadn’t been alive at the kid’s birth, I would fully believe he was dad’s reincarnation. It’s not just that their minds run the same way or their gestures and way of being in the world. It’s not even that they have the exact same taste in women (no, really) but that they do things that no one should do unless they’d learned it, in the precisely same way. What convinced my dad was watching my son, then three, eat an egg over easy. Both he and dad eat the white in a spiral towards the yolk, which they eat last. Son had, at that time, not seen dad since before he was eating. We can come up with some truly bizarre subconscious learning explanation, but I don’t think I’d seen dad eat an egg in years, so I even didn’t remember, much less the kid having seen it. (Like many his generation, dad fell victim to the demonization of eggs. Now in the past, fortunately, since it’s favorite food. As it’s son’s.)
Raising that kid was an education in “What is genetic.” Does he cope with the innate differently? To some extent. He’s certainly picked a different path in work, for which I’m grateful, since it seems less stressful, but then what he’s doing is something that is not viable as a career in Portugal, not unless you’re born to it. But that the base on which nurture writes is identical, and that nurture — in a different country, with a different language, with parents that were completely different than my grandparents — had so little effect blew my preconceived notions out of the water with a high depth charge. (Yes, I call him my male clone. Well, dad and I are very similar, but compared to those two I stick out like a sore thumb. Perhaps for being female. They are more like each other than either is like me.)
Anyway, I have to believe younger son is an outlier. Mostly I have to believe it, because I’ve seen people rewrite themselves from the ground up. (As much will power as that takes.) But I also have to believe it because otherwise we’re all just pre-programmed units running through the world, doing our pre-programmed stuff. Like the theory of Predestination, that’s an evil thing to think. Even if it were true, it is an evil thing. Because it robs humanity of meaning. (My apologies to those who believe predestination religiously. It is still an evil belief in a society.)
At any rate, we have proof that nurture does change us, in the movement of humanity through history. We know for a fact that people learn, and people change. That humans are a self-domesticating animal, that learned to live in close quarters with those not of their blood without instant violence.
The error of attributing too much to nature is that it causes us to fall into despair and despondence, and at society level it causes judging people not as individuals, but as units of their family. It establishes a society of castes and punishing the children for the sin of the fathers. It is the doctrine of the Eugenicists. If it were true, killing vast swathes of the population would be the path to progress. Which is why the science fiction books of the 20s are full of nattering about “racial hygiene.
The problem — besides the fact that you have to choose whom you’ll kill based on your inherent biases and what you place value on (more on that later) — is that you kill millions or billions of people. Or at least prevent them from reproducing, which seems the path the WEF would like to take. For many many reasons this is morally unacceptable.
It is also, ultimately, intellectually rock bottom stupid. Look, we don’t know enough about the human genes and what they convey to weed out people with undesirable characteristics. And if we did, we wouldn’t know what characteristics the future will require. And if we did, we would become bananas. No, literally, we would become like bananas.
Here’s the thing: We do not know nearly enough about the human genome. And the truth is we might never, because it’s like studying a novel while it’s being rewritten.
Human genes are constantly recombining and changing and mutating. We do know that. Because that’s the point of gendered reproduction. It’s not one clone reproducing himself forever, like say bananas, but a recombination of characteristics, which then recombine again the next generation.
Whether you believe we got here through evolution or not, we know evolutionary selective pressures work. We know, because we apply them artificially. Before we even became agriculturalists, by simply selecting and propagating the seeds of the plants our gatherers found most useful, we had changed most plants we ate beyond recognition. And we have evidence of species changing all out of recognition as their environment changed for long enough. (Whales. No, seriously, whales.)
So yeah, the mutations and other recombinations get selected for or not, but where’s the thing: every generation there is myriad little changes (unless you’re number two son.) Most of them are neutral. Not good, not bad. Good and bad in relation to survival. They have bloody nothing to do with our own judgements, that’s for sure.
However, an illiterate mathematical genius in the middle ages might be better at making change and calculating his own household usage of various things, but he’s not going to have the impact he’d have in the world today.
And we don’t know what will be needed in the future. Nor what “undesirable” characteristics come with it. We do know geniuses are prickly and tough to get along with — for the most part — but most people don’t know that 99% of them are also not particularly successful at working or making a mark in their chosen field. (Depending on the field.) So if we weed out for lack of agreeableness and inability to make a living, we’ll be taking out that genius in 100 that would make a difference.
Since sometimes a genius can win a war, or feed the world (no, seriously, look it up) the weeding out of such a genius is stupid and will kill millions, no matter how much he might be so annoying we want to drown him in his coffee cup. (What? I am the dumb one in the family, guys. There have been days.)
To make things worse, most of our eugenicists, like the ones of the 20th century are hung up on completely irrelevant characteristics, like the color of skin/hair/eyes. While you can make sweeping generalizations about vast portions of the world based on IQ tests, or how well those regions do, that’s poppycock, not science. IQ tests are relatively useful in a more or less homogeneous culture (even one like ours) and even then not the way most people think. (There’s a sweet spot for success. Up or down from that is bad, bad, bad.) But once you apply it to other cultures where nutrition, early learning, etc. are different, the result will be utter garbage. And yes, nutrition makes a huge difference. One of the ways in which younger son is different from dad is an additional 3 inches, bringing him to 6’4″ a height he doesn’t have any ancestors having on either side of the family. But you know, childhood nutrition, and not being victim to constant infections before the age of six make a difference.
What we do know is that there is no linkage between how dark or light your skin is and your mental prowess, ability to plan, or basic human decency. The moron (real one, though probably not genetic, since her kids are normal) in my elementary school class was blond and blue eyed.
Yes, all cultures make broad assumptions about physical characteristics associated with “smart.” The one that amuses me most, coming from a family of mathematicians and scholars who are built like the hulk, is that all geniuses are tiny and skinny. Every year at the beginning of school, my teachers would ask me how many years I’d been held back, and proceeded to treat me like a dunce until the first test. After which they were very confused.
Is there a relationship? I don’t know. It would seem to be small and slim would select for high functioning intellect, because… well, you have to survive. And I confess that through their schooling career, my kids looked like four of their high-achieving friends glued together. But is the relationship unbreakable? Uh. Obviously not. (And my school friend who coined the “For the love of heaven, just copy my answers. Don’t think. When you think you ruin everything.” Was tiny and very smart looking. Note LOOKING.)
At any rate the human race is not as genetically diverse as you think. I don’t remember right now if we’re more or less inbred than house cats (why, yes, reading someone with ADHD is like micro-dosing wikipedia. Deal.) but we are inbred enough not to have crazy genetic variety. And genetic variety is important because some people will have a natural immunity or ability to survive a pathogen or a cataclism. We take those people away and we become bananas: a species so inbred it can be completely wiped out by any shock.
Which would seem to be the opposite of eugenicist aims.
But I’ve spent too much time on nature — I need coffee — perhaps because antisemitism is rearing its ugly head and giving me 1930s vibes all over again.
The major danger of our age is nurture. If you believe everything is nature and MORE IMPORTANTLY that you can trace defects in character or breaks with civilization to this or that specific action, you’ll distort society beyond belief. Which is what we’ve been doing.
I confess to having believed it at one time. I think most of us did. It was drunk with mother’s milk. To an extent, the Puritans were already trying that, though their belief was that we were broken by trifling too much with the world and being too easy on ourselves. After that came Rosseau and his belief that people were born perfect, and if we just let them be they’d grow to be noble savages. (A creature, that, like the successful communist society has never appeared in the real world.)
This influenced a lot of the way the West developed. And frankly, since their (deranged) revival in the sixties, the Rosseaunians are now the dominant intellectual/political/moral force in the world and what they are imposing on the rest of us is destroying civilization and can destroy humanity. (The fact that they are also eugenicists, often the other way than they claim to be just makes them extra poisonous.)
Right now, partly through being “anti-capitalist” the left believes that our society — capitalism, the demand for civilized behavior, etc — is responsible for everything an individual does wrong.
And therefore “It’s a fair cop, but society is to blame.”
And therefore, no one should be punished for crimes they couldn’t help committing. Hence, the lawlessness in our big cities, but that’s not all.
This belief also feeds our welfare programs, because, you know, if people steal and rob, it’s because they’re poor. If we stop them being poor, there shall be no lawlessness. This is btw impossible to falsify. If they’re not as rich as the richest, this might be what causes them to commit crimes. (Look, seriously, no. It has no correlation. And where it has it it’s the other way. Those who are by nature lawless tend to have other problems that get in the way of staying relatively prosperous. I’m not going to say our legal system treats the poor well. At this point our legal system needs a kick upside its behind, as it doesn’t treat anyone well, but simply that to the extent there’s a covalence, it goes the other way more often than not.)
And this applies internationally. All that foreign aid is 80% “If we give them money, they’ll be as wealthy as we are” they won’t be violent. Letting the “refugees” come in by the bucket load, is ultimately “If they come in here, we’ll look after them, and they won’t be criminals.”
Add to this a belief that all the people who are crazy and can’t function are so because they have been mistreated by “capitalism” and you have all the homeless everywhere, who can’t be punished for anything, because somehow nothing is their fault.
The amazing thing is not that we are breaking down as a civilization, running as we do on a belief that not only hasn’t been proven, but which has been disproved over and over and over again.
What’s amazing is that we still function at all.
And yet, the chasm between the assumption that “People do bad things because bad things were done to them” and reality is a dangerous one.
Take the matter of what the Gazans did in Israel in 10/7. Those horrific actions, to the west, must only mean that these poor people are so horribly oppressed.
In fact, they wouldn’t be completely wrong. These poor people are horribly oppressed by their violent, hateful culture which has institutionalized envy and entitlement to a level even the Marxists can’t conceptualize. Which is why none of their Arab (or Persian) brethren has offered them asylum and instead will do everything to keep them out of their own countries.
Because their culture is evil and broken, and like the mind of a psychopath, urges them to take “revenge” for wrongs that were never committed. In the end what they are taking revenge for is other people’s ability to live sane and productive lives. They are consumed with envy at this and hate everyone who is more productive or happier than them. Which, btw, is not only the Israelis, but all of us. Heck, it’s most of the Arab countries, and most of the East, and probably vast portions of Africa.
They are indeed a vast open air prison, but not through lack of opportunity, or Israeli “oppression.” If you want to weep read up on the aid that has been poured into that hell hole. It could have been used for all sorts of things, including starting industry, educating children to do something, anything other than monomaniacally hate everyone not of them.
However, regardless of money pouring in, regardless of what they’re given, themselves — their unjust wardens over themselves — keep the population focused only on envy and hatred, and have children’s programs glorifying suicide bombing. Which is why all the money goes to weapons and terror tunnels.
I don’t know how that can be solved, short of taking away every child under three and distributing them to sane, civilized families the world over. And thus ending the problem in a generation.
But I know it can’t be solved by giving in and giving them more money, and stopping the retribution for their horrific actions. Because what we have taught that culture is that the more horrific their actions, the more the west will give them and treat them as victims.
And that is destroying them further, and making them a gun pointed at the world’s head.
Envy is a sin for reason. Whether or not you believe in punishment after death, envy destroys people and their ability to live now. Both those who envy and those they envy.
(This is by the way why the deranged leftist fight against inequality is deranged. There is no way of making a society perfectly equal, short of killing everyone. The root of the problem is envy, not inequality.)
I see the Bidenmites, that cursed tribe, have used their sock puppet to call for cease fire. This is ridiculous. No cease fire without total surrender. And the punishment at that needs to be hard enough their grandchildren know about it.
A total ceasing of Western support and cutting off their sources of aid from their terror sponsors would do it. Starvation and lack of modern conveniences has a way of concentrating the mind and making a culture change. And change fast. Oh, not to sweetness and light, maybe, but definitely towards “Will not attack, because that hurts.”
The burned hand teaches best. No, it doesn’t make those who burned their hand go and stick it in the fire because they’re mad. Or if it does, well, maybe the eugenicists have a point there. Such a short circuit in the brain would definitely make survival impossible, and perhaps should be allowed to perish. (Yes, I know that’s not what it means.)
The problem is convincing the Rosseaunians that this is needed.
Their wrong model of reality will kill us all, otherwise.
This ain’t no paradise. This ain’t no garden of Earthly delights. And you can’t get there from here.
Time and again when reading history, we come across some horrible act of violence, some terrible event, and historians from the safety of their offices and the height of their theories ask how this was possible? How could humans do this beastly thing? How is it even possible that civilized man, civilized, I say, could do this or that or the other.
The truth is that humans, despite all our striving to do better, are creatures where our violence and the ability to dream up and execute horrible atrocities are as much part of us are our dreams, our moral thinking, our thirst for knowledge and our theories.
I will admit the events of October 7 in Israel shocked me. Which is a measure of how soft and “civilized” I’ve become, how convinced of the predictability of the world and my fellow man. which is stupid.
Because this ain’t no paradise. And we can’t get there from here.
And because Israel has always been under attack, since it was founded, and because its neighbors are vile savages, marinated in hatred. (Fight me!)
But that is part of it. Humans have, with great effort, with discipline, with careful raising of their children and with philosophies that value life — be they Judeo Christianity or our national creed — raised themselves above the petty cruelty, the wanton sadism of the not-so-noble savage. We can, in places, in times, given enough abundance, enough time, enough luck, and enough investment in certain ways of living, raise ourselves above creatures that kill innocent women and children. We can even rise above creatures that make the bodies of horses and young men into art installations.
The beast inside isn’t gone. It’s not vanquished. It’s quiet. And kept quiet by ideals and thoughts, by our front brain repressing the impulses of beast.
However, this is never universal. This is never everywhere.
The silly people who think humans can be made perfect with ‘education’ — by which they mean only information — and that humans will never behave like beasts, unless they have been given reason are wrong.
Their cries of ‘teach man not to rape’ are no less silly, but perhaps slightly less infuriating than their belief that the uncivilized are a sort of innocent children, who will only strike out if they’re “oppressed” and they have “Suffered.”
Teaching men not to rape is of course the aim of every civilized society — in uncivilized ones, women don’t have the power to say yes or no to sex — but there will always be men who refuse to learn. It’s not a lack of knowing that rape is wrong. It’s that they enjoy raping, and they’re going to do it as long as they can get away with it. They will lie and tell a sob story of what drove them to it if it will allow them to continue doing what pleases them with no punishment.
And of course, there are entire civilizations of this type, by either self-selection or culture.
The point is that those poisonous cultures kill because they believe they are entitled to kill. They enjoy it, and they will continue doing it, and lying to avoid punishment, so long as there’s no punishment coming.
It is important to understand this.
Humans aren’t born innocent and perfect. There doesn’t need to be evil committed against them to teach them to commit evil.
Humans are born wishing to do whatever brings them pleasure. And if what brings them pleasure hurts others, they’ll still do it as long as they can get away with it.
Yes, temperaments vary, and evil tendencies can be trained out of some. Others will never have the tendency with that strength. I can honestly say I never wanted power over others. It strikes me as scary and somewhat tiresome to have to make decisions for adults. (I wasn’t that happy making them for children. In fact making decisions is something I had to learn and force myself to do.) Other people obviously are driven to getting it.
However, we all have things we really like to do, and will do if we can get away with it, even if we know it’s not good for us or others. And that’s us, people who were trained fairly early on in a society that values respecting others.
But when the culture goes sour, when savagery is encouraged and when it’s believed a source of strength, and mindless violence against others is treated as proof of worthiness and power, be it in the Gaza strip or amid our ante-fa, it must be met.
There must be no excuses. There must be no “more sinned against than sinning.” There must be no excuses.
Because if the civilized won’t stand for civilization, savagery wins.
And when savagery wins, all men must perforce become savages. there is no safe refuge for the weak, the meek, the small or the old. There is only blood and death, and paradise, or even that little counterfeit you can find in an historian’s office, recedes a bit further.
The problem of course, is that to stand for civilization, civilized man must eschew its illusions, be it the idea of dialectical oppression, the idea of the noble savage, or the idea that it can all be solved with information.
Humans must, in final instance, defend civilization in the only language the uncivilized understand: by making it hurt, and making it hurt badly enough that the savage stops doing that which brings it pleasure. It won’t be reformed. It won’t love you. You won’t win hearts and minds. But it will stop savagery. And given enough generations, the savagery recedes, and it might come to accept your rules.
The illusion that violence begets violence; that making the savage hurt makes him more savage; all of it is part of the false gospel of Marx, who among his other many charming characteristics, had a complete and utter inability to understand humans.
Hence, his having re-feralized civilized man, and unleashed unparalleled savagery upon the world.
It’s time to shed Marxism, that illusion of fools. And it’s time to shed Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s stupidity. Savages are savages. They live a miserable life, and create misery and death. But they will do it, as long as they’re allowed to.
We need again the confidence of our ancestors, and the certainty that the West — the civilization that fed and healed most of the humans in the world, and lifted them from vile and dread need — is best. We have our civilization. And there’s nothing the howling savages who kill defenseless women and children and howl for the blood of those who never hurt them can teach us.
Except that it is sometimes needed to unleash our inner savage to defend civilization. And then to chain him again, so that our children don’t need to know his horrors.
We have lived too long with our illusions, and our safety. Among us there are those who think we are now in paradise, with a new man and a new woman (and a new fifty flavors of sexes unknown) and that they can, with their minds will everyone’s happiness forever.
And they will do very horrible things, and empower very horrible savages because of this delusion.
Like their pets, they won’t stop until and unless they’re made to.
It is our duty, our honor, and our tragedy to be the generation that must stop them.
I’m a historian, and I have a hard time seeing a good way out of this situation. How many innocents are there in Gaza? I don’t know. History does not say much for their innocence. Islamic conquests have always been brutal with no regard for what they consider inhuman life–that is anyone who doesn’t submit to Allah. Unlike the voices you hear in the streets of the West, the Geneva Conventions allow for self-defense in kind. Use mustard gas on the US, the Geneva Conventions would allow the US to use mustard gas in return. Any other policy would be martyrdom.
World War II was waged against civilians more than soldiers and armies. The American forces tried “precision strategic bombing” and found it was not only ineffective but self-destructive, losing up to 40% of their bombers and personnel on every mission with little effect on war production by Germany. The Germans had already tried to wipe London off the face of the earth, by targeting civilians by late 1940. By summer of 1942 they had also methodically followed a policy of executing Jews and sometimes Ukranians for the crime of existing. They did it enthusiastically just as Hamas machine-gunned, raped, and beheaded unarmed civilians.
After WWII, America spent a lot of money and effort at writing propaganda to deprogram both Germans and Japanese, transforming their societies in the process, because it was only a minority in both countries who refused to believe the lies, boasts, and grievances of their own leaders. Could the Israelis do that to the Gazans? Hamas has controlled life in Gaza for decades, inculcating hatred and dehumanization of Jews (and also Americans–remember Iran considers us the Great Satan to Israel’s Little Satan). Does anyone believe “world opinion” would stand for such a thing from Israel? Israel has been publicly accused of genocide for decades in the streets and the halls of governments. Why wouldn’t they be tempted to adopt a policy of the only good Palestinian is a dead Palestinian if that is already what everyone tells them they have done since 1948?
Don’t be lulled into Hannah Arendt’s delusion of “the banality of evil”. Eichmann lied his ass off, and she fell for it. Read any account of the death camps and massacres from survivors and witnesses. People have to be taught to hate, the song says, but, trust me, they have been taught very well throughout history.
Do you want peace? The historical path to peace from ape tribes to Genghis Khan has been, kill all the men, rape all the women, so their loyalty to their former nation/race is mollified by their loyalty to their progeny, or salt the earth, and carry away anyone left alive to a far country to be slaves.
If you refuse to allow Israel to take full control of Gaza, and its schools for decades to deprogram the hatred Gazans have been taught, then why would you not expect the Israelis to eventually live up to the reputation you have saddled them with?
As I said at the beginning, I see no good way out of this. We are now left with the least bad of possible choices whatever that may be. In Mein Kampf, Hitler was not shy about his goals, so when you hear crowds chant, “From the river to the sea,” you’d best take those people at their word, and decide what to do about those who want you to die.
****
A Jewish friend of mine wrote his own essay about Gaza that caused me to reflect on more of what I wrote above. Regarding strategic vs. population bombing, he noted that bombing civilians has the opposite of the claimed effect on civilian morale and support for the war effort. That has proven true, but what population bombing, when applied effectively as it was in Dresden and Tokyo, did do was target the workforce rather than the factories themselves since the factories, refineries, etc. were easier to protect. In Germany and Japan, population bombing had a marked effect on those countries’ ability to keep producing arms at scale.
As to the issue of antisemitism, it’s rather ironic that Germany was actually the most open country in Europe for opportunity for the Jews before the rise of the Nazis. There’s a reason most American Jewish surnames are Germanic, although many are also Eastern European and Russian. The French and Spaniards did a very thorough job of eliminating their Jews albeit by ‘somewhat’ less horrific means. “Unexpectedly”, expelling the Jews from a country seems to always lead to a decline in that country’s science, technology, and literature. Gee, who’da thunk?
My fellow baby boomers and I actually grew up in a golden age for American Jews, so perhaps our perspective is skewed. Before WWII, those same Ivy League universities that are now being solicitous of those who hate Israel deliberately discriminated against Jews in their admission policies. The East Coast upper-crust did not want to have their ‘anointed’ heirs have to compete on an even playing field with ‘those Jews’. Many Jews who became members of the ruling class (cough, Alan Dershowitz, Chuck Schumer) were/are secular Jews, who venerate their culture but not the religion that built it, the equivalent of what we Christians call Easter & Christmas Christians. It’s important to ‘show the flag’ at the High Holy Days, but little else.
“People of the Book” is indeed an accurate way to describe the Jews, in my opinion. In fact some time ago, I remember reading that South Korea had instituted teaching the Torah and Talmud because they wanted to copy the Jewish advantage and teach their people to learn to think and reason as the Jews have always taught their children. Although I only have second-hand knowledge, I understand that a big part of the bar/bat mitzvah ceremony is the candidate’s (I don’t know what the about-to-be adult is called.) not only learning the law but being able to give a discourse on part of the law to explain it.
When I first got into the software business in the early 80’s, I used to joke that 90% of us were either Jews or Catholics, because education and reasoning were considered as important a part of our religious tradition as faith. (That’s a separate subject to expound upon another time.) Now of course, it’s more Asians because they also culturally revere learning, and consider it the path to success for their children. (Insert Jewish mother joke here.)
When Russia invaded Ukraine, I of course, sided with the Ukranians as the unjustly injured party, but was made quite uncomfortable by the very enthusiastic, unanimous agreement of ‘all the right people’. I had the feeling that the word had gone out JournoList style, and, like most Americans, I only had a dim view of the realities in Ukraine and Russia. Similarly, the word has gone out about Gaza that Zionists/Israelis/Jews must be destroyed for their ‘evil’ deeds. I hope that is proving quite a shock for leftist Jews.
Reading the section of a biography of Reagan about his presidency of SAG gave me some insight, but reading Witness by Whitaker Chambers gave me a much deeper understanding of how these things work. Ask me about Dalton Trumbo sometime. The power of the Communist/True Believer is that they never compromise. They take the received position and follow it totally. Others in our culture, like the naive academics of our youth, believe in compromise. To a Communist/True Believer compromise can only be strategic when circumstances place them in too weak of a position. They compromise on the surface, only to work to undermine that compromise with all their might by less open means.
One more thing before I close is that I was puzzled by the concept of Hamas thugs videoing and broadcasting their cruel atrocities. It seemed to me to be irrational and counter-productive. A writer I follow explained the strategic goal. He contends it’s a practice that has been ongoing in the Balkans since the Kosovo war. You spread word of your vile brutality in order to scare the mothers of your enemy, convincing them they and their children will be at risk of such atrocities if they move to the territory that the enemy wants to claim, thus essentially surrendering it to the perpetrators of those atrocities.
I apologize for not making this post more cohesive, but my thoughts are still very disordered. Still I feel compelled to share post, hoping that what I have said might help others learn facts that they were unaware of.
Yesterday, I linked one of Sargent Mom’s posts at Chicago Boyz (I still find it funny that my friend who is neither a boy nor from Chicago posts there) and on my reading it, and the comments before linking, I found that the very first comment was tediously familiar.
Note I’m not saying the commenter if a troll or ill intentioned. I’ve known him “from the blogs” for long before I started using my own name, and/or came out politically. I just think he’s not thinking things through. As aren’t all the people who make that same comment.
They are also hopelessly provincial, historically blinkered or, yes, both. It pains me to say so, but I can’t for the life of me figure out how people convince themselves of this nonsense otherwise. Though I will admit there might be a strong contention of “kids these days” and “get off my lawn” in there. In which case — at sixty — I’d like to point out that getting old is no reason to convince yourself of a bunch of nonsense. There’s much you can shake your fist at the younger generations for without swallowing old Soviet propaganda (spit it out. It’s been up Stanlin’s dead ass) or spreading pernicious lies that blackpill or worse the rest of the people still fighting.
The comment goes like this in its most commonly found form “The Republic is gone. Within its earstwhile boundaries, there are just a bunch of disparate people, who have nothing in common. It’s time to break it all apart and go our separate ways.”
My normal response to that would be “Poppycock on stilts” and throwing the nearest dictionary in the general direction of your head.
But because it keeps surfacing, it is obvious most people have swallowed this nonsense without having any clue where it came from, how it contradicts history or how utterly stupid it is. So I’ll unpack.
First, its origins: Perhaps it is unfair to call it Soviet Propaganda. I suspect it is, because of how deeply laid-in it is with a certain generation, but I know for a fact it started being widely circulated in the mid nineties, when the Soviet Union had fallen apart. Though it was mostly spread by old Soviets indulging revenge-fantasies, and by their friendly useful idiots in the US singing along with their old mentors.
All of a sudden, when my kids were little, the idea was everywhere, served up by every single leftist “The US will now fall apart like the Soviet Union fell apart. The only thing that held each together was the need to fight the other.”
It persisted till the mid two thousands, everywhere. I even remember a giggle-worthy pseudo-scholarly paper by some Russian about how the US would fall apart and in what lines, which made it blindly clear the poor dear only knew the US from Hollywood movies.
Do I need to unpack why it is utterly insane?
Yes. The Soviet Empire was mostly held together by the cold war. Let’s put it more bluntly: by the US helping them maintain it locked tight, because due to the cold war and Soviet propaganda, we were terrified Russia might get mad and bomb us all with its superior (largely imaginary) weapons.
(And Russia finally had a beginning on the empire of their dreams, which ideally for them would compass the entire Earth. Paranoiacs are like that.)
However Russia, with its very old culture, its crazy new Communist cult, and its even older tendency to want to invade and subdue everyone else so they don’t attack her is not the US, and never was. Because the Soviet Union fell apart, it didn’t nor does it follow that the Us should also. This is sort of like saying “Because you can beat egg whites into a firm froth, you should also be able to beat egg yolks into a firm froth.” Er…. what?
Neither of these things is like the other, and because the Soviets resented losing their empire and wanted the US to fall apart, it doesn’t oblige us to do so to make them happy in their revenge fantasies, okay.
Alright, Sarah, you’ll say, but just because the USSR’s bitter remnants believed it, it doesn’t mean it’s wrong. Do you see all our divisions and all our blah blah blah?
Yeah I see them. I also — as an outsider who became an insider — am here to tell you that all of those, save the divisions between Americans and those new imports brought over the border these last few years or those imports who are consciously staying foreign, are very small.
No, seriously.
Look: I’ve lived all over this great land. Even during my 30 years in Colorado, we made extensive trips elsewhere to visit and because we have friends/colleagues everywhere. This not counting the fact both our boys dated girls from all over. (Odds, you know?)
There are differences. Sometimes deep differences, in how you interact, where you shop, how you shop, and such. However, if you dropped me blindfolded into various cities in succession, I’d be able to tell you which ones were in America from the way we …. move, the way we look, and the way we hold ourselves.
I’ll never forget when, ten years after moving here, I visited Portugal and my mom had a melt down because having passed me on the street, she didn’t recognize me, just thought I was “some tourist.” This was capped by “You have become American.” (I’m not older son. I didn’t rub it in and say “Why, thank you, ma’am.” BUT I thought it.)
Go to the area where most of your local recent arriveds are and look at them. You’ll see the difference without much effort. I can’t fully explain it, but to me the rest of the world holds itself like a dog expecting the foot to come out and kick them at any minute. We don’t. In fact, that look in an American is a sign of profound trauma.
More importantly, when we had to suddenly function for a month in another state without help, while the national brands and chains helped, mostly we’d have found our way easily enough, just because it’s America. There are commonalities.
Having real-estate shopped across states just recently, you can suss out a neighborhood, evaluate your neighbors, and choose an area which you might or might not love, but you can live in easily enough in a week or so.
What I’m trying to say is despite all the regional differences, there is an overculture which is “American” and one that makes it easier for an American to fit in another area of America. Now, part of that overculture is of course believing them guys ain’t like us y’all. But that’s something completely different.
The only places with truly different and often hostile cultures are fractured, purposely held apart places, including ghettos/inner cities and college campuses.
Which brings us to the whole “We just found out there are enemies in our midst!’ Did you? Really? JUST found out? Well, you must have been covering your ears and shutting your eyes pretty tight.
Colleges have been embeds of anti-Americanism since I’ve come here. The joke about the student who comes home and lectures the parents on not celebrating thanksgiving has been a joke forever. (And not funny, because true.) The other innovations? One day in 2000 I was working in my yard and by a trick of acoustics heard my neighbor across the street discuss his son, who had brought a boy as his SO to Thanksgiving last year, and this year was bringing a girl, and they didn’t even care what the girl was, wasn’t it great? The vice-versa is not that rare, either. Any direction. Now of course, it would be his son thinks he’s a girl.
In fact, the only thing that has happened since I have been here is that the anti-Americanism has moved explicitly down to Kindergarten and up. (Implicitly it was already in my 12th grade history book in 1981 when I was an exchange student. It already was clear enough to make me fume.) It has done so because they are “educated” and think everyone MUST agree with them. But in doing so, it has become visible for everyone, and the counter-attack is everywhere and truly ferocious, because people might tolerate their young adult children becoming idiots, but you don’t mess with their babies.
On that, btw, note that my generation already was heavily indoctrinated anti-American. I remember that none of my classmates would admit to America’s good qualities. It was so…. gauche. And yet, unless I mistake it, my generation formed the core of the Tea Parties. And we’re still here. Because those of us — even those of us with graduate degrees. Even those of us with graduate degrees from Europe! — who grew up, married and have kids know what reality is. Those with experience abroad, know how rare it is what we have here. And we want to keep it.
One additional point, here: the culture used to be WAY more diverse. WAY more. Pre-expressways and TV, them guys over there not only talked funny, but they had other strange habits. I know because I met with remnants of that in my inlaws’ generation. (In fact, I loved my FIL’s Connecticut accent (I’m an accent-loving person, except for my own) and was shocked and startled to hear it come out of my husband’s mouth when awakened in the middle of the night by a would-be-intruder this summer. Suddenly my relatively accentless husband was gone, and a Connecticut patrician was there. And he wasn’t amused.)
In fact, it might have been impossible for a continent-sized nation to have a common culture and way of being in the world absent fast-travel and fast means of communication. And it might be impossible for us not to with that.
Going further back in history, and when the fe(de)ral government was a less powerful polity and states could get their freak on with nobody bothering them, I remember reading a biography of someone shortly after the revolution (Well, you see, there’s this mystery series with a ghost that I want to write. Might involve going to Connecticut for a six month stay, heaven help me. We’ll see if the story shuts up) where this person was in Maryland, escaping the crazy puritans of New England, and then had to get away from there, because Maryland was full of crazy Catholic laws, etc.
We were more desunited in the past. In culture. And it was by region. We were still the United States, where it counted.
“But Sarah, it’s all gone. It’s all vanished. We’re not respecting the laws of the Republic, or the Constitution!”
Ah yup. And I’d agree with you there. However, just because we’re behaving very badly it doesn’t mean the laws are gone. Just that we’re ignoring them. And you know, to an extent we’ve been violating the Constitution, more or less, since we adopted it. Like our flag, it is still there. And we often come back to it. Sideways. Upside down. Kicking and screaming, but we do.
Look, there were worse — far — violations under Woodrow Wilson, FDR and frankly a lot of others in the 20th century. It’s just you didn’t hear about them, because the press didn’t tell you. So you had this idea that everything was hunky dory.
Part of the impression that everything is falling apart and the center cannot hold is that Mass Media can no longer hold the uber-narrative, and those of us who see cracks in it and would rather believe our lying eyes can find each other and create our own spaces. That doesn’t mean things on the ground are worse. Only that it looks that way, because you hear more voices, not one over-arching, all-singing-together-narrative.
Now, are there many among us who are frankly repulsive in their disdain for the land and the law that gave them everything? A-yup. And the pro-Hamas demonstrations are only a small show of that.
But here’s the thing, there always were. And if you say that it’s particularly bad now, I’m going to laugh in “I remember the seventies.”
And if you are going to scream in unassimilated immigrants, I’m going to say “Drives me bonkers too, and I think we need closed borders and a decade or so of mass deportations and of very limited legal immigration while we sort ourselves out.” And? Every period of mass migration did this. Mass migrations are a very bad thing. Combined with a welfare state and a victimhood ethos, they’re horrendous.
Doesn’t mean they’re lethal. Though remedy best come fast-ish within the next decade. As frankly, I suspect it will.
But you have to remember that’s not “Americans.” Americans are those who were born and raised here, or those who bothered to do the work to be more American than not. Those who haven’t are “people living here.” Not “Americans.”
And btw, my kids had a lot of friends who had one foreign-born parent. The kids were Americans. Often annoyingly so. (Note one foreign parent, not both, and none of them lived in an embedded foreign enclave.) In fact, those with one-foreign-born parent were more likely to believe in America as a credal nation.
Speaking of: America is a credal nation. Yes, it’s a land mass (and no, we’re not giving an inch of it to the idiot commies. For one, it would be like what Israel did when it pulled out of Gaza. We don’t need an enemy that close) and yes, it’s an history, a culture, and a way of living. Also a certain genetic heritage, and trust me, it’s still present in America. My kids might be second generation Americans (first born) on my side, but on the other side they’ve been here since before America was independent (and ancestors fought in the revolutionary side), are related to several presidents, and have a considerable contingent that greeted the pilgrims from the shore, okay? My ah…. new and impure blood (snort giggle. I’m just a mutt, y’all) didn’t erase that history. And both of my boys are very proud of it. It’s just good every once in a while to import a bit of DNA, less everyone have twenty toes and play banjo really well.
BUT those saying The Republic is Dead are mostly referring to it in the credal sense.
Nations don’t die because they go through a period of lawlessness. Almost every older (almost all of them) nation has gone through this. They go through periods of lawlessness, or even being outright occupied, and then come back.
But for a credal nation held together by “this we hold to be true” it can feel like it’s all gone.
Go read your Bible, kindly. No, I mean it, even if you are not a believer. Find an old testament. Steal it from a hotel room, if you must, and read the story of Israel.
Credal nations don’t go away. They just don’t. Look at all the foes of the Israelites. The Persian empire is gone, whatever the Iranians think. So are the others, including the mighty Romans. That little credal nation of Israel, though? Well, it went a long time without land, but it is still a people and a creed. And it will be.
I suspect should we be so unfortunate as to lose our land and our common links to each other, and our living together, Americans will yet persist. We might become even more genetically dilute (for us it will take effort) but 100 yeas from now or 500 there will be people claiming to be Americans (Or as some very strange sf writer made it, turning an insult on the boards into a point of pride, as we do, Usaians) even if they really can’t prove an ancestor ever set foot on the continent. And even if some of them are blue skinned and have tentacles.
And as long as the creed is there, we will come back, as an idea at some point.
Not that our falling apart is anywhere near. No, stop that. We are not Rome. The idea that we were is another Soviet idiocy. We used some of the forms, but dear Lord, not the …. history, the feel, the genetics. And if we were, that horrible Rome of the decadence continued for a thousand years or so.
If I had to guess we probably have that long. Maybe more.
Oh, granted, we’ll go through periods much, much worse than this. And periods much better. Nations are things of humans, and that means they’re not…. pure ideas, that live in the purity of being themselves. Every nation goes through very bad times. And comes back. Often seeming decadence, or occupation, or attack, teaches the nation what it SHOULD be.
This doesn’t excuse you from fighting for America to be what it should be.
“But Sarah, wouldn’t it be better to divide?”
HOW? Do you see any “cut on the dotted line” lines on the map? Because I don’t.
And the American feeling and beliefs aren’t quietly divided into states or even regions. The first civil war happened the way it did because the South had common economic and cultural interests the North was unwilling to tolerate. (I’m not going to dip my toe anymore into that. And remember, it’s a forbidden topic for good and sufficient reason. BUT:) There was a clear geographic demarcation, even if the borders were fuzzy.
Now? Oh, for the love of Bob. Yes, there are baked in blue states. But if you think they’re that way because it’s what the population wants, let’s talk. I saw my state flipped from under me by massive fraud securing a tiny margin then going vote-by-mail.
Almost every state that’s baked in blue has some procedural trick (CA) or vote-by-mail holding it that way. What is the will of the people? What do the people believe? I don’t know. And neither do you. If you’re trusting the press, you need help of the mental kind.
I have had three very different people, in/from very different circles tell me they think NYC went Trump in 2020 and that’s why the occupiers are determined to destroy and punish it. Is it true? I don’t know. I found their reasons compelling. So. Why are all big cities hard left? Well, darlings, because vote fraud is hellofeasy in a big city. All you need is well organized vote fraud groups that control the polls. And one side that refuses to fight it. (Trust me. 2012 drove me nuts. And Colorado Springs was not that large.)
Now there is another thing, which is that in the big cities a lot of people work for colleges and big corporations. Judging by the number of you flying under false names and telling me for the love of heaven not to out you, there is a substantial legion that confesses progressivism from the lips out, while hating it in their breast. And the more they’re forced to confess it the more they hate it. But they can speak progressivism very very well (I’ve seen some of you under your real names, yes) and pass. The problem being that in those areas people overestimate the number of the true lefty believers and anti-Americans around them, because they are not allowed to tell the truth or appear as they are in public. It’s poison.
I have a strong feeling I can’t substantiate but is based on the amount of fraud needed and obvious even in supposed bastions of the left, that this is not a 50/50 country. It is at the very worst a 75/25 country, with the 25 being the “progressives.” But even then, I expect about half of that are true believers, and the rest are sleep walkers, who are convinced of the media narrative and that they have to vote for the left because the right are “racissss sexisss homophobes, and WORSE uneducated hicks.”
A lot of that narrative broke badly with the events in Israel and the displays in this country. I’ve been more sleep walkers awake than at any time since 9/11.
And the rest of the left are either very young and indoctrinated, or well…. the same old Soviet-lovers who never woke up and never will. But by themselves they’re not a reason to break up this great country.
Even if we could break up. Even if there were clear regions, instead of each of us knowing friends or relatives who are enmeshed in the left’s narrative, and who live next door, it would be inadvisable. The left can’t build. Only envy. And that means if we separate, we will prosper and they will hate us.
I refer you to October 7 in Israel as what would happen with neighbors whose whole purpose is hating us and taking us down.
So let’s eschew and bury that foolishness once and for all. This is our land. The Republic isn’t dead or close to it, though it’s occupied by an implacable enemy. Which we should each fight, overtly and covertly in every inventive and relentless way possible.
Because after this, comes a revival. They can’t win. And in many ways we already have. But because the defeat took a hundred years, the revival will be slow.
I might not see it, but others will. (Yeah, probably not others of my blood. And? They will be Americans. Even if they’re polka dotted with tentacles.)
