There is a rolling and dreadful (in the original sense of “inspires dread” poetry to the words about the final judgement “when the secrets of every heart shall be laid bare.”

To someone who loves her privacy and who is also very sure she’s not the same twerp she was at say 12 or 14 (but a completely different kind of twerp) and who frankly has forgotten most of her misbegotten growing up years, it would be embarrassing to have the thoughts and deeds of that little twerp not only laid bare but pinned squarely on me.

On the other hand, to someone who loves truth and who in recent years has become very aware of how many of the things that are SUPPOSED to be the truth — news, scientific studies, etc — are in fact packaged narrative manipulated by a small set of people for the purpose of giving themselves power (and quite indifferent to the fact their plans would make it hell on Earth for most people) there is a part of me who hungers and thirsts for that truth to be revealed, for us to see, finally and bare for all how many people and organizations who plume themselves on how just, righteous and CARING they are have been screwing… well…. everyone for decades, intentionally, lying intentionally, trying to destroy what is still the last best place on Earth, intentionally.

There is a cleansing power to the truth. My fourth grade school book, unironically advised that you have a window that opens in the kitchen because sunshine “disinfects.”  which is true, I suppose in a mostly humid climate where your greatest danger in the kitchen is mold and mildew.

It is true in the metaphorical sense, too.  But more importantly, the lack of sunshine, the lack of truth, slowly corrodes. Because we’re humans.  We’re attracted to having our own way, to the things we want to do.  I was never particularly interested in power, except to the level of controlling my own surroundings and environment, though there I can be outright demanding.  I was never interested in power because the saving grace in my character is its immense laziness. Power over others is a lot of work, and it will take time away from writing.

I’ve long since realized that while I’m not alone in that, neither am I the majority. Most people are more industrious than I, they want to control more. And absent public censure and watching them, they will try it by means fair or foul.

Oh, and the means they’re trying are foul indeed.  See Seattle’s Revolt of the Elites, for what they are trying to do to shape opinion.  They are planting misinformation in a ton of channels, so they can then point to it when the mess they made with handling the homeless is brought home to bear and maintain that their destructive policies are “good” and “helping.”

At that this very sophisticated lying is a new thing.  And, yes, stupid.  It can last for a while, but overall, people are going to believe their own eyes/living conditions over what the left tells them, no matter how many times.  Even the Russian people, far more heavily propagandized, figured out “there is no truth in Pravda.”  The greatest danger from this is that they propagandize JUST ENOUGH that people fleeing Seattle will think the problem was “they didn’t spend enough” and buy more and worse homelessness for their new towns.

Note, btw, this is being done by supposed charitable foundations.  Because they don’t actually care that their “solution” is making it worse for everyone, particularly, possibly, the supposed targets of their benevolence. No. They care that it’s done their way and according to their (mostly progressive and “let the good people do it) delusions.  They’d rather reign over hell than serve those who need it in heaven, is what it amounts to.  “Charity”seems to be other name for “command and control.”  As, btw, is everything they touch.  And if they went into this — once — which some of them might have with the intention of “doing the best thing to make it better,” it’s now devolved to “we’ll just virtue signal and pretend it’s the best.”  Yeah.

But they used to get away with this with far less effort.  I realized this when I read this post:  The ideologue who wrote the textbook calling Trump and his supporters “racists”.

Advanced students are being taught this insanity as the truth. They will be expected to “answer properly” in order to make it to colleges.

If you think this is recent, I have news for you. It has been going on at least since the early 80s because my history book when I was an exchange student contained whoppers at least that large (if more skillfully disguised and about the more distant past.)

It’s just that in the past if a parent noticed it, what was he going to do? Tell everyone that the school books were left wing biased? And then what?

You couldn’t do that in public. First of all, you thought you were alone, because the control of the media gave the left de-facto control of what “everybody knew” so you’d be outing yourself as a right wing loon and the punishment has always been swift on that.  The other part, of course, was that even if you complained, as a parent who read the school books you were a tiny minority, compared to the parents who never read them AND those who had no kids.  So everyone would think you were crazy and “denying history.”

Now it can be posted and talked about in public, and no matter what the disinformation campaign, we know we’re not alone and the truth WILL out.

This of course gives the impression that society is on the verge of fracturing and that the left has gone insane.  They have, of course, but it’s not recent. As for fracturing…

I’ve known marriages where one side never dared criticize the other.  There were several reasons for this, but for whatever reason, one side never said anything the other side did was wrong.  The end result was that the person who was never called to reality spun further and further from reality and became more and more addicted to “my way.”

Years ago, a critique group fell apart on this.

Even the best people in the best marriages periodically get way too far up their own backsides, because we’re human and things happen.  At that time it’s important — perhaps the most important — function of those close to us to say “Uh… that is not so.”  Or “Why on Earth did you do that?”

Years ago, I told a friend that I voted Republican, not because they were that much better than the Democrats, but because the press hated them and would keep an eye on them, while the left got a complete pass, which meant they could get crazier and crazier.

I find it bizarre they’re furious at the leaks of Hillary’s malfeasance because it “gave Trump the victory” which is somehow “cheating.”

I don’t think they’re right about giving Trump the victory. I think enough of us just wanted the Clintons to eff off, and when they got there eff off from there, and when they got there–

BUT EVEN IF THEY WERE, this amounts to “we’re furious because we couldn’t hide our candidate’s iffy and outright criminal behavior, and so she didn’t win.”  Come again? Why do you want someone who is AT BEST a careless loon and at WORST (and more likely) a (indicted)  criminal in power over anything? How is it “cheating” to tell the truth?

It is cheating, in their minds, because it never happened before. The electorate should always, ever, think any corruption is on the right. They should be fed outright laws about the left so they think they’re Simon Pure and give them more power.  Why?  Well, because “they’re the good guys” who want “the best for everybody.”

Only they don’t. The stories are too numerous to share, but the corruption runs deep in the Democrats. Arguably deeper than among Republicans.

The difference? The left has no checks. No one calls them on their sh*t.  If the governor of Virginia were a republican photographed in black face/KKK robes? He’d be out of office. He wouldn’t be able to get a job as a dog catcher.  But he’s a Democrat, so most people have never even heard of it.

However, some have.  Which is a beginning.

The window is cracked. The sun is starting to shine in.  What it illuminates ain’t pretty, but being seen is the first step to dealing with it.

So are we close to a national divorce?  I don’t think it’s possible. Not for a couple of generations of selective separation, at least.  Though I’ll note most of the marriages I know where one side cannot be wrong, ever, end in divorce, if they don’t end in death first.  Some hold on, but… I’m not sure they’re good for both parts.

Perhaps this correction, this ability to see things, comes too late for a course check. Perhaps not.  The beauty of the world is that it’s born again, every generation.  I know younger conservatives don’t know and can’t comprehend that sense of “I must be wrong, because everyone else thinks this other thing” that the lot of us had growing up.

Perhaps it’s a matter of time.  Perhaps sunlight truly will disinfect the national kitchen and the sausage made there will be cleaner.

Until then, remember the words of power “I see you.”

The deeds done in dark? Shout them from the rooftops. Do not give the left their presumption of good, or even of good intentions.

Be not afraid. In the end we win, they lose.  Because we fight under the banner of truth, a close cousin of reality. And reality is that which doesn’t go away no matter how much you ignore it.

 

 

 

In Portugal there is a set of chapels called “unfinished chapels.”

If you’re passionately interested in their history it is here.  But it amounts to buildings started by a king who died, his master builder died, someone continued them a hundred years later, and then again 300 years later.  And yet the majority of them are still unfinished.

And still beautiful.  I remember because I visited them as  a kid.

In Portuguese they are known as “The Imperfect Chapels” (Capelas Imperfeitas.)  I mean, they know they’re unfinished, of course, but it’s more considered as though they lack something of perfection.  And part of it is perhaps the attitude of the Portuguese, at least in the time when they were built.

Because they figured they’d be perfected sometime, and when didn’t much signify.

As you can tell today I’m having issues with time management.  Yes, there are reasons: I woke up with symptoms of either a severe cold or a severe auto-immune attack.  Either/both are possible, because I’m under a great deal of stress right now, stress that likely will not clear until around about the fourth of July.  This made yet another visitation this morning under the guise of various bureaucratic issues that had to be solved right then, which means my writing hasn’t happened yet.  Heck, I showered at 11, have only now finished my first cup of coffee, feel a great need to go back to bed, and frankly am rather sick and tired of this rollercoaster/transition year we call 2019.

Which brings me to…

People used to build slowly and in the belief that future generations would finish it.  This came to mind recently about Notre Dame which took, if I recall correctly, 200 years to finish and was added to 300 years later.  Yes, it was also a massive government project, paid for by the taxes of the unheard citizenry.  But let’s face it, in a time with little surplus, that was — more or less — the only way things ever got built.

And sometimes, sometimes the future generations failed you, and things never got built.

Is it paradoxical that in our longer-lived times we must have things faster — and replace them faster? — and that we never trust future generations to finish them?

I don’t know.

I know that while we might lose something as to the span and artistry of what can be done, we also give future generations more latitude.

People going to Europe often are convinced it must be very rich because of all the monuments. But really, they’re not. They’re people living off the long-term investment of previous generations. They have zero capital they can realize, in all this.

What they invested was time, and a certain confidence they could indenture future generations.

We’re back to that community versus self again.

Can a multi-generational project indenture the future and accept that the future will pay?

I don’t know.  I’m against it. Let each person, and each generation make their own mistakes and establish their own priorities.

And then I remember that every child born in the US today is born owing what was it? 40K? 80k?  It’s so absurd, that it’s hard to remember and in a way meaningless.  I understand why the socialists think money means nothing and you can just always print more.  But of course money is a symbol for wealth used.

The truth is that we’re spending not just on those unwilling or incapable of working, but also on easing the way for corporations, and various cronies boondoggles (hello Solindra) the money for several unfinished chapels.

Only instead of taking several generations to complete the project and spreading the pain, we’re charging the future for destroying the productivity and culture today. (What? You thought welfare didn’t do that? You thought it only eased extreme cases? You wish.)

We don’t even know if the future will exist, much less have the surplus.  But we’re confidently sticking them with the bill.

And they won’t even have some cool unfinished buildings to attract tourists, when our time is done.

 

When you jump out of a (perfectly good) airplane, you free yourself from its trajectory, but on the other hand, you are under the pull of gravity.

Freedom is the right to determine what you will be and won’t be subjected to.

I pursued a comment someone made here about religion making a comeback in urban areas in France.  It is. Most churches are reported to be standing room only.  But it is returning because of something odd.

You see… indulge me.  This is a highly abbreviated history of the psycho-social movements in Europe in the 20th century till now.

Europe had just gotten aware enough of the rights of individuals, the idea of individual worth the rejection (to an extent) of classes to be really bothered by WWI which was in many ways an old Europe war.

To make things worse, it was a war you could commute to by train, and a war the press covered extensively.

And what it was blamed on was… nationalism.  Which was not precisely incorrect though it wasn’t correct either, precisely. Bloody stupid alliances and the state as a tin god was as close.

Coming out of it, Europe thought that it would replace the feel good of nationalism — humans don’t live of bread alone, and they need to feel they’re part of something bigger, the something bigger being usually a big idea, a big group, a tribe, something that goes on after them — with the feel good of Socialism. Or at least Marxism. The idea of the social good, the inevitable progress of humanity, and the shiny new future took over.

There is a reason in many ways the time between the wars was great for science fiction.  In Europe the only time that was good for science fiction.

Like WWI, WWII got blamed on nationalism. It really wasn’t. It very much was about the state as divinity and the infinite improvement of humans as a race. That it took the form of poisonous eugenics was just part of that idea that humans can and should be “perfected” to bring about heaven on Earth.

And WWII should have put paid to that idea.  It didn’t. It didn’t because Marxists, by then, had become all the “smart” people and captured all intellectual institutions.

Socialism just went softer in Europe and took other guises.  Christian socialism. Democratic socialism. Purple socialism with stripes.  Okay. I made the last one up. But it wouldn’t be as crazy as some of the variations I grew up with.

But socialism doesn’t mesh really well with those things, or make them better.  Socialism in the end is the drop of sewage in the barrel of wine. Sure, it adds flavor. It also makes i undrinkable. It doesn’t work with humans, and we’ve proved conclusively humans won’t change to work iwth it. Its end stage is a sort of crazy feudalism.

And it fails.  Part of the way it fails is making the societies it takes over, those where it’s the only alternative, into what I call “occupied societies.”  It — particularly in its international variety. National is stupid, but not that way — turns against its host societies. In the name of eliminating nationalism, and leading things to “progress” towards the perfect and shiny new future, it turns on and hates the societies that establish it, eventually hating humanity itself.

The problem is that we know what happens with occupied societies: the women become whores, the men become craven, and there are very few children, unless they’re the children of the invaders.  It’s how the species eliminates the societies and strains that lose a contest.  Except that in socialism there is no more successful society invading. To the extent that it was believed in, between the wars, and briefly (until the collapse started being obvious) after WWII, the “progressives” took over the children of others and tried to build their shiny future. Part of that was the baby boom, and the bright new schools and indoctrinating kids to hate the old society and build the utopia.

Only it’s been painfully obvious since the baby boom came of age that the things they were indoctrinated in don’t work. That being “compassionate” to the evil begets more evil.  That paying for poverty buys more poverty. That refusing to teach or raise the children doesn’t create noble savages.  It doens’t even create savages. It creates neo-barbs simultaneously predatory and curiously helpless.

People know this. They know it even if the cultural outlets are taken over by people who refuse to let it be seen. It shows in cartoons, in jokes, it comes out in off hand comments even by people who would consider themselves devout progressives.

So the end result is that societies feel they’re oppressed by occupiers. Unreasonable occupiers that don’t bring any hope or future. The society, the “something to believe in” is being exterminated.

After the Soviet Union collapsed and this became obvious there was a period of denial and a period that often happens in cults after discomfirmation.  A period of trying to silence the opposition super-hard. Now, even harder.  We’re still partly in that, or at least segments of society are.  They’re trying to silence any dissent with the “occupiers magic words” (And yes, I found hilarious they named their movement “Occupy”)  “Rascism, sexism, homphobia.” Or, of course “Nazi” which honestly is the enemy they fear, because they can’t conceive of anyone NOT being socialist. So being international (effectively Russian national) socialists, they fear the national socialists the most. And miss that we’re not even i that spectrum, and that it was Bernie who identified himself as a national socialist.  (It’s okay. They know he’s lying, so that’s fine.)

But that’s a side show.  It’s a distraction.  If the after-effects of socialism hadn’t already turned Europe into a vast old age home, the next thing would already be obvious.  Oh, it’s starting here too. Sure it is. And it’s just as crazy and perhaps more poisonous.

The… for lack of a better term call it the culture’s mind knows socialism is poisonous and more importantly socialism is done. It doesn’t bring the shiny. Again and again it brings death, misery and feudalism.

So humanity, which needs meaning beyond our small, restricted individual lives, and people are blindly trying to find it.  In Europe, same as it ever was, they’re going back to nationalism, and the traditional religion. They’re doing it for COMMUNITY and common goals.

When I went down that rabbit hole I got a lot about how individualism was wrong and individuals shouldn’t have rights, and the church is about community.

As many of you know, I’m religious. I believe in community, even. But that doesn’t negate the need for the rights of the individual. France is just making the same mistake it made with its revolution, where it took the rights of the individual and made them communal guarantees.  Not life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, but equality, fraternity, liberty.  You can’t have liberty with equality and fraternity. Because enacting those requires other people. They think where socialism went wrong was ‘rights of the individual’ when socialism is all about the rights of the group.

Our own manifestation of this is the same, in a different way. Instead of addressing the central hole in socialism, of treating people as widgets, they just want to attribute different values to those widgets, as though that solved anything.

Which brings us back to freedom — or liberty — and the rights of the individual.  Individualism versus community.

You can only free yourself so far.  At least if you want to be part of something greater than yourself. (And if you don’t you’re either lying to yourself or not human.)

When you let go of the plane, you head towards the Earth.

OTOH sometimes the plane is on fire.  Was talking to an about-to-go-indie midlist friend this morning about the endless compromises, kissing up and begging required to stay employed in traditional publishing and how it was like trading in your soul piecemeal.  Kind of like the French believe to embrace that old time religion they need to renounce individual rights. (Because apparently they missed the part about INDIVIDUAL free will.)

If that were my choice, I’d be happily d*mned.  Fortunately I think they’re wrong.

And fortunately I have other choices than trad pub.  I might starve, yes, but it won’t corrode the soul.  And hell, with two or three year exceptions, I’ve “starved” anyway, if you take in account the amount of work.

It’s a trade.

Sometimes you have to shout “Freedom” and jump and hope the parachute engages.  It beats joining the new cult, same as the old cult.

 

Years ago — the record is here somewhere — I decided that to be able to write I needed to get out of the house.

That wasn’t exactly wrong. I had identified the fact that I needed to set regular hours and that the kids being late high school and college were in and out at all sorts of odd times, interrupting the flow of words.

The problem is the place I picked, which was downtown Colorado Springs (half an hour walk from then-home) on Bijou, between Tejon and Nevada (I think.)

You see, I hadn’t realized the building in which I rented a one-room office I could afford at the time was depopulating.  And also that it had no doorman or guard of any sort, and being near the library was subject to strange people wandering the halls.  I think it was $250 a month for my little one room, and we made it very pleasant, and for about a month it was great, even if my mind was slipping from hypothyroidism.

The thing is, the little room had no bathroom, so I had to leave my office to go to the bathroom a couple/three times a day.

I think I realized two or three days in that the names on the door were actually old, and that many of the offices, like the psychologist across from mine, were actually long-gone.

The building was mostly empty, and then it lost the thing that kept it alive: being used for meetings by AA.  And the hallways started to have… interesting characters.

One day I was leaving my office to go to the bathroom, and stepping out I met with a man who looked… well…

It wasn’t that he wasn’t human. He was. It was that he was a feral human.

I’ve been in situations where people were directly threatening me, where I wasn’t as scared as just with a glimpse of that man’s face.  He was human, but as though the long slate of human civilization had been wiped clean.  There was no higher self, no mercy, no thought. He was as blank and feral as an infant, driven by impulse.

I retreated into my office before the impulse acted.

Looking through a crack near the hinges, I saw him standing there, staring at the door, hunting me.  Like a cat waiting for a mouse.

I could have called my husband, waited for him to come get me.  But I needed to get to the bathroom and I wanted to get out of there.  It occurred to me to play an audio book that was read by a man and sounded like someone talking, REALLY loudly.

It worked.  Five minutes later, he was gone.  The idea the office was probably larger and a male might come out didn’t sit well with him. He apparently only hunted smaller and older.

I waited a little longer, went out carefully, and ran out of the building, to the street, then home.  That was the last time I worked in that office.

Did I make too much of it?  No. There was no security in that building, and I understood why the little offices, usually occupied by a person, alone, were emptying.  If I’d had a buddy in town who’d share the office with me, particularly a male, who would walk with me to the bathroom and wait outside, that office was tenable.  As it was, though? No.

As for the feral man? Who was he?

I don’t know.  Maybe drugs were involved.  Almost for sure drugs were involved, but I didn’t get the feeling just then.  He was homeless, for sure. Not overly clean. Not wasted from drug use.  He was wearing clothes and carried a backpack, but the feeling was like looking in the eyes of a feral ape.  Not even the zoo ones.  They had more … humanity.

This came to mind as I was reading about San Francisco Poop Maps.

The belief these days, about humans, is that we are the apes that domesticated ourselves.  Sure, of course, natural selection, but I wonder how much of that.  Natural selection is relatively slow, and the ferals, which we largely know as psychopaths tend to still leave lots of children.  Women fall in love with convicted murderers and marry them on death row.  Etc.

A lot of it, I think, is raising.

Cats and dogs left to hunt for themselves from an early age, go feral.  Hogs more so.  And hogs, like us, are scavengers.

For years now we’ve gone soft on feral behavior. From children, too. We’ve refused to curb the “Want” and “Impulse” under the belief that the natural man is some kind of angel.  Having children raised by strangers that couldn’t care less is not helpful.

But now we’re doing the same to the adults. There is a difference between compassion and enabling.

We all know of addicts who use compassion as a weapon to get to what they want.  I’d argue that’s the way of feral man.  Wheedle and creep until you can pounce and tear. Except that they don’t even need to wheedle and creep.

In Denver as in CA (and because the state was taken by the same kind of pettyfogging day-dreaming, too wealthy to understand harsh realities party) they’ve now made pooping on the streets legal, because they don’t want people to be deported for “just that” as though people who ignore a basic rule of human decency and public hygiene were precious resources to keep around.

They’ve already made vagrancy and begging de-facto legal.

And I’m sure they plume themselves on their compassion.  But what they’re actually doing is being nice to the ferals and encouraging them to make everyone’s life miserable, and to drive away small businesses, to drive women from public spaces, to destroy the fabric of society.

Man is the self-domesticating ape.  How many feral humans can our very wealthy society tolerate?

I’d bet not as many as the lotus-eaters at the top think we can.  And when the productive people get tired, it will get very ugly very fast.  Civilized man always wins over the ferals and the apes, who are incapable of loyalty higher than a small band.  They also, arguably, always win over the lotus-eating mandarins.

It’s a story as old as time, but it will still surprise the heck out of those who think that in feral they’ll find the noble savage.

When in fact it holds nothing but destruction, including of the feralized individual.  You see they are not WILD apes. Not really.  Only feral.  Just like abandoned cats and dogs aren’t wild animals, just animals who’ve learned to get what they want from human society while not submitting to it.

If society, and our present abundance falls, the ferals will go as fast as the pampered.  They have no ability to fend for themselves more than the pampered do.

And neither they nor the mandarins will ever see it coming.

 

I’m writing a post, which will be up soon.  It’s been a very weird day.  Until I get it written, though:

To all my fans and friends:
I’m very careful about which gofundmes I boost. Usually only those of very close friends where I know the need is real.

Oleg is a very good friend, one who has helped me unstintingly when I was in trouble.

Two major religions — at least — are celebrating the raison d’etre of their existence and one of the branches of one of those will celebrate it next weekend.

I know that Easter/Passover doesn’t align with the equinox, but all the same, it is part of a very old tradition of celebrating a new beginning around this time of year.  (In fact new year used to be in Spring.)

Things are growing, my lawn shows signs of green, and we too want to be renewed and have a second start.  Unlike the “resolutions” of the New Year, which no one over 10 believes anymore, this one hitches our wagon to the power of new life in the world (or at least in the northern hemisphere, cradle of our culture) to wipe the slate clean and help us, magically, mystically renew and grow.

I suspect it’s a very, very old feeling, an ancient tradition, this time of year to bet on renewal and hope.

We’re about a month off my favorite time of year, when the air is mild, there is a song of cuckoo’s somewhere from the woodland.

Some years ago I promised myself I’d take a week off in June.  Probably not this June, since well… since I have two conferences second half of June.  But come July maybe I can sit back and enjoy a long weekend off with my sweetie.  And if we can’t spring for a hotel, maybe just a weekend of parks and museums will do.

In fitting with new beginnings: with the drug interaction eliminated, I can now think and write once more.  Which is what I’m doing today, while the family talks downstairs.

I’ll join them once I nail this plot point.

You guys go. Go home to your cats. Happy Easter, a joyous Passover, and may the year turn to warmth and delight and glorious, unrestrained life-force for all of us.

 

 

You know, I think there are right now any number of people holding their breath and waiting for things to go back to “normal.”

Their ranks include everyone from traditional publishers, to journalists, to … well, to most people who are not actively involved in “how things change.”

Heck, even some of us who are have to fight trained-in assumptions and ideas from our previous life.  Because you know, I can sniff the air and read the atmosphere in my field. I know how things used to go, and sometimes it’s really hard not to panic at some of the signals and events, before taking a deep breath and going “but it’s not like that with indie.”

In the past from which our bodies and — still — most of our minds come, understanding the cyclical nature of things and reading the signs was vital. If you were a hunter who understood the seasonal or otherwise nature of the game movement, and could read the signs of whether this was a large herd or just a limping, elderly buck, you left more descendants.  The same if you could figure out that the bush would flower again and bring berries, and went to look for them when the weather showed certain signs.  Your kids were better fed and arguably smarter, and therefore you had more descendants.

The other thing that we’re good at internalizing is a narrative.  The reason that Marxism is so spectacularly successful is that it’s a “just so” story which — granted if you know bloody nothing about either real Marxism or how the world works — seems to explain everything around you.  It reduces people to easily understandable classes and the myriad struggles of the human heart to “class struggle.”  The stupid old turn of the TWENTIETH century theory never fit very well, even back then, and it’s increasingly tattered, but if you squint and are willing to ignore all signs of things being upended, you can kid yourself it explains “everything.”

People love things that explain “everything.”  It’s at least part of the attraction of dictatorial regimes. You don’t have to think about details, they’re decided for you.

It’s also why we have things like the Iliad.  And probably precursor epics long since lost to history.  If you believed that your people was destined for glory, you’d put more oomph into cultivating your little plot of land and raising your passel of lads, which in turn led to more people who believed it and carried it abroad.

Heck, the West is suffering from the twin collapse of the blind faith in Christianity (and a unified Christianity at that) and the collapse in its innate superiority that superseded it. Were many of the beliefs that propelled the age of European empires crazy, counter-factual and objectively racist (or truly in point of fact White Supremacist, a much abused phrase these days.)?  Sure.  Heck, my people, being able to tan, was ipso facto inferior.  If you don’t believe me read early twentieth century North European writers and their side swipes at “Portagee”.  No matter how smart you were, if you could tan, you were held inferior to the most buck-toothed staring-eyed Englishman.

But it was a narrative. And any narrative is better than none.  Even the subjugated or despised people joined the project for a chance to be “close to.”

Am I hankering for a return to that time?  Are you insane? Did I immigrate to a Northern European countries? Are my kids anything close to blond?  Pfui.

I hanker as always for a world where the individual is revered as an individual and MERITOCRACY rules the day.

Everything else is just a choice of how many people are you creating a hell for.  Current Western Civilization is still the best thing that happened to humanity. It still by and large creates the most wealth and the best living conditions for most of the people in the world.  But it’s lost confidence. Or rather, confidence has been beat our of its children in elementary school.

A lot of this is the relative of the 60s “going back to the land” insanity coupled with a strong suspicion that native peoples of non-western origin are somehow magical (that good old noble savage.)  The end result is something completely insane like Occasional Cortex’s idea that magical native Americans will direct people in healing the Earth.  Because they’re magical and stuff, don’t you know.

Anyway, this kind of nonsense gets fed to kids in school about how precious every other culture/genetics/etc is and how bad and reviled the West is.  And then we’re surprised they don’t get married, don’t have kids, don’t really want to have jobs or do much of anything.

You see, it turns out Mea culpa mea maxima culpa, much less when that culpa is innate, unavoidable and nonredeemable is a lousy way to propel a civilization.

The good news though is that self-hatred is also not stable. And that the narrative is selecting out the easily manipulated:they just don’t do anything and check out of civilization.

The other good news is that while the browbeaters and setters of the death narrative were working at it, the world moved on, and the still fertile, splendidly inventive Western civilization pulled another egg out of its hat: computers, communications and soon almost entirely personal manufacturing.

Yesterday some idiot on FB was ranting about how Sad Puppies had wanted to keep all minorities from writing science fiction.  Leave alone the fact none of us were publishers.  Unbeknownst to a lot of people — some of whom ask me for help of that kind, as though I had any power — writers have near-no power over what their publisher accepts.  Or to put it differently, sure, mega bestsellers — say Larry Correia — have the power to have their publisher LOOK at your work (for those further down the line don’t even count on that. It’s iffy.)  And if the work is okay, even though it might not stand out from the pile, they’ll give you a shot.  Note that usually these friends-of-success writers last exactly ONE book.  but it keeps the author happy, so what the heck.

On the other hand it takes far more than hyper-mega-bestseller to blacklist another author.  I’ll be honest with you, I don’t know if J.K. Rowling would do it.

I know of a bestseller who took offense at my first series and demanded I have no publicity or support and be fired after it.  Was that the reason?  Meh. There was 9/11 which probably greatly exceeded Miss Bitch’s influence.  But even if it were, there were other houses, as I’ve proven over the last 18 years.

And now? Now there’s indie.  So, were we trying to prevent people from writing SF/F?  HOW? Unless we have magical powers, that would be a goal for insane people, and none of us is that crazy.  Heck, we weren’t even trying to prevent them from getting awards. We were just trying to have some people, other people, occasionally, sometimes, also get awards, so the hyper-academic focus of the awards changed more to “what fans like.”

It doesn’t matter now, obviously (yes, they are dead to me, and not just to me) but it matters from how people react to things they don’t expect and don’t know how to explain. They fit them, with shoehorns if needed, into a narrative that has nothing to do with them.  Because most of the establishment in SF suffers from the twin narratives of Marxism and centralized everything, they literally couldn’t conceptualize our rebellion except in Gramscian terms of pyramids of victimhood.  If we had a problem with stories it couldn’t be with poorly researched, poorly written dreck like “if you were a dinosaur my love” getting acclaim in a tiny, claustrophobic, incestuous, log-rolling group.  No, it must somehow be a matter of racial/class/cultural/gender and orientation classes.  Which is why all of us magically became white Mormon males, and they hold onto it buckle and tongue despite the patent inanity.

Because a narrative that fits very badly is better than no narrative at all.

And right now the narrative is breaking up all over. I still don’t understand why Europe doesn’t have blogs, but even there something is happening. Perhaps merely through the exposure to the glorious immigrants from noble savage cultures, which are telling the very abused children of the Europeans that they’ve been lied to, and their parents have been lied to, and their grandparents–  But something is happening.  And the establishment is reacting as though it were a passing thing.

If you haven’t heard much of the yellow vests in France, rest assured they’ve not gone away.  In fact, they’re still there, still fighting. It’s just that the media is convinced if they put their hands over their ears and sing “lalalalalala” it will go away, in time, because in the past such things (such things as they explain them, not as they are in fact) always did.

They are perhaps thinking of the outbreaks of the sixties and seventies which vanished without a trace. But those were the revolts of youth fueled in no small part with Soviet money.  Now… let’s say they can talk about Black Bloc all they want to, but a large number of people on the streets have white hair. And they’ve had just about enough of propaganda.

In the US? Well, sure, we have blogs and alternate channels of information. We tend to think they’re magically important, and the left does too, hence the sudden desire to deplatform us.

But.

I’d say the most important thing in the last twenty years and the seeds of what is going on now underground, at people level, was the Tea Party.  It was reviled, slandered, and destroyed as an image. But that’s the whole point, of course. Because enough people took part in it to know it was no such thing.  Then reading the coverage, they walked away in disgust.

Meanwhile the media, very happy with the hit job, decided to astroturf Occupy Wall Street, and again, to read their fulsome accounts of the glorious heroes of the revolution, and then walk by the gathering of the mentally ill and old hippies on oxygen which showed up even in small towns (Colorado Springs, seriously) made a few more people go “that’s just not right.”

Without those there would have been no 2016 election.  Without those we’d still trust the media.

Now, there’s still some Gell-Mann amnesia, sure.  People who wouldn’t trust the media about anything else, default to believing them about things they know nothing about.  Which means they still have some power.

The problem is that they have no clue that power is no longer absolute and it’s not coming back.

Sure, blogs have something to do with this, because someone in your circle will have heard the truth and you’ll go “oh, that makes a ton more sense.”

I shudder to think what Obama would have been without the blogs to uncover his vapid inanity.  FDR is only the beginning.  And he MIGHT have got away with Fast and Furious, as retarded a scheme as ever breathed.

Which brings us to how people are acting now.  The media, really, truly, honestly doesn’t get it. This would be the time to become ultra-extra-careful, to report only what you fact-verify to oblivion and not to be paws of idiot politicians.  But they seem unable to help themselves.  Because they’re sure the old pattern will return.

So we get things as the Sol Pais incident.  What in heavens name possessed my state to close schools in a large city because a young, out of state woman, had bought a SHOTGUN?  It doesn’t really matter if she had made scary statements. What does that matter? have they ever met an 18 yo?  I went and looked at her “scary blog” and you know what, I was once a teenager and I raised teens. There was nothing scary there.  In bad taste, sure.  But people go through miles and miles of twerpitude before they become adults.

As for her “infatuation” with Columbine this amounted  to a drawing of a boy on a skateboard, labelled Dyl that they decided was one of the Columbine killers, because OF COURSE what you immediately think of when you think Columbine killers is skateboards, right?  Oh, and she liked Marilyn Manson.

Seriously?

They back pedaled to all her threatening statements being verbal, before they stopped reporting on this.

Which brings me to: this happened when our Jar-jar-brain governor just signed a red flag law, allowing the state to raid my home for guns if they don’t like something I say.  Like, giving anyone the right to swat you for “sounding unhinged.” Great idea.  Seriously, did he have his brain ablated at birth?

This case, whatever was really going on with the kid — a psychotic episode is not out of the question, but I’ll note she sounded QUITE sane in the gun forum, and also that what she actually DID accorded with her thinking she was coming to CO to meet up with people and go hunt. She did not go near ANY schools and mount Evans is hunting territory. Yeah, that we know she didn’t get a hunting license, but 18 yo’s have some weird things they forget. Older son was older than that when I realized he had clue zero how to write a check, for instance — was seized upon and blown all out of proportion to lend strength to this VERY BAD LAW.

Would it have worked in the past?  Probably.  Which is why they’re still trying it.

But gaslighting is really hard when daylight is coming in through the windows.

They’ll continue trying. Change is really hard to deal with.  Only five or six years ago, talking to an editor who is smarter than the average bear, I was told all the indies would come crawling and begging to be published, when they found out “how much work it is and how much it costs.”  By then I was re-releasing my older books, and it cost me an average of maybe $200 (less if I do more work myself.) And the work is not significant.  And there are people making six figures. More than I ever heard of in trad.

So change is hard to conceptualize.  And the establishment keeps waiting for things to return to “normal”.

They don’t realize that in paleolithic terms, the icebergs have melted, the herds are moving in different ways, and there’s no reason for us to stay here, trapped with them.

My prediction is a lot more eruptions like the Yellow Jackets.  And the sudden and stunning reverse of 2016 which has them in shock, still.  And, and and…

Sure, they’ll get some in.  And it depends then on whether it’s something essential. For instance, when the Hugos got calvinballed, we just went “whatever dude. Keep the wrapper. It’s not the real thing.”

Our elections getting calvinballed? That’s going to end in tears.  The FBI joining the raindeer games? That’s probably going to end in tears and blood.

But they’ll get some successes along the way.  They just won’t prevail. Because they can’t.

The real world has changed and doesn’t match the model in their heads at all.

No matter how many times they press the right lever, the machine fails to dispense the tasty pellet.

Which leads to more howling of fury more claims of “unfair.”

But more people are waking up too. (As opposed to woke which is like one of those nightmares where you just scream and scream and nothing changes.)

Ladies and gentlemen: refuse to focus on the crazy and roll up your sleeves.  We have a civilization to rebuild.

The things writers read- A Blast From The Past From December 2008

 

Yesterday, in the middle of nowhere, I just felt like sitting down and bawling my eyes out.  Now if this had been ten years ago, when I was more ah captive of the changing moon, I’d know where it came from and ignore it.

You see, I don’t talk too well to my body, which perforce includes my “thinking meat” as well as everything that influences it.  When I start feeling something that has no basis in my immediate reality, that’s when I look at what’s going on with the body, to see if there’s something off.  Yes, I’ve literally gone “My eyes are closing and I’m yawning, but this is really interesting work, how can I be bored? Wait, it’s 3 am.”

Now I know the inability to listen to the subtle signals from your body or anything else is a mark of being on the spectrum. (Autism spectrum, they mean.)  But in this house, younger son and I have been exempted of that by psychologist decree.  Because younger son has the sensory stuff, and because we feared it since both of us are “math brains” and he was, through no fault of our own, born after we were thirty, we had him tested.  The psychologist who did the test said he had picked up some social behaviors from Aspergers, most likely because that was most of his group in school, but he and I were almost anti-autistic, in that we are very conscious of other people’s emotions.

She might have been right, or she might have been toking — hey, it’s Colorado — but I do know that neither us nor the rest of this household is any good at judging what our physical side is up to.  Which is why we tend to become obsessed with something or other and push till we drop.  Husband will literally tell me “I’ve worked four fourteen hour days, and today I just can’t concentrate and want to sleep. I don’t know why.” (Looks at beloved husband over glasses.)

In my case and younger son’s I suspect we learned to ignore our bodies because they were never quite on point.  Mine has been trying to kill me since I was born, and his just threw up enough annoyance often enough he sort of blocked the signal. (This is the kid who used to announce he was going to be ill by throwing up. And looking very surprised.  He would have temperatures of 104 and be acting completely normal to that moment.)

Anyway, this has some problems.  Recently it had the problem that it totally missed a drug interaction.  In the past it has had problems with my not realizing I was sinking into hypothyroidism or suffering from sleep apnea, or all sorts of good stuff.

These days, being late middle aged (shut up wretches. I’ll use “old” when I’m over 65) I’ve learned to pay attention to little weird feelings.  Because that bizarre exhaustion in the middle of a clear blue day might very well be a sign that I’m coming down with something.  Or it might foretell something serious.

So I was completely shocked when, having wrapped up for the day, I suddenly felt I’d very much like to sit down and bawl.

It would make perfect (well, somewhat) sense for me to wish to sleep. It had been a busy and weird day.  Or to wish to go for a walk, since I’d only had  short one. But why, in the name of Sweet Dance Fandango did I want to cry?

I did what I usually do in those circumstances, and asked friends.  They pointed out there have been a lot of very fast changes in my life, starting about three years ago when we moved.  But the changes seem to be picking up speed, instead of slowing down, which ain’t fair.

I had some inkling of it. In fact, I’ve talked about it here.  I had figured out that I was caught in the middle of a tidal wave of change a few months ago and told older son “I think I might be going through a mid-life crisis a bit late.”  And he looked at me and said “You might be. But think about it, mom, if you were a human in the wild, by now you’d be dead twenty years.”

Which has a way of putting things in perspective, right?

Though not all the changes, some of what’s happening is that I’ve fobbed older son off  er… while older son still lives in the house (kind of. It’s an independent apartment in the basement) he legally has his own family unit (soon de facto as well as de jure.  I mean, as an independent couple.  To allude to sir PTerry we don’t think there will puppies in the basket a while yet, since they’re both perhaps TOO financially prudent. That would be another and rather fast change, but not yet.); my career has taken a sudden sharp turn, which changes my view of myself and where I’m heading (in a hand basket. With greased tracks. And little multicolored streamers.) This is not bad, but it is a big change; I haven’t suddenly become aware of my parents’ age, but I’ve suddenly become aware of the toll it’s taking. As for my non-fiction career, let’s just say I’ve got a feeling something is just waiting to pounce, but I have NO idea what.  (I’d still like to find funding for something like instapundit but international.  I have enough immigrant and fluent in other languages friends to do a multilingual news aggregator and maybe start chipping away at the mass media dominance in the rest of the world too.  But it would take money, because we’d need someone to coordinate it and keep an eye on it. And dear Lord, not me. I want to write fiction again before I die.)

There’s other stuff.  Friends who are moving on.  Not friendship break, as such, we’re just drifting past in different different directions.  This is something I’d never thought of, because in the village friendships were lifelong. In fact, one of the most predictive things in your life was your first grade friends.  But of course, it would be. People lived nearby and with very little change to their lives.  Our friendships seem to move more like people on different currents in a very slow river.  Eventually an entire group is replaced, and while you might keep contact and still love people, you’re not that person anymore, and the group has changed.  When this is abrupt, which only happened to us once, when our writers’ group fell apart, it is a major trauma.  But most of the time it just goes on, until you look back and realize either you have a new group, or you just don’t have anyone.

I’m not either place, and some people we’ll keep, thank you (they’re recent acquisitions, in the last 10 years or so) but there has been driftery (totally a word) going on, which I probably became more aware of because of older son’s change of status. And of course, we lost — or perhaps realized we’d long ago lost — our oldest friendship in the last couple of years.

There’s other things.  You could measure our life by cats. We had the old firm: Pixie, (Best cat evah!), Petronius the Arbiter of blessed memory, Pixel’s crazy brother Randy, and our fluffy sweet girl DT.  It seems when we have four, the configuration is stable, and the cat gods don’t send us new ones.  But as one shuffles off stage left, the replacement shows up. The second firm, Miranda, Euclid, D’Artagnan, Havelock and Greebo (outside, now inside and an editor, poor thing.)  Of those Miranda is now on the mantle shelf, and Euclid probably not with us more than a few months. There is a mass over his thyroid.  D’Artagnan being mostly older son’s cat lives with him (Well, we got tired of the howling in the empty room when older son moved away to medschool, (before we moved nearby) and showed up one weekend with D’Artagnan in a carrier.)  As soon as Miranda shuffled off we got back a little girl cat, Valeria Victrix, which I’d raised since she was two weeks old and with an eye infection, and her mom abandoned her at a bookstore’s door step.  (Older son named her. He was reading Operation Chaos at the time.)  Alas getting her back is tied up with the breakup of that long standing friendship, and the insurmountable “will never be forgiven” is that idiot decided 8 week old kitten was “mean” (I suspect because being idiot he didn’t realize she was too young to retract her claws.)  He’d lost a cat, so he wanted her, but never told us they didn’t get along. This despite the fact that Dan loved that girl cat and really wanted her. Instead, out of stupid pride (I’d guess) he kept her, ignored her and feralized her for eight years.

The amazing thing is that given all that she’s a very sweet girl. She was skittish and hid for a year and a bit, but is now demanding pets and dive bombing at all our ankles.  She’s still afraid of strangers and still periodically yells at Greebo for no reason. (Or some reason. I think they’re siblings. They have the same belly-markings in white.)

Anyway, the second firm is starting a turn over.  Two nights ago I dreamed of a little cornish rex cat, so maybe Miranda’s replacement is warming up.  Because Dan and I have dreams of having only two cats, or maybe a cat and a dog someday, I’m hoping she’s coming for younger son, not us.  Which, as I told him, means that he needs to finish up with studies (Stupid university scheduling tricks has extended him till next May) and find a job.

In exasperation, because he’s looking for work for the summer/next year after graduation/part time work for the next year with marked lack of success, but at the same time he has a couple of ideas that if they come to fruition are sort of like shaking the money tree [the odds are SLIGHTLY better than the lottery, let’s just say that] I said “so are you going to be an unemployed bum or a billionaire?”  And he said “Probably both, alternating, mom. I am your son.”

Now, when I was about his age, my mom told me she’d given up on ever being rich. Have I?  I don’t know.  My world is very different, and I have a lot more options.  There is this idea for being ready to replace Amazon when it comes to ebooks that I’m cooking with a friend. Our goal is mostly not to be dependent only on Amazon, but in a couple of years it should pay us living salaries.  Billionaire?  Not aiming for it, but the future is wide open.

I guess what I’m trying to say is I hate being caught in the middle of changes. And rather than slowing down, they seem to be ramping up.  Both boys graduate (G-d willing, and the creek not rising) next May or thereabouts.  It will for sure mean a move for one, and I hope it means a move off our family unit (in terms of self-support, though as I’ve indicated, I’m ready to shuffle him off have him find a woman of his very own.)  And I doubt we’ll have poor Euclid another year.  Worse, Greebo-the-editor has started losing weight. He still moves very well for 16 years, and is sassy as ever, but he wants pets and cuddles more often (his time is early morning, when mom is gathering her wits and making her plans before getting up, but he has been coming up for pets at night, too.)

There are other things going on, which are none of ya’ll’s bizwax.  Small ones, big ones.  For the first time since the kids were toddlers, I’m having trouble carving out a slice of three/four hours to write uninterrupted before one of of the family or friends pings me with an emergency.

Of all this, of course, the kids and being more or less (almost) done raising them (well, I’m done raising them, just not launching them, if that makes sense) is the big thing.

This morning, I remembered when Robert was 9 and Marshall was 6 and, for the first time in ten years, I went to the grocery store by myself, (I was on strict bed rest with Robert.)  And suddenly I felt like I’d forgotten something/didn’t know what I was doing.  It grew into being normal, of course.  Now it would be weird to lug them both to the store.  In fact, I think the last time I did so was almost 10 years ago.  (And it was because I needed help carrying stuff.)

I know this too will grow.  And this new thing Dan and I are doing, trying to find who we were before kids will be okay too. (No, there isn’t a problem in our marriage. Honestly, it’s about the only thing that is still stable in this storm that’s been overtaking me. But we’ve been a family so long, we’re having trouble figuring out how to BE just a couple, without making the cats substitute children or trying to be the YOUNG couple we were and aren’t anymore.  I know this all sounds very silly. And we should count our blessings.)

At the same time, possibly because of physical changes not unusual for women my age (though more usual for younger women. Eh) stuff about me is changing.  Mostly little stuff.  Like, why on Earth do I now like Mexican food? I never did before.  And where did the interest in needle arts come back from? I hadn’t done that since the kids were tiny.  And…

This morning I thought I didn’t care, but I was exasperated the changes didn’t wait till next year. Because it’s an election year, and therefore I’ll be fairly useless anyway. Then I realized things probably won’t slow down next year anyway, as G-d willing one son will move out of state and maybe two sons will move, and honestly we’ll probably lose another cat (and hopefully not gain a new one! Forlorn as the hope might be.)  And… and… and…

All of this of course hit us because of the major holiday.  It might be our last one with everyone nearby.

None of this explains the crying, except from stress, of course.  Most of the changes are good.  The ones to career haven’t been (I really must try not to get fired, okay fired and rate-limited twice in the same week again.  That was a fun time.) But I’m not done either.  One door is closed, but there is a little daylight coming in around one of the rocks, and I have a spoon.

Finding time to stop and write would help.  Probably.  The health stopping throwing bigger and brighter challenges would help too.

But apparently life is change.  And somewhere over the ridge the change will slow a little, and I’ll catch breath for a while before it starts again.

I’m not upset, I’m….

When I was little and standing in the sea (I never learned to swim. Long story) sometimes a wave would roll me.  If you open your eyes under water, you see yellow sand swirling around, and light and you can’t tell if you’re up or down, and you desperately want a breath.

That’s kind of where I am.  But I’ll find a foothold here, any minute, and poke my head above water soon.

And older son isn’t wrong, either. I’m lucky to live in a time where the period of equilibrium ahead can be relatively long, relatively healthy, relatively productive.

This morning I woke up with this Agatha Christie quote in my mind:

I have enjoyed greatly the second blooming that comes when you finish the life of the emotions and of personal relations; and suddenly find – at the age of fifty, say – that a whole new life has opened before you, filled with things you can think about, study, or read about…It is as if a fresh sap of ideas and thoughts was rising in you.

I’ll drink to that time coming.

 

 

 

This morning I was reading a book first published in the 40s (I think) and reprinted (among other editions in 95 and I was very surprised to read the intro on that.  The I guess published and probably fairly well known author (well, I’m not aware of having ever read him) writing it talks about the author’s (of the book) great female character, and how she’s not like the women at the time who had three options “scream, be rescued, throw up.”

Now I’m acquainted with this version of reality from our present bubble heads. Yesterday someone was lecturing a bunch of us on how “fandom has changed” apparently in the strange belief that sf/f fandom was EVER not a gathering of oddballs and strange people, which yes, included strange females and strange people from other races. Pfui. The only way it’s changed is that we have more NORMAL college professors.  Which is why they’re so tedious.

I just wasn’t aware these illusions about women — characters or real life, the way the sentence was written was hard to tell — went back that far IN PRINT.

I remember in the eighties being very puzzled at my well educated, mostly female friends in the US imagining a lot of things about women which I knew not to be so.  Like the one who said that women had become hysteric because they “couldn’t hunt or do male stuff” in the renaissance.  Which forced me to explain practically every middle ages woman hunted.  Unless they were a little odd.  The noblewomen joined the hunt, and poorer women would probably set snares, as well as killing the livestock.

I know I was surprised when I started posting DST in a private group and people were so excited that “she’s not waiting to be rescued.”

I was glad they liked the book, but dear lord, when have women characters waited to be rescued, outside some very tedious books, or books where they’re not the main characters?  (Non-main characters always have less action. It’s part of writing.)

I mean, Heinlein female characters had more options than those.  A lot of them were rather able with gun, knife and hands.  Heck, Agatha Christie’s characters had more options than that.  Dear Lord, as our Mary Catelli is fond of reminding us, female fairytale characters had more agency than these people are crediting female characters in the 20h century with having.

Sure, if all you know is the Disney version of fairy tales, it might seem like the main female character gets rescued a lot, but even then they usually follow the hero’s journey and have a hand in their own troubles.

So why are moderns and let’s face it mostly leftists so infatuated of the idea that female characters (and possibly women) had no agency whatsoever before the late 20th and early 21st century?

I don’t know.  But I can’ hazard guesses.

The first is that they want to be seen as rescuers.  If women were treated as empty-headed dolls and perhaps WERE empty headed dolls before the left “liberated” them, then women do naturally belong in the preserve of the left. Also, what the left made it can unmake, and women like me who don’t sing in the choir are ungrateful AND at risk of being enslaved again.  (How many times have we heard that, complete with accusations of “gender traitor” as though vaginas were something you had to swear allegiance to?)  This is a naked attempt at getting power over half the population and demanding right to our gratitude. More the fools those who believe them.

The second is that they’re genuinely ignorant. Having been taught a Marxist version of history they don’t understand power or ability or agency as anything but a collective endeavor that needs to be affirmed int he history books, with holidays, proclaimed from the roof tops, etc.

It never occurred to them that women aren’t mentioned much in the history books except as someone’s wife or mother (unless they’re queens, but they tend to blank those out) because being a wife and mother was genuinely back breaking work in the past.  That managing to get your children to adulthood alive was a miracle. That it took both halves of the marriage for one half (the one not always pregnant) to achieve something in the public sphere.  Instead, like true sexists, they see only male achievements.  As such, they discount everything women did do, and instead invent reasons why women were “suppressed” by men, or their achievements lied about.

In fact, the only people lying about female achievements, from the middle-ages nuns to the early twentieth century female writers are… the left.  Their minds are so distorted that they can’t understand the feats of quiet (and not so quiet) strength it took to be a woman before the pill effected some liberation from wretched biology and before the free market and invention liberated women from the drudgery of household work.

The third is also ignorance, but more profound than simply “of history.”  It’s an ignorance of humanity, how strong both halves of humanity were required to be in centuries past, how much they had to fight and suffer for us, the few, the pampered few to be here… and completely ignorant of how hard life can actually be.

The week I put DST up, I had been reading (coincidentally. I tended to get my books from library sales before KULL and many of those were history books and biographies) the biographies of several women in the War of The Roses and — again, luck of the draw — the biography of Emma Smith, wife of Joseph Smith (note that I didn’t have any particular interest in Mormonism — and don’t really — but was interested in the biography.)

Those women, while their husbands achieved “well known thing” were busy as heck, and probably worked and suffered more than they did, not less for being very private. They were pregnant, or raising kids or worse, burying kids all alone and struggling to manage estates or farms on their own so their husband could do “well known thing.”

They weren’t waiting to be rescued. They certainly weren’t waiting to be pampered princesses. Not even those who were genuinely princesses.  “Faint, throw up and be rescued” might have been the options of Victorian wealthy maidens. I doubt it was what they actually DID, though they might have played to the image. (Read Agatha Christie’s biography sometime.)

But that was a very small slice both in time and social standing. They are not and will never be the norm for women.

And sure, most past books didn’t have 100 lbs women beating 300 lbs men.  That’s because that is… what’s that word? Oh, yeah, impossible.  Unless you have an explanation of some sort, and no, training is not enough.  Magic, or bio enhancement or something MIGHT be. Depends on how you handle it.

But going around beating up people is not the only form of agency. It’s not even the best one.  It’s the agency of a type of man, not even all of them. I’ll note that in the Musketeer books (Dumas, not mine) the Cardinal is not powerless, or fainting or throwing up just because he’s not out on the street, fighting.  He has thugs for that.  And Milady, likewise, is not a fainting flower, even though the book was written before the 20th century.  Even Constance Bonacieux has agency.  Yes, in the end she trusts the wrong woman and gets poisoned while they’re trying to rescue her.  But that’s agency too. She makes the decision.  She didn’t need to fight in the streets.  The men did that for her. It’s obvious her husband, even, is her pawn.

So, dear crazy people who think that women “only had three options” all of them passive before the late-twentieth to early twenty first century: I don’t know what color the sky is in your world, but in ours it’s blue and occasionally grey, and if it’s green you probably should run.  If in yours it’s made of green cheese? The problems you face have nothing to do with us.

You are ignoring the rich panoply of human experience. You’re belittling the abilities and experiences of real women in the past.  And it’s entirely possible you’re too pampered and rich to understand much of anything.

Check your privilege.  You’re probably high on it.

Whenever you’re ready to join the real world with real people, we’ll be here.